How We Generated 1M+ Registrants at Sub-$5 CPL (And What the Polished Content Couldn't Do)
Time to Rise | THE ANGRY STRATEGIST — CASE STUDY
Role: Senior Campaign Manager & Lead Acquisition Strategist
Client: Tony Robbins & Dean Graziosi
Ad Spend: $4.1M+
Result: 1M+ registrants. Sub-$5 blended CPL. 300+ assets deployed.
The Brief (And Why Most Teams Would’ve Choked)
Here’s what landed on my desk⤵️
Launch a global virtual event designed to activate millions. Do it during the holiday window when attention is scattered, and competition is brutal. Coordinate 10+ departments. Manage $4M+ in paid media. Build the entire acquisition engine from scratch.
Timeline? Compressed.
Margin for error? None.
Still with me? Good. Because here’s where it gets interesting.
What I Actually Did
My title was “Senior Campaign Manager.”
Which is corporate speak for: I built the system, ran the system, and fixed the system when it caught fire — often simultaneously.
Built the acquisition engine from scratch. Funnel architecture. Messaging strategy. Testing frameworks. The stuff that looks boring in a deck but determines whether your CPL is $5 or $50.
Directed $4.1M+ in paid media. Daily performance tracking. Real-time optimization. The kind of work where you’re refreshing dashboards at midnight because a creative just tanked and you need to swap it before tomorrow’s spend commits.
Managed 300+ creative assets. Across paid, email, SMS, landing pages, and livestream promos. That’s not a typo. Three hundred. Each one needed approval, alignment, and deployment on a timeline that didn’t care about weekends.
Ran a multi-week flight plan across 10+ teams. Internal. External. Creative. Media buying. Sales. Content. Everyone rowing in the same direction — or at least not directly into each other.
Here’s What I Want You to Notice
Pause for a second.
When you’re running campaigns at this scale, there’s a moment where you realize something uncomfortable:
The polished content doesn’t convert.
I know. It should. You’ve got the production budget. The lighting is perfect. Tony looks presidential. Everything is on-brand.
And the audience scrolls right past it.
You know what stopped the scroll?
The Breakthrough Nobody Expected
Tony riffing in his car.
Unscripted. Handheld. Shot on what looked like an iPhone.
Sage having spontaneous conversations.
No teleprompter. No studio setup. Just a person talking to a camera like they were talking to a friend.
Partners telling the story their way.
Not our script. Not our brand guidelines. Their words. Their energy. Their version of why this mattered.
That’s what converted.
The $50,000 studio shoot? Outperformed by a selfie video.
Why Does This Happen?
Here’s the principle underneath:
Authenticity creates attention. Attention creates action.
Your audience has seen ten thousand polished ads today. Their brain has been trained to recognize “this is marketing” and filter it out before they’re consciously aware they’re doing it.
But a person talking like a person? That registers differently.
It’s not that production value doesn’t matter. It’s that production value without authenticity is just expensive noise.
Ask yourself: When was the last time a polished ad stopped YOUR scroll? Versus someone talking directly to camera about something they clearly care about?
The System That Made Speed Possible
Here’s what actually drove results at scale:
AI-accelerated creative testing. We generated, refined, and deployed new hooks and angles in hours, not days. When you’re spending this much, you can’t wait a week to learn what’s working.
48-72 hour refresh cycles. New creative rotating constantly to combat ad fatigue. By the time the algorithm got bored with an asset, we’d already replaced it.
Lightweight messaging systems. Simple enough that teams could execute fast even as volume increased. Complexity is where campaigns go to die.
Cross-functional alignment. Every ad, email, and asset working toward the same goal. Sounds obvious. Rarely happens.
The Numbers
Let’s be clear about what we delivered:
What I’d Do Differently
No campaign is perfect. Here’s my honest assessment:
Lock video shoots earlier. Filming ahead of the holiday window would’ve reduced production pressure and given us more time for creative testing. We made it work, but we left performance on the table.
Extend affiliate prep runway. Giving partners more lead time would’ve improved alignment and increased early-stage amplification.
Refine the offer positioning. The messaging around “starting a business” could’ve been more grounded and relatable to broaden appeal beyond entrepreneurial audiences.
Introduce more visual variation. Changing up locations, wardrobe, and speaker styles would help sustain engagement over time. Even great creative fatigues.
Stagger major launches strategically. Avoiding overlap with other campaigns would protect attention and ad efficiency during the final sprint.
The Principle I Keep Coming Back To
Here’s what Time to Rise reinforced for me: Systems beat heroics.
Anyone can crush a single ad. Anyone can have a good week. But sustaining sub-$5 CPL at $4M+ spend across a compressed holiday timeline?
That requires systems that work when you’re tired. Systems that work when the team is stretched. Systems that work when everything is on fire, and you need to make decisions faster than you can think.
The campaign succeeded because the architecture was right. The creative strategy was right. The operational rhythm was right.
The fancy titles came later.
What I Actually Bring
If you’re building something at this scale and you need a strategist who can run the machine — not just draw the diagram — here’s what I bring:
Campaign leadership at an 8-figure scale. Concept to conversion. Strategy to execution.
Direct Response copy and performance marketing creative direction that sounds human. Because that’s what converts now. The polished-ad era is over.
Systems that transform strategy into action. And action into sustained momentum.
Cross-functional alignment. Marketing, creative, product, sales — all rowing the same direction.
Want to See the Work?
I’ll share real campaign assets, strategy documents, and performance breakdowns.
I’m not precious about this stuff. The strategy only works if you execute it. And most people won’t.
This is how I’ve always worked: make it real, make it move, make it matter.
The fancy titles came later.
Want the calendars, flight plans, creative frameworks, and testing protocols? Connect with me
Who Is Go! Go! Captain?
Go Go Captain™ Notes is where marketing leaders come to build systems that scale without burning out themselves or their teams. It’s the brand behind Digital Gardening — sustainable growth methodologies that replace hustle culture with strategic rhythm. Think of it as the antidote to every “10x your revenue” bro who left you exhausted and broke.
Who Is Anna Thundergun?
Anna Thundergun is the strategist behind Go! Go! Captain — a campaign architect and creative director who’s managed $30-50M in monthly ad spend across brands like Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi, and MrBeast. She’s spent 15+ years in direct response marketing turning complex compliance challenges into competitive advantages and building funnels that scale without triggering platform bans.
She also writes as The Angry Strategist — because sometimes the industry needs someone to say what everyone’s thinking but nobody’s saying out loud.
Want help building a compliant funnel that actually converts? Let’s talk. 📧 [email protected]