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Creative Strategy and How AI Is Changing the Game for Growth Teams - with Reza Khadjavi, Motion CEO
01:15:48
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- [00:00]
Reza
The Venn diagram of AI, data and creative. This person is right in the center of those three.
- [00:05]
Cody
Brought in Reza, founder and CEO of Motion. Reza, thanks for joining.
- [00:09]
Reza
Thanks. What's up, guys? It's no secret Motion is uniquely obsessed with the creative strategist role. But there's something about the term strategist that is interesting. In the age of AI, the fear and opportunity with AI is that if you stay stagnant, that's very concerning. But if move and, you know, rise up to the moment, then you can actually, like, increase the impact and leverage that you have in your companies by a very, very large degree. One of the things we realize is that cons around naming convention can be really challenging. What we try to do is introduce eight categories that we think are, like, the fundamental categories that really matter when it comes to creative testing. AI is going to help us see the first, like, $1 billion company that's, like, run by a single person.
- [00:48]
Cody
All right, we are back with another episode of Marketing Operators. We are without Cody Plofker. Today, our good friends, we brought in Reza, founder and CEO of Motion. Reza, thanks for joining.
- [00:58]
Reza
Thanks. What's up, guys?
- [00:58]
Cody
I've talked about a little bit on the pod, but I just moved to la, so my current pod, my. My current entire home setup is. I've got a. I've got a folding plastic table with full desk setup. I've got the. I've got the mic mounted. I've got my monitor. I've got the webcam. I've got the computer. I have a bare mattress that I've been sleeping on for the last three nights. And wi fi.
- [01:18]
Reza
Nice.
- [01:19]
Cody
Those are like. Those are. Those are the bare essentials. I'm getting done absolutely everything that I need.
- [01:22]
Reza
Wait, didn't you used to live in LA or you moved somewhere else?
- [01:25]
Cody
I'm back. I'm back in la. Yes, I've been. I was in Salt Lake for the last three years.
- [01:29]
Reza
Okay. Okay. Nice.
- [01:30]
Connor
That's the ultimate, like, ecom bro set up. It's not a house. It's just a podcast studio in an office. It's not even. You got to stop calling it a house. It's just the mops. The mop studio in the Ridge. In the Ridge. The Ridge office.
- [01:42]
Cody
It's the me. It's. It's basically the meme of, like, guys will live like this and think it's okay. And it's just the. It's like a camp chair and a TV and, like, a otherwise blank living room. Anyway, Yeah, I appreciate you guys bearing with me as I'm like kind of in between more formal setups.
- [01:56]
Reza
Yeah, of course.
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Connor
So is this, is this the office that you're in right now? Is this going to be like the formal podcast studio slash office?
- [02:03]
Cody
This will be the podcast studio slash office, yeah. Nice.
- [02:06]
Connor
That's a good backdrop.
- [02:07]
Cody
I've got a sweet little view of east la. I can see the Hollywood sign. I can see the Griffith Observatory. It's extremely Hollywood of me.
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Connor
You got that. You got that LA mojo now. I can feel it. I can sense it.
- [02:19]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, sweet. Look, we can, we can get into it here. Before I begin, I want to thank our sponsors, Motion. Most importantly in this episode, Rich panel, Prescient after Cell and Revo.
- [02:44]
Connor
Sam. So I don't know about you guys, but we are fully locked in on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday sale at hexclad. Motion is, as always, a very big part of this. We do a ton of just iterations on evergreen ads with like Black Friday sale banners. So we're just taking literally our top performing ads for the entire year, slapping a banner on them. And that's at least one part of our content stack for bfcm. So easy just to use motion to look at like last 90, last six months, year to date. Which ads are getting us the best efficiency? Which ads are getting us the best scale? It's like a really quick and easy way to pull that report in motion and then come up with just a bunch of overlays under your evergreen ads. That's one way we're using motion as we head into the peak season for us. The other way we're using it is for more like, you know, instantaneous feedback. So we're saying, hey, we did that. But we also shot and produced all these seasonal ads, so which ones are performing best? And then we'll iterate on those like during bfcm. So all of this is getting powered by motion reports. It's just the quickest, the easiest way to see what's working, what's not. Connor, how are you guys using motion at Ridge to inform your Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday ad decisions?
- [04:24]
Cody
We're in a similar headspace. We did a, an exercise that I was calling a Bottoms Up Planning this year where we granularly looked at what worked at what times throughout, you know, late October, November, Dec. Last year. That all comes from analyzing our creative. So we got that foundational approach of what are the things we want to be prioritizing and then we can get into the fact of what are the New things that we want to be trying this year. And Motion really kind of led point on a lot of that analysis.
- [04:49]
Connor
Cody, how about you?
- [04:50]
Matt
Yeah, same thing. Like, we'll have everybody propose their strategy and their plan, but, like, there should be no reason to start from scratch. Like, there's no, you know, blank page.
- [04:56]
Reza
I think you got to hit that.
- [04:57]
Matt
Like, 8020 of Explore and exploit. But I think for. For exploiting, like, you got to look at what's performed well. And, you know, we try to have a lot of warmup points. Like, we will have like a holiday kits launch soon. We have Labor Day, we have last Black Friday. So we just build a report of all of them. We just see what traits perform well. Anything that you can filter by naming convention so we don't have to start with a blank screen. And then we're able to just get more pinpointed in our strategy, hopefully each launch.
- [05:19]
Connor
And lastly, one thing I really, really appreciate about Motion is you don't need to, like, be this expert in how to use the tool. Like, like, they're very good at getting you onboarded, getting your data ingested and connected, and then training you on exactly how to use the tool. So if you've been dragging your feet, it's time to get going with Motion. Head over to motion app.com.
- [05:41]
Cody
I want to tee us up here a little bit for those super tapped into the DTC kind of media pulse. We had the Motion Creative Summit last year where we talked quite a bit about the development of the creative strategist role, and you had a bunch of other great guests that created content throughout the day. So I'm hoping to do is run through what I thought were some of, like, the more exciting points, and we can expand and kind of jam on some of those. I wanted to start with this, though, because I've been asking everybody, or I've asked Connor and Cody so far. You're the. You're the newest person to be on the podcast. If you were a director of growth today, what would your first three hires be? I could even tee you up a little bit further. I'll really tee you up here because I think it ties into our conversation. Connor picked exclusively creative roles. He's all content. I think that lends itself well. I forget exactly what they were. Performance, creative, strategist, designer, editor, maybe, something like that. So some people go that way. I chose a retention director, which I think is more of a controversial choice I might take back. And Cody chose. He hasn't. He hasn't answered the Amended version of the question because I hadn't specified that you are the director of growth. So he hired a director of growth first. That would do all sorts of stuff. But that is the context I've got for you. Who are you hiring?
- [06:49]
Reza
One, one clarifying question. What's the, what's the size of this brand? So just like GMB per year, you're.
- [06:55]
Cody
You'Re new, you're a small brand. So whatever we want to call it, maybe you're doing like single digit millions in your first year.
- [07:01]
Reza
Okay, okay. Single digit millions in the first year. I'm not sure I need three roles. That's my first starting point. I think, I think probably the, the most important. Let's talk about like the skillset and what this person is capable of and then what it's called afterwards. But I think the person needs to be extremely AI fluent and like literally they don't do anything in their job without it being like immersed in some kind of AI process and workflow. So that's a really important skill set. I think that the individual also needs to be extremely creative. Not necessarily like skilled at using like Adobe Premiere or like making cuts and so on, but like think about it more like a movie producer, right? Like, so this person has a vision for the kind of creative that would be really important. Like a great storyteller has a really great finger on the pulse in terms of like what's happening culturally, particularly for the, for the brand that they're working for. And then the last skill set is that this person needs to be really fluent with data and like understanding patterns and trends and like understanding what's working and what's not. I don't think they need to be like a data scientist by any means to be able to do like regression analysis and like fancy things like that, but being able to spot patterns in the data, right? So like they, they might have a vision for what they want to do, but being able to validate that vision in terms of like what's working and what's not. So some like the kind of Venn diagram of AI data and creative. This person is like right in the center of those three. And, and I actually think having that collapsed skill set in one individual is probably the most important thing. And then you kind of see what, what's missing depending on totally what that person's like naturally good at. But I'm, I'm starting to get the feeling that this hybrid collapsed talent role is really, really important. I think the brands that have that kind of three in one we used to talk about it as like two in one. Motion was like the big evangelist for the creative strategist role. And we're like, oh, you need a person who's really good at data and really good at creative. As it's like two in one, I think it just got a little harder in that that individual also needs to like now absorb AI as part of that trifecta. Um, Motion's view is that we think the creative strategist is really well positioned to level up and become that kind of three in one person. And so after all of that kind of spiel, I would say that this person for me is a, is an elite creative strategist and that's who I would hire.
- [09:42]
Connor
See, I think that's like the, I think what you just described Reza, that like intersection of analytics and creative is kind of like the, the head of growth, director of growth, VP of growth, CMO role. Like, I think that, I think if you're a, if you're leading a growth marketing or just a marketing team in general, you have to have some sort of overlap between those two things and hopefully you're peppering in, you know, AI into your workflows to just enhance that. So I feel like I, I fully agree with you. I just think that's like one level like up. Like, I feel like the leader of that, of that marketing team's got to be that person with the analytical, the creative and the AI fluency. And I, I use the movie producer analogy all the time because you're totally right. It's like that person is responsible for the end outcome, but they're not holding the camera, they're not doing post production, they're not the costume designer.
- [10:32]
Reza
Yes.
- [10:32]
Connor
Like, I feel like that is the growth lead.
- [10:34]
Reza
I, I think you're totally right. I think the, the only reason I mentioned it, the way I did is that I think there's another trend here, is that. And I think you guys will agree with this and I think for all the other leaders out there, beware, because I think this is important. I think we're getting to, we're getting to the period where the best leaders are elite ICs. And so in some sense the fact that they're a leader and they have to direct this org of people is, is one, one part of it. But I, I've always view, had this view of leadership where like, if you're directing a team, you gotta be the best on that team. Otherwise like, I don't know if that person will do a great job I'm not a big fan of, like, management for management's sake. I think, you know, you have a person who is the best IC as an individual, and then they realize that, okay, in order for me to apply leverage to the things that I'm really good at, maybe it doesn't make sense for me to keep being an IC over and over again. Maybe it makes sense for me to, like, train a team, teach my wisdom, and get other people to kind of execute what makes me really good. But the best leaders that I've seen are the ones that, like, back in the day, they were the best ic. And then every now and then when they want to show the team that they still got it, like, they'll just jump in and, you know, show the team that they, they still know how to, like, roll up their sleeves and, and do the thing. And I think what starts to happen and why I said the AI skill is really, really interesting, is that once you start getting fluent with AI, the difference between managing people and managing AI starts to become kind of blurred. Right? And so I actually think you're right, that that leadership skill of being able to direct people into a certain direction becomes really important. But I think more and more you can get AI to do a lot of those things that you would otherwise, like spell out as execution instructions to your team. I think, obviously, every other month, AI has more and more capabilities. It's not quite there yet to be able to do those things, but the trend is moving really fast. And so I think going into 2026, the type of people that will be really effective at their teams are. Yes, exactly, that kind of director, growth lead, type of individual. But they've not forgotten how to be an elite ic and they're leaning more and more to AI as part of that leverage. So I think, like, you know, there's this idea in tech companies or I think generally any. Any company that AI is going to help us see the first, like, $1 billion company that's like, run by a single person. And the idea is that, like, you know, you could be a leader and you can gain leverage by having a large org, but you can also gain leverage by being really good at putting AI to work. Right? So I think, I think we're going to see more and more people do that and keep their teams leaner, and everybody on the team has that kind of elite capability that they can be a doer, they can execute, and they're not waiting around, like, sitting for instructions. But, yeah, I ultimately agree with you. I think that Is the profile of like the head of growth or the CMO or whoever else. But my view is that for those individuals to do really well in what comes next, they should start to identify as an IC more so than a leader. If you're a product leader at a tech company, it's, I think, better to identify as like, I'm still a product manager, you know, and I love what I do. And as opposed to like, I lead product here or I'm a, I'm a chief product officer or something like that. I think we're getting the return of the elite IC is, is, is where I think the next phase is all about.
- [14:09]
Cody
The way that I've heard other people phrase this, just so we're all in the same kind of like language. Is the merging of strategy and execution. Is that kind of what you mean when you say identifying as a individual contributor? It's like you're not just strategizing, you are also executing on some of that vision. Do you think that's accurate?
- [14:26]
Reza
I think it started to turn when we started to get into a down market and interest rates started to rise and the good days were over. I think the leaders who weren't doing got exposed pretty quickly and like, wait, you're not actually adding a lot of value and you're very expensive and so like, what's going on? But you know, the leaders that can be strategic but they've not forgotten how to execute, I think those are the people that have been really, really valuable in a time where things have gotten more difficult. And I think AI is, is the thing that will help those individuals to continue to, to create a ton of value. But I think having that, like being involved in the work, in the details, I think makes people really great leaders. Like period, always. And the only problem has been like, there's been a trade off that like, okay, if I'm really capable and I can have a lot of impact for the company at some point you hit diminishing returns if you're just doing IC work. And so it makes sense. It's like, okay, let me train a team, let me try to like teach what I know. But I think we're starting to see that AI is like delaying that, diminishing returns. Like you can, you can still do a lot of IC work and train your systems in AI workflows and like get a lot more mileage out of your own icing. Right. And so I think the best leaders should, should push that as far as they possibly can. And I think there's still A point where like, you know, hire more people who are also like that, who can also like train AI systems and get leverage and so on. So I think I, I still believe there's a world for building teams and hiring people. But I think the starting point is like a super elite IC who can gain leverage through AI, not just through growing their headcount and then grow your headcount through that method because then you get like multiplied leverage through individuals who are also capable of that.
- [16:16]
Cody
Yeah, totally. Now I'm curious because I, and I'd like the framing of the original question about these three roles that we have to put together because I, I think we're all on a similar page here where whether it's the director of growth or this creative strategist role, they should be in a modern org structure of a brand. Extremely high leverage via AI, via great process, via great, you know, just tactical skills. I think Connor, your other two were video editor and designer because it still feels to me today you still need people that is where execution is still really valuable and maybe that completely goes away in the next year or two. But I still think someone largely needs to be hands on keyboard designing great ads or like fine tuning really well edit videos and maybe it's only 60. Okay, Connor, you said?
- [17:02]
Reza
Yeah.
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Cody
What do you think?
- [17:03]
Connor
Yeah, well I, I was thinking about it from like what am I, what do I know how to do as an IC and what can I not do? Like I have a media buying background and analytics background, a creative strategy background, retention background. But I am not a content producer. I'm, I'm not going to be able to like shoot you beautiful stuff. I definitely can't design or do video editing. So I was thinking about it from the lens of what's going to be super complementary to my skill set. So it was all of the creative ics. It's like I need, I need a content producer and then maybe someone can do both graphic design and video editing. If that's the case, then I only then like two people are probably who I need out of the gate. Whereas if you're like, I mean we know, we know these people, right? Like if you're a design or like a designer LED founder, well then you probably need the reverse. Like you need someone that knows how to buy ads, knows how to do analytics, knows how to like build out the tech stack and do all the actual like what I'll call distribution of media is like a big, you know, overarching term. So I think it's just depends on your Skill set and like, where. Where you need to complement yourself. So that's why I went the. The pure creative stack route, because I don't have those skills, but I do have a lot of experience working with, you know, being the producer and working with those, Those designers, those editors, those content producers. So that's why I went that way. But I think you could flip it on your head if the person starting the brand what had the. Had the opposite experience and skill set that I did.
- [18:26]
Reza
Yeah, to me, it's like, you know, the, The. The centerpiece is decision making.
- [18:31]
Connor
Right.
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Reza
You. You have some kind of way to. Connor R. You. And at our discussion of the Creative Strategy Summit, you, You. You talked about this flywheel that people really liked. I remember in the comments, I, I can't remember how you phrased it, but it was like, ship ads. Learn ship more ads. It was something like very kind of straightforward like that.
- [18:49]
Connor
Yeah.
- [18:49]
Reza
I think there is a process by which someone is synthesizing those learnings and then coming up with direction. Like basically like the, the. The movie producer or quarterback or whatever you want to call it. I think that's the most important skill for this person to be extremely good at. And then you might need help on the execution side, either to bring the content to life or to like, manage the media budget. And I think that's totally fine. I think the danger is if, if anybody needs help on that quarterbacking, I think then it's dangerous. I actually think, like, that piece needs to be center of excellence. You can't really outsource that. Like, that's gotta be like, core competency. And then once you have some clarity around the direction that you want to go, then it's like, okay, how do I assemble people to help me bring this to life? Some of those could be contract help, external partners, hires, new AI tools, kind of figure it out based on what's available. But the piece that. I think once you have clarity on what it is you're doing around that feedback loop, then it also becomes pretty clear to you, okay, what piece do I need help in? What piece am I missing? And so if you do have three roles, there is something like the quarterback, let's call it strategist type person who knows the direction to go. And then execution help on the distribution side, execution help on the production side makes sense. And then maybe you're naturally good at one, and then you lean on the other side for help and so on.
- [20:24]
Connor
Maybe the title of the role is Director of Clarity because it's like the. It's like the person who's like steering the ship. Right. And using data to steer the ship. And it's like, this is clearly the path that we need to trend and go and march towards based on these data points we have. Whereas, yeah, I think it's a very dangerous place to be if you don't have that person that can understand what's working and what's not and what you should do about it. Because then you end up with this like, very muddy roadmap. And that like, that's a, that is a bad bug. You do not want kind of like filling up your team with. Because if all of a sudden your team starts to be like, wait, I'm actually second guessing why we're even doing these things. Well, that's, that's the worst place you can be in as a, as a growth leader. So maybe that's the role is like clarity is in the name because the whole point is to like steer the ship in the right direction and kind of be the, be the barrel. So the bullets are all flying in the right direction.
- [21:20]
Reza
Totally. Well, this is like we, we, it's no secret. Motion is like uniquely obsessed with the creative strategist role. And it's almost like for us, we keep going back to that as, as the phrase. But there's something about the, the term strategist that is interesting in the age of AI. I remember when we were fundraising a few years ago, a few investors would tell us like creative strategist that sounds like they don't do anything. That sounds like they're just sitting around like coming up with strategy. And I think, you know, there we, over the last maybe like 10 years in knowledge work, the strategist got a pretty bad rep of I'm, you know, not actually doing anything. It's like sitting around dreaming of strategy. But I think as execution becomes more and more of a commodity and more and more of a solved problem, like if you know what you want, getting it done is becoming like more and more of a solved problem every day that goes on. I actually think the very human role that remains left is, is the kind of the, the person who decides clarity. One who has clarity is the one who is basically able to articulate the strategy better than anyone else. And so that's why we love the strategist title as part of Creative Strategist. And a lot of the strategy in my mind is that what are we going to say? Who are we going to say to? What are we selling? And like a lot of those things are represented in the actual creative asset. But ultimately, like we, we, we, you know, being able to articulate what the skill sets are and what's needed is most important. And that's why we, we had a few years ago when we wrote the, there was a ebook that we produced called the Becoming a Creative Strategist. On the title of that book, we put a hat was this black hat with Creative Strategist on it. And our point there was that like, actually the name of the role doesn't really matter. It's like whatever we're describing here is the things that need to be done that is really important. Someone's got to do them. And job title could be founder, it could be cmo, could be header growth, but they're, I think we're all kind of on the same page around this like, set of things that is really important that drives growth in this next era. And someone at the company should take it really seriously because that's going to be the differentiator. I think there was a time where execution was a, was a differentiator. It's like if you built up execution chops that was better than your competitors and like, you know, you had an advantage over them. And I think that is starting to go away. And the question becomes, how do you build this feedback loop that you learn from what's working and you have good taste to come up with new hypotheses and new directions and you do that loop faster than anyone else and then you win because things are in constant flux and changing. You can't have this like, ah, okay, we have our playbook and now we're going to run it for the next one year. Like, it just won't work like that because things change really fast.
- [24:12]
Connor
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- [26:28]
Cody
Can I I've got a little bit of a tangent so I'd love to talk through other ways that we're seeing this. Like if I'm a listener, I'm probably wondering you can imagine where strategy and execution are collapsing at like the ad level and I'm curious like in what other parts of the organization might that be happening? I've got a small example of where we're seeing it in Ridge. If you guys are. If you guys are down to through it with.
- [26:50]
Reza
Yeah, all right.
- [26:51]
Cody
I put this flowchart together a while ago. This is our. It's about Our go to market strategy though, which I've talked about this quite a bit. At Ridge, we've been spending way more time over the last two, two and a half years launching more products and trying to get really good at that. We've basically been doing. We really kind of overcorrected towards launching and We've been doing one or two launches a week now for the last 18 months. We're really back in because we're going to focus our time and energy kind of elsewhere on, on higher leverage things. But the way that it works right now is we get a. We get, let's say we're launching a product. We get a product summary from the product team and for those just listening, I'm walking through the org chart but I'll try to do it in a audible, friendly way. Then from there we create the marketing summary where we're talking about commercial goals, we're talking about maybe certain ideas for channel strategy, we're doing light kind of creative direction. What do we need from the creative team to get this done? Maybe we have historical comps that we're pulling in here and as it relates to this launch, like what are the key messaging points, what are the key creative assets, etc. So we do this marketing summary. Now previously we would do this and then we would hand this off and we would create copies. We'd have a copywriter write the copy and then we would hand off the marketing summary and the copy doc to our retention director and she'd put together the email briefs so she would read both those things and then she create the email briefs and then we'd finally get to the designer and what we're seeing now, which honestly I think this is working like 60 or 70% of the time, there's really quite a bit of work that's getting collapsed here is the people writing the marketing summary, which is myself or the vp, are able to really quickly produce copy. So what we do is then we take that summary and we work, I call it this theme overview where we do like a very quick ideation cycle with. We use Claude for this. Hey, what is kind of our. What are a couple key messaging angles that we could take here? We ideate there, we align on a very short theme summary and then we take that theme summary and the marketing summary and we can produce a full copy deliverable. So we've already kind of eliminated the copywriter role at Ridge as it relates to this process. And then what I found further, we had a E. Comm Manager leave in May So I was like, man, we've got to figure out how are we getting our E Comm briefs done in as efficient of a way as possible. What we ended up doing was like, basically the process of the E Comm manager receiving the summary, receiving the copy doc, and then putting together a marketing brief for the designer is a extremely templatized, mechanical process. And if we're just writing down what that thought process is, hey, interpretation the summary, interpret the copy doc. These are the prompts in order to complete this ecom brief. We're basically delivering the summary, the copy doc, and the econ brief all in one handoff. And we've collapsed what would have been two additional handoffs, three people in total, that would take at least, you know, 14 days. We've collapsed that into like, basically one handoff. And what we're doing now is we're working on a similar sort of templatizing of the briefs for things like email, where all of a sudden one person all the way up here in this creative strategist, producer, you know, whatever you want to call this role, has just extremely high leverage. And then we're just handing off all the briefs straight to the designer. And I think this is like a really exciting example of extremely high leverage work. It's eliminating a lot of people, it's unifying the vision, it's cutting down handoffs. But to my point earlier, we at least still need a designer at the end of the day taking these briefs and designing the email or designing the page. But that is like, as efficient of a process that we found within Ridge that that kind of exemplifies this merging of strategy and execution. What do you guys think?
- [30:18]
Reza
I love that. I. I feel like anybody looking at this and is in an org chart either on the left side of the screen or on the right side of the screen, the goal is to move to the other side. So if you're, if you're a part of the org that is generally involved in the marketing summary part of this workflow, where you're like, setting things up at a high level. And then before you used to rely on other people to just execute that, I agree with you up until the point where, like, you're creating instructions for the brief, the creation side still does need to be handed off, but I don't think people at that level need to rely on other individuals to bring that part to life. And they could just do it. And I think if you're, if you're in a part of an org where you get that Kind of high level summary and your job is to like produce a brief or something like that. What you really want to do is like move further up to the left and get more involved and like help your organization out by doing more of that marketing summary short theme overview. Because like that's the part where the business still actually does need help in. So for example, if you had somebody on the team and all they were doing was writing the ecom briefs at some point you're like, wait, I'm not sure if I need help on this anymore. But if someone was like running the ecom briefs, but you see that week over week they're stepping up and they're able to help take off some of the short theme overview work off of your plate or some of the marketing summary work off your plate, then they can continue to be high impact in their company. And so I think if you're, if you're in the execution side of things, like you want to make your way up towards the strategy side because then you can be more impactful in the company. And I think if you've been on the strategy side, what's exciting is that like you can actually go all the way down into the execution, at least to, to a large degree without necessarily waiting on anybody else to do that. And it's this totally liberating feeling of people who had really good ideas and they're like, I feel stuck because I need someone to kind of take this and run with it. You could probably go all the way down into like executing that pretty far. So I love that example. It sounds totally right. And I think people should kind of act accordingly depending on where they are in an org chart because you can't sit still either way. If you're just sitting on strategy, people who can do that and execution will outlap you. And if you're just sitting in execution, then people who can like step up and do strategy will outlap you. And so I think that's like the, the fear and opportunity with AI is that if you stay stagnant, that's very concerning. But if, if, if you move and you know, rise up to the moment then can actually like increase the impact and leverage that you have in your companies by a very, very large degree. So I think it's very exciting and cool to see you guys doing it.
- [33:00]
Cody
Totally. You know, the, the, the other thing that I hearing you talk through it. So one, you said you agreed up until the point of handing it off to a designer at the end.
- [33:08]
Reza
Yeah, I think we're still a ways away there. I think for some like static production. Oh, right. For some static production on like minor iterations, I feel like we're seeing AI get good enough at that. One of the things I find interesting with advertising in particular, and why I've not necessarily been the hugest fan of trying to solve the creation problem with AI necessarily is that ads in some sense are kind of like an investment portfolio where the upside is pretty uncapped, you know, and like the, the economics of advertising are very different to for example, like if you have a, if you have a product skew of, let's say a hundred thousand products and every day you need to update the product photos of those products, it's like that's a grind. And the upside of that work is not necessarily that high, but we've all seen scenarios where like one or two ADs, like carry the entire ad account for weeks, you know. And so like the, the, the upside of getting things right is so high that I don't know if there's this race to efficiency necessarily on the production of assets. Obviously the more efficient, the better. Everyone's trying to make the process more efficient. But you know, if you can introduce a little bit of human taste in the execution of that asset and it increases the likelihood of that ad working when you, when you ship it to production, it's, it's, it's worth the time, you know, especially because a lot of the execution can be automated. So I feel like the same process that you're, that you've got here, I feel like there's a similar type of a flowchart that happens on the creation side. So I don't know. You know, a lot of the design tools are helping people move faster, but it's not like just does all of it, you know. I don't think that's right.
- [34:57]
Cody
Absolutely. I 1,000% agree. I was also going to say like, in the case of, you know, if we are more or less automating the creation and the redundant or mechanical work of writing an ecom brief, going from summary to copy doc to ecom brief, what is that person best spending their time on? And it comes down to taste, I think, and it comes down to like more critical strategy where it's like people basically at all different parts of the org, whether it's at the very top in the, in the marketing summary role, whether it's at the channel level, if you're writing E. Comm or email or ad briefs or whatever, or at the actual creation level, you should be Finding the places that you can automate or get leverage and then spend your time in, in the, the places where you are uniquely good at as a human. And that might be taste or more putting things through a more critical lens or pulling in examples or inspiration that like an AI won't do automatically. And so I think that's, that's also there are like a lot of little flowcharts within all these, all these different steps which I think are worth thinking through as well.
- [36:01]
Matt
Two years ago we had a crazy Black Friday. We're actually one of the top selling brands and products on Shopify. It was really cool. Harley shouted us out on TV and everything which was awesome. But it wasn't all good news. Uh, with, with unforeseen growth comes some challenges. And one of the challenges we had was we had a crazy backlog of CX tickets at one point, I'm embarrassed to say, we had a seven day average response time that lasted for longer than it should have. A big part of it was our CX software was just not scalable and couldn't keep up. We were using one of those old legacy slow players. There was no AI involved, there was no automation and just the UX was not great. And so when we came into Black Friday of last year we knew we needed to prepare better so we switched to Rich Panel. It was pretty close before Black Friday onboarding was quit. Two weeks was all all it took. They got all of our macros there, they got all of our tickets, they trained our team, they just took care of everything. We got the self service widget set up. I think now like 40% of people are actually getting responses just by the self service widget. And then we're using obviously a lot of the AI. They have this like social AI moderation tool that Austin Ridge are, are big fans of. Our average response time is now within hours. We've gone from 18 people to 10. We're able to, our CSAT is higher than it's ever been. And so last Black Friday, no backlog. All of our peak moments, we're able to, you know, without having to fully ramp up our team, go crazy with it. We're able to get back to people way better, provide a better customer experience and Rich Panel is a huge part of that. So you want to get ready before peak season, before Q4 and Black Friday. Switch to Rich Panel. You'll save money on software, you won't need as many people and you'll be able to just provide a better service for your customers. So go to richpanel.com demo and tell them Cody from Marketing Operator sent you.
- [37:36]
Cody
Connor, do you guys anything at Hexclad where you're like, yeah, this is also a place in the organization where we're seeing some sort of collapse of strategy and execution?
- [37:45]
Connor
Yeah, I'd say first of all that's a great example. I really like looking at that like very specific marketing workflow. I've said this before and I think, I think it's still relevant, especially relevant here where I think a lot of our marketing leaders get become like, do more IC work whenever we're trying something new. So like the framework I think about a lot in my role is like I should be doing more IC on the stuff that's new or like innovative within our marketing stack. And then I measure it and then there's like, there's like two paths forward. It's like if it worked, delegate and like figure out how to like make it repeatable so the team can handle and like how do we, how do we like delegate that the team? So like I, I'm not doing the IC work or another marketing leader is not doing the IC work. If it didn't work then we like memorialize that information and we, and we don't like build out a system around it. So that's how I think about. And like I, you know, Connor Dahl, if you talk to him about this, he'll, he'll kind of say something similar where he likes to give himself certain projects in like the growth marketing stack just to stay sharp and like retention or paid or creative. So it's kind of the same thing. Like if we're trying something new, I'm always going to be a little bit more hands on, a little bit more involved with the team versus something that's like tried and true and we really know how to do it, we know that it works. And I'm still going to be involved, but not as involved as an ic. So like a good example right now is we have a new product launching in Q1. It's like an A tier product launch for us. So we're you know, focused on acquisition, we're focused on lead generation, we're focused on retention. So the actual lead gen strategy that we're rolling out for this product is very, very, very different than anything we've done before for anything that we've rolled out in the past. So right now we're really focused on how that landing page should come to life. So I have been more involved on like working with our CRO lead To, like, outline the sections and working with the team to decide, like, what level of information is correct and, like. Like, kind of mapping out, like, what the funnel will look like. So someone comes to the site, then they opt in, then here's the drip sequence, then we launch it. So a great example where, like, I'm moving kind of further to the right side, not all the way to the right, because I'm not the one that's, like, writing the copy yet or, like, doing the designs, but, like, moving closer to, like, the middle of that flowchart you just mentioned. And that's just one example. Like, they're obviously. I think all of our brands have, like, big net, new swings we're taking, right? Like, you see it with Cody right now in podcasts. Like, he is clearly swinging way far to the right on testing out podcasts for Jones Road Beauty, and it's probably gonna, like, work because of that. But I'm sure at some point, once, you know, a month from now or two months from now, once they've really established what's working, what's not working, and how they want to approach it, I'm sure he'll move back to the left of that. Of that flowchart and let his team handle the middle to the right part. So I think you just have to have, like, that discernment about when you should move to the right versus when you should stay to the left. Because once you can't stay to the right the entire time, right now, you're, like, micromanaging and you're not thinking strategically about the business as a whole. So you have to, like, have that level of discernment on when you should swing to the right and when you should come back to the left of that. Of that flowchart you shared. So that's one example where I'm swinging to the right right now. Matt Ducker, our head of content, who was just on the the Motion Summit, like, we are for a different new product, concepting some partnerships, some bigger partnerships, and same thing, right? He's not staying on the left side and just dumping that off to, like, one of our creative partners and saying, hey, come up with a bunch of commercial ideas for this new product with this partner. It's like, no, he's actually, like, pretty. I mean, we're working with a partner, but he's, like, spending a lot of time with this guy, refining the concepts before going and pitching it to this partner. So he's swinging to the right now on this. On the, like, commercial assets that were that we're going to produce for this new product and then once we produce those, I'll swing back to the left. So I think it's, it's just like we see it in our org and honestly the people that haven't been able to swing to the right haven't lasted super long at Hexclad. So I think it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the show. Like gotta be able to swing to the right and, and become more of an ic, but then no one to come back and like have that discernment on, on where you should be sitting as far as like strategist versus execution and doing on. On various projects.
- [42:07]
Reza
Yeah, there's a couple points that come to mind here. One is, you know, Connor, you drew out the flowchart as left to right and that makes a lot of sense because it's kind of going in sequence. But another way that you can view that is like just a question of altitude. Right. If you're a leader and if you're kind of thinking about things at a really high level, like a 10,000 foot view, you're looking at that, at the world and the entire strategy from a very broad strategic lens. And then it's almost like you're zooming in all the way into like the weeds of the details. And so I actually think from a mental model, the zooming out to really high altitude and then zooming in deep into like extreme weeds, extreme details is helpful because Connor, I think you're right that like, if you get stuck in the weeds then you kind of, you're not seeing the bigger picture. And if you're too far out removed, then you can actually like impact change. So I think the, to me, the, the skill of the leader in this environment is like zoom up, zoom down, zoom up, zoom down. Like do that like constantly throughout the day. That's a very difficult context switch to go into like extreme detail and then go up to like extremely high, high level altitude. But I, I think that's needed because if you're, especially if you go back to like the AI question, if you are this like super IC leader that is going to make AI systems work for you, you absolutely need both. Because LLMs are so sensitive to detail choices that you make along the way when you're trying to, let's say automate some kind of workflow with, with AI, they can be extremely sensitive in the way that you instruct them at the detail level. And if they don't have like good clarity as to like what we're doing at a, at a higher level, it also won't work. So I think those two are really important. The, the other piece you mentioned that actually both of you talked about was the flywheel that I think is going to be more and more important as execution becomes more and more commodified is that product strategy and go to market strategy are actually going to be very, very intertwined. And it's not like some group way over here think about a new set of products that they want to build and then they go to the marketing team and say, hey, we have these like, go and sell them, right? So the, the feedback loop that when we started working on motion four or five years ago, there was a really big gap between creative decisions and performance data. And those two things needed to be working in harmony. And I think the feedback loop of the next like five, ten years is going to be around what we're learning on the go to market side and how that is informing our product strategy. And you know, I think obviously the best companies do this, right? Like they hear signal on their advertising and they say, hey, it seems like like this demographic with this like problem statement seems to be really resonating. What else can we bring to life that we think this audience might really resonate with? And I think that feedback loop will be highly differentiated because, you know, some, some messaging will work or some product positioning might work and then all your competitors will rip it off. But how do you decide what's the next thing that you're going to release in two weeks or three weeks? And like, I think that's where there's still a lot of human creativity. I don't know if AI is going to get to the place where like it's going to make our product decisions for us and then go and like work with a manufacturer and like bring it to life and like partner with some brand ambassador. Like the actual creation of new product and taking it to market is probably going to be where a lot of differentiation happens. So the companies that have like really tight feedback loops between what product choices we make and how we take those to market will be like really, really impactful.
- [45:46]
Cody
I totally agree. There's a great podcast. It's the VP of ramp on 20 minute. It's Harry Stebbing's podcast. I don't know if it's 20 minute VC or if he's got a different one called like 20 minute product manager or something. You get the VP of growth at Ramp on and, and he talks about how they're using AI to ingest a lot of campaign data. And Harry Stebbings goes, doesn't it, doesn't it feel like you should be able to give all your campaign data to, to AI and it just produce another great campaign? And what George, the point that he makes is all it will do is it will take that data and it will iterate on it. So you will have like by, by feeding it your existing campaign data, you will have put some amount of like constraints around it and it will produce something within that. And what you're describing, Reza, is our unique value currently is to be injecting net new ideas, whether that's products or different demos to target or whatever else. And like that is just going to come from like a different sort of process that I think for now I believe humans are better at. I don't know if that'll be the case forever, but like we should do what we're best at, you know, currently.
- [46:48]
Reza
I think it's like that's the only job that remains, I genuinely think. And then it's like, okay, in order for me to make the best decisions. So I think you'll eventually get that down to a science. It's like how are you synthesizing different data points and then how are you being creative ultimately with that final decision of you know, what net new direction you're going to go here? And it's like, you know, if you've seen these, this kind of visual of a really busy executive back in the day would sit at their desk and there's like a pile of papers for them to look and sign, look and sign, look and sign. Like that. I think that makes a lot of sense. It's like all of the prep work is done for you, right? And then you spend a few seconds here and there making a tasteful, very high level strategic judgment call on many, many different things that have like many downstream consequences as a result of just that, like one split second choice. So I think it's like you'll have systems and teams and AI and so on to like help support you in that work. But that final call, the one that goes like we go this way or this way or we go like this way and this way. Like I think that that's a very human thing and I think that's the thing that we'll all compete on is those choices at that like highest level of abstraction and then we all have these wonderful systems that will then take that and like execute it effortlessly. But there's still a choice to be made at that Higher level. Like, you know, some choices are extremely subjective. Like, you know, Ridge sells exclusively to men right now, right? Like, will that change one day? Maybe, you know, but like that's going to be a choice. That's going to be a choice that the company makes, not something that is delegated over to AI. So those like really, really high level choices, I think become hopefully what we spend all of our time doing. Although it's funny, sometimes it's like I was writing a piece of code for something and I was trying it in our system and I was going back and forth with Claude on it and I was the executor for Claude because Claude's like, okay, try this and then see what error you get. And then I copy pasted the error. And so in that moment it was pretty funny. It felt like I was like the doer for the AI, which was so funny. It's like, go and do this for me and let me know what you see. And I'm like, wait, who works for who here? What's going on?
- [49:00]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, we're just like, we're just like the meat robot for. For the AI.
- [49:07]
Connor
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- [51:15]
Reza
Okay, awesome.
- [51:15]
Cody
I want to pivot a little bit and to use the analogy around the altitude, I think we, I think we nailed macro scope like org building and trends and shifts in the way that we can accomplish work. Another very popular topic last couple weeks on the timeline and from the Creative Summit last week was Meta Andromeda, which is funny because I think different parts of it have been rolling out all year. We did a podcast on it back in March or early April so we were talking about it long ago and Dara Denny had a great summit conversation and she makes a point, as does a number of people throughout the day. But there's this shift in the way Meta Meta's algorithm works. So the Andromeda algorithm kind of groups users into unique Persona Personas. It allows like the the larger thing is it's able to look at a much larger set of ads in order to improve its ad matching quality. So where it used to have to kind of zone in on a percentage of your ad library to to decide what ad to serve Connor Rowland, it's now able to look at a much larger one. And what the Meta reps say and what all the documentation from Meta says is that because of that creative diversity is more important than other more important than ever. It's going to be able to use that entire catalog so that you know, if Connor Rowling is in in market for, you know, a red pair of hiking shoes so that he can hit, you know, someplace in in Denver that they know exactly which ad to serve him. Now, I think that has a lot of implications for how internal teams are producing content and how are they doing so strategically? So I. I had one question here for Connor because Matt, who I've got a. If we get to it, I. I've got some points on. On his discussion from last week, but you've been super clear about this as well. @ Hexclad, you guys have, at many points in time, reduced the amount of content that you're creating. So I'm curious how you guys are thinking about that. You're going from maybe producing 75 ads for a campaign to 25, but you know that creative diversity is more important than ever. So is there some sort of framework or decision making that you guys are doing internally to ensure that you have the diversity you need without producing?
- [53:22]
Connor
I feel like in the past, we were. We were taking this, like, volume first approach. It's like, how many concepts do we want to make, right? And we're starting there, and then we're trying to, like, fill. Fill out the concepts from. From the number of, like, deliverables or, like, groups of ads we want to produce, which, like, don't get me wrong, that totally served hexclad at. At a certain time, right? Like, if you look at like, 22, 23, like, I think that's a big reason we were able to scale so aggressively is like, we were just putting so many shots on net and. And it worked. But I realized at some point in time that, like, all the ads we were making felt very similar. Not all of them, but a lot of them, because we were. We were trying to feel like, all right, we need to hit 10 new groups of ads per week to launch. And it just felt like we weren't taking big enough swings. So now we're actually taking the opposite approach. We're actually starting with, like, all right, we have this new product that we're going to build funnels around as an example. Like, what are all the different ways we could sell this product? Like, what are the asset types? What are the angles? What are like, the. From the brand stuff versus from the creator? Like, from an influencer or creator that's not from the brand, like, we're starting there, versus starting with this number. This, like, arbitrary number we're trying to hit. And I think what we're finding is the swings we're taking are way better because of that. Like, we are taking, you know, six really awesome, really differentiated swings. And by the way, like, that doesn't mean six ads, right? That still could mean like 5, 10, 25 ads within a swing. So what I found is that like, by leading with creative versus a number, we're taking better swings and we're still hitting like, it's not like we're not launching a lot of ads. Like, if you go look at our, our creative testing calendar, like, there's still, you know, hundreds of ads getting launched every single month. So it's just like a, it's just been a subtle shift in how we're approaching just the, the creative process for how we're deciding which ads to make that I think is leading to, which I actually think is probably because there's two parts of, of Andromeda that, that are like the key call outs. It's volume and it's diversity. And I think it's actually, we're actually doing both by leading with the, the diversity piece versus the volume piece because it's just naturally leading into like, all right, we have seven concepts we want to produce under all those concepts. There's a bunch of variations within those buckets, and we're, we're hitting the volume piece simply by leading with, with creative and just taking bigger, bigger swings that aren't like, hey, we launched a thousand ads, but they all feel like 95 the same. It's like, no, we launched 500 ads or 250 ads, but like, the overlap between them is, is pretty small.
- [56:06]
Reza
1. One of the things that I think it's really relevant here. We talked about it at the summit, and this week, it's like rolling out to all Motion users. You guys are starting it in your accounts. As of this week is Motion's new AI tagging system. And one of the things that we approach that with is, you know, since the beginning of everything we've done at Motion, like naming conventions in your ads has been such a critical part of all of these decisions. And one of the things we realize is that, you know, consistency around naming convention can be really challenging. We might call something one thing and then mistake and refer, refer to something else later. And we might have different conventions over time, and they're not consistent. What we try to do is, is introduce eight categories that we think are like the fundamental categories that really matter when it comes to creative testing. And a few of them are really high level. And so when people just say, like, broadly, we need creative diversity, it's like, on what dimension? You know, you could say creative diversity on a detail or on something more high level. So the categories that we put out is the most important ones are like, Asset type? Is this ugc? Is it static? Is it whatever else visual format? Is this like an us versus them before, after? Or, like, what is the kind of visual format of this ad messaging angle? So, like, what is the actual thing that we're communicating here? And, like, just those three are actually pretty important. So if you're differentiated on, like, messaging angles, for example, like, there's many downstream implications of the different types of ads you can create. But if everything we do is the same messaging angle and we've produced 500 ads, it's not really differentiated, you know, or there's a couple other categories. One is intended audience. Like, who do you. Who do you want this to be serve to? Hooks are interesting because people tend to track their hooks, like verbatim hooks in their kind of tracking logs. Like, oh, we did this hook. And this is how it worked. We introduced a category called hook tactic, where we're basically grouping hooks around the tactic that was used, like a confession or like a bold statement or like, shocking statement or question or like, this sort of thing.
- [58:11]
Connor
So a little bit. A little bit, like, higher up than, like, the specific. Here's the exact verbiage I use. It's more like category. Like, there could be five hooks that use different verbiage that all are in the, like, whatever. Scare tactic.
- [58:22]
Reza
Exactly, exactly. So then you can analyze just slightly higher, because then you could say, like, oh, we have 20 hooks, but they're all scare tactics.
- [58:30]
Cody
Right?
- [58:30]
Reza
You know, it's like, okay, let's try a different dimension. And so I think, you know, part of it's interesting, like, meta will change their algorithm all the time, and, like, it'll kind of send us racing it to think about what to do. But I think there's still something that needs to be grounded in words that a team can articulate that makes sense to them. Right. So just scrambling to say, like, oh, meta said like diversity. So it's just like, go ham and just start. Do so many different things. Doesn't make sense. But a team can. Why we're hoping, like, the AI tagging categories could be helpful is that then you look at the ads and you're. Then you can see actually that you've skewed in one direction versus another. And then when the team is thinking about creative diversity, they might be like, okay, intended audience. It seems like we're really focused on the same audience. Like, all of our ads seem to be targeted at the same audience. Like, do we think we can try different things with just this one category? And so, like, how Wildly different could we be. And like that needs to match up with products that you have to sell and like offers and messaging yields that might resonate to those people. But we found that especially since people are ideating with AI, what we wanted to do is introduce this. We hope this becomes like the industry standard nomenclature for categorizing like creative elements. We're planning to release an MCP around this. So if anybody wants to like ideate in Claude or ChatGPT or something like, they can have that same nomenclature that is like tied to performance as well. And so it's like our vision for the taxonomy is that as we enter to the AI realm, the humans and the machines need to talk the same language. And introducing a paid media taxonomy that is rooted in creative testing, I think will be super helpful. So to all the listeners, it's starting to roll out this week if you're a motion customer, and if you're a new Motion customer, it's rolling out on every, every new account as well. So excited to everyone we've showed it to has like looked at the tags and they're like, okay, these are actually really, really good. We, we built a pretty comprehensive system around it.
- [60:28]
Cody
I love it. Do you guys see? I mean, I, I, it's just rolling out now, so maybe there are not too many examples, but where brands are most commonly under indexing in terms of.
- [60:38]
Reza
Diversity, often it's messaging angle. Because I, I've noticed that what people tend to do is they're like, they have a messaging angle that works and then now they're browsing the ad library for their competitors and other things and they're just trying to get inspo on visual formats, right? And so they'll try different visual formats. I think like the visual format actually people do a lot of iteration around those. Like that seems to be the, the most common one, right? Because like, oh, I saw somebody use this like whiteboard explainer ad. Let me use that format and but there's like plugging in the same messaging angle that has worked for them in the past. And I think probably like messaging angle is the one that's not getting as much love from a, from a differentiation standpoint, which is a shame because like, that one has like really high impact. Like if you start going into different directions, tell a messaging angle, like you can unlock like really large pockets of audiences. But I think the trap that most people fall into is like, there's a few things that work and they're just rotating out the visual format, which is honestly, there's Nothing wrong with that. Because, like, if you have a story that works and you're just finding different ways to express that story, like, that's fine, but that's when you start to get into, like, plateaus where, Right. It's like, okay, we actually do need to think about the way that we're telling this story. And like, what is it? What messaging are we saying that could resonate? I think people tend to have a hard time unlocking skills with those, and they just kind of stick to what they know and try new visual formats. And I think they get stuck in a bit of a trap there.
- [62:11]
Cody
100%. Connor, do you guys have, like, go to do. I'm curious if anything resident just described sticks out to you as to how you guys approach it and then specifically if you have an answer, if you guys have messaging angles, like two or three primary ones that you're like, consistently speaking to in different funnels.
- [62:27]
Connor
Yeah, I mean, the. The one that we. You see all over our account is the hybrid story. Like, that is always like the. Where the. You know, the durability of stainless, the. The. Or the searing power stainless, the durability of cast iron, the ease of non stick. Like, that is a very key part of our. Of our just like, overall, like what we call like our hybrid messaging arc. But we're starting to like, we. As we dig into like, different Personas and different creators, like, we'll basically re spin that. Right. So, like, we did this. We did an ad with this woman named Marcella. She's an old. An old influencer of ours, but Mar. Rosella I'm gonna butcher. Last name like Vala. Valla Delete or something like that. And she's a mom. And we like, think that our products, like, like the parent angle is like, it can work for us really well. So she led with not the overall, like, not that overall hybrid hook she led with. I'm cooking for my. My family two, three times a day. Like, I need these things to heat up fast, cook fast, and clean fast. So it's like, it's a. It's a very efficient. Like, she led with the efficiency component, which is part of that hybrid story, but it's not like the more general, like, hybrid narrative you hear. So same thing with like, some of the other creators we're working with. It's like she cooked an omelette and like, that's what her audience, like, sees a lot. So she led with non stick and like, wow, look at the. Look how good that omelette looks. And look how easily it slid right off the pan. So we're trying to take that narrative and like personalize it. Depending on what ad we're showing, which creator we're showing the Persona we're going after. Like hex cause of stainless steel pan. So like protein eaters are huge. Like the only diet we see people over index for when we ask them is like, like over indexing on eating a lot of protein. So like we will have very specific carnivore funnels that like just lead with stainless and searing power. And we might not, we might not dig into the non stick piece and the easy cleanup piece as much and we might follow up with that. But like these people want a great crust on their steak and we need to like show that, tell them why that's happening. And then we can send them to like a landing page. That's like five reasons why carnivores love hexclad. So we're getting better. We've gotten a lot better in the last couple years of like getting away from that general hybrid story, which we still lean on a lot in, like just creating more Persona, like positioning our value props to speak to a certain Persona or a certain creator's audience.
- [64:58]
Cody
Yeah, because I feel like almost there is, there's, there's almost like layers within it.
- [65:03]
Connor
Right.
- [65:03]
Cody
There's like value props that can be used to support different messaging angles. Like I need to be cooking all the time for my kids or I need the best cookware because I'm eating a bunch of protein or I just really want to enjoy. Like you say the mission of, of hexclad is to like get everybody to enjoy cooking. And it's like that could be another one. All those are supported by hybrid. Right. And it like can kind of bubble up in different ways. I think that's interesting.
- [65:27]
Connor
Or like sustainability. It's like one angle where we're not hitting on a lot yet, but we think it's going to become a bigger part of our, of our messaging stack is this sustainability angle. And it's kind of like you have to connect the dots a little bit because it's like, well, how could cookware be sustainable? Like you're shipping a 12 piece set with like three boxes. And our angle is if you buy our competitors, a lot of our, not all of them, but some of our competitors, brands that just like, like have a two year shelf life on their cookware, it's like it's, that's not a very sustainable approach because you have to replace that cookware every two years. So we're saying, hey, yes, we're expensive, yes, we're premium, but you buy us once, you're going to have us for over a decade. If you buy our competitors, you're going to probably run through 10x the amount of cookware that you would, if you would have just bought, bought ours. So we're trying to like, there's all sorts of way, like ways you can take it, right? But you're totally right. It all stems from like, okay, well you are sustainable because you're super durable and that durability piece is part of that like single, that single value prop like USP Explainer line.
- [66:28]
Cody
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- [67:44]
Reza
Ever since we started working on the AI tagging feature, every conversation like this that I have, I'm viewing all of these different points through the realm of like, what category is this? Is this about intended audience or messaging angle or value proper? These other things, all of what we discuss here are like context around our strategy, right? The strategy golf like shows itself up in the way that we label and categorize our ads and that whole history of what has happened. What have we tried? It needs to be well documented ultimately so that AI can like Absorb all of this. And one thing that we found is really fascinating is that AI is actually very, very, very good at this because everything that we're talking about here are like words and like categories and clusters of words. The missing piece is like all of these things that we understand about our testing strategy is sitting in like raw data that if you just like copy that and dump it into, into cloud or something like, it can actually pick up quite a bit and do a decent job. But to have everything we've ever done categorized through nomenclature and these like AI tag cards that AI can understand will help AI become like a much better briefing and concepting partner to us because like it understands what these creative tests are. And I think what that really puts on the team is to be intentional about how do we think about all these things so that we can communicate it clearly to ourselves and to our AI friends so that we can kind of build on these. Otherwise, you know, we're just like guessing and riffing. But I believed in early 2021 that naming conventions were like the starting point to creative strategy. And I actually believe like now AI based naming conventions is the beginning to everything. Because you know, we gotta get on the same page with, with the AI systems.
- [69:37]
Cody
Yeah, look, we're big fans of naming conventions on the show. We've said many times it's the heart and soul of every brand. So I'm glad Motion is, is an ally in this, in this message.
- [69:46]
Reza
We are building like a lot of infrastructure to support our AI bets for the next 10 years. And what we arrived at is that like it was so funny as a. Naming conventions, I agree is the heart and soul of it and it must be that naming conventions for AI is at the heart and soul of building the AI system. So we did a lot of infrastructure around that and yeah, excited for everyone to see with this established just how fast everything else moves. Because once the AI understands everything in the lens of naming conventions that we agree with gets pretty, pretty fascinating from there.
- [70:22]
Connor
This, this is where that director of clarity kicks in. I have a, I have a friend, his name's Tom, he's launching, he just launched his brand called Unplugs. It's like a differentiated earplug compared to like Loop or Eargasm, which are two of his big competitors. And he's doing it the right way. Like he, he did a Kickstarter, he, he raised money. He's like very robust launch strategy and launch stack. Have you got Unplugs and you like go to their ad library like they're they're really doing it the right way from the jump. And his big thing was he was asking, he's like, hey, got all this creative and like we're producing a bunch of landing pages. Like I'm kind of thinking I should only launch like some of it at first like in a certain category. I'm like, no, like you should just have like super robust naming conventions that literally addresses every single variable that, that you have in the account. I wouldn't launch all of it, but like you should launch a bunch of it. See what meta serves and like what performs best. And then two months in you're going to have so much data if you have really good naming conventions on like, like the Personas and the asset types and the destinations and that's going to guide the next three, five, six months of, of your, your strategy. So like even for this launch brand, like naming conventions are going to be the backbone of them because they have, you know, they're an earplug brand. Right? So like there's so many different types of ads that could work like targeting like Music festival Go or someone trying to focus or like General Explainer. There's a bunch of different ways to showcase the technology. I'm like, like you don't know what's going to work best. Like you should cast a wide net up front and let your naming conventions like and aggregate that data one month in, two months in and see like you know, wow, the, the music festival Persona has a way, way more scale and way more efficiency than the general ads like you. That is such a huge insight that's going to guide your creative strategy for the next six months. But if you only launched like one thing at a time and you didn't have dialed in naming conventions like you're, it's gonna be really hard to understand that like you're be doing all this manual combing through the ad account. It's going to lead to more confusion than anything. So I think it was just interesting because like we talk about naming conventions being super important for our brands, which are nine figure brands. But you know, Tom is launching this brand from scratch and granted they had a great Kickstarter campaign, I think they hit like 200,000 in, in funding from that. But like it's just as important for his launch brand that as it is for Hex Cloud or Rage or Jones Road Beauty.
- [72:37]
Reza
Totally. And we, we have those brands in mind where sometimes like, you know, the, one of the challenges with naming conventions and I think the reason why people struggle with them is that you can look at an ad and label a million things on it. You know, people are like, okay, well what do I label? Like what are the. And really naming conventions are an exercise in like, which creative elements do we want to test? You know, and like, that's not easy. That doesn't actually, you know, people don't have repetition of being able to do this for a long time. They don't know. They're like, okay, these are these eight categories. Like for you guys, it just kind of comes natural. Like, all right, we're going to try this Persona and this angle in this format and like do a lot of these. But for newer brands who are just trying to understand like how creative strategy works, it's challenging to think about what are the different categories of naming conventions that matter. Because the other thing is like, you know, that's why we went with eight and not like a hundred because the things that matter are actually few. And then there's a lot of different experiments that you could do in messaging angle or intended audience or visual format. But yeah, it's really grounding to help people understand like what, what's the right experiments to try next? And then once you had that going in, then when the data starts to pour in, then you're like, okay, great. Now I know, I know what's working and what's not working. So yeah, it's very, very, very important. And our hope is to eliminate naming conventions for everyone. I think for smaller brands, we're probably most of the way there. For you guys and large brands, we're introducing a more kind of custom tagging functionality where you'll be able to prompt it to a little bit to like describe your own category or values and allow you to kind of steer the AI a little bit with regards to how it edits. But no one should be doing naming conventions the way that we've been doing it for the last five years. That seems, that seems nuts.
- [74:32]
Cody
It's 2025.
- [74:33]
Connor
We've got self driving cars, we got Waymo. Why do we have to type in our own naming conventions?
- [74:38]
Reza
Totally. Yeah.
- [74:40]
Connor
Yeah.
- [74:40]
Cody
That's fantastic. Cool. Yeah. And I just, I think that's again, that's super relevant today. The entire industry is moving in that direction. Andromeda is allowing us to have more creative because it's going to reference more ads when it's matching to any given user. So as we expand that, as we produce more diversity, the way that we kind of name them and analyze the data I think becomes uniquely important. I feel pretty good about that. Anything else you guys want to cover on the Andromeda and or creative diversity front? I feel good about the whole app. I think we got a good balance. We were high altitude and also a little bit, a little bit more low altitude at the end.
- [75:13]
Reza
Try to keep our jobs as, as leaders who can function as ICs.
- [75:18]
Connor
Yeah.
- [75:18]
Cody
100%. 100%. Well, Reza, thanks for coming on.
- [75:21]
Reza
Thank you.
- [75:22]
Cody
All right, that's a wrap on another episode of Marketing Operators. Thank you again for listening. Thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel, Prescient Aftercell and Revo. As always, make sure to like and subscribe. Tweet at us, comment if you've got any questions or ideas for future episodes. We always appreciate it. And we will see you again next week.