Welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. This is the podcast dedicated to rapid growth in online retail. We talk about performance marketing, operating eCommerce businesses, and growth. That is the ethos of this show. The hope is that every episode you read, you develop a hypothesis that you could take into your eCommerce team, your eCommerce business, apply, test, and see what kind of results you get. Every week we try to give you a new test. We cover performance, marketing, psychology, and aspects of operating an eCommerce business. We’re bringing eCommerce operators to give you their experience so you could pick and choose what supplies to your operations and your team and get going.

If you’re into performance marketing, social advertising, and Facebook advertising, you want to serve and read this episode because this chap who I brought in, Reza Khadjavi has been on the podcast in the past. I remember when I was in Klaviyo:BOS we had a quick fifteen-minute chat. He was talking about his app, Shoelace, and what they’re doing. They’re still running that. What they’ve done now is they’ve segued into a workflow platform for performance marketing teams, predominantly running Google Ads and ads that require creatives online.

Rather than using Basecamp, Monday, Trello, Asana, or what have you, this is pretty much built for the eCommerce world, for performance markets and workflow. He talks about roles in performance markets and the role of the creative strategist, media buyers, what a marketing leader should look like in terms of how the marketer is the orchestrator of everything. Also, who curates everything, who controls everything. Also, the role of content creators, and a motion graphic designer who edits all this.

It was an in-depth conversation. If you’re looking to restructure your performance marketing team, you have to read this episode. If you are working on the agency side and you’re still figuring out how to serve customers, what your optimal customer setup should look like, you should read this episode. If you’re trying to structure your agency, you should read this episode because he gives a structure that has been borrowed from traditional markets.

If you look at a traditional marketing campaign, they will always have their content strategist or creative strategist, who’s going to think of the idea, the direction of what a campaign is going to look like. It might be a collection of people, but there’s going to be a creative strategist and that’s going to be different from who’s going to shoot the video or who’s going to edit the video, and the ambition. He talks about the importance of splitting roles, but at the same time aligning to a tool towards your goal. It was an interesting conversation.

We talked a little bit about the impact of iOS, in general, and some of his predictions of Q4 in 2022. It was an all-around good conversation. He’s a clever guy, what can I say? For those of you who haven’t already subscribed to this podcast, subscribe not on the podcast, go to 2xeCommerce.com. You will find where to put your email address and subscribe to our newsletter. We have goodies in stock. We have events, post events beyond this podcast, we’re running webinars and web events. Soon we’ll be running some in-person catch-ups. Subscribe on 2xeCommerce.com. Enjoy this conversation that I had with Reza. He is the CEO of Motion. The name of his platform is Motion App and previous Founder of Shoelace. It’s a brilliant episode that you have to read, so enjoy this one. Cheers.

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Reza, it’s been a while. How’re you doing?

I’m doing well. How are you?

I’m good, thank you. It was back in 2019 when we met face to face back in Klaviyo:BOS.

That was a long time ago when people were still getting together in person.

We’re getting there slowly but surely we will get there. It’s a pleasure having you on the podcast. This is a full one. That time, we spoke for about 15 to 20 minutes. You had a lot to say about creatives at the time and you still do have a lot to say about creatives. What has transpired since 2019 and throughout the pandemic on your side?

In 2021, I’ve been starting to work on a new product called Motion. The way that began is that we’ve been talking about creative and the importance of storytelling in advertising years ago. The last time you and I spoke we were talking about this idea of using advertising as a way to as a storytelling format instead of plastering people with the same ads over and over again. How do we create a narrative? How do we create a story so those experiences are a lot more engaging? The topic of creative has been on my mind when it comes to paid advertising for many years now.

One of the things that we started to realize as creative started to become more and more important. The reasons for that many of your readers will already know. To recap, as the Facebook algorithm got more sophisticated when it comes to targeting as the platform became more and more crowded, and more advertisers were fighting for limited space in the news feeds. The attention of consumers was being fought over. As all of these things started to happen, creative started to bubble up as one of the most important elements in paid advertising that many people know about. The question is, “What do you do about it? What happens now that creative is something critical as part of the performance marketing strategy? What needs to happen? What changes in terms of the workflow?”

We started to talk to dozens of teams to ask them, “What are you doing right now?” “What’s your biggest pain point when it comes to creative?” One of the things we learned pretty quickly was that there were many challenges around creative the teams were having but from pretty much every team that we spoke to creative was a top-three priority. There were a host of challenges that they were having. The most central one was this challenge around, “What is working and why? How do we know what creative is working? How do we know what creative is not working?” There’s so much data to process and reports to create that the teams are having a big challenge around figuring out what’s working.

Also, there were a lot of challenges around taking those learnings, beating them over to the creative team, and having the creative team come up with new concepts that are based on learnings and not based on everyone’s great ideas. How do we create that iterative feedback loop so we learn what’s working on the paid media side and take those learnings and incorporate them into the creative? Those challenges were there.

There were also challenges for a lot of people around, “I don’t have a great creative process yet. I don’t know how to set up a good system to produce creative in the first place. Where do I begin? Am I hiring photographers? Do I need to become a director? Do I work with influencers?” There were a lot of challenges people are having around how to create high-quality performance creative on a budget that works is a big challenge for folks. I’ve been delving into this problem for quite a bit. We built a new product called Motion, which helps teams around this and helps them figure out what’s working. That’s what I’ve been focused on for the last little bit.

Motion sounds interesting. I’ve been on the website and my takeaway from it from a top-level standpoint is more around refining the creative development process. I like a thesis in regards to ensuring that there’s this feedback loop. Speed is important in creative development. My question, throwing this in is, do you not get the data in Facebook Ads Manager? Why the need for a tool, for another stack in your media buying tech stuff? There are so many other tools out there? Why should we use a tool to manage the creative development process?

One of the things from your readers is there might be many who have gone through this process where basically at the beginning of this problem, you’re like, “Creative is important. I need to get my act together. I need to produce more creatives.” You’re figuring out that problem. Once you get that problem solved, you start to scale that process and you have a lot of creative running, you might have an ad account with 100 or 150 pieces of creative running in.

When you get to that level, many people arrive at a point where they’re realizing that they’re when they’re looking at the Facebook Ads Manager platform and trying to figure out, “How do I compare images against videos against carousels?” I might have the same ad that I’ve created but I’m running it into a bunch of different audiences. I have my lookalike audience, my broad audience. You might have the same piece of creative and several different places. You might want to aggregate that to see how it’s doing across the board.

When it starts to become too much data to look at in Facebook, what we observed before we even started building Motion is that a lot of the teams when they got to that point, they were starting to export this data into a spreadsheet to start to make sense of it. They’re creating pivot tables, trying to analyze inside of a spreadsheet, which is a lot more dynamic than doing it inside Ads Manager because you want to group things together and compare them, etc. When it comes to creative spreadsheets are not the most intuitive environment where you want to be analyzing creatives.

Creatives are visual. You want to see them. Even if you do have a good time because you love spreadsheets, and you might love spreadsheets because you’re a performance person. Let’s say on the team, that’s usually the one who’s doing this analysis work, then you need to communicate this information to somebody else. The creative team, the content creator, the owner of the brand, your client, the marketing manager. It’s not a solo game where you go in, learn these insights, and you’re off to the races.

These insights need to be shared with somebody else. It needs to be visual and one of the things you’ll commonly hear about the dynamic between a performance marketing team and the creative team is that the creative team hates spreadsheets. It’s notorious for this. The creative team does not want to look at tables, they don’t want to look at data. They want to look at insights that are a lot more visual and digestible so they can take their takeaways and run with them.

Somewhere along that journey, people will realize that either if the analysis becomes a little bit too complex to do, and they need to go to a spreadsheet or the analysis is not that complex but what they want to do is quickly share these insights with somebody else. She might take a screenshot of your Facebook Ads Manager, and somebody could sit there and look at those numbers. Often, you’ll want to create a slide deck that’s a bit more visual so people find themselves wanting to share basic insights. It’s not groundbreaking insights, but they want to share that with somebody else and it becomes pretty challenging to turn that into a visual way.

Where motion comes in and why our users are enjoying the tool, it makes the analysis process way faster than doing it in a spreadsheet so the media buyers can save a lot of time getting to those insights. Most importantly, when it comes time to share this information with other people, it makes it a lot more visual and digestible so other team members can learn those insights quickly. That’s where it comes in,

I get it. At the core, it’s this workflow management for this specific role, this specific process in media buying that requires team members? This is where my next question segues to. In 2021, what does a team look like? What should a D2C media buying team look like from a best-in-class standpoint? You worked with a ton of brands at Shoelace, same with Motion at the moment. What should we have as a bare minimum? What roles should be there? How do they fit in this workflow of creative development?

We’ve seen a lot of this. I’ve probably spoken to over 250 performance teams asking them this question around, “How do you organize your team? Who’s responsible for what? Who’s doing what?” Lots of teams are different in many different ways in terms of how far along are they? Are they starting out? Are they venture funded? Things can look different from the actual people on the ground but the roles are common. The pattern and theme that I’ve noticed in terms of the roles are pretty common and it might be that there’s a single person who’s doing all four of these roles. It doesn’t necessarily mean that to have a functioning team you need the right 4 or 5 people that I’m going to mention, but these 4 or 5 roles seem to be critical to get the media buying operation working well.

The two main roles that I would think about are the media buyer and one is the creative strategist. There was a time when creative has always been important. You’ve always had teams that have taken it super seriously and have put in the effort but for many years, Facebook advertising was on easy mode, where you can take 3 or 4 pictures and scale them in a way that would make you profitable.

As that arbitrage opportunity went away, the effort that everybody needs to do to participate in this arena is a lot more around, “We’ve got to get serious about creative.” What does that mean? What does that look like? That introduces the role of the creative strategist. Everybody knew the media buyer, the person sitting behind Facebook Ads Manager running tests and the campaign. That role is still there but then there’s this new role that’s forming. When I say new, it’s a lot more common. More people need it. Whereas back in the day, you could get away without it.

That role is the creative strategist role. This is the person who isn’t necessarily a designer and is not necessarily a person who’s shooting content but this is the person who’s thinking about the why behind the creative strategy. What assets are we building? Why are we building those? What kinds of hooks are we going to use in this creative? What’s resonating with our users? How does this fit into our unique selling proposition?

The person who is thinking about building creative in a way that communicates the value propositions of the brand but is also thinking about it in a performance-oriented way. It’s not enough to build a piece of creative that talks about the brand, or the brand story. All of those things need to be included in the creative but it’s also got to be performance-oriented, which means the first three seconds matter. It’s making sure that the right hooks are in the piece of creative matter.

It’s serious work for somebody to be owning this work. I’ve seen a lot of times where you might have a talented media buyer, who’s also doing this. If you have somebody like that on your team, hold on to them forever because they’re valuable. If you have somebody who’s on the media buying side, and also wearing a creative strategist hat, that’s incredible.

It reminds me of a web developer and web designer. It’s a role that you can hardly find.

If somebody’s going to play the creative strategist role, maybe it’s the brand owner, or maybe it’s the media buyer, maybe it’s a freelancer, but someone has got to do it. It could be done by the same person but that’s the first pillar. Someone’s got to do this role. How do the pieces of creative then come to life? You have two different components from there. One is the content creator so you have to shoot the videos, shoot the photos, you need to bring the assets to life.

I’ve seen a lot of times where teams are staying away from expensive high-cost studio production stuff and working with influencers, content creators, stuff that shot on iPhone cameras. That stuff works. It’s okay to start with that but the creative strategist wouldn’t go and tell a bunch of influencers, “Here’s my product. Make me a bunch of ads.” The creative strategist would be scripting those and be deliberate about, “You’re a talented content creator, and I want to work with you on this but here are the things that I need in my ad.” We can talk about how this person figures out what to include.

They work with the content creator, develop a lot of these assets and you’ve got another side of this, which has these assets. Now, you need to turn them ready for ads and create them into different formats, adding some text overlay to them, potentially swapping in different parts of the video, adding product shots, and that sort of thing. For that, you need a motion designer, a graphic designer, somebody who’s not necessarily shooting the assets but editing them behind the computer to make them.

I know exactly what you’ve been through in this process. You talked about the creatives, the media buyer, creative strategist, content creator, and this motion designer, the graphic designer who’s going to stick all the assets together. Is there a number five role in this workflow?

You can think of the person in charge of all of this. That could be the brand owner. It could be the head of marketing there. There usually is somebody who’s not a media buyer, not a content creator, not a creative strategist, not any of these things but they can be the conductor making sure that information is flowing from one team to another and there’s harmony around this operation. It usually does take a person to do that as well. I’ve also seen all of this done in a single person. It’s possible. Even if you’re a single person, compartmentalizing these roles and realizing that these are the various different hats to wear can be effective if you don’t have the budget to hire each of these roles.

It depends on the complexity of operations and how big the org is to determine whether these would be individuals or some of these roles will be consolidated into one. The role that stands out for me is the creative strategist and it circles into a point. I don’t know whether you know David. He’s from Structured Social. He did a presentation in commerce excel. He talked about the fact that rather than asset testing iterations quickly, brands are testing ad angles. They’re not looking at, “Let’s try this ad with a green dress,” and changing all that. They’re looking at, “What is this ad seeing? What’s the message of this ad?” They’re siloing it into landing pages so there’s congruence.

That is also siloed with audience targets that those messages speak to. With all of those moving parts, would you say the creative strategies strategist has to figure out what the landing page should look like along with the forecast and the direction of what the creatives will look like? There’s one step that’s attracting people’s eyeballs and it clicks through to your website. There’s another as to what happens when they get to your website. What would you say to that?

What I’ve seen is whoever is the person that’s doing the edits, the person who might be creating edits to the video or the images to make them ad ready, that person more often than not, is also helping with landing page edits too. To your point, it’s to add that congruence between the content in the actual ads and the landing page.

Usually, it’s the same technical skill more or less so you could have that personal team helping out with landing page work as well or assets that need to go to a landing page. Yes, it’s part of it to make sure that the landing page is being tested as well as the creatives that are being sent. There is a lot of responsibility that falls on the creative strategist but I talked about this role as if it exists on every single team and it doesn’t.

A lot of teams don’t necessarily have an individual person who’s doing this but everyone maybe chips in together to fulfill this role so the designer might pick up some of this work, a media buyer might do that or the head of marketing might do that. As you get big enough, the ideal scenario is you have one dedicated person to do all of this because as we can see, there’s a lot of work to do there. If you don’t have such a person, there’s no big deal but it’s knowing that these are the sorts of things that need to happen.

I liked what you said about the ad angles and thinking about not experimenting with random things like, “I want to make this green. I’m going to try a different color,” and try to dig into the angles and the themes for why they’re testing different ads. Somebody whom I respect, Nick Sharma, said something interesting about this idea around how to come up with hooks or themes that are going to be relevant to your audience. It was a great idea so I’ll share it with your readers.

His idea was instead of brainstorming, and people sitting around in a room and being like, “What should the theme be? What should the angle be?” There’s no reason to guess. You go to your reviews and you see what customers are saying or you go to the past ads that you run in the comments that people may have left on their ads.

People are talking about the things that stand out for them so it might be this particular product, people loved it because it helped them achieve x in their life. Everybody keeps saying that. It’s like, “This is what I loved about this.” You’re like, “There’s a hook brewing here. Maybe we can take this idea that people keep writing about how they loved such and such about our product and turn that into an experiment for a theme that we want to try.” Using those kinds of data points to build these themes was a great idea.

It’s the low-hanging fruit right there. Thank you for that. I also see this content strategist role almost like a head of product because they need in-depth knowledge of why you sell what you sell and understanding of the customer, why customers patronize your brand and they need to create those hooks going back to what you’re saying to appeal to those hooks, to those needs, whys and find further iterations on there. That in-depth knowledge of products would be critical. In Motion, would content strategists have special logins where they see what they see, they have their deliverables or the media buyer have their deliverable? Do you have special logins or separate logins for these five roles that you highlighted?

In Motion, multiple people from the team can have their own login, jump into the app and we do see a bit of a different usage for the different roles. There’s usually one person who’s going in setting up the reports, building out the dashboards, and usually, that person is the media buyer, the one who has the most intimate familiarity with the ad account, knows how the naming conventions are done. That person might go in and create something like 5 to 15 reports to make up the creative performance dashboard. It might be things like the best-performing ads, the best performing video ads, image versus video versus carousel.

The best thumbs up ratios on certain videos or comparing, for example, different angles and themes against each other so we went with something like unboxing versus features focused versus product reviews. A lot of these dashboards will get set up at first so whether it’s the creative strategist who’s logging in on their own to consume this information. More often than not because this team works closely together, they usually have a meeting once a week or twice a week or once every two weeks, where they review these things together. Often, Motion will get pulled up in that meeting and they’ll go through it together to look at the various reports in the dashboard and see how things are doing.

When there are new tests or new hypotheses running, there’ll be a new report created and they’ll go back. There’s this initial process of somebody creating the reports and there’s a process of other people consuming these reports but usually, there’s this teamwork of saying, “What do we do now that we’ve learned this information?”

For example, we’ve learned that the first three seconds of this video have been outperforming every other video, but this other video has the highest conversion rate after they click through. There’s a decision made of, “Let’s take the first three seconds of this video that’s stopping the scroll and getting people to consume. Let’s apply it to the video that we’ve been running that has the highest click-through rate so we can send more people into the funnel of that particular video.”

An action item or set of action items are created as a result of having had that meeting together or that brainstorm and each person goes off and does that. The creative strategist will bring that to life, send it to the media buyer, the media buyer will put it into the campaigns the following week and look at that and be like, “Amazing. The video that was performing the best on the conversion rate has held up. The first three seconds are now as great as we thought so that experiment was a success.” Everybody high fives and onto the next thing because this team does work closely together to come up with these ideas so that’s the thing we’re seeing.

It takes teams to move mountains so anything to consolidate the team is the way things work. I want to get into teams and best practices. You’re privy to some best-in-class D2C brands. What do they do differently from other brands? With this collection, whether they’re individuals or consolidated roles, how do they perform? How do they report data better or read the data better and make better decisions? What sets them apart from the rest? What does the 1% do?

One of the things that I’ve always felt has been a marker for the 1% performance teams who are doing a great job at this is, what are the ad naming conventions look like? When you look inside the ad account, are there clean and structured variables that when you read the ad names do look like there’s real structure here? There’s a discipline when it comes to how we name these things? Does it say, for example, Ad 1, Ad 2, Ad 2 (Copy)? We all have ad accounts that might look like that.

If they’re small, that’s okay. It’s not a huge deal if we’re only running a few variants and you can see everything in one glance, it’s all good. Once you start to get to 50, 60, 100 ads running at that point and beyond, if you hop into the ad account and you don’t see a good naming convention there, you know that is a good place to start to improve because everything stems from there. If you don’t have good naming conventions there, it’s possible that you haven’t landed on a set of hypotheses with your team around what are the different elements that are in this ad that we think are important.

You need to align at first like you’re going to shoot a piece of creative and you say, “What’s unique about this? This might be a fifteen-second video and we’re trying this particular angle on it and we’re showcasing this particular brought product that’s a best seller this month and features so and so influencer in this piece of creative. We think that this is a good idea because of x.” That is established. The naming convention reflects that. Usually, when you have this setup, often then the teams are going and analyzing this data but that’s a good starting point that if you aspire to be the top 1% of teams, having the discipline around clean naming convention is a good switch to start off.

Should read a table of content in a book, essentially, structure?

There should be structure. There’s also one thing I’ll mention in the naming convention. Sometimes because a naming convention is limited, you can’t write long things there. I’ve seen an interesting approach by different teams where they’ll have code names in there. It might be like, “LP 1, LP 2, LP 3.” It says Landing Page 1, 2, and 3 and you have a different glossary or a sheet somewhere that says, “This is how this translates. LP 1 means this. LP 2 means that.” Sometimes you’ll walk into an account, you’ll see the naming conventions, and everything’s a code, but it’s clean. You can’t make sense of any of it upon first glance, but you could tell that there’s a method here happening, and usually, there’s a glossary somewhere else that codes these things.

I’m going to get a bit finicky here and ask you, for an ad set name what are the components? What are the key pieces of information that a media buying team should have in their name so there’s congruence that there’s an understanding? How many are there?

Are you referring to the ad set or on the ad itself?

We’ll start out with the ad set and we’ll move into your ad because you have most of the targeting and in the ad set level. What do you want to amplify in the name of an ad set?

In an ad set usually, people do a decent job with the ad sets, from what I’ve seen, because it’s pretty simple, you reflect some of the choices you’ve made. For example, is there certain geography that we’re targeting? You might put it there. Is it CBO or ABO? You might put that there. Is it a lookalike audience or is this a broad targeting?

You might put targeting, bidding strategy, and geography if that’s there. Usually, those are the sorts of things. It’s anywhere from 2 to 4 or 5 variables within the ad set. Sometimes people are also putting the stage of the funnel. Is it remarketing or prospecting? Typically, I see that at the campaign level where people are putting out there but sometimes it’s at the ad set level too. It’s pretty straightforward. Most people do an 8 out of 10 jobs in naming their ad sets.

What about the ads?

That’s where it gets interesting. The easy first one is the ad format. Is it an image? Is it a video? Is it a carousel? That’s a good one. Another one is, “What’s the theme here? Is this user-generated content, a UGC style video or is it or is it something else?” The angle that we talked about, is something that will go in there, is there a special offer? Is it for example $10 off or free shipping? It’s the offer that might be in there. That can get specific based on what the actual piece of creative is.

Often, they’re like, “Is there a discount offer? Is it image versus video? Is there a particular angle or theme?” Those tend to be the most common but then there are things that are anything beyond those basic ones, the only reason to include them is if you have a hypothesis around it or if you think that there’s an element here. That’s because people can also overwhelm themselves by being, “This has a small shade of green in it”. You can get overwhelmed but if you ask yourself, “Do I believe that this might be one of the main drivers of success within this ad?”

If yes, it deserves to have a spot in the ad name. Usually, that exercise before naming the ad is to look at it and be like, “What are the main elements here that if I had to be a scientist and be like, ‘What are the elements that might move the needle here, what do they might be?’” That can vary quite a bit from ad to ad from company to company based on the hypothesis that they might have but those first 4 or 5 could be pretty common for everyone.

Thanks for shedding more light on that.

I’ll give you an example. You could be a footwear company and some of your assets might be the just product shot, just the shoe. Where some of them, you might have the shoe worn on a foot in the real world. Product shot versus lifestyle is another common one. If you’re a team where you have these different variations, you quickly say, “This is a product shot. This is the one worn on the foot. Let’s separate those to compare the ones worn on the foot versus the ones that are just the product.” That’s a high-level enough thing that you can be pretty certain that you’re not getting too micro with your testing that it’s nice and big as a difference between the different ads.

Are you seeing any dynamic creative testing, whereby you have two different feeds in fashion, that is. One feed is product studio-y forecast, another feed is on the bottom of the funnel, another feed is more lifestyle-y and they’re testing to see what will work side by side? Have you seen anything like that?

In terms of the feed ads, I’ve seen that where people have catalogs where that might be product focus and another catalog that might be lifestyle-focused and they’re testing that. The amount of testing that I see with feed ads tends to be a little bit less. It’s usually the amount of effort it requires to go and update your entire catalog, for example. It might be something that you do every once in a while. Although there are some tools out there that will help them add certain elements to your catalog so if you’re testing that, that might be something to name and compare. Most of the testing that I see happens on the actual piece of video, a video, or an image and they’re duplicating that. They’re testing different audiences and that sort of thing.

That makes sense. We can’t talk about Facebook without talking about iOS 14. You refer to it as turbulence, more or less. Turbulence is a positive term in the sense that we’ll still, hopefully, get to our destination with a bit of a shake and a wiggle. What are your general or 30,000-foot thoughts on what is happening from a data standpoint? There’s a data loss standpoint. What does media buying look like? I don’t even want to talk about my perspective but I’ll throw it to you. What do you think about iOS 14 and data loss?

It’s a critical moment, no doubt. We’re living through an interesting moment in time where a major change is happening. People will look back to this moment and be like, “That’s the time where everything changed when it came to digital advertising.” At a high level, it does feel that important to me. It does feel like we’re probably not going back to the way things work. I don’t know where things will end up but to me, it feels like we’re not going back to that level of the idea of privacy-driven advertising seems to be a trend to expect.

The idea that we’ll sort it out and we’ll go back to the easy days of crazy micro-targeting, I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I don’t know if anybody knows, but it feels to me that the trend would suggest that we’re exploring new territory somewhere that we’ve never been before with regards to how the industry is going to change. It’s hard to know what’s going to happen. From a 30,000-foot standpoint, it feels like we’re innocent bystanders in a war between two titans. This is beef between Apple and Facebook. They’re throwing punches and that’s the goal.

I don’t buy the idea of Apple trying to do this for the sake of privacy and that sort of thing. I don’t buy that one bit. It’s titans at war and for everybody else, the ground is shaking beneath. What’s going to happen when the dust settles? I don’t know. It’s hard to know. One good prudent thing to do would be to not expect things to go back to the way they were.

If you had a certain expectation about how digital marketing has been for the last couple of years, we’re going back there. We’ll see how things shake out but those are the things I’m pretty confident about with regards to specifics. We can talk about what people are doing around the loss of signal and stuff like that but most people are just working through it and trying to figure it out day by day because so much is changing every day.

I could name a podcast episode. Privacy Driven Advertising. That’s a great way to coin what’s happening. My thoughts are not every D2C brand had the boom but the majority had a boom in 2021 in COVID and it was unprecedented. Some quadrupled in GMV, others doubled, others tripled and this happened. It’s almost like you’re stopping and you’re not going to have a free lunch. I have seen brands caught through all of this noise because they have always spoken directly to their customers on other channels and used Facebook as a medium to recapture the audience.

They were talking to other platforms, such as YouTube. They’re still making strides. Nothing has changed in some of the brands. I’ve seen some other brands almost fold up as a result of the escalating CPAs and the receiving. From your point of view, can creatives stop this hemorrhage? Do creatives have a role to play in terms of getting more attention and beating the lack of data from Facebook Ads Manager because a lot of us are fighting in the dark?

We’ve heard this a lot where a lot of people are trying to point to what can be done in the aftermath and creative comes up a lot like, “Creative is the answer.” “Invest in creative and that’s going to solve all the problems.” The challenge is it’s deeper than that. Creative is important. The lens with which people might be thinking about this creative would be the new hack. This is how you might hack the algorithm.

The biggest change that’s happening is we need to cool it with the business of hacking the algorithm. That’s the thing that’s changing so it’s more the role that creative play is that it’s similar to being out of shape. If you’re out of shape, and you’re not forced to run necessarily and all of a sudden, you need to run, it’s like, “My lungs. I didn’t know I was this out of shape.” It catches you off guard because you haven’t had something to shake you and force you to run.

When that happens, it’s like, “What’s going to help? Maybe learning how to breathe better.” There are so many things that you then need to do if you’re put into a situation where you were out of shape once and now, you’re forced to improve your endurance and creative as an example of that. Maybe for a while, you were able to get away with great performance without having a great operation or without having a great way to build new creative tests, new creative, and that sort of thing.

To the extent that creative is important, it’s important to build the muscle of creative and be the organization where everybody’s workload went up a lot. We got used to being able to do things and play on easy mode a little bit. It’s funny because before we got into this, we had a year of a crazy boom so Facebook advertising was hard for the last couple of years. All of a sudden, after COVID, it’s this nice freebie boom for everybody. It’s almost like a going-away present. Everybody got one last year of a good time.

To me, the answer is looking at our businesses and being like, “What are the things that we’ve been neglecting and not taking seriously that we now need to?” It’s thinking about how do we build more relationships with our customers? How do we build our own audience? It’s all of the things that you will hear in the list of things that are important to do. All of those things are the right things to do but they’re not overnight things. They’re not things that are going to you solve and go back to the way that things were.

It’s hard for everybody and the only way to survive is to stop neglecting some of the things that we know we’ve been neglecting for the last few years because it’s been easier and there’s no guarantee that that’s going to solve it either. It’s an unfortunate situation but it’s better to acknowledge that quickly and try our best to improve our fundamentals so we can stand a chance but it’s not easy. A lot of small businesses are not going to be equipped to adapt as fast and don’t have the budget to do so. It’s not a good time for a lot of people, for sure.

Working capital and funding companies are having a field day right now. They fund lots of performance marketing campaigns and we also have the issue of shipping. We can go on and on. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, Reza. For people who want to find out more about Motion, it’s MotionApp.com. It’s a workflow platform for performance marketing teams. Where do you hang out most, Reza on social media? How can readers follow your work?

I’m on Twitter. I go through sprints on Twitter. Sometimes I’m more active there. Sometimes I’m less when I’m deep into work but Twitter is usually where I am. You can find me @RezaKhadjavi on Twitter and you can send me an email as well. Reza@MotionApp.com. I’d be happy to connect with anybody interested in these ideas.

Lovely to have you on. Thank you for coming to the 2X eCommerce podcast.

Thanks, Kunle. It was a pleasure.

Cheers.