Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast

About Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast

Velocity by Hawky: Performance Marketing Podcast is aimed at fostering a community of digital marketers and performance marketing leaders to share insights and real-world campaign experiences. The goal is to collectively gain knowledge and accelerate these learnings across the industry. We host marketing experts, CMOs, and agency founders from leading brands across business verticals and geographies to understand their performance marketing philosophy. In this podcast, we will cover topics spanning campaign optimization, creative scaling, audience targeting, attribution modeling, and cross-channel performance among other key aspects of digital marketing velocity. Whether you're scaling Meta campaigns, optimizing Google ads, or building high-performance marketing teams, Velocity delivers the insider strategies that drive measurable results and sustainable growth.

Publisher

Hawky

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

9 Sept 2025

Latest episode

6 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

21 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Oct 2026

   EP 22 - Automation Isn't Your Problem. Fragmentation Is | Anthony Higman

   $190M in legal ad spend. Every client account touched by hand, every single day. And a habit of spotting Google's changes before Google announces them. In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we sit down with Anthony Higman, CEO of ADSQUIRE, a Philadelphia agency and Google Premier Partner that runs Google Ads, Local Services Ads and ChatGPT Ads exclusively for law firms. Anthony has spent 15 years in paid search, and his five-person team deliberately works the opposite way to everything Google is pushing: manual bids, daily negatives, no automation platforms on top. Anthony explains how Google's recommendations tab began as an internal churn-prevention tool for its sales reps, which control he has quietly stopped fighting for (and why it costs advertisers their creative insight), and why fragmentation across four ad platforms hurt his business more than automation ever did. He also shares what happened when ADSQUIRE spent $15,000 on ChatGPT Ads in the first week of self-serve, why results fell off a cliff the week after, and how he worked out that ChatGPT targets your conversation history more than the query you just typed. 🎯 Key Topics Covered: 00:00 - Meet Anthony Higman: $190M in legal ad spend, managed by hand 01:28 - Google's endgame: "give us your credit card and your URL" 04:07 - Recommendations started as a churn tool for Google's sales reps 06:02 - The control he gave up on: Google Business Profile assets 07:00 - Auto-apply assets: the setting most advertisers never find 11:10 - Why a law-firm agency still depends on Google 14:25 - ChatGPT Ads: $15K in week one, then results fell off a cliff 16:00 - Where ChatGPT Ads work: bankruptcy and truck accidents 17:51 - Ads that ignore your query, and the conversation-history weighting 20:10 - Spend 10 to 15% of your time outside the ad platform 20:46 - The legal channel mix: search, LSA, YouTube, ChatGPT, billboards 22:04 - Why 15-second non-skippables are still his favourite YouTube ad 22:32 - Five people, 35 clients, and still in every account every day 24:55 - The real problem isn't automation, it's fragmentation 25:31 - Google reps: 12 calls a day, and going around the agency 26:27 - What a media buyer's job actually is now 28:30 - What he hires for: creative problem solving, humility, hunger 29:27 - Why ADSQUIRE refuses automation platforms 31:27 - How five people run 35 accounts: a full-time lead-quality role 32:52 - What's next: social lead gen, Demand Gen and Google's branded search beta Meet Surender (Host & Co-Founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/) Meet Anthony Higman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-higman-a3656a46/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-higman-a3656a46/) 🔗 ADSQUIRE: https://adsquire.com/ (https://adsquire.com/) About Hawky: An agentic performance marketing platform. Two always-on agents and a Copilot that buy media against your KPI, generate on-brand creatives from your winners, and answer any question about the account instantly. Other tools generate. Hawky operates. 👉 Book a Hawky demo: https://hawky.ai/get-demo (https://hawky.ai/get-demo) 🎧 More episodes: https://hawky.ai/podcast (https://hawky.ai/podcast) #GoogleAds #PPC #LegalMarketing #LawFirmMarketing #ChatGPTAds #LocalServicesAds #PerformanceMarketing #MarketingPodcast

2. 

   29 Sept 2026

   EP 21 - Why Affiliate Programs Fail: The $10M Rule, Referrals and AI Attribution | Michael Cole

   Bootstrapped to $35 million ARR. Zero investors. Sixty-five percent of new revenue from referrals. And they grew by switching off a Google Ads channel that was profitable. In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we sit down with Michael Cole, CMO at Everflow, the partner marketing platform that last year tracked more than 1.3 billion events and attributed more than 700 million conversions for 1,200 plus brands. Michael was an early Everflow customer before he joined, and has spent eight years on the problem of paying partners for what actually happened rather than for the last click. Michael's core argument is that most affiliate programs do not fail because of the affiliates. They fail because they launched before the funnel was ready, and affiliates carry all the risk in the deal. He explains why he puts the threshold at roughly $10 million in revenue, why your best affiliates are the ones already promoting your competitors, why they killed a profitable paid channel and grew, and why 22 percent of their demo requests self-report AI while their analytics can only see ten. He also makes the case that AI companies are the affiliate category nobody is running yet. 🎯 Key Topics Covered: 00:00 - Meet Michael Cole: a customer before he was the CMO 01:15 - Bootstrapped to $35M ARR with no outside investors 02:25 - 1,200 customers, and why the whole journey has to be tracked 04:03 - 65% of new revenue from referrals, and the two plays behind it 05:15 - The structure: $250, $500, $1,000, and how it filters itself 07:07 - Your best affiliates are already promoting your competitors 10:40 - Networks vs platform: marketplaces and super affiliates 12:47 - The profitable Google Ads channel they turned off 13:41 - Referrals that never produce a click, and how you track them anyway 15:41 - What AEO did to affiliate publishers 17:31 - 22% of demos self-report AI while analytics sees 10 20:02 - Who affiliate works for, and why AI companies are ideal 22:19 - Channels don't matter: find the affiliates who own your vertical 23:36 - Micro influencers, and why the channel needs a dedicated person 25:54 - When to start: referrals on day one, affiliates at $10M 27:30 - PLG vs SLG, long sales cycles, and where resellers come in 29:00 - Catching fraud with deterministic signals 31:32 - Optimise Google for company emails, not demo requests 33:01 - The marketing stack, and what to buy vs build 35:03 - HubSpot, Gong, Jira, Supabase, and Claude on top 38:31 - GTM engineers and an AI-transformed content workflow Meet Surender (Host & Co-Founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/) Meet Michael Cole: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcole6 (https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcole6) 🔗 Everflow: https://www.everflow.io/ (https://www.everflow.io/) About Hawky: An agentic performance marketing platform. Two always-on agents and a Copilot that buy media against your KPI, generate on-brand creatives from your winners, and answer any question about the account instantly. Other tools generate. Hawky operates. 👉 Book a Hawky demo: https://hawky.ai/get-demo (https://hawky.ai/get-demo) 🎧 More episodes: https://hawky.ai/podcast (https://hawky.ai/podcast) #PerformanceMarketing #AffiliateMarketing #PartnerMarketing #ReferralMarketing #B2BSaaS #Attribution #AEO #MarketingPodcast

3. 

   29 Sept 2026

   EP 20 - Why 1,000 Ads a Month Won't Scale: Creative Strategy from $5K to $600K | Sarah Levinger

   Most brands don't have a creative strategy. They have an ad factory. Sarah Levinger can tell the difference in about thirty seconds of scrolling an asset folder. In this episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, we sit down with Sarah Levinger, consumer psychologist and founder of Tether Insights, one of the most-cited voices in creative strategy for DTC. Sarah works the psychology layer under ad creative: what the customer is really saying beneath the pain point, and why the ads a team labours over are rarely the ones that scale. Her case is that volume is the wrong goal, and that the category's loudest advice, ship more ads, is what quietly caps performance. She rebuilds creative strategy from scratch three times on the show, at $5K, $60K and $600K a month, and the answer is never "more". 🎯 Key Topics Covered: 00:00 - Meet Sarah Levinger, founder of Tether Insights 01:20 - "You don't have a creative strategy. You have an ad factory." 04:26 - The four steps before you pick an ad format 07:04 - What creative strategy actually is 08:14 - Why the job exists now: iOS 14, TikTok and the algorithm shift 10:36 - The one metric she judges creative on, read by cohort 12:13 - $5K a month: three to five ads a week, and why ten reads as noise 15:08 - The only research worth doing yet: reviews, surveys, support tickets 16:23 - Why she won't look at competitor ads until you're bigger 17:33 - When a brand earns its first designer ($30K–$50K a month) 18:28 - AI vs human creative: why all-AI accounts struggle to hold performance 19:21 - Trigger, Exploration, Evaluation, Purchase: her model, not TOFU/MOFU/BOFU 23:04 - Her cadence: quarterly goal, monthly culture, weekly account 24:34 - $60K a month: format diversity vs story diversity, and the one-angle account 28:35 - One campaign per journey stage, built for the human 30:15 - $600K a month: segment by product category first, then expand 32:15 - Brief creators like a film director: character first, one ingredient 36:07 - Creative fatigue: frequency isn't the signal; the ad is starved, not tired 38:56 - How she scores a creative: valence, self-discrepancy, story depth 40:40 - Spend an ad needs before you can call it: 2–3x CPA, ~$100 an ad 41:42 - Where AI stops: objective on data, useless on context 43:48 - Andromeda: a purchase is a symptom of a good movie 46:41 - The post-mortem on a flopped ad: account, psychology, culture 48:26 - Stop and start: run half your ads, ask customers what they want Meet Surender (Host & Co-Founder at Hawky): https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/say2surender/) Meet Sarah Levinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahlevinger (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahlevinger) 🔗 Tether Insights: https://tetherinsights.io (https://tetherinsights.io) About Hawky: An agentic performance marketing platform. Two always-on agents and a Copilot that buy media against your KPI, generate on-brand creatives from your winners, and answer any question about the account instantly. Other tools generate. Hawky operates. 👉 Book a Hawky demo: https://hawky.ai/get-demo (https://hawky.ai/get-demo) 🎧 More episodes: https://hawky.ai/podcast (https://hawky.ai/podcast) #PerformanceMarketing #CreativeStrategy #MetaAds #AdCreative #UGC #SarahLevinger #MarketingPodcast

Contact Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.