Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Brand-side veteran turned collective leader Gabe Wolff makes the case that tidy ROAS and over-engineered account structures distract from what actually scales: a sharp creative angle, a full user journey, and profit-first measurement. We cover misaligned agency incentives, post-iOS14 realities, practical ways to structure campaigns by angle/ICP, and why entry products and retention paths drive LTV more than day-to-day CPA swings.
You’ll learn:
- How outcome-aligned compensation changes behavior and results.
- Why algorithms do the heavy lifting—and how to give them better angles.
- When to keep one “scale” campaign vs. adding controls for inventory/LTV.
- Persona-driven creative that sells (not just formats and hacks).
- The LTV math of entry products, cross-sell, and retention.
Connect with Gabe
• Everything Bagel: https://www.everythingbagel.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriel-wolff/
• Email: gabe@everythingbagel.com
Work with Adam
Unpacking real. Ditching noise.
Creators and Guests
What is Is Anything Real??
Is Anything Real? is the Reality-First Leadership podcast for builder-leaders who want outcomes, not optics. Each week, Adam W. Barney sits down with founders and operators to unpack positioning, marketing, community, energy management, and influence - plus the numbers behind what actually worked.
You’ll hear: a quick Reality Check, a practical Proof Stack (inputs → actions → outcomes), and one EnergyOS habit you can run this week. Specifics over slogans; humane systems over hustle cosplay.
New episodes every Wednesday at 12:00 PM ET.
👉 Book your 20-min Exploration Call: https://calendly.com/adamwbarney/explorationplugin-20min
[00:05.4]
Welcome back to "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", the podcast where we sift the real from the ridiculous in modern marketing. I'm your host, Adam W. Barney, and today we're joined by a guest who's not just rewriting the agency rulebook, he's shredding it and making something far more useful.
[00:21.7]
Gabe Wolff runs Everything Bagel, a marketing collective that's built for today's fragmented AI jammed, authenticity-starved world. Think anti-agency agency. We're diving into what actually works now, why account structure obsessives are missing the point, and how to build campaigns that feel human again.
[00:42.3]
Gabe, pumped to have you here. Likewise. Awesome. I mean, to kick off, I know you were brand side for 15 years, hiring and firing agencies before building Everything Bagel, what were you sick of seeing in the old model?
[00:59.2]
Yeah, and before we jump in, it's not that people at agencies are bad; they're actually the most talented in their field. So get that out front. I'm not like, I don't think all agencies are the devil. What I found when I was an operator of multiple brands was that creating a ton of operational bloat to hire managers to then have each of those managers manage two to three agencies and two to three freelancers created so much bloat, for lack of a better word or redundancy, and unnecessary communication, and unnecessary meetings.
[01:39.8]
And who doesn't want fewer meetings in their life? As well as just didn't move the ball forward as efficiently or quickly as I needed it to as the operator. So having multiple people send multiple reports with information that's not really useful, and my team has to interpret that information and figure out what's useful.
[02:01.6]
Meanwhile, I'm looking at the P&L every month and trying to direct them accordingly. Way too many cooks in the kitchen and nothing together. That's not a fun dance to be in the middle of, right? No. Pretty painful. I mean, what were you sick of seeing in that old model?
[02:20.7]
Beyond that, though, anything specific or, you know? How do you break down what led you to start Everything Bagel?
[02:34.2]
The pricing models of different agencies vary by what they sell and what type of agency, they are. Some charge by the hour, some charge a flat fee, some charge by the amount they spend on your behalf. And it creates this weird misalignment between their incentive and the companies.
[02:53.3]
And traditionally the agency model has kind of run the hey, we're going to take a percentage of what we spend on your behalf. And for large accounts like Pepsi or P&G, that may make sense because of how they rationalize the ad spend.
[03:10.0]
But for brands that are SMBs, sub $100 million or even sub half a billion dollars, they still need their dollars rationalized. And so why would you pay somebody to spend more money if it's not warranted?
[03:25.8]
And the reason why that model also doesn't work is because then the reporting structure becomes more about fluffy numbers such as, hey, we scored the CPM, or our CPCS are really strong, or we reached 50 million people with your ad budget.
[03:42.9]
And while those numbers are impressive, at the end of the day, the question always has to come back to, did we grow the business? Right. And so that's mainly it. If the agency partners are misaligned with the actual goals of the business, then that relationship is doomed to fail.
[04:02.9]
So with everything bagel, I hired the teams that I had built internally at previous stance, and we do it for a portfolio of companies in a way where we're aligned with their goal. When they win, we win.
[04:19.9]
So fee plus commission model, the commission gets split with the team. Everyone from the art directors to the designers to the retention specialists to the head of CRO, they all split that bonus pool. So, yeah, that happens every month so that the client continues to grow and our team continues to hunt and kill for them.
[04:40.4]
Yeah, that's incredible actually. And you know, I also know, Gabe, you're not here to just run ad accounts. You're actually building full user journeys in the work that you do there. From front door to retention. What does that actually look like in practice when you think about those clients that you've got in your portfolio?
[04:57.0]
Yeah, I think because of the way we're set up and because of our experience actually running brands, we're not here to just sell influencer marketing for the sake of selling you a service or sell you Facebook ads to sell you Facebook ads.
[05:12.1]
Like, these are tools in a digital toolkit that help create a user experience or a brand experience that we're trying to accomplish for an end result, which is typically sales. Right. So depending on the stage of the company. You know, a company that's sub $5 million a year has a different path to getting to $5 million a year than a brand that's doing $15, $20 million a year has to get to $50M.
[05:36.1]
And so the diagnosis is different. The prescription is different. And so a brand that's doing $20 million a year needs way more ad creative, way more touch points, way more authentic touch points, way more creator touch points than a brand that's just starting to get product market fit and just needs to hammer one creative or two creative angles with like maybe 15 ads, 30 ads a month, plus a really specific funnel.
[06:01.6]
Like, it's just, they're different. They're just completely different. Right, right. And you said this during our first conversation that paid ads used to be surgical. Now they're blunt amplification tools. Can you unpack that a little bit more in that lens as well? Yeah.
[06:17.0]
We buy products to solve problems. The success of any business is their ability to articulate the problem that they solve reliably.
[06:29.8]
Reliably is a very key word in that. The clarity of the creative angle that you have at the ad level can take different formats. It can be UGC, it can be a slider, it can be an advertorial, it can, it can take all these different formats and, you know, our team's able to do that.
[06:50.7]
There are many teams that can reformat one creative angle 50 different ways and push them all through an ad account. In the past, the ad account structure needed to be set up a specific way because the actual platform itself wasn't as sophisticated. What we went through in 2020, beyond the pandemic, but with iOS14, actually made the platform more sophisticated.
[07:15.4]
So now that we don't have the full purview, or didn't have the full purview for the past couple years, the algorithms have had to get back better at predictive analysis. Yep. They knew that Adam thumb stopped on this asset. He's more likely to now buy from X asset, Y from this company that sells shoes, whatever it may be.
[07:34.1]
Right. And so like they know you have the problem. So whether or not I'm using an ABO, a CBO, an ASC, 50 different ad sets with one ad in each. Or like all of that stuff is complete nonsense at this point because ultimately all that learning is done at the post ID level.
[07:56.5]
So like all that really end ends up mattering is what creative angle is winning. Winning and then putting more dollars behind that. Right. Do you think that the old dream of hyper-targeting the right buyer with the perfect message, is that kind of over?
[08:16.9]
You think it's over? The clients of ours that win are the ones that really understand their customer, or customers, I should say. So I think old school customer personas are more important than ever. Understanding that a female, age 55, going through menopause or has menopause symptoms has a very specific life experience right now.
[08:38.7]
And you need to understand how to communicate to that person and then show that your product helps with those symptoms or whatever problem that they're facing. Right. And you can do that through 50 different ways and you can talk about all the other problems that kind of surround that condition or whatever it is that you're solving.
[08:56.5]
And if you're an apparel brand for a specific use case, then it's why do we make you look your best? How do we boost your ego and your confidence in a way that like you feel the most confident in our clothing and you're very specific about who that ICP is, i.e, Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle.
[09:16.6]
Now when the whole drama that's created. How do you think about ad structure with that shift in the format? Because I know you've mentioned simplifying everything back to that business objective and that creative instead of trying to game, whether it's META, whether it's Google's machine learning.
[09:38.1]
Yeah, I there's an asterisk to all this that in brief sprints you may want to layer in a cost cap campaign to get some edge performance in a shorter time frame. But over the long run that's going to wash away anyway. Like the long term impact of that cost cap is not going to necessarily make your account kill it.
[10:00.6]
The way we structure is mainly around creative angle because if we want to. And that's more of like a control issue. So if you are comfortable running your business for optimal performance across just revenue dollars, ad dollars out, revenue dollars in, you don't need to do this.
[10:17.5]
You should honestly just put your creative angles in one gigantic scale campaign and let them compete against each other for efficiency. If you have multiple products and you do care about inventory dynamics for specific products and being able to have the controls to kind of push product X versus Y, or acquire more of customer X versus customer Y because of something you're seeing on the lifetime value right.
[10:44.4]
Then you do need to format the ad account in a way that gives you those controls, i.e., separated campaigns for those angles for those ICPs or for those products, so that you can dial up or down as inventory fluctuates, or as you see patterns in life.
[11:01.5]
Right. That makes a lot of sense that you have to be able to optimize it just in that new manner, what do you see your best clients there get that others don't when it comes to measuring the ROI across the board? They are religious about the entry product and the retention around that.
[11:23.6]
Okay. We have one client that sells, without disclosing, they sell a packaged food product, a packaged electrolyte product, and a packaged coffee product. Those three products and their entry points lead to completely different outcomes of the LTV.
[11:45.6]
So that matters. How we spend dollars against each of those three categories really does matter. So we format accordingly. And there's got to be cross-sell/upsell into that on the back end also to lean into. Which leads into why this is full journey.
[12:01.9]
Because if you're only focused on the ad, you miss the 4x, 5,x 6x of that first order AOV that occurs over the course of the year. And that's way more than, you know, fringe delta on an ad on any given day.
[12:19.6]
Like yeah, your CPA could go up 5 bucks, down 10 bucks, whatever it may be. It's kind of meaningless if you're leaving $200 per customer on the table over the course of a year because you just, you're focusing on pennies instead of seasons.
[12:39.5]
We live in a world of Twitter where like that's everything is like ads and ad account structure. And I got a 5x ROAS today. It's like cool, but that customer is a one time buyer. So like congratulations, they're gone, they're never coming back, that type of thing.
[12:56.2]
Another thing that we're dealing with these days, AI is you know pumping out ad creative that's not just bad, but it's boring. Where does that leave us as marketers in 2025? Right now AI doesn't fully understand all the nuance that a customer may have outside of what it can produce in text and then output, whether that's image or a shitty AI video cut from that text.
[13:28.0]
People are going to continue to need to relate to people and they're going to get better as there's just more overall volume from AI. Right. The ads that are good, made by good marketers will continue to do really well as AI kind of just brings the floor up.
[13:47.5]
I know you joked before also that AI can generate perfectly bad ads on command. Do you think that potentially we'll see a wave of deliberately ugly but human ads start to work? I think ugly ads have worked traditionally because they signal that they were human and could have been made by your friend while you're scrolling your feed.
[14:09.4]
Right. Like that's the whole purpose behind the Post-it note trend. It's like, your buddy just made this and now you're reading it and you realize it's by a brand.
[14:25.1]
I think AI can replicate that easily today. Like they can make Post-it note ads, they can make ugly ads if instructed to do so. I think what becomes harder to replicate is understanding of the actual pain point and proof that it works.
[14:41.5]
And we, as humans, on these social networks rely on other humans to show us that something worked. As opposed to an AI generated image or AI generated video, which as of today, in 2025, we are very easily able to spot when there's an AI generated UGC creator versus a human being.
[15:04.7]
We're also really good. Sorry. We're also really good at knowing when a creator has been paid to say something versus genuinely feel something. I love it. Yeah, that is so true. I mean, in that realm, what do you think about say, founder stories? Humor, and even vulnerability, and creative.
[15:21.5]
Do you think those are the leading edge that we're headed towards? 100%. You could look at brands like Midday Squares or Minted, the running company, in New York City. These are brands that have a founder that is telling a story of why they're doing these things. They're doing it in real life events, IRL events where they're showing people actually interacting with the founder.
[15:42.1]
The more things you can do to prove that you're human and that you are doing real things in the real world on social, the more successful you'll be as a business owner or a brand. That makes a lot of sense. What would you say, Gabe, that you know, one lesson that you learned from your previous days before Everything Bagel, from firing an agency that you now apply to how you run Everything Bagel on a daily basis?
[16:09.1]
That's a loaded one. You don't have to drop names, you don't have to include clients. I didn't sign an NDA, and our listeners didn't sign an NDA. You're good. I think the main thing that I learned was meeting the client where they need to be met in terms of data speak and marketing speak.
[16:33.7]
I remember being bored out of my mind just because I wanted to be polite when I was a CRO while an account rep talked about the nuances that they're seeing in the marketplace and in the ad account for 25 out of a 30 minute meeting, when all I really needed to know was what worked, what do they need more of for my team, and what are we doing next?
[17:00.9]
And so, like, what we do is in that weekly communication with a client, first off, like, it's a shared scoreboard. We all know what the results are before we even jump on the call. Like, yeah, we know how much money we made and how much we spent, so that's done.
[17:16.3]
You don't need to like present that for the first time. It's really, what are we seeing underneath all that at a high level? It's literally a sentence. What do we need approvals from from them. So are there new ads coming your way? Are there new emails coming your way? Is there a new web design that we need your eyes on so that we can execute on it?
[17:35.2]
And then what we expect the outcome to be and what we'll be looking for in the next week or month or whatever period that we're discussing. Just keep it transparent, right? I was a CEO. Like, I don't have time for that sh*t. I just need to know what you're doing and what's next. Like, that's it.
[17:52.3]
What you did and where we're going next. Exactly. Wow. All right. You know, Gabe, this was a breath of fresh air and maybe a few whiffs of garlic and poppy seed. I love how Everything Bagel has taken the bagel approach to marketing; dense, satisfying, and full of layers.
[18:11.0]
Where can folks connect with you or learn more about Everything Bagel's approach? You can connect with me on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on our website, everythingbagel.com. You can just fill out the form right there if you don't want to talk directly to me.
[18:27.1]
There are way more sophisticated, smarter people who don't curse all the time in our company that would be happy to chat with you, so... Awesome. And we'll, of course, link to all that below in the show notes, but just to wrap things up for anyone out there still pouring money into over engineered ad accounts, what's your one piece of tough love advice you would give them?
[18:51.1]
It's the creative angle, and you're probably losing money white knuckling the ad account. That's it. Fantastic, Gabe. Super simple. I love it. Awesome. All right, well, thanks again for tuning into "Is Anything Real in Paid Advertising?", I'm Adam W. Barney, reminding you that not every new tool makes you better and not every ad is worth the spend.
[19:14.8]
Gabe, thanks for joining us, and please look forward to sharing links and everything below out to everything that you're working on there at Everything Bagel. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.