I spent about $30k on this ad, and I can't attribute a single dollar of revenue to it.

This is when I worked at CreativeLive- we did online education for creative people and worked with lots of big names like Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Brene Brown, Richard Branson, Ramit Sethi, etc etc.

I joined in 2013 when they were mostly making photography classes, and I started our music channel - I was something like a GM, and I did all the high-level stuff outside of production: recruiting instructors, signing partnership deals, and running marketing.

Shortly after I joined we raised a $21M series B led by Chamath Palihapitiya (now famous from the All In podcast), which meant I finally had some budget to work with.

And one of the first things I did was signing a year-long deal with Alternative Press magazine for $30k.

Like I said earlier, I can’t attribute even $1 of revenue to the ads, but I still think it was some of the best money I ever spent.

Here’s why:

Instant credibility

We were a Silicon Valley tech company with no currency in music- and in music, authenticity is EVERYTHING. If they see you as an outsider, you'll get nowhere.

I had a decent network in music from growing up in the hardcore scene and writing about music, but it wasn’t enough - I needed to get to people who were way bigger than that.

And full-page print ads in the biggest magazine in the genre = we're instantly taken seriously as a real company.

It’s pretty simple:

When I would cold email a record label or instrument company about partnerships, they’re about 100x more likely to reply if they’ve seen our name in Alt Press for the last 4 months.

Easier to recruit instructors

Notice that I prominently featured instructors in the ad— most of them are music producers, who normally barely get a mention in the liner notes let alone have their faces in a magazine ad.

That made it a lot easier for me to sign other instructors, because they saw how hard I hustled to promote everyone.

And since signing the right instructors was the biggest growth lever for the business, that alone was worth the $30K.

Access to their network

We weren’t Alt Press’ biggest advertiser by any means, $30k was enough for them to consider us a partner.

Since they were the biggest publication in our space, they were connected to just about anyone and everyone. If I needed an intro to a potential brand partner, instructor, etc I could ask and they’d almost always be able to help.

What’s the ROI?

Did we sell any courses from this ad? Honestly, I never even tried to track it and didn’t care.

This was an investment in BRAND— showing the music world that we were serious about being an authentic part of the scene so we could make the moves that would set us up for long term success.

There’s no way to measure the ROI in concrete terms, but I did grow the business to about $1.5 million in 18 months and I’m very sure I couldn’t have done that without this AP deal.

I’d say that’s well worth $30 grand.

(also, they gave me an amazing deal: $30k for an entire year of these full-page ads, which was probably something like an 80% discount)

→ My point:

If you try to measure brand marketing like it’s performance spend, you’ll almost always come back with a negative ROI.

But not everything that grows your business shows up in Google Analytics.

I’m not saying everyone should do print ads- that’s just one specific tactic that made sense for us in this specific situation.

But you SHOULD be investing in things that will give you credibility, access and help you open doors that would otherwise be closed.

Brand IS an investment with very real returns, even if they don’t fit nicely in a spreadsheet.

PS - I love meeting new people! Reply to this if you like my emails… stay silent if you secretly hate me and want me to feel your contempt and disappointment 😇