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- [00:00]
Ralph Burns
Hey, real quick, before we dive in, if you've got a brand or marketing tool that marketers need to know about, sponsor the show here at Perpetual Traffic. Perpetual Traffic puts you in front of thousands of seasoned marketers, CMOs and agency owners. So head on over to perpetualtraffic.com to apply to be a sponsor of this show.
- [00:19]
Reza Kajabi
A great book is a psychological kill shot.
- [00:22]
Ralph Burns
You guys got 25,000 registrations for an online training on creative trends in 2026.
- [00:30]
Reza Kajabi
For most advertisers, when something's working like their accounts just not taking off, it's usually because you're listening to Perpetual Traffic.
- [00:41]
Ralph Burns
Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11, alongside my globe trotting non virtual background in the hills of Medellin, I believe co host.
- [00:58]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Lauren E. Petrulo, the founder of Mongoose Media.
- [01:01]
Ralph Burns
So glad you joined us here today. If you're not watching this, you get. You definitely got to check out Lauren's non virtual backgrounds. One of the best backgrounds I've seen since we've done this show. 750 episodes. And you are in Medellin, right?
- [01:16]
Lauren E. Petrulo
I am, I am. Si, si, senor.
- [01:20]
Ralph Burns
Si, senor, of course. Well, today we are very excited and I believe he's calling in from an area that's maybe a little bit colder than we didn't even ask him. Actually, he's sitting in the virtual green room right now. We've got the CEO and founder of Motion, not the Motion app. The app that we use at tier 11 to guide all of our creative decisions, which is just sort of fortuitous that he's here on the show today, but Lauren doesn't use it. So today is going to be. It's going to be a tough one for our guest because it's going to have to convince you that what they have is something that you should be using because we're already using it. I'm already convinced here.
- [02:01]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So you're convinced I'm using a different tool. I know. So you know you're testing my loyalties here.
- [02:07]
Ralph Burns
Well, they're a proxy for the Perpetual Traffic audience at large, but we're not even going to talk about all that today. Obviously. Reza Kajabi is the CEO and co founder of Motion, here to talk, not just to pitch Motion, of course, but to talk about creative trends in 2026. So welcome to Perpetual Traffic.
- [02:31]
Reza Kajabi
Rezo. Thanks so much. Great to be here.
- [02:34]
Ralph Burns
Let's talk about these creative trends like you guys put on. I think you had to notify what the Guinness Book of World Records at the end of December. It was like, December 18th, the time that you would always think, like, no one's ever going to show up for an online webinar.
- [02:50]
Lauren E. Petrulo
They're new.
- [02:51]
Ralph Burns
Checked out, like, December 18th. I think I was already on vacation.
- [02:55]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, that was. No one was paying attention.
- [02:58]
Ralph Burns
Christmas.
- [02:59]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Senioritis. Christmas Itis.
- [03:01]
Ralph Burns
Absolutely. But you guys got, like, 24, 25,000 registrations for an online training on creative trends in 2026. So that is outstanding. First off, congratulations.
- [03:15]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yes.
- [03:16]
Ralph Burns
But secondly, like, we want to know, like, what you guys are talking about, so drop the goods here for the perpetual traffic, folks.
- [03:24]
Reza Kajabi
We were blown away by it, too. Motion's virtual events have been growing in. In popularity over the years. Like, we. It's been something we've taken really seriously. And every time we have this, like, one event that really blows it out of the park. We had. We had an event earlier in the year called the Creative Strategy Summit, and that one had 18,000 registrants. And we're like, oh, my God, this is crazy. And then the Creative Strategy Summit, we prepped for so much, and it was like, that was like our big kind of virtual conference of the year. And so we're like, okay, it made sense of that one really went crazy. The Creative Trends one was kind of like, okay, well, we'll do one to round out the year. And, like, we had some really amazing speakers, but, like, there wasn't as much prep or anything as much as the kind of online conference that we have. So, like, we really got blown away by that one. And. And I think it just kind of shows there's just a lot of change happening right now in Creative that I think people understand across, like, AI. Across, like, the dimensions of what's going on in organic. And so, like, there's just. There's just a lot of change right now that I think that people are interested in learning about how the best in the world are kind of navigating the change. So, yeah, 26,000 registrants. We had a really great lineup. Speakers with Orin John there, who's great, with Jack Appleby, Dara Denny, and a couple other really, really amazing speakers. Probably the number one trend, and it was like, reflected in the. In the speaker lineup that we brought on, too, is that these speakers were not all just kind of paid social types, right? Like Orin and Jack and even Alfred. They're all very heavy on the organic side. And probably the number one trend unanimous across all the speakers. The. That was the Idea that the world of organic and paid are collapsing. And like, those are, those are effectively the same thing. That was probably like trend number one. And so maybe we can talk about that one a little bit. The other one was about hooks. We talked a lot about hooks. And so hooks is this really interesting idea both for organic creators, but also, also paid. Everybody intuitively understands, right, that like, as people are scrolling past the content, you've got like just a couple of seconds to get their attention before they move on. And so, like, what goes on in those first few seconds are really, really important. And so the speakers talked a lot about, like, what goes into an incredible hook and how to think about it. Another piece that was really interesting, and this one was from, from Ashley Rudstein, who talked about the idea of. She had a really cool term for it. She called it the effort signal. So the idea was that, like, in the era of AI, where it's so easy to produce content, it's almost like signaling the fact that, like, no real human effort went into this kind of like, you guys know when, like the.
- [06:15]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Moat, like create the moat around your content, but the effort signal of, oh, you just took the first prompt solution that AI gave you. This is so replicable. Replicable, Replicatable, duplicatable. There was no effort. So minimal.
- [06:31]
Reza Kajabi
Exactly. So like, you know when someone like, in the movies would get kidnapped and then they would have them like, hold a photo of a newspaper to like, prove that they're alive or whatever. So some, something to say that, like, how can you prove to the viewer of your content that this was not like, AI slop that like, no, this, like, you know, filming stuff that happened in the real world with like, real world footage and so on that like, really signals that effort was put into the content here as a way of building trust.
- [06:59]
Lauren E. Petrulo
With Kate Ashley, founder at Stuff About Advertising. I'm here for this. I, if she came up with this amazing if no way. She, I mean, I love that that's such a piece that, like, in the world of AI, slot for creative, like, agnostic of where the creative is being put. I mean, garbage in gets garbage out. And the effort signal. Oh my gosh. Okay, this is, I'm done. I, I, I'm, I'm great.
- [07:27]
Ralph Burns
You've gotten your one tip away. You're leaving now.
- [07:30]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Is that, and it's not even Reza's. Right. It came from Ashley. So thank you for bringing this into my ecosystem.
- [07:37]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah, that was, that was really good. And then, and then the, the, the, the first one around organic and Paid colliding I thought was really interesting. One of the things that's really interesting about in, in the world of paid, everyone was talking about like Andromeda and Gem and all these like crazy updates and people.
- [07:51]
Lauren E. Petrulo
What are those things, Ralph? Have you ever heard of those two things?
- [07:53]
Reza Kajabi
I haven't heard of them. Don't know what you're talking about. And you know, the, the, the, the knee jerk reaction is like, how do we game the system right? Like you know, media buyers and like growth marketers, we're like hackers and just.
- [08:03]
Ralph Burns
Very state what thinks of course.
- [08:06]
Reza Kajabi
And like it turns out the answer is it'll like just make phenomenal content as like a starting point and you'll land roughly in a good spot. Because if you're constantly producing good, high quality content for your audience, like you are going to break out of the kind of Andromeda trap of similar content. Obviously like just creating new novel content is not enough, but like that's kind of like the point of Andromeda. It's kind of trying to push people towards the idea of even paid folks need to participate in this like content feed as content creators. Yeah. So that's a really big takeaway for paid folks. And you know when you talk to some of the best creative strategists on paid and you ask them like, how do you come up with really phenomenal content these days? The answer that I hear that was reflected in this, in this event is like, okay, well first we'll try to find out who our audience is. Then we'll try to find out like who are the creators that our audience trust and listen to. Then we'll go and try to see like what kind of content this creator is putting out that is doing well and working and landing with this audience. And then I'll take a lot of inspiration from that and try to use that to kind of create my own ad to speak to this audience. And so like the idea of learning about what is going on in the organic feed and specifically what is going on with the creators that your audience already consumes content from and trusts gives you a lot of really good signal into like how you can create content for them that would almost like blend into their feed. So it's like you kind of, I'm like earn a place in their feed to feel like, kind of like sneak in there a little bit to be like, I'm, I'm one of the other posts, you know, like I, I've had.
- [09:51]
Lauren E. Petrulo
A long, in order to stand out, you have to fit in, blend in, right? Because otherwise, if you stand out as, like, an ad, when you're obviously an ad, you're obviously being skipped. So, like you had said earlier, too, like, the goal of so much paid creative is to give the illusion that it's organic so it doesn't look like an ad. And someone's like, oh, my God, ew, I don't want to watch an ad. Which is like, when you think of, like, the Kardashian era and like the celebrity era, when they were telling stuff and you thought it was authentically their recommendation and then how that pivoted and then you had the creator economy and doing all this influencer stuff, where I'm saying, hey, this is what I. I recommend. Like Gen Alpha, they grew up knowing that anything that they see from a creator is an ad. It's all like, integrated advertising, everything.
- [10:36]
Ralph Burns
Or compensated.
- [10:38]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Or compensated. Yeah, there's some. It's transactional. It's very rare that you see something that feels authentic. So what you're saying is that these creators were seeking a lot of inspiration by researching and doing discovery, which is, who is the audience, you said, who are the people that your avatar, your ICP trusts? And then leveraging inspiration from what content that they're already producing that's working, creating and embedding it into your paid or organic advertising strategies in order to stand out by fitting in totally.
- [11:10]
Reza Kajabi
And like, you know, people have been saying for years that creative is the new targeting, right? And then the question is like, okay, well, how do you do that? And this approach, one of the other benefits of it is that it ends up like putting you in the feeds that you want to be put into, right? And like, you, you. It is like a vehicle for giving meta and the platforms the information that they need to place you correctly in the feeds that you want to show up in. Right? So it has, like, a really interesting distribution benefit, like, targeted distribution benefit, if you are very thoughtful about, okay, here are the. Here are the people that I want to go after. Here's what their feeds probably look like, and how do I create content that matches that feed so that I can. So that I can earn my place there? And then the next one was like, okay, you're doing this. But people are still just getting bombarded with content, obviously, and you only have a couple of seconds, like, the idea of the hook being such an important part of the ad creative. And so our team also has been very fascinated with the idea of what a hook is and what is a great hook. Because on the one Hand. You could say anything to do to pattern interrupt and get someone to stop the scroll is a hook, right? In some sense that's true, because you got them to stop a visual look. Yeah, but then it's like, yes, exactly. And it's like, but then what? Like, if. If. If the rest of the content is completely irrelevant to that, like, pattern interrupt mechanism, then, like, yeah, what's the point? They're just gonna scroll past you right on second four instead of second zero.
- [12:46]
Lauren E. Petrulo
It's like a bait and switch kind of situation. You're like, this was interesting. Oh, ew.
- [12:50]
Reza Kajabi
Exactly. Yeah.
- [12:51]
Ralph Burns
They hooked me in and now I feel dirty.
- [12:53]
Reza Kajabi
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The. The. The team at Ridge, who obviously make phenomenal ads, they have a term for this called the hook ramp. Right? So they're like, okay, there's the hook and then there's a hook ramp. Like, how do you ramp from the hook to the body of the. Of the content and the. Very thoughtful about it. Right, exactly. It's like, Lauren, before we started recording, you gave this two really good examples of hooks. Maybe you can share them again. But it's like hooks that basically have, like, the DNA of your entire ads concept wrapped into it. What. What were they? The.
- [13:23]
Lauren E. Petrulo
The 2A. When you get out of bed, you sound like a dying whale. Like, the concept of, like, every time you get out of bed, you sound like a dying whale, and it's embarrassing. And then we had said the visual hook of, like, two aliens on a podcast talking to each other being like, these Neanderthal humans. I don't understand. We solved this, like, pain relief without surgery 2000 years ago. Why are humans still accepting it? Like, that's just what Neanderthals like, that kind of thing. It sounded more fun in the pre recording. I'll say that list.
- [13:55]
Ralph Burns
It's never as good. The second time I was like, is she gonna nail this one? I don't know. We'll think of another one. That's okay.
- [14:02]
Reza Kajabi
Our. Our team, you know, the. The. The thing that's really interesting about those two examples, we. Our team was we spent like, a couple of weeks trying to articulate, like, what is a really great hook. And Alicia from our team, who's one of the best creative strategists I've met, came up with the term. It was like, I got it. I think I know how to describe a really great hook. And we're like, okay, what is it? She's like, a great hook is a psychological kill shot. And like, okay, that's very good. Like, it's gotta strike a nerve so deep that like, yes, it gets you to Scott the scroll, but it's like you feel gripped by it. Okay, you've said something that resonates really deeply to a problem I have or an aspiration that I have. And so now I'm intrigued about where you want to go next to like, okay, resolve this pain or, or whatever it might be. And so, like, that is the essence of a really great hook delivered in a fashion that is, like, entertaining and like, fits within the feed that. That, that it wants to wind up at. And like, that's not easy to do. Like, those types of, like, psychological kill shots that land and work and are relevant to your product. Like, they really don't grow on trees. Right. And so that's the reason why people find a lot of benefit in spending time iterating on hooks. It's not like, you know, sometimes the, the, the naysayers, I think people who don't understand creative as well, especially in the era of. And drama, that are like, well, don't waste your time iterating on the first three seconds because Andromeda is going to view the ad as the same thing. Like, fair enough. But it's like testing great hooks is something really valuable to do to figure out, like, what are the hooks that. And like the good hooks. You could probably spend millions of dollars against a really great hook. Like, the amount of ad concepts that you can produce against that are a lot. And so I think it's. It's like, it's almost like the foundation. If you find something that works, you can produce hundreds and hundreds of ads against. Against that same theme.
- [16:05]
Lauren E. Petrulo
But you're talking about hooks versus creative concepts. Like, you have the, the three. Like the hook rate, which is a lot of turn. Like, is a. I think meta actually adopted it naturally natively into their system where it's like, what retention do you have for the first three seconds to get people to consume the content? But that's like your visual hook. And then you have the retention for the hook ramp, which means first three.
- [16:23]
Ralph Burns
Seconds divided by impressions.
- [16:25]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Right? Right, Perfect. And then. But like with the hook ramp, it's like retention to. Yeah, I was like. I was like, either way, it's a former.
- [16:32]
Ralph Burns
It's divided by three second views.
- [16:34]
Reza Kajabi
Right.
- [16:35]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Which is only dependent upon videos. Right. So the hook rate is a native. Now native meta performance indicator that you can pull inside of your dashboard before you had to do it as a custom calculation. But then with the hook ramp, you have retention, which a lot of YouTube media buyers and YouTube creators, they know because retention makes so much of a difference of play. But from the paid ad side, if you don't have the hook ramp, if you don't have that retention, you don't get to the call to action, which then what was the point? So like you're saying, I just want to go back to. So the, the hooks that we have, like those psychological kill shots, combines the visual interruptive hook, pad, interrupt, thumb stopping magic with the opportunity to allow consumption in a binging matter where you're like, you freeze everything. Your attention is solely shifting into what is this experience of an ad that leads you to the call to action. But from the iterations you're saying in the past, a lot of media buyers would be like, oh, okay, great, I'm just gonna keep making different visual hooks. I'm gonna, like you said earlier, pop a balloon. I'm gonna look like I'm being pulled by a car. And then you find out that I'm not actually connected to visual hooks. And then the back end of that ad was the same. But what you're saying now differently is you can make, you can make iterations with the hooks. I just. Because, like creative concepts and hooks. Can you go a little bit deeper of like what that means for making hundreds of iterations?
- [17:57]
Reza Kajabi
Well, maybe given.
- [17:58]
Ralph Burns
Maybe give an example to. Because like we have talked about hooks hundreds of times here, like diving deeper into it right now because it is such a leading indicator as to whether or not there's going to be a successful ad. At least it's a leading indicator. It's not necessarily the indicator indicator. However, like, maybe an example would be super helpful here.
- [18:17]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah, so terminology is really interesting because people use different terms for different things. And I don't know if as an industry we'll get to the same exact terminology.
- [18:27]
Lauren E. Petrulo
We're going to define it right now.
- [18:30]
Ralph Burns
Hook, right strap, hook, ramp. Like those are two. Like can you hook them in? Yes. Can you get them to the next step? That's sort of the ramp. So I love those terms right there.
- [18:41]
Reza Kajabi
Anyway, so, so this is the, the, the question about like, what is the thing? What do we call the thing that you can create a hundreds ads from? Right, right. And that thing, like the boring way to call it would be like the messaging angle. Right? You say we have this one messaging angle. We know this resonates, and from this messaging angle we can create hundreds of ad concepts. Okay, fine. That tracks. The problem is if you say messaging angle to someone who doesn't understand, like Direct response principles, they might come up with a messaging angle that's something like durable pads that technically that's a messaging angle, but that's not it. Like, that's not what we're talking about. You're. You need. Your messaging angle's got to be your psychological kill shot. Like, that's the thing.
- [19:26]
Lauren E. Petrulo
That's a, That's a benefit or not. That's not benefit. That's a feature. That's not an angle. That's like what the product is, is a description.
- [19:33]
Ralph Burns
However, if you're rolling around in like, crushed stone all day, you know, as like, some work guy, like, that might be a really good angle.
- [19:40]
Reza Kajabi
But, you know, the best way that I've been thinking about it is like, durable pants. The sentence has got to be. Has got to pass the direct response test.
- [19:51]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, okay.
- [19:52]
Reza Kajabi
You know, like, whatever. Whatever that is has got to be like, this thing can sell. Like that sentence can sell.
- [19:57]
Lauren E. Petrulo
And like a three line for a movie, right? Like, you do whatever that through line is where you explain, hey, this is movie Silence of the Lambs. You thought humans were tasty. Well, so it was Hannibal. Whatever that.
- [20:11]
Reza Kajabi
And so, and so what I've seen on, like a bunch of teams, like create a pipeline and create roadmaps, when they say, okay, These are the 10 concepts that we're going to do. Normally, what I've seen is they have the verbatim hook. So like the line that's going to get spoken plus the visual format. So is this like a podcast ad, a founder ad, and us versus them or before, after whatever else? So the pattern I've seen is like, people are using the verbatim hook as like the messaging angle of the ad concept. So there's something really interchangeable between the idea of a messaging angle and a verbatim hook. But, you know, not to confuse the audience, the. The general idea is that spoken hook can carry a lot of weight because you. It can touch on something really powerful that you can express in many different ways. You wanted some examples, Ralph? Like, there's some. There's one Ridge wallet. If you look at like the verbatim hook, and sometimes it's verbatim hook, sometimes it's written on their. At their, their. Their static ads. The one that does a lot of work for them is your wallet sucks. They do that a lot. And so they'll show like a really beaten up old wallet. That's like, that's, that's one example. There's a AI company called Fixer who do a phenomenal job with their advertising, they have this. They have this one hook around missing family dinner that I thought was really fascinating. So the ad will have someone. And what do they sell? Oh, yeah, yeah, Email.
- [21:52]
Ralph Burns
Okay.
- [21:53]
Lauren E. Petrulo
AI will but like your personal emails, like it reads your calendar emails. It's like your executive assistant with AI.
- [22:01]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah, basically. Yeah. And so like, and so the ad will say something like, I stopped missing family dinner or something like that. And the idea that I found really fascinating there is like, you know, you can sell the features and benefits of this. AI will write your emails for you and say, okay, great. But like something really gripping about the idea of missing family dinner. That's a lot deeper than just like the features and benefits of that product. And there's a lot that they can do with that type of concept. So those are the types of things that I think carry a lot of load. And the brainstorming exercise for teams to find their hooks, or let's just call them psychological kill shots, because it's like, different and you unique. That is like, you know, for most advertisers, when. When they're like, something's not working, like your account is just not taking off, it's usually because of a lack of enough psychological kill shots or because they've exploited one and have not found their next one. Right. So to me, the formula is find your psychological kill shots, then go as visually diverse as possible.
- [23:10]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yes.
- [23:10]
Reza Kajabi
Like motions AI tagging system, which we can talk about, has tagged all the possible visual formats that exist right now. And every time there's a new one, we tag it. And so you want to look for any individual kill shot. What are the dozens of different visual formats that I could run this with? And then within the visual formats, you probably could do iterations. I actually think there's nothing wrong with iterations as long as they are visually distinct.
- [23:39]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So 25% differences, Meta's demand. If they are not 25% different, you have visual blindness and they're counted as one and the same.
- [23:48]
Reza Kajabi
Totally. So, like, here's an example. Imagine we have missing family dinner as like our messaging angle. And then we have founder ad. It's the founder of Fixer talking about the problem. We can iterate on that quite a bit. Like in one scene, like in one ad, he could be in his car. Another ad, he could be in a boardroom. Another ad, it could be just like.
- [24:08]
Lauren E. Petrulo
You know, he'd be outside the restaurant looking at his family, paying the bill, finished with dessert, and you're like, shoot, I'm really hungry. Or like, it's him on a podcast being like, yeah, this, this is the hardest thing. This is what, Like I'm on a divorced founder's podcast and it's like, yeah, I've missed every meal or so that like you have the verbatim hook of like, stop missing family dinners. And then you have the visual format of Us vs. Them founder story. Maybe it's like a cute little AI duck being like, aw, what the duck?
- [24:37]
Ralph Burns
Or it's the founder telling his own story about, like he had this problem and he kept missing like his kids bedtime family dinners and he realized he was spending all this time on email. And so like reversing it that way, like that would then supplant or like buttress like the original sort of messaging. A key is. Is you're talking about like a message behind the message, like the benefit behind the benefit. It's like, you know, in their case, it is, you know, write faster emails. Second benefit, save more time. Third benefit really sort of benefit behind that benefit is the fact that you can now spend more time with your family. You're not going to miss family dinners. So it's that sort of cataclysm. But that's like all in a. Like a conceptual. And then you have all your other creatives that sort of reinforce that concept in a conceptual manner.
- [25:23]
Reza Kajabi
Mm, yep, yep. So, you know, those are all really interesting, like direct response principles. And the thing that is fascinating about this work is that like, then you have to park these and then go and actually like consume content and understand like what really good content looks like. And like put yourself in the mind of your consumer. Like a bunch of people. Barry Hot is probably the first person who said this to me, but I've seen many people other do it as well, where they'll try to create like a dedicated Instagram feed.
- [25:55]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Michael, I'm lonely. This. Yeah, we do YouTube channels where it's like we followed all we like, you make your avatar and then you had to build a YouTube channel as if you were that avatar. And then you start to see the thumbnails. And so he. He was behind. He was a paid media director of Alex Rosi. He was behind Jimmy's or Mr. Beast nonprofit stuff like that was. He said, make your own channels and consume as if you were the consumer.
- [26:20]
Reza Kajabi
Totally. Yeah. And like you do that and then, you know, stay true to the direct response principles that we've been talking about. And like, that formula should work. You know, I think that the only missing piece other than those two is like, is the Product that you're selling, does it have product market fit? How big is the tam? Like, and you know, one of the things that I'd be very bullish about is that for creative strategists to do their job sometimes, especially at this point, a lot of it is going to be around like managing up to the leadership and be like, okay, what are we actually selling? How big is the market for this thing? Is it realistic for us to go and spend, you know, many hundreds of thousands of dollars against this thing? Because is the market even big enough? And like, it is important, I think for creatives and this is why the job is getting very hard, is that you have to triangulate like really good organic consumption, really good direct response principles and then like also good like business acumen to think about things like market size because. And does this product actually have like real product market fit with this audience that you want to sell to? And if not, like, everything else is just going to be so hard. Like if there isn't actually real large tam for the product that you're selling, it's going to put a really big strain on everything else. And it's valuable to identify where the problem exists. But you know, you have a company like Groons, for example. One of the reasons, obviously they do a terrific job with their creative and they're, and they're paid, but like, can you imagine the market size for what they're selling? Right? Like just a massive, massive market.
- [27:48]
Lauren E. Petrulo
I don't know what Groons is.
- [27:50]
Reza Kajabi
No, no. Oh, okay, let me show you. Groons is like a supplement brand.
- [27:55]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, Gummies, that kind of thing.
- [27:58]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah, exactly. It's like a daily nutrition brand that packs like on their product packaging it says Superfoods green gummies. Right. So like the idea of get your vitamins through this, like delicious gummy, right? What's the market size for them? It's like Massey, right?
- [28:17]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Every inner child that has a full time job. Yeah, I'm like an inner child that has a full time job. Yeah.
- [28:24]
Reza Kajabi
I actually think that stuff is not talked about enough when people go study like ad library of Groons and then like, how do I do this? For me, it's, it's a useful exercise. But the question is like, are you also selling into a market that big or is your market size different? And if it, if it is smaller, like, you have to be a bit more realistic with how much spend you can deploy. But I think that is a really important job of a creative strategist who is tasked with like, hey, I Just need you to scale this budget at the and keep these performance targets. Okay. That's the job. Right. And part of that is building really good creative, but another part is having, like a market analysis hat on and being like, how is this product doing in the market that we are advertising to? And I actually think, like, my take for The Creative Trends 2026 is like, from the role of the creative. Also, before we recorded Lauren, we were talking about the. How the creative is getting automated with AI and so on. Like, how can creative people level up and add more value? I think one of them is this, like, feeding back insights that they're learning through advertising back to, like, help guide business strategy and say, like, here's what we're learning from the market. Here's what that actually means for the decisions that we might want to make on the business side. Because the feedback loop between what we're learning in the market and what we do on the business side, I think needs to get really rapid. And there's something really pure about the signal that you get from advertising that you actually don't get anywhere else else. We were talking with a brand. I won't name them because there's obviously internal politics around this stuff. But, like, you have the brand team, right? And then the direct response.
- [30:08]
Lauren E. Petrulo
The D2C.
- [30:09]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah, the D2C team. And oftentimes the brand team is very out of touch with like, the customer and what the customer wants and why the customer even buys from this brand. So they'll come up with these, like, vague, fluffy terms around brand identity brands.
- [30:25]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Give yourself the time where it's like all three clothing brands. Chanel is like one of the most famous cases where, like, their brand has been out of touch with what the end consumer wants. And then in the last five years, brand got a rehaul with their direct consumer. And now you have the highest resale value from any luxury brand. I know that's probably what Ralph knows the most about. He looks like an avid Chanel purse collector.
- [30:49]
Reza Kajabi
I am.
- [30:49]
Ralph Burns
I have multiple ones in the other room, but, you know, who's counting? I can't even keep track of them all.
- [30:54]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah. So, like, you know, to me, it's like the team that I was talking about, like, they've crafted some of the most phenomenal hooks in the market. But those hooks are not in the conversation when it comes to, like, what is our brand and how do we talk to our customers, like, really at the largest scale. Whereas I actually think the right way is if you take the most powerful hooks, the Ones that are working across the largest audience. Like that should actually be the biggest input into your brand identity and like the signal that you get from, from like what is actually resonating with customers. What are they hearing from us? It's causing them to move. I'm not saying you take like you, you, you sound like a whale and make the brand identity.
- [31:35]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Everyone's dying whale, like that's not it. But if it's like what's being told about and then all of a sudden like there's a, a trending sound that sounds like, oh, okay, nevermind. This is recorded in the video, I'm not going to do that. But if that ends up becoming, it can become a thesis and then like what is the bigger picture that that falls into and having that connection. But you're talking about how like creatives need to know what's working and there's that feedback loop so rarely happens. If anyone's watched Mad Men, you can see like Peggy is just like living on her own space and they're like, I keep coming up with ideas. Is it working? It's working. Pay me more. So it's like people don't want to tell the creators what's working because they don't want the critters charge more. But if the crazies don't know what's working, they're going to make ideas that can flop. Yes, tremendously. And so that information though, that feedback loop I believe is where you're getting into that motion will solve.
- [32:25]
Ralph Burns
So in that vein, I think it's important for us to sort of bring it like land the plane here to a certain degree is like, all right, these are all important. But how do you actually read the tea leaves? How do you really understand all this is great. I mean we could talk for hours on hooks. Like what is a great hook? What is not a great hook? And I've seen plenty of hooks that aren't look like great hooks but then they don't have that ramp and then they don't convert. So how do you read all of that to understand like what's going to be best, what you should iterate on and then that's sort of the next solution. That's what we use motion for. I mean speaking the way that now this has changed somewhat with Andromeda. It used to be more conversion based. Now it's really because that would always say, all right, let's reiterate like three years ago, let's say if we're doing like top of funnel level one ads and then we're doing retargeting ads. Like all the retargeting ads are the ones that getting all the purchases but or the add to cart like abandoned cart ads. We don't necessarily want to redo all that. So the shift has really changed fundamentally from what is converting what's getting that Last click Purchase vs what's Engaging People at top of funnel. And that's I think where motion really comes in. Not to give you guys a pitch here, but that's where we use it. Because what used to be the case and how you would measure a good creative has drastically changed with meta and gem.
- [33:51]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah, yeah. And you know, maybe I can share screen as well and show you a couple things on on Motion. But like when you think about the formula, the formula tends to be find your psychological kill shot, call it whatever you want, messaging angle, hook concept, whatever else. Once you have that messaging angle that's working, then the idea is like how do I test as many different visual formats as possible? I think the trap that people fall into is like they'll find something that that's working and they'll keep doubling down on it. And there's something about that that makes sense that you should be doing that, but not on every dimension. I think people fall into these like small iteration traps. And so I want to show something that I think is a really helpful way to. Really helpful way to think about it. And so motions AI tags which are really, really effective. And we've spent. We were talking about this earlier as well. Like you can build a feature around AI tags in like 30 minutes, but whether they're good or not is a separate question.
- [34:55]
Lauren E. Petrulo
What's the effort signal?
- [34:56]
Reza Kajabi
Right. You know, actually the effort signal is compute. That's actually a good one. We have spent many, many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars on computer and continue to do so to make these AI tags really good. And so actually in AI like tokens consumed and money spent on compute is probably a good effort signal on the quality being really good because we use like the best models and we run them multiple times to make sure that like we catch the duplicates and they were like aligned and we test them against like our, our entire data set to make sure that like the way that we're coming up with these naming conventions become really representative and that you can rely on them so that it's not like one day it's tagged this another day it's tagged that like it manage to have consistent. Yeah, it has to be consistent because otherwise like we're looking at stuff and like we can't actually learn anything if the tagging is not consistent over time.
- [35:55]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah.
- [35:56]
Reza Kajabi
And at the moment that requires like pretty significant spend on compute, which we could do at a large scale and our benefit. And our customers can benefit individually because we don't charge on a usage based for this. Like, we spend all the, like, let's say, like it's interesting because software never used to be this way, but like we're almost spending this like capex that we're spending and then everybody else kind of benefits from. Yeah, for sure.
- [36:19]
Ralph Burns
Well, that's what makes, that's what makes the platform really good. So if you're not watching this, you've just been listening so far, you've been walking the dog, you've been to the gym or whatever it happens to be. We're going to do a screen share here, Inside Motion, just to kind of give you guys an idea of this. Even if it's. This isn't the solution for you, it's. It should be good food for thought for you to how to sort of, you know, laser focus in on the best creatives that should be iterated on. But also there's some traps that go alongside that. So head on over to perpetualtraffic.com YouTube subscribe if you're not already a subscriber on that channel. So take it away.
- [36:57]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah, yeah. So what I want to show you here is you're looking at the card view of a regular motion report and I have three AI tags loaded up here. I'm not going to spend time on the messaging angle one, because I'm just going to say, like, let's say we have a messaging angle. Let's say we know it works and now the work is like, okay, take that. And how do you actually run with it in a way that's Andromeda friendly in a way that doesn't get you into this like small iteration trap. Let's assume that all of these creatives have the same, like roughly speaking, messaging angle. And like these ones were all about the 2026 Creative Trends event that we did. And these three are very informative. So first one we're looking at here is visual format. So visual format is like how the ad is presented. So stuff like green screen, comment response, expert explainer, us versus them. This is the first line of diversity that you're going to want to see. Because if it's, if all you're doing is green screen, the chances that you're going to fall into like similarity trap. Is high. But you know, if you got green screen on one and you've got listicle on another one and expert explainer on another one, like, you know that you're being like, horizontally broad when it comes to visual testing. Yep. The other one that I really love is intended audience. Something that when we first launched our AI tags, we were like, wait, no, there's a bug here. Because every single motion ad was tagged with the creative strategist as the intended audience. And we're like, this gotta be wrong. Because we're not just talking to creative strategists, we're talking to like marketing professionals and media buyers and so on. But we, we went and re watched the ads and we're like, oh, no, we think we're talking to media buyers, but we're actually talking to creative strategists in every single one of these videos. Interesting. So the. So the AI got it right, even though we would have tagged that as like, okay, this is a creative. Because I want to talk to a media buyer here. But like, the AI does a really good job checking your bias. And once we saw that, we were like, okay, we want to make ads that are diverse on the intended audience side so that we start to see it get picked up as different tags. And then we started to see, okay, this one is creative strategist, but like, this one is performance marketers. And so it's almost like doing your creative testing and then going and seeing like, what the AI picked up. And so that's a very interesting distinction where people are like, oh, AI tags is interesting because it'll automate my naming conventions, but it's actually more than that because I might sit down and have my own human bias when I'm labeling something and I'm in a rush and so on. Like, who's to say that I have the same level of consistency and honesty when I'm tagging something, but if the AI is doing it, then, like, it. It has that kind of honesty and consistency, which I.
- [39:42]
Lauren E. Petrulo
But also, let's talk about teams at scale. Like, there's teams that have more than one creative strategist. There's teams that have multiple media buyers. It's not just about consistency as the individual, it's consistency across the platform. And if that person leaves and all that tribal knowledge of what I identify as a tag is not a tag, I'm like, this is future proofing, future proof. Like, there's a lot of assumptions that like gen zers have no loyalty to their companies and you're lucky to Say have them for more than two years, God forbid, all of a sudden you lose all that tracking or it's misre, misguided for a new hire. It's not sustainable long term.
- [40:15]
Reza Kajabi
Totally. And so like, you know, people are like, how do I know if I have creative diversity? Well, if you open a motion report like this sorted for your last 30 days and then see are you getting the same visual formats and the same intended audiences and the same hook tactics across the board. If so, you're just iterating across these.
- [40:34]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So if you see 50 shades of gray, because for those that can't see it like each different like green screen has a green tag. Performance. Mass performance marketers are yellow marketing professionals. Orange like you, I'm looking at a Crayola box of colors. Like this is quite diverse in terms of visually telling me that there's an abundance of options. And if you're looking at all 50 shades of gray, then yeah.
- [41:00]
Ralph Burns
And also keep in mind that this is either a media buyer or a creative strategist or a creative production member that's looking at this and the time is of the essence and they just want to be able to see at a quick glance like all right, where is that ad resonating? Which ICP is it hinting on what hook is working?
- [41:16]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah, this is fantastic.
- [41:17]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Sharice the Stoner, the one that wants to know like how are our ads doing? Which ads are working, which ads are live? Because they're not going into Meta Ads Manager, they're looking at a dashboard or using something with supermetrics tied into Looker Studio. But that's just showing performance on a performance only side. It's not giving direction of what else do we need to create? Is saying what was done. This is showing ideally options of where you can create iterate more of.
- [41:43]
Reza Kajabi
Well and check this out. So like if you go to the filter and you filter by AI tags and we go by visual format now, it actually shows me this, actually this is a filter but it shows me a lot of really interesting information. So it shows me that in this report I'm very heavily focused on green screen. And when I see these ones are all of the various opportunities that I could be doing here that I'm not right. So for if I'm sorted by a specific messaging angle, I'm like, okay, we're doing a lot of green screen, but let me just scroll through here and be like, this is our roadmap basically right? You like take this messaging angle and like pick from this list and go run with it. And then what you can do inside of motion. Let me just go and share another tab. Is that in our Inspo feed, because the visual tagging is consistent across the board, then you can take the ideas for like, posted or comment response or whatever else that you want to see, and you can like filter for them here. Right. So we could say comment response and then you can just look for inspo on comment response because we've tagged our entire Inspo library with the same taxonomy. And so if you find an opportunity in that list that you want to go and test, then you can go jump over to the Inspo feed and search for only the visual formats of that type. And then you can like, pick a few, send them as an example to your designer, and. And go and execute. So, like, at that level of altitude of like, having a messaging angle that you know that works and testing relatively broadly on the visual format side should put you in a good place from an Andromeda standpoint, because there are so many visual formats that people can and should be testing that they haven't yet. And so having like a rigorous list, usually very quickly, it's like, oh, yeah, actually we could be very diverse. What were we even talking about? Like, we're not even anywhere close to exploiting visually the different ways that we can say this message that we know works.
- [43:41]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, you think that you're diverse, when in fact this will tell you whether or not you are or whether you aren't as well as all the other options that you have there to just continue on that diversification, which is so key.
- [43:55]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, it's allowing someone else to say what a lot of people listening are like, I've been telling my client this for a while now. It's like, well, seeing is believing. And what I take away from that is that trends important being able to see in the discovery of all other options. It's like we use the Facebook ads library a lot and I love it. And you can see in TikTok, you can see with Google, you can see what other people are running ads for and you can see iterations like, I'm gonna use Ryan Dice, one of our, like, good friends. You go into Facebook ads library for Ryan Dice, you can see all the ads that he's actively running and the iterations is insane. Like, he has so many versions of his X tweet, and that's the one that he's just done so many copies of. You know that that one's leading the most responsive, like what I've had my team Whether it's organic or paid, look into, look inside Facebook ads library to understand what are our competitors doing, what are other ads that are out there. But what you're showing is a combination on the creative visual side versus the performance side or just in general inspiration because there's no performance based off of it. That's a tool I can see whether you're on the paid team or organic.
- [45:04]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah. Well, let me show you this too. So like, the, the fact that we have consistent tagging across the visual formats also exists at the individual brand level. So if I go to our inspo and I search for, let's say Huel, I can very quickly see the different visual formats that are testing and then I can click if I want to see. Okay, it seems like they're doing a lot of feature benefit point out. Let me filter for that and just see all of their feature benefit point outs. Or it sounds like they've done a little bit of testimonial. What does that look like? Right? And like, because the language is consistent across your ad account and across the ad library, that hopefully gives the team's shared language when they're doing their creative roadmapping to say, okay, take a messaging angle and then combine it with a visual format. And like, that is basically the language internally around coming up with a new ad concept. Because just that alone, I feel like teams struggle quite a bit. Like, it's fascinating what happens when you have shared language, how fast you can move. But when people are like, okay, let's come up with five ads. How do we describe these ads? And everyone just kind of struggling to.
- [46:10]
Ralph Burns
But no one's using different nomenclature for the same thing or different things.
- [46:14]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah, it's totally. But at least at the visual format, like, we tried to take a crack at a kind of industry standard across like posted ad and comment response. Like we're trying to. We're catching all of the new ones too. So that one, I feel like is the biggest gains that people can get is aligned taxonomy around how we talk about visual format. Because very quickly you'll realize like, wait, there's actually many more of these than I could test right now. And there's no reason for us to be pigeonholed into UGC testimonial product demo.
- [46:49]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Like, those are what people know and they're familiar with. And like, oh, this works. But in the age of Andromeda and the demand of options, what, you know, work testimonial you talked about earlier, like, people get in this trap of iterations and iterations and iterations. So then. But you don't actually test and see can we find a different psychological kill shot that can really expand into new markets. So if we go back to like evaluating the TAM and you're making something and you're only hyper focused on this one demographic or this one option, you could be leaving out the opportunity to penetrate new markets that could have better cost efficiencies.
- [47:21]
Ralph Burns
I mean I quite honestly I was a little bit reluctant to have you guys on here today because I mean this is sort of a cheat code that we've been using for quite so now the world knows about it. It wasn't just the brilliance of our creative strategists, but there is a reason behind it. Because of Universal Taxonomy. It's about all the things that we've talked about here today. If people want to take sort of that next step engaging with you all. I hear you've got another free training that's coming up.
- [47:48]
Reza Kajabi
We do, yeah. We have a very, very exciting boot camp. It's a six or I think eight week live program with some really fascinating instructors. We tried to take people who are like actual practitioners at great companies and try to yank them from their day job a little bit to run full on creative strategy boot camp to teach people how to do really great work. The really cool thing about it is that it's a hundred percent free. One of the cool things about being a software business that something like that's free.
- [48:17]
Lauren E. Petrulo
A six to eight week training with the leaders and doers of not the people that are on stages that are repeating what their teams are doing, but the actual doers. No way. I don't believe you. That it's free.
- [48:27]
Reza Kajabi
You know the, the interesting thing is like the economics of a software business is that we make money off selling our software. Right. So we actually don't have to make money on selling the course. It's a very like simple business model. If we can get like thousands and thousands of people to come through the course, then a bunch of them will obviously end up becoming Motion. That is our book. Crap. Yeah. And like that's kind of been like Motion's go to market strategy since the beginning is like create really great content, talk about creative strategy and then ultimately like Motion as a product becomes an obvious choice.
- [48:59]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Ralph, we're canceling this episode right now. I don't want anyone else to go to this Creative Stratus boot camp. Monkey will be there.
- [49:06]
Ralph Burns
We might just throw this one in the dustbin. Maybe not, I don't know. Just, I don't want to be giving away too much. Where can people sign up for that anyway in case we do air this episode?
- [49:18]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah. So we have the landing page coming up. If it's not ready and it's not in the show notes, keep an eye on Motion's social media page or visit our website. It'll be out any day now, but we're going to do so much advertising for it that you won't miss it. Look out for Motion Boot Camp. Like, it'll start on March 17, so you'll have plenty of time to sign up. But we're starting registrations at the end of January and I think there will be limited spots.
- [49:49]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Don't sign up. You can sign up. We're already signed up.
- [49:51]
Ralph Burns
He's taking, I'm sure head over to it's motionapp.com correct me if I'm wrong. Probably a retargeted is my guess. So you probably see it. But we will leave links in the show notes over@perpetual traffic.com for anyone who just wants to cut the line and sign up with you guys. Any discounts you can offer our listeners here?
- [50:10]
Reza Kajabi
Yes, we do. We have discount code of traffic 10, which will give you 10% off your first three months of motion. So just mention that as you're, as you're signing up. And yeah, our, our team does a lot trying to like onboard people onto Motion because oftentimes we see that when people want to be successful with the product, there's a lot of work that happens outside of the product around. Like how does our team work? What's our weekly process like? So we run a lot of workshops with people who are starting to become Motion customers, evaluating the product. So I highly recommend grabbing time with our team because we've, we've had people like go through motions like sales process and just learn a ton about how good creative strategy works and so highly recommend grabbing some time with our team. Even if Motion's product is not for you, I bet that our sales process will give you a lot of valuable insights around at least the Motion POV and how we do things. And if we're not a good fit for you today, maybe, maybe tomorrow because we're always shipping really exciting new things and we have a lot of really exciting AI things coming out this year as well. So hopefully we can create enough value to earn your business.
- [51:22]
Ralph Burns
All right, well, that's traffic 10. Make sure you do that. We'll leave links in the show notes over@perpetualtraffic.com make sure that you do Watch this as well. So you can actually see us going through the interface inside of the Motion app. And you know, I mean this is. We just redid. I just actually met with our finance department this morning. I'm like, what softwares can we cut out in 2026? And yours made the cut. It did not end up in the cutting room floor. So that's how important the software has been for us. Lauren sounds like maybe she's now going to be a customer as well. But anyway, I'm not pitching anything here. I don't want to care. We've already given away way too much.
- [52:04]
Lauren E. Petrulo
No one should sign up for it. It's not.
- [52:06]
Ralph Burns
No one should sign up for Motion.
- [52:08]
Reza Kajabi
Nobody.
- [52:09]
Ralph Burns
Don't register.
- [52:10]
Lauren E. Petrulo
The only thing I wish, like I would be like, okay, maybe it's in your roadmap or something like that because we do use an alternative tool is that if there was a connection of putting up creatives there for approvals and having that all dialed in as a pre live because it looks like this is showing you inspiration before you build and then information after you've gone live with the launch. So I just like if there ends up being that pace. Reza, we have guaranteed my business.
- [52:36]
Ralph Burns
I can't disagree there because we use another one for that. Just specific, you know, sort of creative and approval process for clients. So yeah, food first thought.
- [52:45]
Lauren E. Petrulo
I want this to be the high level of creative. High level as it is like the sole software for agencies to use for like CRM, esp, billing documents. I want this to be the sole software for creatives.
- [52:58]
Reza Kajabi
So I love it.
- [52:59]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Make that happen and I guarantee you have my business for life.
- [53:02]
Reza Kajabi
I love it. I'll talk to our team.
- [53:04]
Ralph Burns
All right, well, yeah, I'm sure Lauren will be the first one to know about that. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on this week's show. Really, really appreciate it. How can people connect with you personally?
- [53:16]
Reza Kajabi
Yeah, I'm on Twitter or X as they call it, reza Kajabi and LinkedIn as well. But our team and following our blog and signing up to our newsletter, we have a content team of about I think six or seven people now and the amount of stuff that they put out around creative strategy education is just like mind blowing. James, who leads our content team, loves this stuff and we've almost like built a media company within motion to educate this specific problem space out. More interesting than me is following our our content and signing up for all of our events because there's like really, really, really valuable stuff in there. Awesome stuff.
- [53:57]
Ralph Burns
Well, very Very cool. All right, we'll leave all the links in the show notes over@perpetualtraffic.com and of course, wherever you listen to podcasts, wherever that happens to be, please leave us a rating and review, gets us out to a wider audience and teach people how to do this stuff the right way through metrics that matter in growth at scales. Motion being a huge part of that. So thanks for coming on, Reza, thanks for having me on behalf of my amazing Medellin based co host, Lauren E. Petrulo, D Till next show, see you.
- [54:31]
Lauren E. Petrulo
You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.