How to become a TOP 1% Creative Strategist with Meta Ads

Evan: How's it going, everybody? So excited to be here with you today. We've just wrapped our fourth creative strategy summit. I cannot believe it. Reza, what are we here to chat about today?

Reza: Oh man, it's wild. It's it's it's so interesting. I remember the first time we did the summit before the summit, we're like, is this creative strategist role a real thing? It it seemed to be new. No one really knew what it was, but it felt to us like it was the perfect role that described the problem at the time. And what did we have like maybe like a thousand people registered for the first creative strategy summit. And then now there's like, you know, this past one had I don't know, like 15,000 people register for it. And to see the journey of the creative strategist and how far it's come till today has been really exciting, but also insane to understand that like this role is just at the beginning of its story. And especially with what's going on in AI, our view is that the creative strategist has 100 X more growth ahead of it. And I'm just so excited to talk about the role and where we think it's going. And excited to be here with uh Alysha that all of you should know and and and get a get a better understanding of who Alysha is and you'll understand more about the the role of the creative strategist through her story. So excited to dive in.

Evan: This is incredible. I remember those thousand attendee days and to know that 18,000 people attend now, oh my gosh. And to know that every D to C brand has or is hiring a creative strategist, oh my gosh. But we have to start by paying homage. What I'm really curious about is how this role has evolved and I think Alysha is a perfect representation of that. So Alysha, maybe you can kick off with a little bit about your story.

Alysha: Yeah, so three years ago, I worked at a D to C company as a graphic designer and one of my responsibilities was making ads and I used Motion to measure the performance of my ads. And for the first time in my career as a designer, I finally got this feedback loop where I could measure the results of my actions day to day and I became really obsessed with this idea of creative strategy. So I met Evan and some of our uh monthly calls. I attended the creative strategy summit, of course, and I got a PDF in my inbox one day called becoming a creative strategist, which truly defined what I wanted to do when I grew up. I just became obsessed with becoming a creative strategist. So I just dove in head first and kind of elbowed my way in and uh one thing led to another and now I work at Motion, which is insane.

Evan: I think the coolest thing about Alysha's story is just like seeing a graphic designer and I was like, what the heck's next? Like I'm not seeing the value I can really create, not sure what's next. And then this role popped up called the creative strategist where it's the perfect marriage between the data side and the creative side. And seeing Alysha embody that, absolutely incredible. Reza, something I am curious about is like a lot of people can see themselves in creating a career similar to Alysha. What I'm curious about is on your end, how do you see this role evolving?

Reza: The the interesting thing about the creative strategist role for anybody who's been like Alysha, a person who can like tap into a different discipline that's related to the discipline that they started in and realize that like, hey, actually I could be pretty good at both of these things together. That's kind of what made the creative strategist really special. It was like at that point in the early days, you had this the data and the growth team over here and the creative team on the other side. And someone needed to bring those two worlds together so that they can operate efficiently and like actually create more winning ads. And the person to do that really needed to speak both languages. They needed to have like left brain, right brain in sync so that they could basically be this like hybrid human that in some ways I feel like everybody aspires to be this polymath type of individual that could be like, you know, the idea of an engineer who can design or a designer who can write code in like the software world. I think it's similar in marketing if if you're a data person who understands creative or vice versa, that's a really powerful individual. And at first, I think as an industry, what we thought was that this is a role that is kind of neither, but helps those two worlds talk to each other better. And I think what we've seen in the last few years is that the individual who is in between those two worlds basically they they became forged into this new really powerful, high leverage individual that has a lot of capability to not just facilitate work between these two roles, but also do a lot of the work themselves. Why we are very excited about the creative strategist is that for the last four years, the creative strategist has basically been mastering the art of like bringing multiple disciplines together. And so they're really well positioned now that the whole industry needs to understand, okay, AI is the new thing and we need to figure out how it fits into our workflow. The creative strategist who began as the person who was the bridge between data and creative. Now this is the individual who's the bridge between data, creative and AI. And from what I've seen, the creative strategist like Alysha who are really good at being an excellent creative strategist are just naturally moving into this role because to get really good at AI, you need to be able to communicate to other people around a vision and an idea that you want to bring to life, which is which comes really naturally to the creative strategist anyways. And so our bold claim is that like the creative strategist is going to be 100 or a thousand X more important from here. And the reason is that everybody knows that AI is going to change everything, obviously. And who is the person in the in in the growth marketing roles that's going to drive a lot of this impact. Our view is that it's the creative strategist. So you can think about the future of this role is almost perfectly in in sync with the future of AI. And as in the creative world, creative production is becoming more and more commoditized. It's not there yet, but with a click of a button, all of your ads get produced. But it's becoming more and more commoditized every day. We see that. And on the distribution side, the algorithms basically figure out who to put your ad in front of. So if the distribution is becoming commoditized and the creation is becoming commoditized, the role in the middle who helps both of those things is the one that rises to the highest leverage point and that's already the creative strategist. So it's just such an exciting time to be to be in this role.

Evan: Reza, a quick follow up on that one. So now a lot of people jumping into creative strategy, they're wondering where do they fit in this org, like talking about bringing this all together. What does the org of tomorrow look like around this?

Reza: It's such an interesting question because we like none of us actually know the impact of AI on organizational structure, but I think what we know for sure is that the roles that have the highest leverage point will remain and just become more and more and more and more important. To describe the role of what a creative strategist does, that's the part that regardless of what the organization looks like, you could be a founder running your e-commerce business with like two other people or you could be, you know, 50 person D to C brand or larger. Somewhere in the org, this function needs to be taken really seriously and done very well. We used to joke about the hat of the creative strategist. That was on the PDF that Alysha talked about like it literally had a picture of a hat on it because our whole view was that like ideally if you're a larger org, you should definitely hire a creative strategist and our view is that that should be for all the creative strategists, the highest paid role on the team. We can talk about that. But even if you're a founder and you're running an e-commerce brand, to understand how you can wear the the hat of the creative strategist and basically take that job really seriously is the thing that matters the most. The creative strategist job is to direct what happens next. There was a time where people were like, oh my God, AI is going to just eat all of us and we have nothing left to do. I think slowly everyone's getting to the point that this is a very powerful technology, but it's still there to fulfill the commands of the human who can command it well. The thing that the creative strategist does a really good job is like having a vision and directing people towards it. So I think there's a lot of questions on what happens to orgs, but I think if you're your aspiration is always like, how do I have a bigger impact? How do I leave a role that's just basically like grunt work and execution and how do I level up to do more high impact work? AI is going to accelerate that. And so everyone should figure out how do I go to one level higher of impact? And I think the creative strategist role is a perfect place to embody that.

Evan: I love that. I love that. Look fear in the face and say like, how am I going to start to evolve in this new world? That's such the right mindset and I think inspiring for the people that are out there. Reza, the piece that I'm curious about on your end is you've talked a lot about what this could look like, but when it comes to the actual role of creative strategy, how do you think AI is going to impact it the most?

Reza: We use the word words like prompting AI, which is a which is an interesting like phrase to use. Even pre AI, we're always prompting each other to do stuff, right? Like if a creative strategist, let's say AI doesn't exist, what are they doing? They're basically prompting all day long a creator or a designer or other people on the team, here's what I'm seeing, here's what I think we should do, or going back and forth and like facilitating a brainstorm around figuring out what to do. The role of the creative strategist in in some sense has always been about producing a brief and to get to producing a brief, you're basically going through a lot of analysis, you're going through a lot of research, you're doing ideation. The role of AI is basically just there to accelerate all of that. Like I remember we created the the the diagram of the creative strategy flywheel. This was I think before the first creative strategy summit, we're like, what are all the moving pieces here? Like what's the job of the creative strategist? And in some ways, you can make an argument that it starts in in different places. Our view has always been that the creative strategist should be a role that drives revenue for a business. It's why we think that it should be the highest paying uh job. It's the same way that like if you're in a sales role in that career, you can make a lot of money because you're driving revenue for the business. Our view is that the creative strategist is a 100% revenue generating business, like directly impacting revenue. Because that's true, our view has always been that that role should be very rooted in analytics and data. Like this is not a role of just pure intuition and pure uh guesswork because as you ship more ads, there's a lot of information around what's worked, what's not worked. How are we using that to come up with new iterations? A really strong grounding on performance data and analytics is really important. Alysha, you were talking uh before we started around how that used to be intimidating for creative strategists. It might be helpful to just stay on the analytics for a second and Alysha, talk talk a little bit about like how intimidating it used to be as a creative strategist to be like, oh my God, I have to wrap my head around data. And then now like there's like tools that make that a lot easier and creative strategists could be more well grounded in data so that they can do the rest of the work a lot more effectively.

Alysha: Yeah, well, I think of course, Motion helps so much with that intimidation because previously my option was to look literally at Facebook ads manager, which was essentially just a a spreadsheet that was difficult to navigate as someone with a creative brain, made things colorful, put them in charts and put all of my ads that I made that I feel so personally invested in, paired that with the numbers that showed me what was actually moving the needle. And that's what made it so much less intimidating and more accessible and really helped me do my job better.

Reza: Yeah, so it's like the the the analytics is a starting point and then that way the creative strategist is well grounded on what's been working and what's not. And then the rest of the work is like research, research around competitors, around what's going on in organic, just general trends. There's a lot of a lot of the role is to just have a finger on the pulse of what's going on in the world, what are other people doing. The cheap version of creative strategy is go like rip off a competitor and see what they're doing. And like, you know, there there's a place for that and I think even the best creative strategists who like don't like to say it, I think everyone's doing a little bit of like uh getting inspired by by other competitors, but that's just a small part of the research process. Um and then it's taking all of that, synthesizing those learnings from the analytics side, from the research side to start grounding some intuition around, okay, what are we going to try next? What direction are we going to go? And then ultimately just communicating that as a brief that today goes through a human, but, you know, our our view is that eventually that brief still stays the same. You still need to be able to articulate, here's what we learned, here's what we're thinking, here's what we want to do. And it's very possible that that brief is just a prompt that goes to an AI system. And we're not there yet, but it's very obvious for everyone to understand that we are going there, which is why it's very believable that the creative strategist is going to be the role that has the highest impact because now they're communicating to a team, tomorrow they're communicating to AI. And so the person who can communicate and direct the best is the one who's who's going to have a really big impact on on on the team.

Evan: Huge. This makes me think of something uh so some of us on the Motion team were hanging out with Alex Cooper and Hannah Haug the other night. And they were talking about how freaking hard it is to hire a creative strategist. Shout out to Hannah and Alex by the way. They are the best. So in this process, Alysha, something that I am curious about is like when people are trying to navigate their careers, what types of folks should be getting into this field?

Alysha: Well, I think uh Reza touched on something which is like that you're essentially prompting all day, like you're you're really doing the work all day. And what that means to me and what I think is so important is that just because AI exists doesn't mean that you need to not know how to do this job. In fact, I think you need to become so passionate and so invested in your work in all of these different facets of your work that that is what enables you to use AI to its full potential is having true understanding and expertise in everything that this role involves. And that includes everything from paid and organic social to copywriting, to consumer psychology, to media buying best practices. So for me, it's all about just investing in all of those areas and really diving deep in each one of them so that you can truly raise the bar of your work and become this incredible valuable person on the team that we all know that creative strategists can be.

Reza: Yeah, because one thing I think we should emphasize, a lot of people talk about AI and they say, oh my God, it's going to make everything easier. You don't need to learn this and that. And like that is not what we're saying at all. It's like what we're saying is that the creative strategist job is not easy and it's getting more difficult because first they had to master creative and then they had to master data. And to Alysha's point, they still have to master and continue to master those two things. And now they also need to master AI. This is an extremely ambitious, extremely high performing role that's not like uh if you remember in the early days of of like e-commerce, there's these courses around like how can you be a drop shipper? It's so easy, you click a button. We're not saying creative strategist in a box, click two AI buttons and you're going to be great. The thing that will make someone really great is to understand those disciplines really well so that when they are talking and communicating to AI about those things, they can do it at an elite level and get the most out of the AI system. So there's no shortcut here about how to become great at it. And I think uh it's why Motion's commitment has always been around this role is hard and it needs really good content. And we realized that early on, our content team is now like eight or nine people and we're we're producing so much stuff around what it takes to be a good creative strategist. And as we were talking about like in order to arm the creative strategist for 2026 and introduce AI into this mix, like there's a lot more to learn here. So I think we need to balance the audience a little bit by saying there are tools that are going to make things a lot easier, but there's like real skills to master in order to be able to make the most out of it.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been uh working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but um yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion, you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about. So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports. And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format. In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging the gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data is intimidating, but it also is very rewarding. It's like a dopamine hit every single time I see an ad that works. Finally, I feel some kind of feedback. And I think designers, videographers, social media managers especially have a really hard time justifying the value of their role because they don't have that that core component to their role. They can't actually prove revenue. So having that association with your work is actually like really, really motivating and fulfilling and also, of course, huge, huge leverage in your career as well.

Reza: Yeah, the the one piece that I am sometimes a little doom and gloom about when it comes to AI, and I think it's important like we should talk about there's like immense opportunity when it comes to AI, but there are danger zones too. Like the types of jobs that someone can issue an instruction to you and then you need to fulfill that instruction is very dangerous. I think those are the roles that AI will very quickly take over. But I think it ties very nicely with human ambition anyways. Like who wants to be in a job where all they're doing is someone gives them instructions and they do it. And I think sometimes if you're in like the content creator side or on the design side, because of how challenging it's been to produce that work historically, you could kind of make a good living by being someone that's like, okay, what do you need? Let me look at it, let me produce it and kind of just go into a rhythm of doing that. But I think if you're in a creative role that kind of looks like that, that is a bit of a danger zone to be concerned about. But you step a little bit over into this side on the piece of that work that impacts revenue and it's like a world of a difference. Exciting on this side, a little bit concerning on this on this side. So like Motion wants to help you uh kind of lean into the excitement and help figure out how you can drive impact and revenue for the companies you work with and obviously career acceleration for yourselves.

Alysha: Like you said, if you're in a role where somebody can tell you what to do and you can do it, I can promise you creative strategy is not that role. As someone who has had to break it down and systemize it to help us build a better product, it is actually so much harder than you think. Yeah.

Evan: Guys, I hear you loud and clear, but let's say I'm a creative team member. You're speaking at this level. What I really need to know is like, okay, tomorrow, step one, what the heck am I doing? So Alysha, based on experience, where can people start this process?

Alysha: If you're starting from a different perspective, whether you're a UGC creator, a designer, a social media manager, a copywriter, of course, just start looking in the other direction. So we always talked about initially data and creative and whether you're on either side of the spectrum, you just have to start moving towards that other end of the spectrum. But in terms of like practical advice too, I honestly think just organic social media at this point is the best thing to look at. So if you're not in tune with what's happening on organic social media, practically, that's that's a great place to start.

Evan: Huge. I love it. Easy place to start. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been flirting with the idea of like there's so much that Motion is cooking up across the board. So I really want to bring our community up to speed on some of the plans that we have. Reza, I'm going to throw this one to you first. There's been a lot that's happened this year across the board, right? So I'm wondering if you could share a bit of the story on like what's happened and where we're going, especially on the product side of things.

Reza: Yeah, it's so cool because like Motion's journey has been in many ways tied to the hip with the story of the creative strategist. Early on when we were ideating and we came across this problem between media buyers and and creative people, it was like, who are we building for? And we had the choice in that moment. It was like media buyers have all these other problems, creative teams have all these other problems too, but they both kind of have this shared problem around needing to collaborate better. It felt like we we had this perspective early on too that there was going to be a role that needs to fulfill this. It's not just going to magically going to like bridge. And so we took a pretty big bet that the creative strategist role was going to get more and more important. I remember at the time, it was kind of insane. We were fundraising for our seed round and we talked about this idea of a creative strategist and investors were like, what the hell is this? What do you mean? They're building a product for this non-existent role? Like what's going on here? When we raised our series B last year, it was like a commitment to that same story that often times a company will go and like once they start to scale to a certain point, in order to reach some bigger milestone, they kind of need to become the everything company. That moment was an interesting question for us. Like, okay, is this the point where because we want to scale to become bigger, Motion starts to broaden a bit and say, okay, we're kind of for the creative strategist, but we're also solving problems for these other roles. And we thought pretty hard about that. We're like, no, this thing is going to still keep growing. Like the creative strategist, in our view is still very much in its infancy, especially with what was going on with AI, that at the end of last year, when we raised um our our series B, it was like, okay, now this whole thing needs to be reinvented to be AI first, both for us as a tech company, like any tech company that's been paying any attention for the last one year has basically needed to go all the way down to the roots of their system and reinvent themselves, which has been quite the journey. And for us, that was like, we need to become AI native, the creative strategist needs to become AI native because we have this long stretch ahead of us, both Motion as a company and creative strategist as a role that we need to prepare for. So the last, I want to say like since January especially, Motion has been in like, okay, rip everything out, reimagine everything, like literally all the way down to the to the core of our system to be AI native. We shipped out a lot of stuff. So like our our um expert agents was was the big kind of AI release that we were experimenting with all year. And I think everybody who played with them gave us a lot of really great feedback. And us and all of our users who used it are like, we see the vision for this, but like obviously the the agents that we released early on were very simple. You click the button and they would do one task for you and it didn't even have a follow up. Like it was very, very primitive. But underneath all of that, it was the perfect vehicle for us to start testing AI systems in our product. And a lot of what people didn't see and a lot of work that Alysha and others on our team have been working super hard on is how do we reinvent the core of how Motion's infrastructure works to basically support the next 10 years of AI investment that we want to do into this role. And so a lot of exciting product drops coming out in Q4 for Motion and a lot of that has been because of all the investments we made on the infrastructure side. So excited to dive into a lot of those, but yeah, this year has been reinvent mode for Motion and I'm I'm excited that to wrap up this year, um a lot of people are going to see the the the fruits of that effort and hopefully it becomes like the the beginning of the next chapter for Motion and and creative strategists together.

Evan: Can we give people a sneak peek into what that's looking like? Is there anything we can we can foundationally layer on what they can look forward to?

Reza: Totally. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about it and then Alysha, maybe you can you can dive into into more details on how it works. But when we started thinking about, okay, if we want to reinvent this whole thing to be AI native, what's the best way to do that? And so we thought about um creative strategy pre AI and what's the foundational piece of that? And one of the things that I always remember is that for the first few calls of Motion, all the way through to like four years in and it comes up so often on on calls is that people get really excited about the platform and then they often say something like, ah, well, it looks like for me to get the max out of Motion, it seems like I really need to have this like robust naming convention. That seems really important. And you know, a lot of great teams invest heavily into their naming conventions and that basically becomes the foundation of their testing strategy. For AI to build an entire creative strategy system from an AI native lens, we we started at the question of what does naming conventions look like in an AI first way? Basically, that's like the the big first investment that Motion has made in our pursuit to becoming an AI native platform is how do we introduce the concept of AI tags? AI can go and tag anything that that you wanted to, but how do we introduce a language, a taxonomy that the AI and the humans on the team can both align on that becomes the foundation for all of it. And so that was the point that we decided to spend a lot of time on. Alysha led the effort there and very, very excited about how it's turned out. Everybody who signs up to Motion will now see that their ads are tagged in a very elaborate way with AI. And there's a lot more for us to talk about around like how we're going to use that to extend the capabilities of of the rest of the products that we're building. If you don't have good taxonomy around what are things called, what are we testing, then basically nothing else really works. And so I'm very excited about that as a really foundational piece that we've invested in and excited for Alysha to tell you more about how it works.

Evan: It's been so fun seeing it from uh my angle because I think like when you think of AI tagging, it sounds basic. But what's been so cool is we've literally built a team of creative strategists to tackle this who have such strong opinions. So Alysha, I would love if you can take it away and show the people some of what this looks like.

Alysha: Yeah, for sure. The most important part of this for me is that naming conventions, what they were trying to achieve was unlocking creative insights. So Motion did a great job bridging that gap between creative and data, but in order to get to a true creative insight, you still had to watch your ads and understand what was going on in the ad in order to identify what was working, what wasn't, so that you could decide what to do next. So the thing that AI tags does for everyone is unlocks the same power and the same abilities that naming conventions do without having to manage naming conventions because I think every creative strategist, every media buyer can agree that managing a naming convention system is actually heinous. Like it's very, very difficult and confusing and especially if you work on a big team with a lot of different stakeholders, it can break in a million different places. So we have just done that for you, which is incredible.

Okay, so when you hop into a top ads report in Motion,

you'll notice something new, which is that we've tagged all of your ads in these eight categories. And these are the eight categories that you should care about.

So let's dive into visual format, which is the one that you probably hear spoken about most often. Immediately, you can start to identify patterns in your creative to determine what is leading to performance within your creative. But if I were to ask the question, what is my top visual format? What these AI tags unlock for you is comparative reports.

And this is a type of report that a lot of teams without naming conventions really couldn't get the most out of until now. Now with AI tags, with one click grouping by visual format, I can immediately identify that green screen is one of my top ad formats, but I can also see here that skit is my top ad format.

In addition to that, I can also see where I can identify some opportunities, some visual formats that we should lean into a little bit harder and visual formats that might not be on this list that you should try next. So I know what you're all thinking, are these tags accurate and how do I know for sure that these are the correct tags on all of my creative? We have spoken to hundreds of teams and what we actually notice is that the teams that have the most criticism about these tags are the people who are already thinking in this systematic approach and probably already have a really strong naming convention established within their teams, but that doesn't mean that these tags are incorrect. They're just different. And what I mean by that is that this LLM that is tagging all of your creative is a neutral third party that's trained on creative strategy best practices. So while you might tag something a certain value and the LLM tags it differently, it's not necessarily incorrect. It just identifies something that you might not have noticed about your creative. So they can work in tandem with your naming conventions to to actually fill in gaps that you might not have noticed before.

Reza: You make a good point too about like data