Why Most PT Ads Don’t Work

0:00 Passing way too early from three separate Wi-Fi connections. It's PT Breakfast Club with Tony Meritato, Dave Kittle, and Jimmy McKay. Hot enough for you? I mean, what are you doing this weekend is easily the most asked question in health care to a patient. What'd you do about that heat or how's the heat treating you? That's got to be number two, especially in July, right? That's the cliche. It's the cliche. It's the cliche days. you know what i love i don't know if we talked about it already i love all the videos on social media from europeans coming here who are like going crazy about how amazing this country is how amazing the food is how amazing the people are it's such a breath of fresh air and then of course like everything is air conditioned and everything is you know You do, absolutely.

0:58 As much as I try to produce more than I consume on social media, the negativity is outrageous. It's so nice to see the positivity. So funny you mention that. I was driving this morning and I work mostly from home, then travel. The funny part was when I was in radio, I was in the car a lot, which was notoriously one of the places you consume radio. So while I was ever in the car when I was in radio, I always made it a point to have the radio on and listen to things that were not just ours. And it does put you in that similar mindset of your consumer. People don't... We don't notice it because we're blind to it, how wide the aisles are at a grocery store or how big a Buc-ee's is.

1:41 Somebody had a comment like, it's as big as our parliament. There is a gas station in America as large as our Capitol building. And we drive past and we go, oh, yeah, that's pretty big. The third time you drive past it, like Seth Godin would say, it's Purple Cow. But you don't notice it anymore. Yeah. Well, do you know the delicacy? You've heard this then if you're paying attention to the World Cup. The delicacy that people are – even the TSA, Transportation Safety Administration, is giving heads up. I'm sure you know this one. Let's see if Dave knows. Do you know the delicacy that Europeans are – infatuated with to the point where they're trying to take it home in their carry-ons but because it's our liquid our our crappy food our horrible it's a condiment ranch dressing baby i did i did hear that i did there were crazy over ranch they they're surprised europeans you're not missing anything you're not missing anything with the ranch Oh, nowadays.

2:43 I don't know, man. The funny part is it was Italians. And I'm like, do you know what I don't want to see in Italy on the menu? Ranch. I like that here. I don't want to see that on the menu in Italy. I love pizza with ranch. Dipping pizza in ranch. Oh, my Lord. Oh, my Lord. Oh, my Lord. I was more of a, if it's two o'clock in the morning, you dip the pizza in blue cheese. That was the thing I didn't see coming that I would enjoy. Yeah. All right. Let's get into it. You shared an ad. I've got it. I can bring it up on screen. You shared the one yesterday and you were saying you had some feelings about it. Dave, why don't you describe the ad while I work my magic to get it up on screen here?

3:26 Yeah, this was on Instagram. I think it was it was like one of those story ads. Like if you're looking at stories and they throw an ad in front of you. So it was not in the news feed. And you can see it's kind of like the full the full size of the phone. So this was like a like a story ad. a story ad. And again, not to pick on this physical therapist. I think he's in the area in the New York city area of redefined physical therapy, not a big deal, but I just looked at this and I sent it to you guys. I do. This is what we do. I don't know if the audience, I think the audience knows by now, like we just screenshot stuff or we'll send links to each other. And we're kind of like, Like this is awesome or this is horrible or like, yeah, what do you guys think or whatever? So I sent this to you guys and to me, it just, it just looks or feels like cheap.

4:08 I don't know if it's the, the gold, the gold, uh, circle banner with like the, almost like the ribbon or the, or the, the, yeah, like the sticker. It just looks, it looks cheap. It looks like it was made probably on chat GPT or Gemini or Claude or something. And, um, yeah, I don't know. There's nothing wrong with you. You should absolutely use those tools to get in front of your ideal patient. And maybe this resonates with their ideal patient. Maybe this ad is crushing it. In the coming weeks and months, especially, you know, let's say in the next six to twelve months, if I keep seeing this ad, then I will send it to you guys again and say, hey, obviously, obviously I was wrong. Obviously, this ad is working because this physical therapy practice is still running it and you're only going to keep running ads for multiple weeks or months if it's crushing or if it's doing well my initial response was this looks kind of tacky or something i don't know what do you guys think tony what's your what's your initial gut reaction here with this thing Yeah, I mean, you got to talk to the person who posted it.

5:08 What is their idea behind it? What's the intent behind it? Free vouchers is just weird anyway. I've always said I could fly a flag like the two crazies who were on the Empire State Building. Yeah. And I could say free physical therapy for a month and it wouldn't make any difference. Nobody cares about free physical therapy, at least not in my world. It's not going to be like Chick-fil-A can give you a free sandwich and the line is out the door around the block. Nobody is going to line up for free physical therapy. There's no value in that. Yeah.

5:50 For me, I would need to know the goals. But now that we're looking at this ad together, there's like four things that's going on here. There's too much. I don't know where my eye is supposed to go. Am I supposed to go to the image? Then there's a bulleted list. Then there's a free voucher thing. Then there's a claim your spot. I get what you're trying to do with scarcity. Fifty is not the number. If you're trying to do scarcity, I'm like, I'll take my time. Three, five, seven. Ironically, as dumb as it sounds, I read stuff like this and they say odd numbers actually perform better for some stupid reason. But fifty ain't it. Because if you've got fifty, I'll come back in a week. Let me know what you've got. But they're trying something. They are trying something. Unfortunately, I think in this particular ad, they're trying seven things at once.

6:31 Avoid surgery and get back to an active life. That should have been it. But when you're sitting there, I get when you've got Canva and it'll just let me keep adding things. Now, I will give them this thing, although this doesn't look it. Have you heard about the issue with the company rei and they didn't run an ad but meta used ai and ran an ad for them i think this is meta's way of pushing out like well we'll have rei do it and then we can sell it to the redefined physical therapies the problem was they took content from rei's page used an ai ad generator generated it but rei got crap because they're all about nature and of course what's the opposite of nature data centers right so rei wants to be as clean i bet you they're a company that comes out and says we only use real images taken by real photography but here's the image can you spot the problem with the rei ad i don't know if you guys are cycling experts The pedals?

7:41 Oh, the handlebars. The handlebars behind the seat. Yes, look, there's two handles. Which way are you supposed to ride that bike? The AI put handlebars. It's a mountain bike. So the mountain bike is going from my right to my left if you watch the screen. But the AI put handlebars. It didn't know what to do. It put another set of handlebars going the wrong way, which would be an uncomfortable bike seat. So I was going to give them this organization, the PT organization, the benefit of the doubt. But that's what happens when you give all creative control and there's no checks. Larry Benz has an episode of his podcast, The Operator. I helped produce it. I'm on it.

8:21 He had a great line for his episode that comes... The article came out yesterday. His podcast will drop today. And he said... autopilot flies the plane. If there's an altitude change, it does that. It does some turns, but human beings take off and land. And when the red light goes off, autopilot says, grab the wheel again. Now you're in charge. So I think it's okay to have AI do some of these things, but you should have someone look at it and go, does this pass the smell test? Does this feel good to you? Does this, like the first thing we said, does this accomplish the goal we set out to accomplish? So A for music doing something, I don't know, not an A, C plus for doing something or a C, I don't know, what's it?

9:08 Maybe a B or C, yeah. I was going to say, so I like the, I do like the headline. I'm fine with the yellow accent on active life. I don't know about get a free again. That's another thing. Like we have, when our, when I have new therapists, by the way, like get ramped up, we'll reach back out to like previous clients. And as goodwill we'll announce like over text or email to our previous clients, like, Hey, we have Dr. Andrew. Hey, we have Dr. Ethan now to get, you know, basically it's like to get them busy. We'll offer previous clients a complimentary visit. But I used to say free, I used to say the word free, you know, words matter. Words are important. So we used to say, you know, free visit with Andrew, free visit with Dr.

9:48 Ethan and it expires next Friday. Now it's like instead of two weeks, it's like one week. Now, all of a sudden, more people grab it. More people do it because we're big, dumb animals. The aesthetic real quick of the ad. Another thing that I think distracts is that there's two different images. Right. I think it's probably it's probably best to do one image per ad. And again, I could be wrong, but with doing these ads, and by the way, I'm maybe in the future, in the near future, getting back into some meta ads to test, but you have to have like a ton of creative. Like every time you run an ad, there's gotta be like dozens of variations. And then you just like, you pick the winner, you see which one's winning, and then you just double down on that.

10:31 Then you make more new versions that models closer to the ones that already were winning. And then you continue to refine it and refine it. This with two images is distracting, right? It's like one headline, top to bottom, my eyes go headline, sub headline. Now it's like two images. So it's like, do I look left or right? Then like you said, Jimmy, I got the bulleted list on the left. I got the the fifty free voucher sticker and claim your spot, you know, call to action in like yellow orangish. It's just a lot going on. So again, we could see if I keep getting hit with this ad in a month or two, I'll share it with you guys again. I'll be like, hey, we're still running it.

11:12 I recorded radio versions of this that just sounded like I'm talking about one thing, then another, then another. You know what we call this in radio? We call this ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag. It just doesn't fit. It ain't accomplishing the goal. It looks mushy. It's busting out the sides. What would you have done with this? And this is, what was the story? This came out late. So this was people climbed, what? Yeah, a couple climbed to the very extreme tip of the Empire State Building, which is insane. That's insane. I don't know if you saw this, but yesterday on Instagram, in the evening, there was a post from Netflix that was, I think this couple, Oh, yeah.

11:56 And they did a documentary then. And I think that there might be something coming out with them again. And I think this proposal media, I think, is a media stunt probably backed by Netflix. I don't know. I don't know for sure. I don't know for sure. Maybe it'll come out this week or today or something. But that's my hunch. And, you know, then I don't know. Well, the city of New York and Netflix and Netflix will just pay a fine. You guys know me and you might roll your eyes, but of course I see something and then I'm like, oh, I have a story for that. So AAA baseball in Scranton, the local team became the AAA Yankees. And when that happened, they changed from the Phillies to the AAA affiliate Yankees in the Scranton.

12:39 We couldn't get in the stadium the first game because our media competitors had media rights. And the lead singer of Breaking Benjamin, which is a band we played the crap out of, was going to sing the national anthem. We could not be there. So, of course, Jimmy goes, I'm going to figure out a way to do that. The stadium was sort of built in a valley. And in left field was a mall and an Italian restaurant. I took the vinyl from one of our billboards. Like when they take it down, they ask if you want it or shred it. I go, oh, I want that. And it just had a young woman in a tank top that said, I'm your next ex-girlfriend because the radio station was ninety seven nine X. And when they said and the home of the brave.

13:20 We unfurled our banner in left field so the entire stadium could see it, but we weren't on the field. So this is hijacking someone else's visibility. What do you think it would cost to get a logo on the top of the NFL stadium? incalculable you'll never get that money back but it's a step forward it doesn't have to be a billion dollars ours was cute for a moment i got yelled at by it because of course you know the stadium was like you can't do that i'm like oh it's not your rocks i can climb on rock but of course i was never going to do the same gag again anyway it was the point but i think you're right tony like you could do whatever you want and for what we provide it's is it because it's too abstract I'm thinking, I don't know.

14:11 Tony, I don't know if you saw, but at least the people that I follow on Instagram in the New York City area, people started to hijack that stunt and have their own stuff AI on a banner. And it was like, you know, weight loss opportunity in new york city or whatever or you know personal training we're the best whatever and like it's the two it's the two the russian the russian couple that went up to the top of the empire state building that got arrested for and they you know they just changed the world And they just changed the word. So like, but that was multiple people. And it's so funny. Like, I know we've all seen this where like something happens and then like people pile on and do like an AI version for themselves for like self-promotion. I'm totally fine with self-promotion.

14:52 But Tony, you didn't see any of that on your newsfeed yesterday afternoon or evening? Absolutely. I saw that. I'm going to share an image. um i don't know this meme this meme yeah this meme is just filling my feed the wmba girl who's pointing at the other girl who says don't point at me um there are so many like hilarious takes on it like that girl in the physical therapy clinic pointing and then the therapist pointing back and I've been seeing this trend on Instagram where it's like gangster, gangsta, and they're CrossFit gyms. And the person will walk by the other gym and they'll pull up their shirt and they show a dumbbell, you know, like a gun.

15:35 And there are just so many of these things that, yeah, totally. Why is it not the massage gun? Yeah, but it's the yes and. It's the ultimate, what can I take out of this? And I don't have to re-explain the rules. This is why when I used to do radio bar events, I didn't do complicated games. I did musical chairs, but with adults and drunk people. Because I didn't need to explain anything. It was simple and you already understood the gag. And that's why a play on these is pretty brilliant. And I mean, simple, quick, in and out. I've got a friend, Kay, who runs the Instagram page, DPTs with Anxiety. In the kitchen. that's the whole strategy that's the whole strategy she'll see this and then she does nine versions of it puts it out and everyone's like oh that's this is my favorite oh i like how you spun that it's yes and when something popped like the Empire State Building thing, you knew what our entire radio station was talking about, mocking, loving, hating.

16:33 There's no mayonnaise. It's always ranch dressing, baby. It's got to be one way or the other. No mayonnaise. It's got to be a little spice. We were either going to love it and own it, or we were going to trash it and tear it down. And then, forty-eight hours later, we were gone with it. Just so the viewers and Dave knows we're wrapping today's episode at nine. So we have about eleven more minutes. Yeah. But the question is, so now now we go back to reality. Now we say, OK, does this turn into money? Does this put dollars in our pocket? Is this just for, you know, vanity metrics? I will say, though, a couple of weeks or a week or two ago, we shared the Home Depot do it yourself total knee replacement image that I generated.

17:17 I cannot believe how fast you brought that up. Boom. So, but that image put four hundred dollars in my bank account, like just from Instagram bonus, which I didn't even realize it was a thing. Yeah. On Instagram, that image has generated about four hundred dollars in bonus income for me. um i was on uh paypal i went into paypal this morning because someone was sending me a payment and i've got all of these thirty dollar facebook payments and i don't even know what they're from like facebook is paying me thirty dollars every two weeks i gotta figure out why why i'm making that money i found so i found two times in a nickel yesterday so that's it's like the same thing tony's got money being paypal to him he doesn't know where it's coming from But yeah, we need to understand, like, I don't want to put the effort into making a funny meme with the girl pointing and me pointing back.

18:11 Donald Trump pointing at the basketball player and her pointing back is freaking hilarious. I don't want to put time into that because I don't know if it's going to make me money. Unless you can directly draw a line to what you're doing. Like this is, this is where like Judy and Judy's pancakes come in. She takes a video and whatever it is, she just figures out where do we jam Judy? Judy is the marketing strategy. And if you don't know who we're talking about, just look up Judy and pancakes and look at their Instagram account. And she has said people. Now she's in, I can't, it begins with a G random ass, Illinois, and she sells pancakes, but, she's a tourist attraction now and she's the thing.

18:53 And because the kids want to do it. And in your brain, you're like, all right, well, if we're anywhere close, the kids get a t-shirt, but now whatever Judy paid for real estate, she didn't do it in downtown Chicago. She did it in a random ass spot, but she went to the people with those things and she understood it. Tony needs it. I'm a tick. I'm a tick tock famous shirt for sure. Tony needs this thing. Concierge pain relief is back on tick tock. Speaking of TikTok, guys, I have been down the rabbit hole of how much money regular people, forty year olds, fifty year olds, sixty year olds are making as TikTok shop affiliates.

19:34 Yeah, it is absurd. And so this morning before we got on, because I was going to try and bring some numbers, but I didn't have them ready yet. I was looking at like, what are the products? What could I what could I promote that I already use in my clinic? I think the biggest one that none of us are taking advantage of is BioFreeze. Like Dave, you seem like somebody who would be using something like that. I never use it in the clinic, but I should, I could. I think it's got commercial appeal. It's got the history behind it. It's been around forever. You know, the consumer wasn't able to buy BioFreeze directly from the company. They had to go through the healthcare provider.

20:15 But now I think that's something that literally could put six figures in your bank account because the general appeal and accessibility for a product like that, if you made one viral video that hit several million views, which is totally doable for any of us. I'm trying to better understand how TikTok, I've got like two hundred dollars in my TikTok affiliate account that I've earned. But I think this is a really ideal opportunity for people like us. For someone thinking and going, but I don't want to do the ticky-tocky, like, just talk about it. Yeah, it wouldn't be any of that. No dances, no gimmicks.

20:56 Here's how Rory Sutherland, I think, would explain it. He would say all TikTok did was two things. they took the distance between someone seeing something and giggling about something or being interested in something and owning that. And they took that distance down to essentially as close to zero as possible. And they aligned the person who has credibility or an audience or the ability to build an audience. And they put them on the same team as the Biofreeze or the Hyper Ice Gun. And they said, if you do this thing this much and it gets this much, we'll give you a cut.

21:38 The reach is infinity. Like the reach is potentially, it could be infinity. So simple, but not easy. And Ben's already pilot bio, bio mildly cold is a cheaper alternative. I don't know if that's a, is that a dad joke or is that there actually something called bio? That'd be a smart, like six minute abs. Why not do five minute abs? Dave, you brought up or you shared an ad that you share or that you created or I should say a post on LinkedIn. I wanted to ask you about it because I wanted to see if it was an error and I'll bring it up on screen here. So you had the ad and I'll zoom in a little bit.

22:22 Physical therapists in New York City paid more for treating less. Great hook because that doesn't make sense. I get paid more. That's why I have to keep reading. How is that possible? He says. And then you go on to a set. You're using hard numbers, which nobody does, which is the way to do it. How is it possible to earn a buck twenty six to one hundred and seventy K, but only treating four to six patients a day? Details below. What's up with the orange square? I stopped. It got me. So I want to know, where'd you come up with this? I was like, is it not loading? Where's the is my phone broken? What happened? This is partly why I did this, so that we can talk about it.

23:04 Neither of you have ever seen this before? No. I don't think so, no. You probably have seen it before because this was what, do you remember the fire festival? The guy that eventually got, uh, in trouble, the original promoter, I forget the guy's name. Uh, they were paying all of the big, like all the celebrities and the models and the people that were going to be Kardashian. They were all posting. The Orange Square. This was on Instagram mostly years ago with the Fyre Festival. And it was meant to be exactly what it did to Jimmy, which is it's a pattern interrupt.

23:47 It's a scroll stopper. And I could have used a different color. I could have maybe used our own brand color. I could have just done royal blue or something. But I went with the exact same solid orange square image that is meant to cause you to pause or give you intrigue or yeah is there an error or like what what is this like um usually it's going to be text on the square right so that it literally that is literally the point of it is to be unique different something that you will not see or haven't seen recently in your feed and probably won't see for a while unless other people start copying it so I'm surprised that you guys don't remember, but I know it was kind of like a big thing.

24:31 Yeah, Scott Embry is here live. Scott probably saw that on LinkedIn. Scott's always on LinkedIn, I think. And Scott agrees with Jimmy. Great hook and got his attention for sure. So that's the point, right? First line, hook on purpose, but the image is also kind of like a visual hook. I'm going to get really nitpicky. The only way to make this better is... Give it to me. Give it to me. Don't put the space here. Don't have the space here. Make this second line here. Here's why. LinkedIn will truncate this and sometimes make people see more to expand.

25:12 And I don't want that second subhead to get cut off. That's the only, and that's like, that's like a point five percent. The rest of it, I think, is fine. What was in the comments, though? You tried to share something and it didn't work. Yeah. So then I then I was like, my my intention was actually to add a couple like PDFs. Right. So we have like a seven or something, six or seven page FAQ, because I want people to know a bunch of information before we even do an intro call. I don't want to do an intro call where I'm answering the same questions every day. So I tried to attach PDFs and then I was like, I was like, oh crap, I can't do it. And I'm like, ah, whatever. I'm just going to leave it. And so now, now, now I'm getting, now I'm getting DMS and emails from this post.

25:56 Right. Uh, asking for the FAQ document, which I have to send them. And then I'm also asking for the two pager elite clinician growth opportunity, which is like describes like the base salary, the performance pay weekly PTO, like that whole thing. I thought what you were trying to do is get people to comment to drive attention too. Because if more people comment, it shows it to more people. More people comment, snowball effect. Overall, I think that's great. Again, that took you five minutes, ten minutes to think about and execute it. If it gets you an interview that leads to a hire, it feels like it's a good use of your time. We got two minutes left. Let's go with parting shots so we're not late to our next gig.

26:36 What do you got for us? Parting shots. I want to talk about next time. Boom ball. So this is an up and coming competitor for banana ball. You know, I mean, this is what's going to happen. You create something amazing. There are going to be people who make it even better. There are some interesting rule changes and how it works. Yeah. I read about that. They play with a live hand grenade. One out of nine innings. You never know which one it is. You have to watch. It's called boom ball. So what's going to be the boom ball for the physical therapy profession? How is this going to change and grow and adapt into something new and different?

27:16 That's my parting shot. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's a good one. All right. That's a good conversation. I'll come prepared for that one. What do you got, Dave? Party shot. I'll go back to that social media post. Just trying to do things that are different, unique. Try to think outside the box, whether it's posting on social media, making videos. We got a bunch of videos coming out that I was telling Tony about last week where we're having a catch in Central Park with a real baseball and gloves and talking about physical therapy and healthcare in New York city and all that. So we're just trying to continue to, of course we've got to sprinkle in the normal stuff, like sprinkling videos of like treatment, manual therapy, you know, therapy exercise, like strength training, that type of stuff, but also sprinkling in like the, what someone described to me recently, like the, the behind the scenes, like, you know, walking down the street with one of my therapists and we're just, we're just chatting.

28:05 Right. So, um, that, that, that's my parting shot. Just like, we're continuing to do different things and almost getting closer to the point of Tony's stage advice, which is like, we should be recording everything. We should be posting everything like HEP videos for patients, put that online with, with their, with their permission and therapists talking like, um, Like talking between patients and waiting for a patient to show up. Are they going to be late? Are they going to be early? Are they going to no-show? Like whatever, like all that type of stuff. So that's my parting shot. Can't interrupt a pattern if you don't have a pattern. So do the normal stuff, right? And then every once in a while... Shake it up. That's why there's specials. There's a blue face special. Got to throw him a curveball. Curveball.

28:45 Curveball. Got to throw him a curveball. All right, guys. We're back next week. And enjoy the heat. Enjoy the heat. Stay cool. That's it. We're out. Boys, what the hell are you doing? Follow Tony Maritato on YouTube at Total Therapy Solution. Find Dave Kittle at conciergepainrelief.com and on YouTube at The Dave Kittle Show. and follow Jimmy McKay at PG Podcasts on YouTube, the socials, and wherever you binge podcasts you pretend are for CEUs. And hey, just a reminder, none of this was for advice. This was for entertainment only. Our lawyers say that counts. Thanks, Keith.