The Tribe You Didn’t Know You Joined — And Why Ad Hoc Marketing Fails
Two tribes are running Facebook and Instagram ads. Which do you belong to?
It’s a cannot see the tree for the forest thing.
Yet, you can tell which tribe someone’s in simply by listening to how they talk about results.
One tribe blames the algorithm, bad luck, or the fact that today is Monday. The other blames its own decision tree.
One tribe swaps tips in Facebook groups like oral history: half-remembered, the secrets passed hand to hand, rarely tested. The other keeps a KPI on a dashboard and checks it on a schedule.
One tribe treats “I’m testing” as a badge 📛 you wear. The other treats testing as a practice 🎽 you do, with a hypothesis attached and a built-in kill switch.
Anthropologists study tribes by their rituals, not their stated beliefs: what people actually do, repeatedly, regardless of what they’d tell you if you asked.
Apply that lens to Meta ads, and the two tribes separate ➗ cleanly.
The Post-and-Pray Player’s rituals: boost the post, wait, refresh the results page, feel the dread, blame the platform.
The Booked-Solid Builder’s rituals: check the primary KPI, run the decision tree, let one variable ride, kill the loser, protect the winner, repeat next week.
Neither tribe thinks of itself as failing on purpose.
That’s the interesting part.
The Post-and-Pray Player is often sincere — the rituals feel like effort, feel like control. They’re just aimed at the wrong things, inherited from a culture that never had a KPI in the first place.
Here’s what’s actually going on inside each tribe, and which one’s customs you’re about to find yourself practising, whether you meant to or not.
This is Urban Renström writing. Everything written and spoken comes from real ad accounts and real numbers, not a hunch dressed up as advice.
Why Ad Hoc Marketing Fails
(I’m not dumping on the Post-and-Pray Player. Merely highlighting a difference between an ad hoc way and a structured system. One has lower anxiety, less guessing, and less wasted time and money. The other not so much.)
When you sit in on ten conversations between ad-hoc advertisers and ten between disciplined ones, you’d know which group was which before anyone mentioned a single number.
The vocabulary gives it away first. “I think it’s working.” “I’m testing something.” “The algorithm’s just not showing it to the right people this week.” Versus: “Cost per qualified booked call is up 12% since Tuesday, so I’m killing Variant B and letting A ride.“
Same platform. Same budget range. Two different tribes, speaking two different languages about the same activity.
Agitation — The Post-and-Pray Tribe’s Rituals
Every tribe has its folklore: the stories members tell each other that explain the world and excuse the outcomes.
The Post-and-Pray Player’s folklore runs deep. Boosting a post isn’t a strategy; it’s a ritual, performed the same way each time, believed in more than examined. The algorithm is the tribe’s shared scapegoat. When a campaign underperforms, “the algorithm’s punishing me” absorbs the blame, so no one has to ask harder questions about the hook, the audience, or the offer.
Facebook groups function as oral tradition: tips get passed around, repeated, half-remembered, rarely tested against your own numbers before being adopted as gospel.
And “I’m testing” is worn like a badge, a claim to legitimacy, without the actual apparatus of a test: no hypothesis, no isolated variable, no predetermined kill criteria, no real comparison at all.
None of this is stupidity. It’s culture. It’s what gets absorbed by osmosis when nobody ever showed you a different set of customs.
Take the Quiz: Score Your Account, an ad testing framework.
The Turn: The Moment You Notice Which Tribe You’re In
Here’s the uncomfortable part: tribal membership isn’t fixed, but it is chosen, usually by default, rarely on purpose.
Most people don’t decide to join the Post-and-Pray tribe. They just never got shown the other ones’ customs, so they inherited the only rituals available.
The turn happens the moment you actually watch what you do, not what you tell yourself you’re doing, and notice you’re refreshing a results page instead of checking a KPI, or waiting for luck instead of running a decision tree.
Method: The Booked-Solid Tribe’s Customs
The Booked-Solid Builder’s tribe has its own inherited practices, just aimed differently.
A single Primary KPI, cost per qualified booked call, replaces the scattered vanity metrics the other tribe watches. A defined audience (who to speak to, who to let walk past) replaces “everyone.”
Every hook gets tested against a specific problem the audience actually has, one variable at a time, not guessed at and changed in bulk.
Ads run in multiple modalities — video, text, audio — because the tribe understands people consume content differently throughout the day.
A go/no-go decision tree (kill, iterate, scale) replaces hope as the mechanism for deciding what happens next.
An 80/20 learning loop keeps 80% of spend on what’s proven while 20% keeps testing new angles, so the tribe never fully stalls or fully gambles.
The Pixel closes the loop between what the ad promises and what the website proves. And underneath all of it, a funnel exists to catch what the ads generate, because a tribe that spends money driving traffic somewhere always makes sure “somewhere” is built first.
“Must everything be boring and sad?”
Perrin Fertha, Andor, S1E4.
Boring is a good situation compared to the anxiety of ads going wrong.
It’s the Post-and-Pray tribe’s real objection to all of this, even if they’d never phrase it that way: discipline feels like giving up control and costing something fun. It doesn’t cost fun. The cost is pretending the algorithm owes you an explanation.
Wrapping this all up
Which tribe you’re currently in matters less than which tribe’s customs you start practising tomorrow.
Tribes aren’t identities.
They’re just the last set of rituals you happened to inherit. Your rituals can be swapped for better ones the moment you notice you’re running on autopilot.
The Post-and-Pray tribe isn’t full of worse people. It’s full of people who never got handed the other tribe’s playbook. Now you have it.
Related
The original post is here: EP 6: Ad hoc Ads vs High-Ticket Ads Strategy, the sibling post to this one is here: Ad Testing Framework for Coaches: Score Your Account
Photo by Brooke Cagle
