What I’ve Learned Spending Eight Figures Advertising Annuities

Scott Brooks, MBA, CFP®

October 12, 2026

I started creating annuity leads in 2010. Since then, I’ve spent more than eight figures advertising annuities on the web, on radio, and on national television.

People sometimes assume there was a blueprint for this. There wasn’t. There was no lead gen university I could go to, no course that taught you how to build a national lead program for annuity agents. Almost everything I know about this business I learned in the trenches. I ran campaigns, made mistakes, paid for a lot of them, and listened to the agents and advisors who were out there every day actually working the leads.

A lot has changed since then. The internet is different, consumers are different, advertising is different, and the annuity business is different. But some of the lessons I learned early have held up for 16 years, and I think they explain how our program works today better than anything I could put in a sales pitch. So I want to tell the story of where that money went, what it taught me, and what I’d do differently.

In This Article

Where It Started: 401(k) Rollovers, Monster.com, and CareerBuilder

Before I ever sold an annuity lead, I was in the training business. From 2007 through 2009 I ran a 401(k) rollover training program for financial advisors and insurance agents, and about 7,000 people went through it. By the time I started thinking about lead generation, I had a big group of guys who already knew me, already trusted me, and kept asking the same question: can you help me find people to talk to?

So in 2010, rollover leads were the natural place to start. I’d been teaching agents how to do rollover business. Now I’d help them find it.

The first thing I did was set up national partnerships with Monster.com and CareerBuilder. Think about who’s on a job site: people who are changing jobs or retiring and have a 401(k) they need to do something with.

Before we could sell a single lead, I had to build a national footprint. If you’re creating leads all over the country, you need someone to buy them all over the country, and it took me seven or eight months to recruit enough agents and advisors to cover it. We ended up with about 300 of them signed up.

I had all this desire, and I had a great list of people who wanted to buy from me. What I didn’t have was much experience actually creating leads.

My Most Expensive Mistake Was Also the Best Thing That Happened to Me

I built that first campaign around what our clients said they wanted. And what they wanted was reviews: the ad would offer people a review of their 401(k). I literally emailed the ad to hundreds of advisors and asked, “How can I improve this?” I got feedback from more than 300 of them. We landed on a portfolio review for people who were changing jobs or retiring.

On paper, it made sense. Someone’s on Monster.com. They’re out of work, looking for another job, and they see an ad offering to have someone review their 401(k). Why wouldn’t that work?

It didn’t just fail. It failed massively. Monster told me it was the worst-performing ad they had ever tested in their history up to that point. Think about that. Of everything ever tested on Monster, an offer to have a financial advisor review your 401(k) did the worst. That tells you how hard it is to create leads in this industry.

The problem was the offer. A consultation, someone reviewing your 401(k), just wasn’t something people wanted to raise their hand for. I was paying Monster and CareerBuilder per lead, so when almost nobody responded, they weren’t making any money either. The odds of someone becoming a lead were so far below their threshold that they didn’t even want to keep running the ads on their platforms.

I was really frustrated. I started tracking down writers who had worked on financial campaigns. I remember talking to one who had worked on something for Fisher Investments. He looked at the ad, said it looked good, and told me he didn’t know why it failed.

Meanwhile, I was working seven days a week, I had 300 people signed up for a lead program, and we had virtually no leads. It was a miserable situation. I’m pretty sure I lost money that first stretch. It was not a success out of the gate by a long shot.

So I changed the offer and reran it, and it started producing leads. But then I ran into the second problem. These were co-registration leads. Monster and CareerBuilder pre-filled the person’s information for them, so people didn’t really know what they were opting in for. Becoming a lead took almost no effort, and the quality showed it.

Co-reg leads are horrible. I’d avoid them at all costs, on any platform where the person’s information is pre-filled for them. It’s going to produce a ridiculously low-quality lead. It’s funny, because there are people selling $30 annuity leads from Facebook today, and this is where those leads come from. People actually think they’re worth something. They’re not. They’re worth zero.

I learned that one again years later. Early on, I ran a Facebook campaign targeting insurance agents and financial advisors. After 50 leads came in, only two or three of the people on the whole list were actually agents or advisors. The other 47 had opted in without even realizing what they were doing. Insane.

My business was really born out of that first failure. It forced me to learn the fundamentals, and those are still what I focus on today. The offer has to be something people actually want. And if we were going to produce leads, we were going to control the process as much as possible ourselves. No buying or sourcing leads from other companies, even trustworthy ones. When you outsource your process, you outsource your quality.

From that moment on, we either did everything internally or vetted it internally. Later, when we used an outside call center for years, every call was recorded and one of our own team members independently audited it. I honestly don’t think the business would have succeeded if that first campaign had worked.

“When you outsource your process, you outsource your quality.”

Around the same time, I tried one more experiment that taught me a similar lesson. I hired a call center in Canada to make outbound calls to people who had posted resumes and try to convince them to become rollover leads. It worked, in the sense that it produced leads. But those leads were significantly weaker when our clients worked them than leads from people who raised their hand on their own, whether online or by calling in. When you have to talk someone into becoming a lead, you haven’t created a real prospect. We ran it for four or five months, and I shut it down because the quality wasn’t good enough. From there, we moved to our own online advertising and an audio CD I recorded on the seven biggest mistakes people make when they roll over a retirement plan, and I learned the rest while running the business, with real clients and real money on the line.

Our Clients Told Us to Get Into Annuities

In 2011 I did something I’ve done many times since. I surveyed the people buying our leads and asked them, “How can I help you more?”

A lot of them said annuity leads. So we started creating them, and it didn’t take long to see which program our clients liked better. It wasn’t close.

The rollover leads were usually people in their 40s and 50s, and the cases were typically $50,000 to $100,000. The annuity leads were older, mostly in their 60s, and the cases averaged $200,000 to $300,000 in premium. For an agent, that’s a completely different opportunity.

By the end of 2011, I’d turned off the rollover program and we were focused entirely on annuity leads. That same year we added radio to our online advertising. Television followed around 2012.

Radio, TV, and the Question of Trust

It’s hard to remember now, but in 2011 the internet was a very different place, especially for older people.

If you were 70 years old back then, the idea of finding a financial company online and handing them your personal information, including how much money you had, was kind of taboo. People just weren’t comfortable with it yet. Radio felt more legitimate. And national TV felt more legitimate than radio. Radio has always had a lot of local advertisers, but national television is mostly national brands. Consumers knew it took a real company to get on national TV, and that gave us a level of credibility the web couldn’t.

So in 2011, if you ranked them by how much people trusted them, the web was at the bottom, radio was in the middle, and TV was at the top.

That has flipped. Today a 70-year-old has used the internet for decades. They’re comfortable online. And honestly, people don’t even trust what they see on TV anymore. Back then people trusted everything more, the media included. Not only has the marketing changed, but people’s habits and preferences have changed with it. That shift ended up mattering a lot to how we built the business, and I’ll get to that.

When we first moved into radio, I think lead quality got better, and there were two reasons. Part of it was that the leads were actually better, because of that trust. But part of it was perception. The agents working the leads believed radio leads were better, and that confidence alone helped them.

Then we went on TV, and it was the best campaign I’ve ever run. When we first rolled out on television, it was raining leads like mad. Every time we ran the ads, it was like hitting a grand slam. We’d get flooded with calls. And the cost was very low.

People always used to wonder how I could price our leads so competitively. That’s how. Things changed a lot over the next six or seven years, but in the beginning, TV performed better than I ever could have imagined.

TV also gave me one of my most painful failures. I ran a commercial that sent people to a website that wasn’t built to create leads. It was more of a branding site, designed to make sales. It had a lot of product information for people to go through, and then they could apply. I ran it in about eight different cities, on reputable stations, and spent $25,000. It was a lot of media.

It produced no leads. Not one. I was sure it was fraud, that the spots never ran. So I got the post logs after the media ran, and the commercials had aired exactly as scheduled. Twenty-five thousand dollars, and no leads whatsoever. None. Zero. It was a complete bust in every sense of the word.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars, and no leads whatsoever. None. Zero.”

Making the Ads, and Getting Fired by Ad Agencies

I didn’t produce the radio and TV ads myself. I hired professionals. But production is always a little nerve-wracking, because you never know how an ad is going to perform. You end up agonizing over every word that’s said.

Some of our media I bought directly, and some I bought through agencies. Here’s something most people wouldn’t guess: I’ve been fired as a client by more than one ad agency.

That really bothered me, because I always tried to be an easy client to work with. We were spending about $600,000 a year with one of them. With the other, I think it was a little under half a million. Both of them were buying TV for us, and we were running radio, TV, and online at the same time back then. It was humbling, especially with the agency getting $600,000 a year from us. I remember thinking, what am I supposed to do now?

The $600,000-a-year agency fired us for reasons that turned out to have nothing to do with me. I’d been put in a division of the agency that handled smaller advertisers, and they shut that whole side down and fired every client in it. They just wrecked shop.

What stuck with me was how it was done. I was single back then and traveling a lot. I’d wired them money from Asia and from South America. The guy who called to fire me told me he realized that working with them had been really good for me but not good for them. Then he said something like, “I realize you’ve been traveling around the world, but this relationship is now over.” He didn’t need to say that. He was a complete jerk about it, and I think he was probably jealous.

Business has to be a win for both sides, and sometimes a relationship ends. But that phone call changed how I treat people. I always try to be kind to people when they leave our program, whether it’s on good terms or bad. I think people remember the beginning and the end of a relationship more than the middle. One of the hardest things to do in our business is to be as kind to people at the end as you were at the beginning, especially when they aren’t always kind to us. I try to do it anyway, because I remember what it felt like to be on the other end of that call.

“People remember the beginning and the end of a relationship more than the middle.”

The second agency fired us because they wanted us to increase our spend by something like 40%, and I couldn’t do it. We didn’t have enough agents to buy the leads that spend would have created. It was that simple. He wanted us to spend more than we could.

Looking back, that was one of the best things that could have happened to me. If we’d kept pushing TV, I think our whole business probably would have crumbled.

Our First Annuity Offer Had a Problem Nobody Saw Coming

Our first annuity offer was another audio CD, The Seven Biggest Mistakes to Avoid When Buying an Annuity. I recorded it myself. It was about an hour long, it was genuinely educational, and lots of people wanted it. Our clients would pay a dollar or two per CD to have them mailed, and then they’d work the leads.

On paper, it worked. We got a lot of response.

The problem showed up on the phone. An agent would call a lead and hear, “Oh, I haven’t had a chance to listen to the CD yet. Call me back next week.” So the agent would call back the next week. “Still haven’t listened to it. Try me next week.” It turned into a never-ending game. The agent kept calling and calling and never actually got to talk to the person about a recommendation, because the person still felt like they were doing homework.

In 2014, we stopped using the CDs. We moved to an offer built around helping consumers find the very best annuities in the market: a comparison, a proposal, real product information.

The response tanked. At a minimum, we lost 35% to 45% of our volume, and some campaigns dropped as much as 70%. Depending on the market, that’s somewhere between a third and more than two-thirds of your leads gone overnight. That’s not easy to watch when you’re running a lead business.

But the leads that came in were different people. They were already looking at products and proposals. They were in a different part of the buyer’s journey. So when the agent called, the consumer wanted to talk about exactly what the agent wanted to talk about. Our clients got blown off less, set more appointments, wrote bigger cases, and asked for fewer refunds. Every metric that mattered to them improved.

That was one of the first big lessons, and I’ve built on it ever since. The offer you run decides who responds, and more leads is not the same thing as better leads.

“More leads is not the same thing as better leads.”

Back Then, the Program Was Pretty Brutal

I want to be honest about what the early days were like, because I think it matters.

Our original program was pretty brutal. Scrubbing was basic. We checked name, phone number, address, and email, and if somebody didn’t have valid contact information, we threw them out. We also removed insurance agents and financial advisors who responded to the ads. That was about the extent of it. We always scrubbed, but nothing like what we do now.

It was harder for the average agent to succeed in the program back then, and we did get complaints.

One thing that made it hard for me to know what to fix was the feedback itself. We were signing up a lot of people, and a fair number of them didn’t really spend money on marketing. They’d buy a few leads, not do much with them, and tell us the leads were bad. Other agents were spending real money, working hard, and writing business. You can’t treat all that feedback the same. Over time, I learned to listen most closely to the people who are successful in this industry and are actively spending on marketing and working their leads. Their feedback is usually the most genuine.

So I didn’t have one big moment where everything changed. It was more my belief that you keep evolving and improving what you’re doing, a little at a time.

The Call Center Changed Everything

Looking back, one of the biggest needle movers in our history wasn’t an advertising channel at all. It was a call center.

In the early days, when someone heard our radio or TV ad, they’d call a number and leave a voicemail with their name, address, phone number, and email so we could mail them the free CD. That’s easy. A lot of people will leave a voicemail to get something free in the mail.

Around 2013, we set up a live call center to take those calls, and that happened at about the same time we moved away from the CD and toward the proposal offer. Now when someone called, a real person answered and asked questions. What year were you born? How much are you looking to invest? Do you want income now or later? Do you work as a financial advisor or insurance agent? What’s your time frame for making a decision? What’s the best time for the annuity specialist to call you?

I listened to a lot of those calls. When people are early in the buying cycle, every question you ask is a chance for them to say “forget this” and hang up. And they did, at every point. For one person it was the age question. For the next person it was the investment amount. They’d just refuse to answer, or they’d end the call.

To become a lead, you had to make it through every question and be okay with someone contacting you. Then our team independently listened to the recordings and pulled out anyone who shouldn’t be sold. Out of 100 people who called, maybe 10 or 20 would be thrown out by our own audit, things like insurance agents or people over our age limit, and a lot of the rest never finished the questions. After all that, we’d end up with 30 to 40 leads out of every 100 calls.

For several years, we even gave our clients the audio recording of each call, so they could hear the person themselves before they picked up the phone. Eventually our lawyer recommended we stop, so we did. But for a long time, that’s how open the process was.

Two things changed at once: the offer and the process people had to go through to become a lead. Together, they moved lead quality more than anything we’d done up to that point.

The Mistake I Made With Investment Minimums

If I’m honest about the call center era, there’s one thing I got wrong.

Back then our age cutoff was 85. For a while, we didn’t have a minimum investment amount at all. Eventually we set it at $25,000, and years later I raised it to $50,000. Looking back, I should have had a higher minimum much earlier and tossed a lot more of those leads.

Radio and TV made that harder, because those audiences pulled a lot of people with less than $50,000 to invest. Their investment amounts were much lower than what we saw on the web.

But there’s always a balancing act. If 100 people call and you only sell 10 of them, the math doesn’t work, and you won’t be in business long enough to help anybody. You have to deliver a legitimate product to your customers and stay in business at the same time. I didn’t always get that balance right, and there wasn’t anyone to teach me. I learned it the hard way.

Make People Work for It, But Don’t Run Off the Best Leads

Everything we learned in the call center carried into how we run our online campaigns today. The core idea is simple: the more work you make people do to become a lead, the better the lead is going to be. So we put more friction between the moment someone first comes into our world and the moment that lead goes out to a client.

I’ve pushed that idea pretty far. I’ve tested up to 70 questions. The most extreme thing I’ve ever tried was having consumers fill out full-blown suitability applications directly from the ads. That doesn’t work, for obvious reasons. Those people aren’t really leads anymore, and you can’t scale it.

The real danger with friction is that you can scare away the best prospects. And if we scare away the people our agents most want to talk to, we haven’t protected their opportunity. We’ve destroyed it. I’m very aware of that.

Here’s something I’ve learned about wealthier people: they’re finickier. In my experience, lower-income, lower-net-worth people will put up with a lot more questioning. Higher-net-worth people won’t. Certain questions just repulse them, and they leave. So we have to get two things right. We need the right bait up front, meaning the message that attracts them in the first place. And we can’t do anything during the qualifying process that makes them bail.

How you ask matters as much as what you ask. People will willingly give you information when they can see it’s related to what they’re asking for. If someone wants information on the best annuities in the market, and you explain that their age and investment amount change which products and rates are available to them, a lot more people will answer. Ask them something that seems unrelated and you get more friction.

So we test constantly, and we don’t only test how many leads come through. We test the quality of the leads that come through. We look at exactly where people drop out of the questions, find the ones causing the breaks, and fix them or replace them. And I talk to our better clients over time and ask them straight out: which of these questions actually help you, and which ones don’t? Then we cut the ones that aren’t earning their place.

How I Know Whether Something Actually Worked

When we change something, how do I know whether the leads got better?

All the usual numbers matter: contact rate, appointment rate, cases closed, and refund requests. But I’ve always been especially sensitive to refund requests, and here’s why. When our agents are succeeding, we usually don’t hear from them at all. When they’re struggling, we hear about it. Complaints and refund requests are a signal.

They’re also hard to read. When someone complains, we don’t always know whether something is actually wrong or whether the agent just isn’t very good at marketing or selling. So we look at everything together rather than one number.

The source matters too. Radio and TV leads had a higher contact rate. People answered the phone. But the odds of getting blown off were way higher. With radio and TV, it was usually one or the other: you got an appointment, or you got told to go pound sand. The quality was very unpredictable, call to call.

I think a lot of the people who became leads from radio and TV were really interested in the free offer. They were less serious and earlier in the buying cycle, and that caused problems when agents called them.

This wasn’t just an annuity thing. I got to be friends with the person who ran our call center, and he told me it was the same across all their offers, and they worked with a lot of big clients. Radio and TV just pulled more looky-loos. People are conditioned to see “free offer” and call for the free offer. Online leads, at least the way we’ve done it, have generally been more serious. People don’t hand out all their information online without thinking it through, especially when you’re asking for a phone number and a lot of questions.

Cheap Advertising Isn’t Cheap If It Brings You the Wrong People

We’ve always tracked everything by source. On radio and TV, every station, show, and channel had its own phone number, so we knew exactly where each call came from. Online, we track each source separately too. I’m not going to get into our online sources or tracking methods here, but everything is tracked. I’m very picky about where our leads come from, and I always have been. I’m kind of OCD about it. I’m not as much of a perfectionist as I used to be, but I still have those tendencies, and I take our sources very seriously.

What that tracking showed us was eye-opening. Television game shows, for example, brought in people who didn’t have much money. Fox Business had the highest-income audience on television. That’s why we were on Fox Business nationally, every week, for about eight years in a row.

We look at cost per lead, but it’s not even the most important number. The most important question is whether a media source produces the kind of people our clients want to sit in front of. That’s how we decide where the money goes.

I think of it this way: we’re advertising on behalf of everybody in our program, and our job is to find where those advertising dollars are treated best. A cheap source that sends the wrong people isn’t cheap. It creates refunds, complaints, wasted time, and agents who quit. The higher the quality of the leads we create, the less I hear from our customers and the easier the business is to run. It’s that simple.

Radio and TV Didn’t Die Overnight. They Died Slowly.

One thing I’ve learned about media is that channels usually don’t stop working in a week or two. They die a slow death.

Part of the reason is that audiences burn out on an offer. For a while, I ran what I called local blitz campaigns on radio. We’d run 30 to 50 commercials in one market over a week, saturate it, create the leads, and walk away. Then we’d come back four to six weeks later and do it again.

I had a client in Phoenix who knew about our commercials, and one week he and several other agents I knew there told me they were hearing 20 annuity ads a day on the big news stations. Think about what that does. Say the audience is 5,000 people and they’re hearing 20 annuity ads every day. Whoever is interested has already called. Everyone else has been inundated to death with the offer. It’s like running a seminar to the same neighborhood every few days. It just won’t work. That’s what it looks like when a media platform dies: people stop calling in.

We tracked radio and TV weekly, monthly, and quarterly, and I’d watch the numbers move over time. Year after year, they got worse.

Take Fox Business. Over the seven or eight years we ran there, the price of an average spot went up more than ten times. Over that same period, the number of leads coming in went down 60% to 70%. We went from being extremely inexpensive to ridiculously expensive, and it just didn’t work like it used to.

We weren’t the only ones. Other companies on TV pulled back for the same reason: the math stopped working. And remember, we were strictly a lead generation business. We didn’t have money to spend on branding or anything to subsidize the advertising. I had to account for every penny, and if a penny didn’t produce a result, it got pulled. We started lowering radio and TV budgets around 2017 to 2019.

National coverage was its own nightmare. With radio and TV covering the whole country, I needed buyers in all 50 states, and we had almost no national buyers. We had one, and they weren’t paying enough to help. Meanwhile most agents want leads within 50 miles of their office, and if they had their wish, 30 or 40. So I was advertising nationwide while agents were coming in and out of the program wanting small local markets. That’s really hard to maintain, and it created a lot of leads in places where nobody was ready to buy them.

The final straw was the pandemic, and honestly, the pandemic almost took us out.

When the country shut down, we lost something like 35% to 40% of our clients in one swoop, all within about 10 days. I didn’t know whether we were going to survive. I had no clue.

Eventually about half of those clients came back to us. The rest we lost for good.

You’d think creating leads would have been easy with everybody stuck at home. It wasn’t. It was really difficult. The pandemic just froze people.

And our radio and TV audience was the wrong audience for that moment. They were much more likely to live in rural areas and much less likely to be tech-savvy. Over the years, we could only get an email address from maybe 40% to 50% of them, and the number one reason was that a lot of them didn’t have a computer. When everything moved to phone, email, and video meetings, we needed people who could work that way. So I pulled the plug on radio and TV, and we doubled and tripled down on online. Our online campaigns are much more targeted, which also cut out a lot of the waste the national footprint had created.

Rebuilding Around Online, and Raising the Bar

When we rebuilt the program around online advertising, I did three things.

First, I changed the message. I wanted to appeal as much as possible to wealthier people, because roughly 30% of the leads are the ones that determine whether an agent really moves the needle.

Second, I made consumers jump through more hoops. They had to answer a lot more questions to become a lead.

Third, we increased the percentage of leads we throw away. We lowered the maximum age from 85 to 83 and raised the minimum investment from $25,000 to $50,000.

Part of the reason for all this was something I kept seeing over and over. An agent could be up 50 times their money in our program, and then we’d send him one lead who was 84 years old with $20,000 to invest, and he’d quit. One lead. So I made these changes to help everybody. Our scrub rate went up, but our clients were getting more of the leads they liked and fewer of the ones they hated. When agents stay longer, it helps them, and it helps us, because we don’t have to recruit as much.

On the message itself: how you’d talk to an 80-year-old doctor is different from how you’d talk to a 55-year-old factory worker. Some things that work on the factory worker you just can’t do with a more sophisticated 75- or 80-year-old doctor who knows more. Our campaigns are written with a higher-net-worth, higher-income, more educated audience in mind. I’ll leave it at that.

What Becoming a Lead Looks Like Today

Today, consumers have to read and engage a lot more in our campaigns. One of my core beliefs is that they need to do more work. If someone reads a lot and really engages, they remember what they went through.

Compare that to what I see from some competitors. Their annuity ads say something like, “Earn a 12% guaranteed return from an A-plus rated carrier,” maybe with a bonus thrown in, and then they ask for name, address, phone number, and email. Four or five questions. Then they brag that their leads are phone verified. It amazes me, because they haven’t done anything to build trust with that person.

I want consumers to trust us, and trust is earned by what you do and what you say. When someone reads our content, I want them to walk away thinking this is a believable, trustworthy company. A lot of the marketing in this space looks like hype. It looks like spam. It looks scammy. That’s not the experience I want anyone to have with us.

So we keep people engaged on the front end, and when they get to the point of entering their information, they do a lot of work and answer a lot of questions. Then, on the back end, our team manually checks everything they gave us. We Google their name, address, phone number, and email. We try to figure out what they do for a living. We look at their age and investment amount and whether the whole picture makes sense. We’re looking for the problems, the things that don’t add up, and that’s why a real chunk of leads get thrown away before they ever reach a client. (We’ve written about our scrubbing process in more detail separately.)

There’s also a lot more bot traffic and fraud online than there used to be. Our team has had to get much more aware of it, and we’ve installed fraud and bot detection technology at both the hosting level and on our website. We do as much as we can, but it’s not an easy problem.

The Market Decides Who Responds

People think lead flow is all about advertising. It isn’t. The stock market, interest rates, and the time of year all change who responds and how many.

When the stock market is strong and calm and everybody thinks the S&P 500 can only go up, it gets tough for us. If there’s no fear, there’s no perceived need to buy an annuity. The past year has been like that. Lead volume drops and our costs go up. Summer is usually more expensive too. Some parts of the year just cost more.

What changes even more is who responds. When the VIX is low and the market is complacent, the average age of our leads goes up substantially. We get a lot more people over 75 or 80, and investment amounts fall off a cliff. It’s almost as if the somewhat younger, wealthier prospects just disappear.

That’s when agents start emailing to ask why they aren’t getting more leads. What they don’t see is everything we’re scrubbing out. During those quiet periods we get more responses from agents and advisors, more people over 75 or 80, and a lot more people without enough money. The number of leads we reject goes through the roof.

When volatility comes back, it’s the opposite. It feels like it’s raining $500,000 leads every day across the country. That’s what it feels like to me, anyway.

2022 is a good example. Rates jumped, the stock market went down, and there was a lot of volatility. It was one of our best years. More people were interested in annuities. It’s really that simple.

Interest rates matter too. When rates go up, more people want fixed annuities, the interest-rate-based products like MYGAs. Some of my clients who mainly sell indexed annuities find that frustrating. They don’t want to sell MYGAs at all, but more of their prospects want them. If MYGAs are paying 7%, how are you going to talk someone into an indexed annuity instead? Maybe they can, but that’s their problem, not the consumer’s.

That’s why our advertising takes an open-minded, general annuity approach. We don’t build it around one product, and we don’t recommend just one type of annuity. We also ask consumers which type of annuity interests them most, so what they actually want guides the conversation.

Because the market moves around so much, I try not to make rash decisions. There will always be bad days and bad weeks. What matters is whether a decline holds up over time, after you account for seasonality and market conditions. We look at the longer-term picture before deciding anything.

Why We Don’t Change Our Message Every Time the Market Moves

To me, a good advertising message is evergreen. You shouldn’t have to make big changes to it all the time.

Could we change our messaging more often? Sure. Maybe we should. But one thing I’ve always tried to give our clients is stability. I want our lead quality to be as consistent as possible, and every time you change the message, you add another layer of variability to what comes out the other end.

When we do test something new, we test it small, on a local or regional basis, isolated in specific campaigns. We look at the data on that smaller scale before rolling anything into the national campaigns. I’m conservative about it on purpose, because I want our clients to have a consistent experience.

Good Leads Are Expensive to Make

People ask how we price our leads. During the first few months of the business, our leads were $35. Then we went to $79, $99, $125, about $200, $250, and today we’re at $300. A whole group of companies charge $400 to $500. We’ve always been in the middle, never the most expensive and never the cheapest.

I’ve never tried to charge as much as I possibly could. Maybe I should have raised prices sooner, but I never really did. We look at our real costs, overhead, and expenses, and that tells us what the price needs to be. I’ve also always run a lean operation, which was a strategic decision from day one. If I’d had a fancy office full of staff, we’d have had to charge a lot more. Running lean gave us a cushion. We haven’t raised our price since 2023, but everything gets more expensive every year, so at some point we’ll have to.

The biggest mistake I see agents make when choosing a lead company is chasing the lowest price. A lot of agents think they can get something for nothing. They sign up for a deal that looks too good to be true, get ripped off, and then call me wondering what happened.

Here’s the reality. Creating leads is expensive now. In my experience, it costs at least $100 to $200 to create an annuity lead, and likely more to produce one that’s been properly qualified. So when I see leads offered for under $200, I’m highly skeptical. I don’t see how a company at that price can pay people to scrub the leads, keep meaningful filtering in place, and throw away the leads that shouldn’t be sold. Something has to give. Maybe the lead is being sold to several agents. Maybe nobody is checking the information. Maybe they accept almost everyone who fills out a form.

Look at lead generation like a business owner. A real company has to spend a lot on advertising and pay people to do the work. If it looks too good to be true, it usually is.

A Much More Crowded Market

The biggest change since 2010 is the number of advertisers. Annuities have become one of the most saturated categories online, probably the most saturated. It’s insane how many companies are advertising now. Every guy with ChatGPT can build a webpage without really knowing what he’s doing, and there’s no barrier to entry.

When we started, there was a real moat. Building national coverage through radio and TV was hard, and national media was priced so far below local media that we were practically working for free. A lot of our agents didn’t understand that they could never have produced those leads themselves at the price we sold them. They didn’t realize how good a deal it was. Online, at least on some platforms, that advantage of advertising nationally is mostly gone.

Consumers have changed too. They’re much more sophisticated and knowledgeable than they used to be, and with AI giving them more product information every day, that keeps growing. If you ran an ad from five years ago today, it would probably flop.

The rules have changed just as much. We basically have to keep a law firm on retainer, which tells you something. The sad part is that annuity advertising itself hasn’t gotten much better. I’ve reported several of the more misleading annuity advertisers, and the media companies didn’t seem to care. Honestly, there aren’t many companies in this space I really respect.

To the Agents Who Want to Do This Themselves

Every so often an agent tells me they’re going to stop buying leads and run their own ads. Good luck to you. You’re going to need it.

I see our former clients on Facebook running their own annuity campaigns all the time. What’s amazing is how fast they disappear. I almost never see the same ones twice. And honestly, the quality of what they put out is surprising. It’s amateur hour.

So here’s what I’d tell any agent thinking about it: it’s not as easy as it looks. And the window is closing. Every year or two it gets harder, not easier. More competition, more sophisticated consumers, more fraud, higher costs. I’ve spent well over eight figures learning what I’ve shared here, and I’m still learning.

What I’d Do Differently

If I had to do it all over again, I don’t think I’d build the business around a national advertising footprint. It caused me too many problems. Knowing what I know now, I’d have raised our prices earlier. And I’d have filtered the leads much more aggressively from the beginning. In the early years, we let through leads I should have tossed.

What I’d Keep Exactly the Same

The one thing I wouldn’t change is our commitment to doing the right thing for our clients and for the consumers who respond to our ads.

I remember Tom Cruise talking about how he approached movies like Top Gun. He said he wanted everyone to win. Instead of focusing on one or two characters, they tried to make every character look good. I’ve always tried to run this business the same way. The consumer should get honest information and talk with one qualified professional instead of getting buried in phone calls. The agent should get a real opportunity that someone has actually looked at carefully. And our company should get paid fairly for the advertising and work it takes to bring those two people together. Everybody should have a chance to win.

We’ve worked with almost 3,000 agents and advisors over the years, and about 90% of them came to us through referrals. We’ve done almost no advertising to recruit clients in 15 years, which is kind of crazy to say. Part of that is because it’s hard to advertise to the top people in this industry. But mostly it’s because when an agent does well with us, they tell somebody.

There’s something else most people don’t know, and I don’t mind sharing it. I’ve been seriously and chronically ill since 2015. For 11 of the 16 years I’ve run this company, I’ve been sick enough that it’s been very hard for me to work and function. Some days I honestly don’t know how the business is still standing. When I think about everything it’s been through, from that first failed campaign to getting fired by agencies to the pandemic, while I’ve been as sick as I have, the whole thing is a blessing. It’s a miracle.

I think the answer is our clients, the reputation we’ve built in this industry, and the way we’ve tried to run the business: putting through honest, legitimate leads and doing the right thing when no one is watching. The advertising will keep changing. The technology will keep changing. That part won’t.

For our full guide to contacting, following up with, and converting annuity prospects, read Working Our Annuity Leads.

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