You might have seen a story making the rounds about a 9-year-old who spent $118,000 of his father’s company money running YouTube Ads to promote his gaming YouTube channel. While equal parts amusing and horrifying, the “Mighty Mikes Plays” fiasco also shows how multiple points of failure can drive massive ad costs with limited results—something that might sound familiar to business owners with their own advertising blunders in the past.
Understanding How Advertising Blunders Like This Happen
Most of the world became aware of this only after the son’s father, Dave, posted a video to the channel saying the advertising was over, outlining what happened and his uncertain future at his company after spending over $100k that wasn’t his. It paints a picture of multiple systems and safeguards being removed and ignored for this to happen, and the same can happen to your company when advertising if you don’t take care. Let’s go over them in detail.
1. An Inexperienced Person Decided to Run Ads
While obviously a 9-year-old shouldn’t have been given access to create advertising campaigns linked to a company card, it’s not uncommon for advertising agencies like ours to hear from clients that “advertising didn’t work for us,” only to dive deeper and find out they did it themselves or worked with a marketer who didn’t optimize advertising, understand whom to target, or write ad copy. Many advertising platforms are very user-friendly, so owner/operators can run ads themselves—but that doesn’t mean they can run good ads.
2. Safeguards Were Not Put into Place on Advertising
Putting aside the fact that Dave put his company card info into the Google account that handled his son’s YouTube, there were multiple safeguards that could have been put into place to avoid the excessive ad spend (over 3 weeks or over $5000/day) both on the advertising account and the company card. The fact that no one was monitoring this spend on the other end shows a failure in financial oversight. Budgeting is a vital part of setting up advertising, and everyone needs to be on the same page before ads start rolling.
3. Advertising Costs Could Have Been Limited by Targeting
While Dave explained to his son how the advertising worked (setting a budget, selecting who sees the ads, etc.), he obviously ignored most or all of it. The simplified interface of the “quick setup” version of YouTube Ads (versus running them via the Google Ads platform), also means a lot of the fine-tuning is lost. If you set targeting right, you can limit costs by making sure only relevant people see your ads, including limiting by language, location, interest, etc.
4. The Advertising Wasn’t Optimized for the Best Results
We picked apart some of the numbers covered in the article and video, and the results are… not great. Three of the promoted videos got roughly 200,000 views between them. The 9-year-old’s channel had negligible subscribers before the ad spend and about 50,000 after, so about $2.3 per follower. These are tangible results, but like your own advertising, there are many ways to optimize, including moving away from “maximize clicks” as your target goal.
To be clear, I’m not blaming the 9-year-old or even his dad, but this viral story has some nuggets of truth for many businesses who have struggled with advertising in the past. Inexperience, a lack of oversight, and not using the best tools happen all the time in advertising. It doesn’t have to happen anymore with yours. Work with Vision, where we start from first principles, make a plan that works, and adjust advertising like Google Ads every step of the way. Contact us today to learn more.
