Ads Are a Megaphone: Fix the Foundation Before You Spend a Dollar
By Armando J. Perez-Carreno · Featuring Sheldon Poon
I talked with Sheldon Poon of Drive Marketing about why most ad budgets fail before launch and why GA4 works as a data hub even though people keep treating it like a broken report.
Most ad budgets fail before a single dollar gets spent, because the business underneath them isn't ready. Sheldon Poon, co-founder and CEO of Drive Marketing, put it the cleanest way I've heard. Ads are a megaphone. If your foundation is broken, all you're doing is amplifying the broken thing. His agency turns clients away all the time, telling them to fix the foundation first, because running ads on a weak business is a fast way to burn money.
In this episode, I talked with Sheldon Poon, co-founder of Drive Marketing, a paid-ads agency out of Montreal. Sheldon has a wild path to this work. He graduated computer science during the dot-com bust, taught high school media for about seven years, ran the network for the largest English school board in Montreal, then studied philosophy before he and his co-founder accidentally built an agency. People kept writing checks to a brand name that wasn't even a company yet, so they had to incorporate to cash them.
The foundation point is the one I want every owner to sit with. Before you spend on ads, Sheldon wants you to already have organic sales so you know what sells and what doesn't. He wants you to talk to your customers and ask the uncomfortable questions. What pain point did we solve for you? Why did you choose us? If we disappeared tomorrow, how would that hurt your business? People who buy from you because they like you give you a warm feeling, and that warmth won't scale with ads. As he told me, "I cannot scale people liking Armando." The bad outcomes he sees almost always trace back to the business and not the ads. Phones go unanswered, emails sit for days, and orders that can't ship show up in the data plain as anything.
The second big idea is how much the platforms have changed. Years ago on Facebook, you picked the interests yourself. You'd guess that I live in Texas, that I'm male, that I'm an entrepreneur, and you'd stack interests until the targeting was tight. Back then competition was thin, so familiarity did the work. Show someone your brand around 30 times and they'd take a look. Today Meta's Advantage Plus flips that. You let the system sort through the roughly 57,000 data points it holds on a person and find your buyers. So the targeting work moves out of the platform and into the creative. Your ad itself has to carry the message that pulls the right person from attention to interest to desire. You dump your whole asset library in, tell the algorithm to chase reach, clicks, and conversions, and let it run.
Sheldon leans on a model from 1898 to keep this straight. Attention, interest, desire, action. It predates the word marketing, and human nature hasn't shifted much, so it still frames the work. You need a certain number of assets for attention, more for desire, a plan to retarget, and clean tracking underneath all of it. Work with the AI, keep the library full, and make sure the data is accurate.
That tracking part is where his dev team earns its keep. A lot of owners treat Google Analytics 4 as a reporting tool and then hate it. Sheldon says they're holding it wrong. "You're using a screwdriver as a hammer right now." GA4 was rebuilt as a data hub, pulling from Search Console, Merchant Center, Google Ads, and YouTube, crunching it, then feeding it back into Ads so the system targets better. Most default setups miss micro-actions and key events, so the data comes in thin. His team rebuilds the tracking before a single ad runs.
The numbers back the discipline up. Drive Marketing has case studies at 12-to-1 and 18-to-1 return on ad spend. For a national brand sold in Costco, their 2025 average came in around 12X for every dollar, in an industry where 3.65X is considered a big win. Sheldon's take is humble. He doesn't think they're magical. He thinks the average is low because most shops skip the homework. Before any creative, his team runs a full SWOT analysis and maps direct, indirect, and replacement competition. They'll show a client a Google pie chart of their real market and point at the competitor eating their lunch online, someone the client had never heard of. Every audit he's done has turned up at least two or three glaring holes, and he's pointed at one and said, "that's $200,000 that you lost last year for no reason."
At the end of the day, the lesson for any small business is to slow down before you scale up. Start with organic sales so you can see what people pay for. Learn your customer and the real pain you solve. Fix the broken parts of your sales and service, then clean up your tracking. Once that holds, put the megaphone to your brand. Spending before the foundation is solid is how you hand your credit card to Meta and pray. Fix the thing first, and the ads finally have something worth amplifying.