Emily Hickey's \"Motivator Map\": The Creative Framework Behind $1B in Meta Ad Spend

Emily Hickey: My name is Emily Hickey and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Chief Detective. We are an ad agency and we work across Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Google, like you name it. And, um, as Evan also said, we're very proud, uh, to be one of the top performing agencies on Meta. They have a super hardcore way of measuring that. And so we're always really proud to kind of, you know, hang on to that designation. We're also one of the only agencies in their creative creative innovators group, which is the small group of mostly high-spending operating companies that they monitor to understand where creative is trending on the platform. And so, um, that that's to say we're a full service agency. We manage the media spend and we strategize, concept, write, and execute the creative for most of our clients. So we are like really in this. We're completely knee deep in this at a very tactical level. And, um, we're really proud to have helped build, you know, like some of the coolest brands around. Like we we put a lot of pressure on ourselves, um, to do this. And I always say that our job is to sit in a chair and make money and to go shoulder to shoulder with founders and growth teams to grow the hell out of their company and that's it, right? That's our whole job. And so we're really proud to have played that role with what I think are some of the coolest companies around, including Jenni Kayne, Dôen, goop, Merit, Frank & Eileen, TWP, Ursa Major, Buck Mason, Marine Layer, Rag & Bone, Weight Watchers, Donni, um, Mother Denim. I think even some of our clients are here today, I've heard. But, um, we're really honored, you know, because like these are just some of the coolest brands around that I think make the world a better place and more fun place. And so I think we we get to do the coolest thing, which is to help them grow. I also, just to keep my knives sharp, because you have to remember in when you're in my chair that you're not just running ads, right? You are helping to build a company and you're working within a system of of variables, right? That have to conspire to create greatness. And so I do a lot of advisory work. Um, I'm on the board of Jenni Kayne. I'm I'm an advisor at goop and at Faherty. I do a lot of brand work and at Ursa Major and some other companies. And I also host a podcast at goop called The Pursuit series because I am obsessed with the dual journey of success in business and success in life, right? And the shared humanity of work and the agony of trying to be successful. It's been very hard for me. I've failed a lot. So I try to share, um, the way that I think about this stuff and how I've gotten myself, you know, out of my own way through my Instagram handle, um, and uh, Substack and things like that. I live in Telluride. I'm in New York City today, but I live in Telluride. So living the life out in the mountains.

Emily Hickey: So that's me. Um, and the first thing I want to say guys, you know, I always start with this, right? When I'm talking to people is, um, that it took me way too long to realize this that but without a marketing tool, something simply doesn't exist. And I realized this through failure and through trying to build startups and focusing on product and then having no clue of how to get people to actually use it. And at some point in my career, I walked away from everything that I was doing. I bought like 30 books on copywriting from the old masters from like the 1930s and I built a bunch of arbitrage companies, like drop shipping and media businesses and things like that. And just did the the sort of bare-handed blue collar work of marketing. And I said, I'm going to get good at this. And if I do, I'm going to be a very valuable person because there aren't a lot of people in the world who are good at this. And if you think of the billions of people wandering around the earth, how many of them have the ability to press a button and grow a company? Almost none of them, almost none of them, right? And by the way, anyone who's built a company knows it's almost impossible to hire a CMO who can grow your company. And that means you've got to do it, right? So I'm really want to give a shout out to everybody here because clearly you guys are committing yourselves to getting good at this. And I don't think there's a more valuable thing to be good at. So everyone needs to think, you know, like to to to cultivate that ability and in this humble kind of Luke Skywalker type journey that marketing is because you're always getting better at it and, um, it it it works or it doesn't work and it's it's an exercise in humility and and striving, right? This is an ad that I did two weeks ago for goop. I shoot my own UGC for my clients because I don't think I should run an ad agency that sells UGC unless I myself can do it, right? And that's Jenni Kayne, like we work with these founders. It doesn't matter how successful anybody is. Nobody is too good to market, right? So I'm really psyched to be in this company because clearly you guys all agree with me and that's the first step to marketing success is realizing that it is a trade and it is something to throw 10,000 hours at.

Emily Hickey: Okay. So the way I got good at it guys was I started with like all these drop shipping companies and all that, but I was also doing a lot of consulting. And when you're like a serial consultant going into company after company, you lift up the hood on all these companies and you realize that they're all the same, you know? You look under the hood of a company, it's all the same parts and pieces and the kind of, you know, laws of physics and everything else. It it all is the same across all of these companies. And at some point, I got it through my dumb thick head that like if I just embrace the facts that we don't appreciate enough, they're facts of business, right? If I if I can just embrace the facts and stop overthinking this and just take the same approach and and leverage the the laws of physics that exist on the planet of marketing, I'm actually going to be on like the five yard line and I'm going to be good at this, right? And so over time, I just started to develop my own first principles. I don't know why there isn't an operating manual for building a business because there should be because there are first principles and there are things that if you do them, you are going to build a good business. And so that's what I want to share today is not necessarily like tactics and formats and things like that, but how we root our thinking at Chief Detective that has made us successful with a major knock on wood across so many companies again and again and again. So these are five of them. These aren't all of them, but these are five really, really critical ones. The first one is that any algorithm-based marketing is a creative game, period, right? And you guys clearly all must know that. And the way I think of it is that the algorithm is like the house, right? It's going to take your money either way, but you better get your money back, right? But that's up to you. It's going to take your money either way. And, you know, Meta, for example, publishes the equations that it uses to rank ads, but I don't think enough people embrace the simplicity of these equations. There are two factors. I don't think there's any confusion over who your customer is, right? We hear that a lot from clients. I don't think that's the problem. They know that you're selling a sweater for $300. They know every single person on this platform who's added to cart or bought or whatever. They know who's in market for that product at that price point. But they are going to decide whether you deserve that impression. And that's what the creative game is. You are competing for impressions, you know, quality of impressions, right? And the way that you win that competition is through your creative. Do people hover and engage with it, but way more importantly, purchase rate. Does your ad drive purchases at a higher rate than the ad next to it? If the answer to that is yes, you're going to win the good impression. It's that simple, right? So the obsession level on this game is at the creative level, right? The second principle is that the winners win and they win and they win and they win. And this is what Evan was referencing at the beginning. Strengthen strengths, follow the cash of the business. It took me so long to understand this very simple theorem of business, right? Do what's already working. And so when we are working with clients, we're always trying to find what's the flagship, what are the hero products? It's so much easier to get five times out of those than it is to go find a new one, right? And so we're constantly trying to find the asymmetric of a business. It could be headlines. You guys have seen this, right? It's the same creators work over and over again, the same headlines or angles work over and over again, your top formats, your top products. Results, it's a huge fallacy to think that there's going to be any sort of symmetry at all in business. It will always be asymmetrical. And so if you can train yourself to find the asymmetrical winners, you are you're literally going to be on the five yard line and I'm going to be good at this, right? And that's something we say to clients over and over and over again. We don't need five pictures of everything. We need a ton of creative asset depth in the stuff that's going to drive the demand. We all know that, right? But it's simple, but it it is ignored right and left. So that's the second one. The winners win. The third one is the power of small scale tests. So how do you find a winner, right? So if you if you know that intellectually that the the best products are going to do 60% plus of the revenue, the best headlines will do, I mean, a best headline like glow, for example, on beauty could be an entire business to itself, right? Exfoliation, um, wrinkles, fine lines, travel for apparel. Um, you need to test to find what those winners are, right? You need a methodical, habitual way of existing that it's like a metal detector on a beach that gives you access to those winners so that you've got this huge Easter egg to open up and work with, right? So the power of small scale tests, there's so much money in small scale testing. Spearpoint marketing, I'm going to talk about in a second. And then the last one is that awareness and brand really matter. I'm die hard about building 100-year brands and the importance of brand and awareness. I think it's the biggest, um, ignored factor of building businesses. We're probably not going to have time for that today, but maybe in some other motion summit, we can talk about that.

Emily Hickey: But so to start with, um, I hope you guys don't hear these sirens. I'm sitting in a window in New York. But anyway, okay. So the first concept here is spearpoint marketing and I do want to just dive in on this for two seconds because it's so critically important, right? And it's just an example of a framework that can open up so much money if you start thinking about things this way. It is a model of specificity, right? And my experience says that specific works better in marketing. And so one of the things we often see going into a new account is that they're advertising spring dresses, right? Or they're advertising at the brand level. We all know on this call, advertising at the product level is going to work better, right? So if but we practice, we'll we'll advertise at brand, we'll advertise at product.

Emily Hickey: Now, um, also think about that for value props, right? So if I do an ad that says this is a dress that looks great on everyone, I I will sell none of those ads. I will sell none of those dresses, right? But if I say, um, I'm self-conscious about my arms and I wear this shirt all day long, I'll sell a thousand units. There's there's a huge difference in outcomes when you speak specifically in copywriting, right?

Emily Hickey: Um, it also is true with photography. So when you crop on a detail, that works much better often than full body zoomed out, but you want to test the gamut. So it's just a mental construct for zoom out, zoom in. It's a model of specificity.

Emily Hickey: I had a sound bath guy friend in Telluride, um, who needed help with marketing and he was like, yeah, I keep doing these things at yoga studios and nobody comes. And I was like, well, let's carve out a test road map talking about all of your use cases. And it turned out that when he advertised it as a sound bath for anxiety and depression, that that crushed, right? So again, it's just applying a model of specificity. Where do you put the zoom lens on your marketing? It's very important to explore that as a mental habit.

Emily Hickey: Okay. Um, now, how do you market a product? We do this over and over and over again. This is a core kind of operating sequence that we do at Chief Detective and it is rooted in marketing fundamentals, right? And we call it the hero sequence.

Emily Hickey: Um, it executes in two phases, guys. So the first one is to figure out your playbook. What is the winning formula? And I look a lot at CPG because when you talk about 100-year brands, you look at a brand like Tide detergent. It's been dominant in a very competitive marketplace for decades. But the ads that you see today are the same as you would have seen in 1975, right? What are they doing? What's going on there, right? Well, what's going on there is that, you know, Procter and Gamble has a point of view that in order to build a big 100-year company, you need to constantly win the two moments of truth in marketing, right? And the first moment of truth is in the aisle and the second moment of truth is when they go home and wear it for the first time. So in, you know, so you're thinking about like what are what are the what do you deliver to the consumer in terms of marketing to win in the aisle and then in terms of the product experience to win at home, right? And that you do those two things, you've got you're in business. You've got a good company. Well, what do what do both of those require? It requires understanding consumer needs better than the guy next to you, right? And if you think about a Procter and Gamble or a lot of the old school companies that have been around for 100 years, they have built out massive infrastructures to understand consumer needs. And that is always like they're trying to be distinct and different against a consumer need. And we spend a lot of time and I I really believe as an industry guys that we are guilty of ignoring this as one of the greatest, most important fundamentals of marketing is research, right? And understanding what makes people purchase. If you take the time to understand that better than the person next to you, you will have a better company. It's that simple, right? And the other thing about that is you take the time up front and then you're kind of never have to do it again. I don't know that anybody wakes up to buy detergent today for a different reason than they bought it yesterday or 10 years ago, right? When you get that figured out, it doesn't change. So is it worth the time to figure it out? Yes, because typically you're only doing it once. And that's not just for the consumer needs, right? That's for a lot of other aspects of your advertising. It's like, okay, this is the winning formula. Now we just need to rinse and repeat against this. And there's a central construct in advertising, why buy, why believe. I'm going to come back to that. But the why buy is what's on the left. Build your playbook, right? So that's phase one. When we come into a company, we're trying to figure out, okay, what are the like, let's pick a product and I'll go through this in a second. And then let's figure out how to market that product, right? That's building a playbook, building a product playbook. So that's phase one is finding your winning formula. You do it once, hopefully. And then phase two is you're just executing that all day long. That's like the fun right brain creative work of like, okay, now I've got the scaffolding. I've got this marketing ladder and how I market something. Now I'm just going to be throwing creative concepts at it right and left. And the why it sells, right, is never going to change, but how I sell it is where all my energy is going to go. So we see this as a two-phase kind of process. Figure out how to sell it and then it's just the creative journey from that point forward.

Emily Hickey: So, um, that is the product sequence. So just to go through it again, you pick the product, you do your research, you do your testing, and you put together your motivator map. Now you're moving on to phase two and you're executing creative all day long. Hopefully you never even have to go back to this, right? It's not going to change.

Emily Hickey: So this is where that kind of dual construct of why buy, why believe comes in, right? It's so important to lock that into one's brain as a marketer because what I see a lot is proliferation of content without strategy, right? And it is going to be so much, your hit rate's going to be so much higher if you've got some thinking behind what you're doing and you orient this in your motivators, right? So your motivator map is your why buys and then you're brainstorming as a content strategist, you're brainstorming why believe all day long. So if your why buy is this is this army pant is the best for travel, then you're brainstorming every month, okay, I got to keep that thing alive every single month of the year. It's one of my evergreen heroes. So every month, one of the things I'm doing is telling travel stories in some different way, right? It's why you see so many before and afters in beauty, right? It that isn't like that's not something that just like randomly works on accident, right? It works because it's really strong why believe content against the central promise of the product, which is anti-aging or, you know, hydration or getting rid of redness or whatever, right? So, um, thinking in those terms, I think really orients you're you're already like ahead of the game. Okay, why buy, why believe? Why buy, why believe? When I sit down to brainstorm, you know, my content investment because it is an investment, that's how I'm going to orient it. I've got to make them believe something. What's the central promise? I've got to make them believe that, right?

Emily Hickey: And then of course, you know, I'm sure this goes without saying, but taking a pillar content approach, um, and, you know, we we do this a lot where we'll really spend a lot of time and, you know, leg work and money on one really killer, you know, UGC ad or a very, very multi-hour long shoot with a founder or whatever. And then we're milking that, you know, for years really because if you approach that, not just, oh, I've got a hit ad, but I've actually diligently gone through and marked out my key moments within that ad, then you've created these portable pieces of content that could be remixed really, really easily. And that's a lot of what you're trying to do is make your life easier to keep things alive and fresh, right? So this key moment marking, I think is really important. And then just thinking from an Andromeda perspective, like, okay, how am I diverse with my content? I won't even talk about that because you just spent a long time on Andromeda.

Emily Hickey: But look, I I think this is important is, um, all of your marketing is driven by strategy. And this is where I just see an absence even in the most sophisticated companies and it's not because they don't know any better, it's because they're too busy, right? And but that motivator map, it really tells you what to do, right? If you sit there and think about what events am I going to have, what collabs should I have, which influencer should I recruit, what what is my styling closet? What are my products? What are my product names, right? Product names, I think are just so underleveraged in terms of like hitting people in the nose that you understand their needs, right? If you call it the great travel pant, that's very different than calling it the Cecilia or some random woman's name who nobody's ever heard of and has no emotional association with it at all. So, I think product names, like your landing pages, right? If you if you orient everything you do back to that motivator map, then you are you're intrinsically working with strategy, right? And if the whole company understands that, then the discussions that you're having even at the product design stage are so different than if you didn't have that, right? You're really just trying to constantly understand your consumer better and be the one to grow faster than the category because you've met their needs with both product and marketing, right? Now, that gets back to winning the two moments of truth. And I'm obsessed with this. I think about this constantly.

Emily Hickey: You, in fact, if you look at, um, I've been doing a lot of content recently about the the war happening in the athleisure space between Lulu and Alo and some of the other competitors. And the comments on those and and these have gotten hundreds of thousands or million views, these posts. And the comments always say the same things, which is I'm bored with Lulu's product, but I hate Alo's quality. And that's a really good example where I think Lulu is losing in the aisle. I mean, it's a huge global company. They're not losing, you know, by any means. But I mean, in terms of the court of public opinion, I think that they've really let their customer get vulnerable because they've their product merchandising strategy has gotten behind has fallen behind the customer, right? And so that's an example of like, okay, we know that they want something flattering and da da da da da, but we're not marketing and giving the product aggressively enough. Whereas Alo, they would say, okay, all the comments, this is not me saying it. I don't wear either brand. But, um, but that's just a a tangible example. There are, I I believe that, there are two moments of truth and you've got to be laser focused on both of them and they both relate back to that motivator map. It's an understanding of the consumer needs, how you fulfill that need in a better and distinct way, attacking it with your product and with your marketing. So we're going to market to you that this makes your butt look good. And then when you go try it on at home, your butt's going to look awesome, right? That's winning both the moments of truth. That's how you build a 100-year brand. So, I think orienting, creating that motivator map is so important for so many reasons and it's just a crisp understanding of the consumer needs that you're trying to be the best at at meeting in your space with product and with marketing. Okay. Um, one of my other favorite Tide is one of my favorite examples because the CPG guys are so disciplined about this, more so than I think anyone in the space. And, um, it doesn't change. I I've been watching Tide ads, you know, since for decades, since the seventies and they haven't changed. It's always a kid banging through the screen door with a skateboard being like, mom, you know, I I spilled spaghetti on my t-shirt, you know, and she says, that's okay. And she washes it. There's a before and after and then there's the why believe content of the ingredient story, the reason it's blue. Why is it blue? Because of the associations of cleaning, right? They could have made it green, but that wouldn't have been as good, right? So it's all like they they have such clarity. Why do people buy detergent? To to fight stains, to make clothes smell good, and the emotional why is to, um, turn laundry into an act of maternal love. And that's why the hero of every Tide ad is a mom or a wife, period. The emotional why of Pampers is to get the baby sleeping through the night and the great feeling as a parent of having that baby sleep through the night. That's why every Pampers ad ends with a video of a baby sleeping through the night. So they take this formula, right? The why buy, their marketing ladder doesn't change. Fight stains, makes clothes smell good, turns mom into a hero. And then they just rinse and repeat that on the ad for decades, but they also innovate the product, right? So anyone who has kids on this call knows that the modern family is oriented around the kids' sports. And so, of course, for them to be the premium family detergent, they have to come out with Tide Sport, right? Or because one of their core, you know, promises with the product is to make clothes smell fresh, they don't do just any collab, they do a collab with Febreze, right? The marketing leader, the market leader is also another Procter and Gamble company, but the market leader in fragrance, right? So, um, it's so simple. They've simplified to this point where they just have a choke hold on this market, right? And it's just a great reminder of like, okay, if I understand why people are buying this, um, then then I'm going to be the best at owning this market, right?

Emily Hickey: Okay. Um, so that in a nutshell is how we do things at Chief Detective and, um, I don't know, Evan or Melissa, what our time, I I know we were supposed to wrap at five, but, um, if there's time for questions, I'd be happy to take any.

Evan Lee: Yeah, let's get to a couple. There's there's so many people in the chat who are like, I really want to be Emily when I grow up. So there's a lot of love. There's a lot a lot of love popping up for you.

Emily Hickey: I appreciate that.

Evan Lee: There's a mixture of there's a mixture of questions that are coming through. Some that are more just like career development and like personal growth and then there are others that are more tactical.

Evan Lee: Everyone, you see the slide here, tap in with Emily on her socials, make sure to make it happen. But the first one that I'm going to pull up here is more related to a tactical implementation here. Let me see if I can pull it back up again. Um, so the question comes from Lorena, Lorena, let me know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Does this playbook work differently when what you are selling is an experience or a service over a product? And I've also had some like B2B SaaS folks in the chat also wonder how to apply it in that world.

Emily Hickey: Yep. Yeah. Um, we we do work, you know, we happen to work with a company, it's Blackstone's biggest portfolio company. It's a B2B company. And I myself am a am a services business, right? And so it's a really good question and yes, I do think it's the same. Like, most of what we're selling, you know, I like I do the sales for Chief Detective. I'm on sales calls all day long. The agency doesn't exist without sales. And so, and I I still because I've been doing the sales for the company for so long, I hear the same things over and over again. I understand the needs of my own market, you know? And so, and I I craft our work to those needs. So I still think it's the same mental discipline of believing in asymmetry, you know? And that of all of the use cases or the demographics, the the personas that you're going after, a couple of those are going to be dominant. And then even within those, you still, so let's say, okay, I've got my small business customer versus my big like whatever, right? Enterprise. They might have different needs, but within each of their need stacks, always a couple of those are going to be dominant. So you're you're doing the same thing of trying to magnetize yourself towards the greatest needs, right? And and then the testing, like we're doing this testing with this B2B, I'm personally doing this myself because I've worked really closely with these guys as an advisor. And we're we're lining up, we're thinking of, okay, who are the stakeholders, right? There's SMBs, there's enterprise, there's mass market. And what are their needs? And we're doing this exact resonance kind of fruit fly testing. It's just different because you're not doing it on a purchase, but what can you do it on? You can do it on your lead gen funnel, right? There's always an event. There's almost always an event, even if you have to manufacture it to hang this testing against. And, um, it's so simple. They've simplified to this point where they just have a choke hold on this market, right? And it's just a great reminder of like, okay, if I understand why people are buying this, um, then then I'm going to be the best at owning this market, right?