The Game with Alex Hormozi
Breaking Down Ryan Reynold's Billion Dollar Marketing Strategy for Mint Mobile | Ep 844
Fri, 28 Feb 2025
Wanna scale your business? Click here.Welcome to The Game w/ Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition Mentioned in this episode:Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap
Chapter 1: What is Ryan Reynolds' marketing strategy for Mint Mobile?
What's going on, everyone? Welcome back to the game. Today, I'm going to do a very in-depth breakdown of Ryan Reynolds Mint Mobile. Now, this will be different than the Rihanna collab by Fenty. I don't know, a bunch of people corrected me in the comments. I don't know how to say it. I'm obviously not a buyer of the lingerie, but I am a consumer of business models.
And so I am going to talk very little about big picture stuff that they did, distribution, brand deals, any of that. I'm just going to be talking about like what ads are converting, what pages are they pushing to, what's the offer they're running, how are they packaging it, and how are they following up via email to maximize conversion.
And I think there's a ton of stuff in here, super tactful, that any business owner can use. I certainly am. And at the end, I'll give you some things that I think if I were the CMO of the company, I would consider at least testing that might show some performance improvements over what they're currently doing. Ryan Reynolds acquired over 2 million customers from Mint Mobile with paid ads.
Chapter 2: How did Ryan Reynolds acquire over 2 million customers?
And I'm going to break down the best paid ads these run and how you can model the structure for whatever it is that you sell in your marketing. I'm Alex Ramosi. I'm the founder of Acquisition.com. We spend millions of dollars every month on ads. We make tons of money and no one cares. Let's start with the first ad.
At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot. we charge you a little. They put their names on arenas, we put ours on my lower back. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. And if this were one of their ads, they'd end it here with a happy customer.
So we'll end ours with an angry goat. Look at the angry goat.
So let's break this down frame by frame. Now notice, though, that this is a 30-second ad. And so 30-second ads, as a side note, there are some placements you would get all over the internet that are helpful.
And before I break down the actual structure, I think what's important to note is that Ryan Reynolds, despite having a very large personal brand, still used paid ads as the primary acquisition strategy. And so think about it like this. If all he did was just post every day, just be like, Mint Mobile, Mint Mobile, people would just not really care. Right?
So instead it's like he provides value via movies and things like that. That's where he gets his mass distribution. That's where he builds his brand and his goodwill. And then he monetizes through the paid ads as basically almost like a retargeting, but his warm audience is everyone. So the hook is basically a contrarian hook.
So there's a little bit of curiosity here because you're like, okay, well, one, you recognize Ryan Reynolds right off the bat, and he's got brand placement behind him. So he's making the association between him, the thing you like, and the thing you might not know, which is Mint Mobile.
And so that's a 101 strategy, and there's a reason that I wear this hat and why underneath of my shirt, which normally is unbuttoned for those of you who are you wild fellows, because of my 90% male audience. The reason I rep my brand is to make that same association.
If there's stuff that you use for my content and it makes you money, then hopefully you associate that value with me and acquisition.com. All right. So here, this is a contrarian hook and the curiosity is, okay, well, what's opposite about this thing versus what my current carrier. So this is a clear setup for an us versus them strategy. All right.
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Chapter 3: What are the key elements of effective advertising?
So I'm sure there's different audiences that look that do better. And it might be for discount providers rather than people who are maybe at premium. They might have found, for example, that, you know, switching someone from Verizon might be more difficult than switching for someone from like maybe pay on the pay as you go type phone, especially given the price points.
Now, the third part, which is right here, step three, what should my ad say? And so this mirrors that three-step process. You get your call out, which is the hook. You got the value, which is the meet. And then you got the call to action, which is the end. All right. So besides the kind of general points that I start that are more common hooks, obviously, there's not exhaustive.
You can have unlimited types of hooks that could fit in the book. But in terms of concepts, he's using contrast here. Contrast in two ways. One is that there's contrast visually. Like this is a bright color. This is something that's going to pop out. But then also he's using contrast us versus them. That's kind of the theme here. All right.
Chapter 4: What makes Mint Mobile's ads stand out?
Now, from a value perspective, we get into the interest step. All right. And so the interest step is the best ads make benefits look as big as possible and the costs look as small as possible. And so from the benefits and cost perspective, what we're basically doing is a reverse value equation. And so the good stuff is what's the outcome they want, which would be phone coverage.
People would want it fast, they would want easy, and they would want it to be likely. Now, the negative side is going to be what is a nightmare scenario, the worst case scenario, slow, hard, and risky. And so as he's describing the benefit here, which is less bad stuff, the nightmare scenario is that you pay a lot. Right. And you get basically the same thing.
And so before this, he said, and we do this due to not hating you. Right. And so, again, he's he's talking about the nightmare scenario. They charge you more and they don't like you. And so he's saying we charge you less and we do like you by implication. And then he adds in more humor. And to be clear, he doesn't actually show an angry customer. He shows a sheep. Right.
And so it wasn't actually like showing a negative review, which other companies like Liquid Death, which is a water company, which took the market by storm with cans of water that looked like beer. They actually had ads that were one-star reviews of their product because they kind of went, again, contrast, that contrarian angle. Now, here, we finish with what? The CTA, right?
So they make the offer, and they tell people, midmobile.com, and what do I get? Unlimited. Now. Speed. Just. relative to the cost, low, done. Fundamentally sound ad, and obviously brought lots and lots and lots of customers in. So if we're thinking about this ad in three slices, right? We've got our hook, We've got our meat or value and we've got our CTAs. All right. And so we cover the hook.
We cover the CTA. Let's talk about the meat. And so here we've got more good stuff or less bad stuff. Now on the good stuff, what we're thinking through here is how can we make it faster? So we would describe speed if we can. How can we make it easier? And how can we make it risk-free? Now, if we wanted to improve this offer, it would be month to month, not just monthly, right?
Now, there's some disclosures at the bottom. What does it say there? Limited time only offer, new activation, and upfront payment for three months. There we go. Promotional rate for the first three months only. Again, so now we get to understand, oh, it's only $15 a month. for three months, and then it will go to, who knows, maybe it goes to 30, we'll find out.
Taxes and fees are extra, so there is more on top of that. And what are these fees that they haven't disclosed? And unlimited customers using 35 gigabytes per month will experience lower speeds. Okay, so they do slow you down. and video streams at 480p, see full terms at midmobile.com. All right. And so that is the fine print on this.
Now that's because he's being a compliant advertiser and that's wonderful, but big picture though, if we wanted to make this more compelling, we would actually flip those things. We would say, okay, well, your dream outcome is to have unlimited,
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Chapter 5: How does humor play a role in Mint Mobile's ads?
who see this with a pink elephant and i will just cry myself to sleep every night because of it but the point here is is that they said we don't want smoothing we want chunky milk and we started the the the video starts with the actual uh brand itself and then subsequently follows with chunky milk and almost the entire ad is talking about chunky milk and that it's disgusting right and so people now just simply associate mint mobile disgusting thing so now they complete the loop and say that's not right kind of like your wireless bill
which is a simile, if you want to use kind of, like, sort of, it's basically drawing an equivalent between two things, which by the way, is one of the key ways of educating and advertising. So they hit the three here, right? It's easy, it's online, which to me would be, it's fast. Like it's not something that you have to talk to anybody. So that's taking away some of the pain associated.
Now, they don't really hit risk-free, but I guess they kind of lower the risk again with the small price here. And you have clear call to action, which is the end of the ad. And then obviously the call to action is just simply go to the website. All right. So I think that the mistakes in the ad are that branding works, whether you like it or not. Associations occur.
And so they branded themselves with Chunky Milk, and they took out their biggest star, which was Ryan Reynolds. And so unsurprisingly, the ad didn't perform as well. All right. Let's go to a good one.
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds, owner of Mint Mobile. It's the holidays, and the big wireless companies are busy spending billions on advertising. At Mint, we're not into wasting money, so we bought this spiffy stock footage for $500. Our footage also came with another hand, so we can let you know if you switch to Mint, you'll get three months free on all of our plans, even unlimited.
Feels like that deserves an exclamation point. Whoa. Easy.
Easy. All right, so because what we have to think about when you're advertising here, because I don't actually think this is an effective hook from a hook perspective, but because this is fundamentally not going to strangers, this is going to people who already know who Ryan Reynolds is. And so the equivalent to that would be if I'm in a local area and I run an ad and I say, hey,
Towson locals, which is a suburb in Baltimore, which is where I'm from, then people are gonna be like, oh, this is for me. I recognize something. One of the four elements of getting influence with someone is likeness or relatability. You're like, oh, I know this guy. Yet again, he continues to hit on this us versus them concept. And obviously it's working.
So when you do have something that works, keep doing it. And so he's drawing this parallel between us and them yet again. He delivers one core brand message here, which is that we're not into wasting money. Now they're a budget option. And so it makes sense for this, that this ad did significantly better. One, they have their main person. Two, he's the focal point. Three, the scripting itself.
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Chapter 6: What advertising strategies can businesses learn from Mint Mobile?
He just draws a contrast and says, by the way, we're cheap and you can buy three months free and get three months free. That's it. That's the whole ad. So in my next book that is coming out, I talk about this particular offer structure, which is a buy X, get Y. Right. And so he's got a parallel structure buy three, get three. I would say that I found that buy one, get two or buy three, get six.
If you can contrast that you get more free than you pay for, it will typically convert better than a mirror structure. So I would test buy one, get two versus three and three, because you would probably end up getting you would save money as a business and you might end up still converting more because the discrepancy between what people pay and what they get is higher.
I mean, if I wrote this ad, I'd probably have the CTA. This is yet another joke that he weaves in. You could say that this is on brand for him. So one of the nice things I think Ryan Reynolds does for his own personal brand is that he does weave in direct response advertising, which is what this is, with what some people might consider branding.
And so he does very much kind of brand himself in these ads because the ads are funny. Um, and he kind of like, if you literally look at this ad, it pretty much alternates humor, moves the ad forward, humor, moves the ad forward, humor, moves the ad forward. And it's a pretty simple structure in terms of how he's making this.
And so what we're doing here as we're looking through this in terms of tools is that one, obviously he's a, he's a celebrity. So we just looked at his YouTube video and ranked the videos that had the highest views, but I can guarantee you virtually that the ads that are doing the best are the ones that are being pushed out every single day on meta, on YouTube, et cetera, from ads, not organic.
Like, sure, he might get some signups from the six and a half million views, but believe it or not, six and a half million views for an ad, not that much. So right now we're pulling up the Facebook ads campaign. So if you don't know how to do this, by the way, just Google Facebook ads library, and then you sort, and then you type in the account that you're looking at.
And it's because Facebook is trying to be transparent. They show you every ad that is running for an account, and sometimes also ads that are running in the past. Now, the rule of thumb here in terms of looking for ads, because you're like, well, how do I know which one's working? Well, the easy way to do it is just say which one of these ads has been running for a long time.
And so the longer the ad's been running, the more likely that that ad has worked well. And so let's say you put out 100 pieces of creative. Anything that's new will always do better than something that's old. But if something is old for a while, then it means even though it's old, it's still performing really, really well. So here's some of the oldest ads that they're running. So let's pull it up.
Despite the fact that... I think this ad fundamentally from a creative perspective kind of sucks. It's been running for five years or six years. So it's probably doing okay. Now I will bet that this is a retargeting campaign. And so this is probably converting very well for people who have already seen some of the top of funnel ads.
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Chapter 7: How to optimize ad performance based on audience awareness?
you almost never want the three tiers to be evenly split. So we're going a little bit into pricing, but YOLO, we can do what we want. It's our video. So where you move the middle... on a three-tier offer determines where you want to nudge the customer, okay? So if I want more people to take my 12-month offer, I will make my six-month offer really close to the 12-month offer.
And so I'm like, oh, well, shoot, this is so close. I'll just do that one, right? So this is the typical small, medium, large soda play that movie theaters has done for ages, right? So if you have a... I'll explain it to you real quick. So let's say that you've got... equal ounce differences between Between sodas. Okay, so let's say that this is 10 ounces.
This is 15 ounces and this is 20 ounces Okay, so that's what that's what these sodas are obviously at a movie theater It'd be like a gazillion ounces and they just give you a gallon of whatever soda you want All right here you're asking someone to make a logical decision and it's proportional to how much they buy and they're not really saving anything by buying more so functionally this would incentivize people to go here and
because there's no savings for buying more. And if you wanted to just get some more later, you take on less risk by buying a smaller purchase, and you can always just double up again later if you so desired. Now, what does this next pricing tier tell you? So let's say we keep our $5, and then we have $6 here, and then we've got $10 here. What does this tell you?
That tells you here that this is the best value option. The first is here. Now let's look at a different pricing scheme. So if we have $5 on the low option, but let's say that now we've got $9 on this option and $10, what is the pricing tier that we're pushing towards? We're like, well, dude, for an extra dollar, I'm getting another five ounces. This is not a bad gig.
Now, because of this basically dichotomy between the 10 and the 20, We would probably realistically what this would probably be priced at. Like if we were in the movie theaters, this would probably be eight bucks. This would probably be seven. And so this would then push more people to here. Right.
And so how you price your three options, you can tell what offer a smart business owner is trying to incentivize you to take. We're getting into a little bit of advanced pricing, but you're an advanced person. So let's talk about it. All right. So if I have this $6 option, what does it really communicate? We think like for a dollar more, I'm going to get 50% more soda.
That's a pretty good deal for here for a dollar more. I get another five ounces of soda. And so these prices are always taken in an aggregate, right? Now, If I have a lot of people coming in the door and everyone's buying smalls and I want them to upgrade, then I'm going to put my price here.
If everyone's coming in and they're getting mediums and I want to push them the largest, then I'm going to move my price of mediums up to make the large more appealing. So what you're ultimately trying to do is maximize revenue per soda buyer, right? And so it'll depend where your average customer is actually entering the business to determine which of these you would actually push.
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Chapter 8: What are the common pitfalls in advertising?
And so you basically stack those at the bottom. And you've probably seen this on a lot of pages. Even if you look at like an Amazon purchase page, they're going to have their FAQs at the bottom where the seller will answer some of the questions that people are asking. And so, by the way, if you want a really great way to study how to make sales pages, study Amazon.
Think about how they structure their pages and how many elements of persuasion are woven in that are real and actual. Now, they obviously are a trillion-dollar company, and so they have a lot of resources at their disposal. But you can still use the elements of persuasion that they have. And fundamentally, that's what they're harnessing here.
And at the very bottom, I see this as a – if you haven't decided to buy yet – Why don't you enter our long-term nurture sequence where we'll send you emails to hopefully get you to buy later, right? And so that's basically what we're doing here. What's that? You want to see the emails that they send to ConvertWarp customers? Fine. We'll look into them. Okay. Big picture.
This is their actual email sequence. So we looked it up. You'll notice that these are very visual. So these are very picture-driven. So I want to make a clear point here. I would say it's very split in the types of products that are being sold, what types of emails convert. And so I've seen, this is just me, Alex's point of view, pictures do really well with physical products and low ticket items.
So people just like click and buy, right? If you sell services or complex services or complex products or high ticket products, oftentimes basically almost the exact opposite perspective of this, which is lots of text that's plain text, maybe one hyperlink, that's all not formatted to basically make it look like a real email that someone might send to you.
That tends to be the best deliverability, which will ultimately convert more people for those more complex things. So if you sell services that are complex, I would lean towards that. Here, if you're e-commerce, which fundamentally this is e-commerce, it's just a phone service that you're getting, it makes sense. Now, one last point here is that notice that they don't offer phones.
Remember the BYOE? So they're able to sell at a much lower price point because most of the other carriers include the phone in some sort of payment plan with your service. And so a big portion of what you're paying for is the $1,000 smartphone that they're subsidizing for you over X period of months with a decent markup. All right. So let's look at the offers they have.
So email one is they just say, they just restate the offer. Cool. Let's go to the next one. All right, now they say it's easy. So let's think about the elements of value here, right? So first they restate the offer. Then they say, by the way, it's easy. Now the makings of Mint Mobile. So now they're saying, okay, someone didn't take the first two.
So now let's just give them a little bit more information, right? Let's talk more about the value that they're getting. That's the next email. Yeah. And so here they're also telling a little bit of the story of the founder or at least the spokesperson. And so this would be more common if someone hasn't made the purchase for you, purchase with you yet, you're explaining more about yourself.
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