David Blair

Helping celebrities & brands achieve HIGHER ROAS, & IMPLEMENT AI into their marketing for more💪 ceo & founder @FanwardOfficial

[David Blair @davidblair777]

There are two ways to launch a personal brand. You can launch the business and then build the personal brand from within the business. That's what I'm doing. Or you can build the personal brand first and then launch a business off the back of it. 

if I build the brand for five years, then my business will take off within six months. No, a business is a business.

And it takes five to seven years for a business to gain its footing because there's a lot of things you need to learn and so on. So no matter what approach you take, when you choose to start the business, you need to plan for a five-to-seven-year run before it feels like the business is successful. And so whatever allows you to do that is: hey, if I'm in a position in which I can start my business and keep the personal brand growing, and I can stay stable in my life and have my bills paid for the next five to seven years.

That would be more the time that I would recommend starting the business off the personal brand rather than a specific time frame.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

When I worked at Mastro's as a server in Beverly Hills, we discovered that there are actually three types of tables. And with our clients, we discover the same thing.

There is the a-hole that you cannot please no matter what. They come in hunting for a problem. Their entire validation of their existence is to just slam other people. Those are called pitas. Pain in the aha. Then there are the

Amazing regulars. These are the dream tables. They have money, they are personality, they tip you, they care about you, they appreciate the fact that you're a professional, etc. And most people, most servers put their tables into those two categories. And I have found these same two categories in marketing. However, there is a third.

The third category is the diva category. And diva typically has a negative connotation. But if you, as a service provider, whether you're serving a table or doing marketing or anything else, can get your own ego out of the way, then you can actually have the ability to recognize the diva.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

the founder face is typically top and middle of funnel. Founder face, co-founder's face, anything talking about the mission, getting it out there. Right now in 2026, the bandwidth mix, whether it's ad budget, whether it's time spent, whatever, the bandwidth mix is sixty percent.

Cold audience awareness, meaning introducing yourself to the cold audience, 30% middle of funnel in which you're further educating who you are, what you do, who you can add value to, and only 10% on conversion. Most people reverse that or do 100% on conversion. And in doing so, you burned out your audience. You have no reach for further people, et cetera.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

TikTok shop, live selling. the live selling part, it requires a lot of time. Three to five hours, two to three days a week at minimum. But that will seed more stuff into the internet. Because think about it. If every second that you're doing is seeding into the internet, then if you're live streaming for three to five hours, how many 30-second clips are you putting into the internet, even if you don't clip them up? Versus

How long let's do the math right here. let's say you stream for three hours. And let's say your average clip that you would post on social media would be 30 seconds. So three times 60, or 180 minutes. And then if there's two clips per minute, live streaming for three hours puts the equivalent of 360 30 second clips on the internet. Without any editing. All of it.

So imagine how fast you can sew these this signal into the internet. That's why live shopping is so powerful.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

In the very beginning.

You should be doing the content as the founder because you need to understand content. And then after that you will have a really good idea. Like you can justify spending nothing on content if you're the one doing the content because you're investing your time. Or you can justify spending half a million dollars a year on content if it's not gonna bankrupt your company. You know? A lot of creators and companies that are bootstrapping it are spending zero dollars on content doing themselves. And Kevin O'Leary is spending half a million dollars a year on content. So

There is no actual number. That's the biggest thing is like test, pivot, test, pivot, test, pivot.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

Working seven days a week somehow grows your brand faster. It does not. It grows your friend brand faster for a small amount of time and then three years, five years in, you end up in the hospital or you end up burned out. You have to think of professional athletes.

You are constantly tasking it, constantly challenging it to learn, grow, and get stronger and learn new things. It needs a recovery time. This is like if you went to the gym, it's like, I'm going to build my muscle, and then for all day, every day, you're just doing this. Which means it's triggering breakdown, muscle, breakdown, muscle, breakdown, and then you never give it a rest to actually recover, which is when the muscle is actually built. The brain is the same way.

You tax it, tax it, tax it. It it heals during sleep. If you're getting seven hours of sleep a night, And then make sure you take at least one to two days off a week so that your brain gets more powerful over time. And your brain you will maximize efficiency much faster which will make your other five to six days way more productive.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

It is very, very important for us to understand that there is ether around the earth. And every time we say something, feel something, and there is a vibe that goes out, it resonates in the ether. understanding that the most real things on earth are the things unseen. The single most real thing is gravity. Like if you jump off a cliff, gravity will kill you. Nobody can see gravity. So

It really cracks me up when people like don't believe in God and they don't believe in spirits and they don't believe in this. I'm like, well then you don't believe in gravity.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

Poppy is a great example of human marketing done right. Why? Because when they launched Poppy, they did not try to sell Poppy. they did brand awareness for two or three years. And the the reason that brand awareness is so beautiful is that it starts the conversation. Like I I I I liken marketing to dating, oftentimes. if you try to sell someone in your first ad that they ever see.

you're like, hey, yo, person on the internet, buy this thing. You don't know me. I don't know you. We don't know this thing. I don't know if this thing benefits you. Humans operate in the same way, whether it's trying to find a partner, trying to date, or

Trying to find a product and trying to solve a pain point in their life.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

Authenticity means there needs to be an authentic vibe about every single thing I'm saying about the marketing.

We should not be saying something solely for the sake of a sale or solely for the sake of introducing ourselves to someone. This doesn't mean that we can't craft a narrative that fits the circumstance. Because if you walk up to a dude, you're like, hey, what's up, bro? And you walk up to a girl, you're not gonna go, Hey, what's up, bro? it's an the same greeting is not authentic to the girl and is authentic to the guy. So authenticity means

Understanding what resonates with us as a brand or us as a human or us as a marketer or us as a founder all the way through the destination. the human destination, the mind that it's supposed to impact in a positive way.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

What makes people think the celebrity collab succeeds versus falls completely flat? Because it's really about setting expectation and that often comes from each side knowing exactly what they're looking for.

Oftentimes it is a social media girl that is setting up the collab with the marketing team that exist is expecting a bottom-of-funnel ROI. And oftentimes that's not the output. Oftentimes they're gonna get more impressions and more view and build an audience, and that's not gonna relate to sales until two or three months later. So you have to have expectations and metrics on on on what's called derivative testing. So when you do the celebrity collab, you want to do your best to make sure that no other

variables are changing so that you can measure at the top level, middle level, and bottom level whatever shifts there's happening. Cause if you have two things changing at once you have no idea which one drove the change.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

if the brands don't spend time in the comment section, they'll get it wrong. If the celebrity doesn't spend time in their own comment section, because a lot of these celebrities became famous because they were in a show or movie. They didn't become famous because

They built their audience from scratch singing from their parents' basement. Influencers, they know their audience like the back of their hand. Sometimes celebrities don't. Sometimes celebrities do.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

If you dive into the the the market or the the fans of the of the influencer celebrity, then find their most viral videos and read through the comments and then structure your structure your brief of what you're offering the celebrity based on actual comment feedback of people that like them.

I highly doubt that most people that are in charge of brand collabs spend time pouring through the comments of the celebrity before they send over the brief. They should. Because we're actually not partnering with the celebrity. We're partnering with the celebrity's fans.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

we prioritized meta because that's where they had traction so it's called more better new right you do more of what's working then you make it better then you look at something new so it's not like I come in and I just we automatically go to Amazon. No you look at what's working you do more of that you look at what you think you could improve you do that and make it better and then you try new stuff.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

I didn't have a 90 day plan when you start. When you start you have to understand where the brand is at. if if they are bringing you in with traction, you have to figure out where they're at first, which means audits. So you have to have really intelligent, forward thinking, proactive thinking, CMO type perspective to understand where they're at. I think the most important thing that marketing companies miss is they should be talking to the CFO as well as everyone else. And most marketers are scared to talk to the CFO. that is one thing I do that almost nobody else does. I want to talk to the CFO as fast as possible or whoever does the books.

In close conjunction with CFO or the bookkeeper, whoever does the PNL.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

We brought in James Maslow. Celebrity collaboration is where it's at. Intelligent celebrity collaboration. There is nothing that burns a budget up faster than a bad collaboration with an influencer, and there's nothing that's more beneficial than a good one. And all that's based on the partner that you have running the ads, how good the celebrity is about following instruction and how good they are. here's a good here's a good thermometer.

Is the celebrity or creator able to make a really good video that is ranging 90 seconds to two minutes? If they are, at the direction of a marketer working with the marketing team, it's probably gonna be a win. if they're not able to make more than a 30-second video, they're probably not very good at what they're doing. And if they really, really, really hammer you to stay below 60 seconds?

They either need a coach or you need to maybe try to find another creator. It's a general macro rule. There's a ton of nuances. That is not a hard, fast rule, but that's a good like guideline.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

We're going back into the world in which macro brand awareness is becoming critical again. think back before the internet became a thing: you had to do commercials on television shows and so on that would actually raise the name of the company so that the name of your company was recognized. So brand recognition and trust are becoming paramount again for very different reasons than it was in the seventies and eighties, but the end result is the same. Brand recognition is where it's at. Like, think Henry Ford.

Ford Motor Company. It's brand recognition because it's his name. we are back to those days.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

The cookie depreciation is overhyped. technology will always provide different way to analyze tracking. omnichannel brand, like the PNL doesn't require cookies, right? you can get trend analysis from your PNL. Like look at your numbers, look at your look at your financials. Like cookies don't affect the financials.

You need to look at the financials from the PNL perspective, cookies really rely on platform attribution, and platform attribution is becoming less and less reliable every day.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

AI algorithms are doing something beautiful. They are allowing us to talk to an audience of one, the specific person that is interested in the context of our message rather than just keyword matching. Let's use fitness, Do you want fitness equipment for the road? Do you want to understand what fitness equipment a gym has before you join? Or do you want to build out your own fitness garage? All of those

have the same two keywords, fitness equipment, but contextually they mean something completely different. So what the AI algorithms have really helped us do is understand the context of the keywords, not just keyword matching himself, which tends to be a little more on the dumb side.

[David Blair @davidblair777]

10 years sober today.

Still focused on learning and growing

Never give up

[David Blair @davidblair777]

Everyone should be doing blogs. Everyone should be doing not AI slot-driven blogs. Everyone should be doing their own written blogs that actually adds value to their customer because AI loves that. It loves scraping it. And it's beneficial for you because it's more mission-driven. It's more education driven. You're adding more value. AI is just drinking that up like someone who's in the desert with no water. because it's true human content as long as you're not using AI to generate it. And we are back to the world of blogs.

Blog blog blog blog blog. But don't be lazy and have AI generate your blogs.