"The hardest ads to make from a time perspective are probably the first 10. If I need to make five more, it doesn't require 50% more energy."
His core argument for why product portfolio decisions should be filtered through creative production leverage.
"Mine's the the slop one that I think we're maybe too hung up on like, hey, the AI can now produce content. We're getting really excited about that. Probably some point next year it's going to be about, oh, it's actually we got to we got to reel this in a little bit. We need to be applying way more taste and refinement."
MacDonald's 2026 prediction — the industry will have to reel in AI output and apply taste.
"There's like 300 million people in the US. Half of them are men. So we've got another like 140 million wallets to sell, something like that. We're looking for 100% penetration."
On Ridge's TAM and why he refuses to treat the wallet category as saturated.
"I love copying… but there is a productive way to do it and there's an unproductive way to do it."
On competitive research — pulling from brands that may be acquiring unprofitably is the trap.
"Before you get to like the true creative or content piece of it, we need to nail like what the message is and who it's for."
Order of operations for go-to-market at Ridge — positioning precedes creative strategy.
"We went through a period of time where we got too hung up on number of deliverables and the ultimate goal of the business is to to produce results."
A mistake he's made himself and warns creative teams against.
"More people search for Ridge wallet every month than men's wallet."
A stat he uses to frame Ridge's category dominance and the opportunity to expand silhouettes.
"The best strategy today is like not all that different than the best strategy six years ago."
Contrarian take for 2025 — the fundamentals (launch more products, expand channels) haven't changed; what changes is how efficiently you run the business.
"We actually like front-load all of our creator spend early in the period."
On BFCM influencer timing — ~90% of Ridge's creator content goes live in November, almost nothing in December.
"How do we ever operate without just this like, at a moment's notice being able to visualize this data?"
On how comparative analytics has reshaped creative decision-making versus the old world of pivot tables.
"We've seen videos provide a higher incremental lift versus images and therefore we plan our budgets to some degree that way. We don't just show up week of and spend 90% of our budget on images."
Pushes back against the prevailing "statics beat video" narrative using Ridge's own lift studies.
"That is the most valuable information we get to feedback and help inform our merchandise calendar for, you know, later next year or something like that."
On using paid-creative performance as an upstream input into product roadmap.
