My first ads were job listings

In 2022 I was sixteen. The war in Ukraine had just started, a lot of people were arriving in Israel, and most of them needed work quickly.

A family friend worked at a recruiting company. She mentioned in passing that the way they found candidates was by posting job offers into local Facebook groups. That was the whole channel. That was it.

I'd been watching marketing courses on YouTube for a while by then, and it was obvious that nobody in that industry was buying ads. So I spent a couple of days learning how to actually build a campaign on Facebook and Instagram, drafted the creative in Photoshop, and sent her a proposal.

She understood it immediately. We turned the campaign on.

It worked faster than I expected. The leads came in straight away, and they were serious ones. These were people who had just moved countries and needed to be working.

What worked in the ads

I put the exact hourly rate in the ad. Everyone else was writing things like competitive pay. Naming the number does two jobs at once: it answers the first question anyone has, and it signals that we aren't hiding the rest.

I described the actual position. What you'd be doing, the hours, the shifts, the location, what came with it. Most listings at the time were three vague lines. A job isn't a small decision. You're choosing where most of your waking hours go, and people want to know what they're walking into before they raise their hand.

I varied the visuals instead of running one template into the ground. I started generating images with AI for the creative, which in 2022 almost nobody was doing yet, and it made the ads look like something other than the same stock photo everyone else had.

What it actually taught me

The opportunity wasn't a clever idea. It was an empty channel. Everyone in that industry was posting into the same Facebook groups, and I didn't do any of it better than they did. I just went somewhere they hadn't gone.

The gap between deciding and running was about two days. I didn't know how to build a campaign when I proposed one. I learned it from YouTube in the time between the idea and the launch.

None of what worked was persuasion. I wasn't writing more convincing copy than anyone else. I was including information other people were leaving out, and the information did the selling. That's still how I think about ads.

It paid on commission, so I only earned when somebody was actually hired. Not per click, not per lead. Per person who got the job. That teaches you quickly to care about what happens after someone taps the ad, which is the easiest part to stop paying attention to.

This is where marketing started for me. I learned it by hand, while it was already running, which is not the same thing as learning it from a course.