Your Stubbornness Is Killing Your Results

Consider this a bit of an intervention. If you're stubbornly stuck in your ways as an advertiser and unwilling to evolve with the changes, this episode is for you.

I speak to you as a peer with experience in this area. I'm a creature of habit. I need routine and structure to be productive. Change feels like chaos to me. Fourteen years into my business, many of my processes and software remain unchanged. I've conducted a weekly webinar for my private community for more than 10 years, still using the same slide template and profile photo from 2014. My logo? Designed by a friend back in 2012. Brand colors? Still the same.

These are my safe spaces. They're comfortable and familiar. And when it's a system or tool, I've refined it over time to work for me.

But the truth is, I was forced to make some big changes in recent years. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be recording this podcast. Who knows what I’d be doing instead?

Let me share that story and connect it back to advertising.

My Origin Story

You might not know how I got started, so here's the short version. My path was winding: philosophy major, five years in insurance, three seasons with the NBA, and two and a half years of layoffs. I launched jonloomer.com in 2011 with no plan or business knowledge, and somehow it worked. Within two years, I’d built something I couldn’t have imagined.

For the next eight years, I did everything I could to preserve it. I wanted to work less and be present for my three boys while they were growing up. I coached all of their baseball teams. It was the best decision I ever made, and I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything.

But that came with a conscious decision: scaling my business wasn’t the priority. Change was scary because I didn’t want to lose what I had. So my model didn’t evolve. I relied on my blog to attract traffic, built an email list, and sold courses and memberships. That worked until around 2018 or 2019. Then, things plateaued. A slow decline began.

It still worked well enough that I tried to ignore the warning signs.

Then COVID hit. Everything collapsed. I lost focus. While other marketers leaned into virtual and embraced video, I hid. I didn’t like video, so I kept blogging, posting to Facebook, and creating courses. But all of it worked less and less.

By 2022, my youngest son was 14 and I was finishing my final summer coaching baseball. My business was fading fast, and I finally had time to focus on it again. I had to face some hard questions. What could I do differently?

The answer was video. It was obvious, but also painful.

I committed to creating at least one video per day for about two years. That forced me onto new platforms: Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn. And it worked. That change helped stop the downward spiral and stabilize things.

Stubbornness nearly killed my business.

My Evolution as an Advertiser

Let’s talk advertising. I get it. Change is hard. Meta advertising has changed dramatically since the iOS 14 update. It can feel overwhelming.

I remember being very vocal about how much I disliked audience expansion when it launched. I prided myself on microtargeting and remarketing. I built my brand around isolating the perfect audience. Audience expansion felt like a threat.

So I resisted. And as a result, I got left behind.

It took a lot of tests and time for me to come around, but I did. I had to put my ego aside and face the fear of change. If I hadn’t, my old-school approach to advertising would have made me irrelevant.

What About You?

Are you still using the same strategies from years ago?

• Do they contradict Meta’s current best practices?

• Do you constantly reject suggested changes meant to improve performance?

• Do you defend your approach to advertisers who follow the best practices playbook?

• Are you clinging to manual audience isolation?

• Do you remove placements instead of trusting Advantage+ placements?

• Do you maintain a complex web of campaigns and ad sets rather than simplify?

Maybe you’ve convinced yourself the old way is still the best way. But if you’re ignoring signs of decline, that’s a problem.

If you're not careful, your resistance to change will make you irrelevant.

But there's still hope.

Bottom of the Glass

Change is hard. I'm proof of that. There's comfort in what's familiar. It's easy to distrust what’s new.

But if you want to remain relevant, you need to push through that. It's time to evolve.