The CBO Method That Generated $100M

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

Did you know Nick Theriot has generated $100M for his clients using ONE campaign on Meta?

Yeah, you read that right. One.

I (Ash) sat down with Nick on my Ad Spend podcast recently, and what he shared completely challenged how most brands manage their Facebook ad accounts. After 10 years of running ads and testing every strategy imaginable, he's landed on something deceptively simple that's working RIGHT NOW in 2025.

Let’s get into it…

On the Menu:

TV is the next frontier for DTC brands, but it’s a huge challenge to crack the code and determine true impact/ROI.

One of the main problems is that most "CTV platforms" are just reskinned DSPs that can't even buy linear TV.

That means you're missing 50% of your audience (linear TV still commands half of all viewership) and paying a 106% markup through the ad tech tax. 

But Tatari was built differently from day one:

Unlike platforms that bolted CTV onto display ad tech, Tatari was purpose-built to evolve television media buying. 

They're the only platform that lets you buy linear TV, streaming, and online video in one place, with the same rigor you expect from Meta or Google.

Tatari has helped marketers evolve from testing the waters of TV advertising to getting them in the Super Bowl. This year, they helped 5 brands get into the biggest TV event of the year.

Here are 4 ways Tatari delivers real performance marketing → 

The results speak for themselves: BREEO saw a 47% decrease in CAC and 68% increase in ROAS after switching. It’s why Rocket Money, Teladoc, and 400+ other brands use Tatari to turn TV into their most efficient acquisition channel.

🥾Here's the kicker…you can start with just retargeting your site visitors on TV (seriously, it works) and scale from there. No massive upfront commitments or archaic insertion orders.

Ready to access the ENTIRE TV audience?

See why brands are choosing real infrastructure over wrappers and interfaces → Tartari.tv

P.S. – They just launched self-serve with credit card billing. You can literally be live on Hulu by tomorrow. The future of TV buying looks a lot like Facebook Ads Manager, and Tatari got there first.

Here's what Nick's doing that's different → One CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) per business objective.

Just one CBO per major product category.

📝Here's exactly how he breaks it down:

So for a brand like Obvi, we'd have maybe 2-3 total campaigns. Not the 15+ most brands are running.

Inside each CBO, Nick runs broad Advantage+ targeting. No interest stacks. No lookalikes. Just broad.

As Nick says:

"Meta released these new audience segments where you can see exactly where they're spending," Nick told us. "We tried excluding past purchasers to force new customer acquisition. Didn't change anything. Meta's gonna find who it wants to find."

In fact, Nick isn’t even using a "main ad set" for winners anymore, which is pretty standard practice these days. 

Instead, each ad set lives or dies on its own. Facebook doesn't know your strategy of moving winners to a special ad set…it just sees you turning off something that was working.

His typical campaign contains:

This structure has been working consistently for two years with no constant rebuilds and no chasing the latest hack.

"As long as it's quality, I don't care about quantity."

This might be the most controversial thing Nick said during our entire conversation.

While everyone else is pumping out 30+ creatives a week, Nick launches 3-6 new ad sets weekly. 

But here's the difference → each one is a complete concept, not a random test.

His 5-step testing methodology:

As mentioned, Nick doesn't consolidate winners into a main ad set anymore. His explanation:

"We used to pull winning ads into a 'proven winners' ad set. But think about it – Facebook's spending money on this winning ad set, it's profitable, and now we're going to turn it off and hope Facebook figures out what we're trying to do? Just leave it on and keep making money."

When something wins, he'll spend 2-3 weeks just iterating on that specific concept. Different angles, different hooks, different variations. Only after exhausting that vein does he move on to completely new concepts.

The result → Way fewer ads but much higher win rates.

This is where things get really interesting.

Nick introduced us to his Purple Cow theory: "You're driving down a country road, you see a field of cows. Which one do you notice? The purple one. Because you've never seen it before."

Every creative needs to be a purple cow. But how do you consistently create something nobody's seen?

Nick's 3 strategies for differentiation:

1. Out-execute the competition Everyone else drops their phone case from a table? You drop it from a house. They drop from a house? You drop from an apartment building. Same concept, 10x execution.

Example: ICON Amsterdam scaled from $200K to $2M monthly by spending $500-$1000 per UGC video when competitors spent $100-200. Better creators, better content, better results.

2. Target sub-identities Don't target "coffee drinkers." Target "military-affiliated coffee drinkers" (Black Rifle Coffee's exact strategy).

Don't target "people wanting to lose weight." Target "moms dealing with the post-pregnancy pouch."

Smaller audience, but you own it completely.

3. Make bigger (but compliant) claims If everyone promises results in 30 days, you promise 7. Just make sure you can back it up.

His creative process for making this happen:

Here's a great example: Nick saw a dating app ad that said "POV: You went from girls ghosting you to them always texting."

So he adapted it: "POV: You went from losing money on Facebook ads to scaling profitably" with a simple Shopify screenshot zooming in.

That ad crushed.