Ashley Woods builds marketing strategy for Google and YouTube during the day. On the side, she runs Primer Libro — a Spanish-language children’s book company for bilingual families — and she runs it on zero advertising spend. Her best-performing channel isn’t paid social or search. It’s in-person events. In this episode, she explains why that’s not accidental, and what it tells you about where small business marketing actually works.
Jo also covers how she cancelled $850 a month of marketing software and rebuilt it with AI agents — and why that’s a fundamentally different use of AI than what most business owners are doing.
What Google does that small businesses should not copy
Scale changes what’s worth doing. At Google, incrementality testing, multi-touch attribution, and complex measurement frameworks are legitimate tools — the volumes make the results meaningful. For a small business running a few hundred dollars a month in ads, those same frameworks produce noise. The data is too thin. The conclusions you draw from it will be wrong.
Ashley’s observation: small businesses often copy large-company tactics without the volumes that make those tactics useful. You build dashboards, run attribution models, and end up measuring activity instead of outcome.
Her Amazon ads wake-up call made this concrete. The dashboard said the ads were working. She turned them off. Sales didn’t move. The attributed revenue wasn’t incremental — it was customers who would have bought anyway, now credited to an ad they happened to see.
Why events keep beating paid channels
Every paid channel Ashley tried for Primer Libro came second to one thing: showing up in person where her customers were. The books are for Spanish-speaking families. The community is physical — libraries, cultural events, bilingual parent groups. When she arrived with books in hand, she could watch a parent pick one up, flip to a page, and see their child’s reaction. That’s a conversion moment no retargeting sequence can replicate.
From the episode: find where your customer already gathers, then go there. Not to run a campaign — to be present and useful. The customer acquisition cost from events, when you account for it honestly, often comes out ahead of paid channels. Most business owners don’t do that accounting.
The data advantage small businesses have that Google doesn’t
Google can’t know what one specific customer is actually doing. A small business can.
Ashley’s point: a small business owner can watch ten real customers interact with their product and collect information that a large company’s data team would need a controlled experiment to approximate. Direct access to real buyers — not survey respondents, not analytics proxies — is a structural advantage. Most small businesses don’t use it.
The practical version: talk to people who bought from you. Ask what they were looking for when they found you, and what almost stopped them from buying. That conversation is worth more than a month of headline testing.
Why she’s spending zero on advertising for two months
Ashley made a deliberate decision to go dark on paid channels. The reason: she wanted to understand what baseline demand looks like without ad attribution adding noise to the numbers.
The honest question behind this is incrementality: if the ad is removed, does the sale still happen? Most small businesses never ask it. They run ads, see attributed revenue, and assume causation. Ashley’s argument is that without at least one clean period with ads off, you don’t actually know what your advertising is contributing.
That’s hard to stomach when every sale matters. But business owners who understand their numbers at that level make consistently better decisions than those who don’t.
AI for more than ideas and email drafts
Ashley’s observation: most small business owners use AI for low-stakes tasks — content ideas, first drafts, captions. Jo’s response in the episode was concrete. She cancelled $850 a month of marketing software and rebuilt the same functionality with AI agents. Not tools that suggest things. Agents that execute tasks on a schedule, without supervision.
The difference matters. Using AI to draft content saves time on a single task. Using AI to replace a system removes a category of work. That’s a different order of advantage — and it’s available to small businesses right now, without enterprise-level setup.
About Ashley Woods
Ashley Woods is a marketing strategist at Google and YouTube. She is also the founder of Primer Libro, a Spanish-language children’s book company for bilingual families. She brings marketing principles from operating at scale to the practical realities of building a business from scratch.
Website: primerlibro.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ashleywoodsmarketing
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