Happy Birthday, Eric: An Ad for an Audience of One

Verification status: Partially verified, from Dennis’s own telling. The cost comes from our examples list; the ad’s exact targeting settings weren’t kept.

I met Eric Ludwig in April 2009, years before he became CMO of Rosetta Stone and hired us (moving fast by moving slow). When my buddy turned 50, I didn’t send a card. I ran an ad.

“Happy birthday, Eric.” Aimed so tightly that the one person who saw it in his feed was him. Our examples list records the cost at about 83 cents a day.

Why I still tell this story on stage

It’s a fun prank. The business point is serious: if you can put a message in front of one marketing executive for less than a dollar, you can put your expert’s video in front of the forty people who decide whether your company gets the contract. The facilities managers. The property managers. The procurement team.

That’s the micro-targeting idea in the Dollar a Day master course: proven content first, then aim it at the few people who matter. Rosetta Stone itself later hired us; read how Rosetta Stone scaled social video ads on the same logic.

A note on what works today

Audience-size minimums and privacy rules have tightened since then, and a network may not serve an ad to a single person. The same thinking works at the scale of one company or one buying committee, especially on LinkedIn.

Part of: Dollar a Day, the master course · All the stories · Next: Bryan Eisenberg’s mom vs. Sears