Dear Reader,

How you measure success quietly shapes every decision that follows.

Not loudly. Not all at once.

Quietly.

Short-term metrics reward urgency.

They train businesses to chase activity instead of building trust.

Long-term thinking does something different.

It builds reputation.

That difference shows up in advertising more than anywhere else.

When success is defined by what’s easiest to measure, advertising drifts toward what’s easiest to justify.

These aren’t theories. They’re patterns you see once you know where to look.

Once you understand how measurement shapes behavior, it becomes very hard to unsee.

The real limit on advertising isn’t creativity.

It’s how you define success in the first place.

Watch/listen above or read below.

Todd Liles: This is the second of three special episodes where we’re slowing down and we’re focused on core principles that have surfaced repeatedly throughout this season. Now, today’s principle has less to do with tactics, and it has far more to do with time. Specifically, the idea that the time horizon you choose determines the kind of advertising that you buy, the way you measure success, and ultimately, the kind of business you end up building.

Now in this episode you’ll hear Roy explain carefully and in depth why short term thinking leads to short term results, and why some forms of advertising feel measurable but they don’t scale. And why reputation building requires patience that most businesses never allow themselves. These are longer, uninterrupted explanations drawn from across the season because this idea doesn’t live in just a single conversation. It shows up wherever growth, trust, and longevity are being discussed.

Let’s get right into it.

Roy Williams: There is no way to efficiently spend your ad budget on Google Ads. I’ve watched a lot of private equity companies come in and immediately discontinue doing what’s most effective to do what is most easily measured, because they’re spreadsheet people. And very, very often, it takes them about two and a half years to get in deep, deep, deep trouble. It takes a couple of years for the momentum to fade.

When you’ve been using mass media correctly for a long time, you can coast. Say, “We canceled it and see nothing, no damage.” And 60, 90, 120 days after they cancel everything, they’re just going, “Great. That wasn’t working at all.” It’s like, nope. What you did is you had a train going down the track at 80 miles an hour. It’s a heavy train, has a lot of momentum. And you quit throwing fuel on the fire, you quit throwing coal in the little coal thing. I’m pretending it’s 100 years ago, right? And so…

Todd Liles: We still get it though.

Roy Williams: Yeah. What happens is, if it’s a level track and it’s not climbing uphill, man, a mile-long train that’s loaded doing 80 miles an hour can coast a long time. Then it begins to slow down a little bit. But it wasn’t right after you canceled the advertising. It’s six, eight, nine months later, a year later, starts slowing down. “Well, I think the economy’s changed. I think maybe nobody’s listening to the radio anymore. I think maybe people are watching streaming things instead of watching the news on television.”

And they start making up all this stuff and everybody sits around, oh me and all my friends. People go to the “me and all my friends” ratings way too often. “Well, here’s what I think, and here, everybody agrees with me.” And it’s like, okay, that isn’t how advertising works. I don’t watch the news, and I hate listening to the radio. I hadn’t listened to the radio in 30 years. So why do my partners and I spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year buying television news and radio ads?

Todd Liles: Because there’s clearly people that are, and the bargain is so much better than…

Roy Williams: Because it works unbelievably well.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: And it produces unbelievably well. And I’m going, “Huh, everybody thinks there’s no value there, and that’s why they’re selling it way too cheap. Everybody thinks they can just turn business up and down with Google.” And I’m going, “Nope, hadn’t been able to do that for a long time.” Now, what happens is anytime you are doing something that works in the short term, everybody believes in direct response because you make a strong enough offer and a bunch of leads come in and you go, “Ooh, I cried wolf and the whole town came running.”

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And then you cry wolf again and a pretty good crowd comes running. But the problem is the longer you do something that works immediately, the less and less well it works, until it finally quits working at all. Because now everybody knows you’re lying. Now everybody understands this is false urgency. This isn’t a special thing. They do a special thing every freaking month, and only an idiot would call them when they’re not having a half-price sale. See what I mean?

Todd Liles: Exactly.

Roy Williams: Now, another company is just winning your heart. The little company is just talking about what they believe in and why they do things the way they do them and what it costs them to do it the right way. You are appealing, you are appealing to customers that are switchable for reasons of price alone. All the research, every independent research organization that’s ever researched it, and some big ones have, they’ve done it for decades, guess what they will always tell you? The customer who will switch to you for reasons of price alone will switch from you for the same reason just as quickly. And there is nothing that someone else cannot do a little worse and sell a little cheaper.

And so you cannot build a solid business on price alone. And so whenever you get caught into this trap of discount and special offer and whatever, you’re training these people to wait for increasingly big offers, and you’re training everybody else, “Those people are just scam artists, and I want to deal with a company that is reliable, has integrity, delivers a high level of service, and they’re not caught up on all this carnival barking.” And so the switchable customer is how you build a powerful company.

Todd Liles: Absolutely.

Roy Williams: And then you win the switchable customer, and then you make them non-switchable. Any benefit out of an ad that has a limited time for this offer, guess what else expires at the end of that limited time?

Todd Liles: Your reason to call.

Roy Williams: All memory of the ad.

Todd Liles: Yeah, it’s gone.

Roy Williams: You don’t remember ads that had a time limit once the time limit is over. And so the only ads you remember forever are the ones that don’t have a time limit, the ones that are true yesterday, today, and forever. “Here today, here tomorrow, here for you.” And you remember from now on a message that will never expire. And so you said, “Okay, now if the message never expires and every time you repeat it, you build the message a little more deeply in the mind, you’re making an investment in future customers.” The longer you do this, the better it works.

So at what moment, if you’re going to measure return on ad spend, at what moment have you exhausted the benefit of all your advertising investment? If you’re thinking long-term, return on ad spend does not work. Return on ad spend as a calculation will force you into short-term thinking and pay-per-click. You’re going to wind up doing 100% pay-per-click, and you’re going to wind up paying too much to reach too little people, too few people, and it’s not scalable.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: And so whenever I tell people, I’m saying, “Yeah, yeah, I’m telling you, the way that you measure your advertising will determine the kind of advertising you buy.” And so be careful how you measure it, because if you’re using that as a metric to tell you whether or not it’s working, if you measure short-term, you will run short-term ads, you’ll get short-term results, and you will not build a brand, you will not build a relationship with a customer, you will not build a legendary company. You’re never going to be rich.

However, if you build a reputation. The more you do that, the better it works. Like eat right and exercise. You mentioned in the last episode working out every day and making that a habit and making that a priority and doing it without fail. And I’m going, yeah. Anytime you focus on something and you’re committed to it, you usually accomplish it. And if building a relationship with the public is what you’re focused on, then the only way you can possibly measure that is top line growth of your company, measured yearly.

And so if you’re looking at top line growth, how are you trending? There’ll be dips that are inexplicable simply because of the weather or of the economy. And so you can’t pretend those things don’t matter. Or just an incredibly, wildly, ridiculously strong offer made by a competitor. Yep, they’ll ding you, they’ll hold you down sometimes. But if you look at it over a longer window of time, is the top line of the company growing? How much bigger are we this year than last year? How are we trending in the big picture? You can measure top line.

You can also measure use of branded keywords. How many people are typing my name into the search engine? My point being this… By the way, I’m going to put it this way. We have one schedule that we run for every client, which is almost 1,000 clients, 87 partners throughout the US, Canada and Australia. You know what it is? We’re going to achieve reaching the identical same people. You know what determines how many people we can reach? The amount of money we have.

Todd Liles: Sure.

Roy Williams: That’s it. How much money we have determines how many people we can reach. The non negotiable is we are absolutely going to correctly do the math. And people that sell it don’t do the math correctly. You can’t trust their math. But if you do the math correctly, so we’re going to reach every one of these people at least three times within seven nights sleep, every week, 52 weeks in a row until Jesus returns.

I now have clients that we’ve been running 52 weeks a year with a three repetition, a three frequency. The average person hears it. If they hear it, they hear it at least three times a week actually hear it. So that’s 156 times a year. And I’ve had people doing it for 37 years that are still clients. And they’ve become huge. They are the dominant stores in their category in all the towns where they are. They’re the overwhelming monster kings without fail. And they’ve spent all of their money on one freaking thing all these years. It’s broadcast radio.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And what I’m saying is, and… Or you can do it with TV just as easily. Just as easily. The point is you cannot target with mass media. They call it mass media for a reason. And by the way, did you know that every person in the world that has a friend is an influencer? People talk about, “Influencers. Influencer. What do you think about influencer marketing?” Man, I believed in influencer marketing before there was an Internet. The influencers are the people in your life whose opinion you actually will listen to.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And so you don’t have to win the target customer if you just win 25 of their best friends. And it’s like this is… It’s not hard. You don’t target with mass media, you win the hearts and minds of people. How many people can you afford to own and carry around in your pocket? Your budget determines that, but the method never changes, the schedule never changes, the kind of ads you write doesn’t change. It’s just understanding what works and what does not.

Todd Liles: Now if there’s one thing to take away from this episode, it’s that how you measure success quietly shapes the decision that follows. Short-term metrics reward urgency, and long-term thinking builds reputation. And once you see that difference clearly, it becomes very hard to unsee it.

Now, in the final episode of this three-part series, we’re gonna focus on the idea that sits underneath everything Roy teaches, and that’s the nature of being remarkable and why consistency and reputation matter more than cleverness ever will. So until then, I’m Todd Liles, and thanks for listening.

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