A Strong Brand Is “Instant Cheating” Online and The Math Behind It
By: Eva Keller
Vi Wickam has watched a strange pattern repeat across dozens of his clients’ accounts. The bulk of their ad-generated revenue traces back to a single campaign type: brand search. Not display. Not video. Just ads that show up when someone searches for the company by name. Vi has seen this simple bet on a business’s own name consistently outperform every other channel it’s paired against.
“A strong brand is instant cheating online,” Vi says. It sounds like a soft claim dressed up as something bigger, until you look at why it works and where it came from.
From Fiddle Contests to Reading What a Market Wants
That instinct for what actually earns trust didn’t start in advertising. It started on a fiddle stage.
Vi grew up performing with his family band from age three, eventually becoming a four-time Colorado State Fiddling Champion. At fifteen, convinced he was good, he entered the national contest and placed fifty-sixth out of sixty-three. “That was a useful year,” he says. He started practicing an hour or two a day and kept at it through high school. The other skill the fiddle taught him was listening, reading a room well enough to know what people actually want rather than what they say they want. He once played a retirement gig that opened with rock and blues until someone asked for it to be turned down; the room lit up the moment the band switched to old country. That same instinct- to hear what’s actually needed, not what’s stated- is the one he now applies to reading what a market responds to before he ever writes an ad.
Betting on His Own Business
He built a company with college friends, and when graduation came with corporate offers attached, he turned them down and kept the business instead. “I wanted to own my skills rather than be beholden to a single boss who could decide to fire me on a whim,” he says. Twenty-nine years later, he still runs it: Wizard of Ads Online, handling Google Ads, Local Service Ads, SEO, and brand work for service businesses, alongside a partnership with Wizard of Ads doing radio and long-form brand writing.
How Google Actually Prices Ads
Most business owners think a bidding war rewards whoever spends the most. It doesn’t. Google scores ads on relevance: how well the keyword, ad, and landing page match what the searcher wanted. A bad match can cost five to ten times more per click than a good one. Budget isn’t the lever. Relevance is.
There’s a second layer most owners miss: Google is not on their side. It gives out recommendations, and business owners follow them, assuming a search engine wouldn’t suggest something against their interest. But Google makes its money selling ads, not running a neutral search engine; the searcher is the product, and the recommendations are written to keep both the searcher and Google happy first. Vi compares it to Western medicine getting paid when you’re sick, not when you’re well. When a client’s brand is strong enough to turn a modest ad budget into an outsized return, that’s not a result Google is thrilled about.
The Case for Bidding on Your Own Brand Name
That’s what led Vi to focus so heavily on brand campaigns. Most owners resist bidding on their own company name; why pay for a click from someone who already knows you? Because if you don’t, whoever does shows up first. As his clients climb toward the top of their markets, competitors start buying their name. Google won’t stop them. Whoever pays gets the placement.
Bidding on your own name converts at a premium because the searcher already trusts you. That’s the entire mechanism behind the strong returns those campaigns produce, no clever targeting required, just closing the gap between the trust a business already earned and the trust it’s paying to defend.
Protecting the Business as AI Search Grows
Vi has managed Google Ads campaigns at a scale most agencies never touch, working with clients across a wide range of industries and budgets. The number that matters more to him, though, is smaller. “What drives me is small business owners having the chance to build jobs and lives for themselves and their employees,” he says. “When a campaign works, somebody hires another technician. That’s how I know we did the job. It isn’t why I do it.”
Part of how he gets there is refusing to be the contractor holding the keys. He tells every client to register their own domain, host it themselves, and tie every Google account to an email address at their own domain, a few extra minutes of setup that prevents the common disaster of a business walking away from an agency and discovering someone else owns their data. “Your data is your data, and so is your domain,” he says.
The same logic explains why AI-driven search is reshaping the game. As Google search shifts toward direct answers instead of link lists, Vi expects the value of ranking to keep concentrating around brand recognition: the company someone already knows and trusts is the one that gets picked, whether the customer typed a name into a search box or got a single AI-generated answer with no clicks at all.
His read on where that leaves everyone else is blunt: “Winning your market still comes from being the company people search for by name. If a customer types ‘plumber near me,’ you already missed the bigger opportunity.”
