We were lucky to catch up with Barry Hott recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Barry, thanks for joining us today. Was there an experience or lesson you learned at a previous job that’s benefited your career afterwards?

Continuous improvement. This core value was a big part of one of my past jobs and it’s stuck with me and become one of my own personal core values and an infectious mindset that helps individuals and organizations that even if things are good, they can always be improved. Providing feedback on how to improve something doesn’t mean it’s bad or wrong, it just means it can be made better. When everyone is on the same page, everyone cans start to see things to improve and not stick with the status quo.

Barry, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’ve been doing Facebook ads since 2008, back when they were only tiny little ads in the right column. Since then, I’ve spent nearly a billion dollars on the platform and have analyzed billions of dollars worth of ads and ad performance for some of the biggest brand names on earth as well as some of the fastest growing startups from the past 5 years.

I’m a passionate nerd about everything surround Facebook (now Meta) ads and their performance, so that’s media buying, creative, and landing page and website optimization. Anything that can get someone from not caring about a brand/product to getting them to buy.

I like solving complex creative problems around what consumers care about and what they don’t. I’ve become somewhat well known for my “make ugly ads” concept, where I encourage advertisers and creative teams to make less-polished and professional content in favor of making more authentic-styled ad content that’s native to the platforms they’re being shown on.

I also work on teaching media buying literacy and expertise. I think too many Facebook advertisers/media buyers have beliefs about what works and doesn’t, but haven’t been able to test them enough at scale or across multiple accounts and verticals, which is something I’ve had the fortune to do in my career. I’ve learned all the crazy things NOT to do with advertising and all the scenarios by which data can be deceiving or misleading.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Stop making ads for your ego and start making ads for your audience. Stop making excuses and start making ads yourself. There are no gatekeepers anymore. Anyone can make an ad. From interns to CEOS. Make ads with post-it notes or in Canva. Shoot on your phone, edit in CapCut. There’s no excuses anymore.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

While I was working at a growth marketing agency, I started working on a hard seltzer brand on the side, Lone River Ranch Water. I did it entirely for equity. We were a small, scrappy team selling a new category of hard seltzer that launched in early 2020. We used my DTC ad playbook to create a champion versus challenger ad competition structure so we could keep improving ads and optimizing spend to the ones that had the greatest impact on our audience. One year later, we were acquired by Diageo.

After the acquisition, I continued to consult for Diageo, now getting paid to do so, and that gave me both the financial freedom to go out on my own. The work that I did toward the acquisition gave me the confidence that I could make money working for myself, on my own, and I’ve been consulting and dabbling in a few things since then. Now, I’m dabbling in too many things and need to scale that back but it’s been great to get to experience different things and get more clarity on what I enjoy working on and different ways I can make money with my skills and expertise.

My whole career, people have told me to expand my experience beyond just the niche of Facebook ads to be more of a generalist, but my whole career niching down into those ads has continued to pay off as I’ve become a deep subject matter expert in the area and I’ve become more valuable than if I were more of a generalist.

A big part of this all has also been my scrappiness and creative side. Beyond just doing the technical advertising, I also shoot and star in ads, make image ads, edit videos, tweak landing pages, and anything else that can improve ad performance. I love getting to be at the crossroads of creativity, technical know-how, and consumer psychology.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hottgrowth.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/binghott/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/binghott
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/barryhott
• Other: https://intro.co/BarryHott