Motion raises $30 million USD to build the command center for creative strategists

Motion's CEO Reza Khadjavi shares more details about our Series B raise.
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It’s a big day for Motion. 

I’m excited to share that Motion has raised $30 million USD in Series B funding led by Inovia with participation from Threshold Ventures as well as existing investors Headline, Abstract Ventures, and Sugar Capital. This investment brings Motion’s total funding to $42 million USD.

We raised this round to accelerate our product roadmap and to build the command center for creative strategists. Motion’s customers are the best-of-the-best in paid social and the creative strategist is at the core of their workflow. Our goal is to make this role more approachable for everyone by building the tools creative strategists need to ship more winning ads. 

Here's some background on why we decided to raise these funds and what the future looks like for Motion.

The rise of the creative strategist

In recent years, audience targeting on ad platforms has become algorithm-based. As a result, growth leaders shifted their focus towards making better creative. Very quickly, creative became the biggest lever for success in paid social. Terms like “creative is the new targeting” were popularized across the industry and we entered a new era of digital advertising.

In a sense, it’s a pivot back to the old-school advertising principles of the David Ogilvy era. Conducting customer research, storytelling, and craftsmanship are all essential once again. But while the principles are timeless, the digital world is a very different environment.

The creative strategist is the modern-day Ogilvy. They know how to blend art and science to ship winning ads. They are as creative as they are analytical and they bridge the gap between media buyers and creative teams. They live by data but know how to move beyond the numbers and let creativity run.

Motion’s mission is to serve the creative strategist

We believe the creative strategist is the most critical role in performance marketing today and will be even more so in the age of AI. Soon enough, AI will drive the cost of new creative production to near zero. 

Which means that the most valuable question to answer is what to create? We built Motion to help creative strategists answer that question.

I’m so proud of what Motion has achieved in such a short time. 

In the last year, Motion doubled its size from 25 to 50 employees and has grown to over 1,000 customers in the direct-to-consumer and ecommerce industry, as well as the B2B SaaS and consumer app verticals. 

Motion’s customers include some of the most prominent advertisers in paid social. Brands like HexClad, Vuori, True Classic, Jones Road Beauty, and Ridge use Motion to analyze over $6B in media spend every year. 

When we started Motion, the creative strategist was a very uncommon role. Now we are a community of thousands across the world. Our third annual Creative Strategy Summit on September 19th and 20th attracted over 17,500 registrants. But we believe this is just the start.

Until now, Motion has been laser-focused on building the absolute best creative analytics platform out there and we will continue to make a lot more investments here. There is still so much more we can do to help teams understand what’s working in their ad creative and why.

But the creative strategist's job goes far beyond analyzing what worked.

Research is another really big part of the creative strategist's workflow. Ogilvy famously said, “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.” So I’m excited to announce a suite of tools we’ve built to help you here.

Building deeper into the creative strategist's workflow

Today, we are releasing Creative Research, a brand-new product area within Motion that pairs nicely with our Creative Analytics that you know and love. Even better—Creative Research is available to everyone and it’s entirely free to use! ‍

This new product has three main components: Brand Intel, Collections, and Swipe File.

Brand Intel helps you track your competitors and brands you respect to learn from the creative they’re producing.

Collections helps you get inspired by trending ads that are curated by our team at Motion as well as experts in our community.

We know it can take time to build a library of ads you love. So we've made it easier to get started with our pre-built Collections of top ads curated by the Motion team and experts like Savannah Sanchez, Cody Plofker, Nik Sharma, and many more.

And finally, you can build your own Swipe File of creatives you love and easily share them with your team.

It's easy to save ads from the Facebook and TikTok ad libraries, build boards with your team, and get inspired together.

Here's a few samples of Swipe File boards that the Motion team built. You can get started with these, add to them, or build your own.

Boards are useful for briefing creative team members as you can send them examples of specific ads to emulate. Or you can study the patterns in certain DTC ad formats, mastering the nuances of different shots and styles, and then adapting these techniques into your own advertising.

And as I mentioned, Creative Research is completely free. And this is the only start. We've got exciting new updates planned and will continue to build deeply in this area.

Training the next 100,000 creative strategists 

While I’m excited about all the products we are building, we know that the creative strategist is a new role. So there is a lot to learn. It’s why we invest so much in educational content about the role. For example, our newsletter Thumbstop is read by 50,000 advertising professionals every week.

We want Motion to be the best training resource in the world for anyone who wants to master the craft of creative strategy. So to help us push the boundaries of our content and train the next 100,000 creative strategists, I’m thrilled to welcome Motion’s new Chief Evangelist, Dara Denney to the team.

Dara is one of the most trusted voices on creative strategy and has a dedicated following of 75,000 YouTube subscribers, 77,000 TikTok followers, and 32,000 Instagram followers.

Dara is going to help us create some of the best creative strategy training the world has ever seen. And she is also going to be working closely with our product team as we cook up new features. 

If you are as excited about Motion as we are, you should check out our careers page. We will be hiring across the board and would love to hear from you!

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