Motion's 2026 Creative Trends (Full Event)

[0:00] Evan Lee: Welcome to the party, y'all. I'm so happy to have you. This is actually our third time that we've run this creative trends event. > [VISUAL: Slide with Motion logo. Title: "2026 CREATIVE TRENDS". Subtitle: "CHANGE HOW YOU CREATE ADS IN 2026". On the right, there are headshots of 7 speakers: Joanna Wallace, Elfried Samba, Oren John, Ashley Rutstein, Alexandra Espinoza, Jack Appleby, Dana Denney. In the top left corner, a video feed of the speaker, Evan Lee.] This one, we have 26,000 people registered to this thing. So give yourselves a round of applause because this is going to be straight facts, no fluff. People are going to come up here for 10 to 15 minutes and by the end of this next two hours, you're going to have your playbook for 2026. All right? Amazing.

[0:23] Evan Lee: But first, before we welcome some speakers onto the stage here, I want to say a little bit about Motion and why we host events like this.

[0:30] Evan Lee: So first thing I wanted to note here > [VISUAL: Slide titled "Community hub for Creative Strategists". It shows images of two books titled "The Rise of the Creative Strategist" and "BECOMING A CREATIVE STRATEGIST", a hat, and posters for "THE 2024 CREATIVE STRATEGY SUMMIT" and "THE 2023 CREATIVE STRATEGY SUMMIT".] is that we've been doing this since 2021 and supporting the community trying to, at least from the best of our ability. We've literally written the book on creative strategy, as you can see, and we've hosted events where hundreds of thousands of people have been able to attend and level up their knowledge of creative strategy. And outside of education, we're lucky enough to > [VISUAL: Black slide with white text. Title: "$14 billion in media spend analyzed every year by Motion's customers". Below are logos of various brands including TRUE CLASSIC, HEXCLAD, JONES ROAD, RIDGE, vuori, ILIA, WPROMOTE, ClickUp, BYLT, AG1, PRETTYLITTER, earth breeze, grüns, COZY EARTH, obvi., MaryRuth's, and Power.] work with the best of the best brands every single day. So, we actually manage over 14 billion in ad spend annually, which is mind-blowing to me. But we help them make the best creative decisions possible every single day. But some of you are probably wondering, Evan, what the heck is this creative strategy thing exactly? So let's start with a quick definition here, all right? > [VISUAL: Slide with text "Creative is the #1 lever for success within your paid ads". To the right is an illustration of a smartphone showing an ad for shoes, with a trophy and money next to it.]

[1:11] Evan Lee: So first things first, creative is the number one lever for success in your paid ads. If you don't have amazing creatives, you're not going to make it. It's not going to be able to scale. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "How we help teams". On the right, under "Direct response playbook", there are two boxes: "Clear insight into messaging that works" and "Uncover the next visual formats to test".]

[1:19] Evan Lee: And how we help brands is that we want to be able to give them their direct response playbook, which involves two things. Number one, we want to understand what messaging crushes it. And number two, we want then want to tell that message in as many visually diverse ways as possible. But y'all, here's the thing. To make amazing creative, there's a couple different types of teams, people, and brains involved. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "Performance teams work with data, creatives work visually". An illustration of a brain is shown, with the left side labeled "Creative" and the right side labeled "Analytical".] So on one side of this thing, shout out to our analytical heads in the chat. I know you can live in spreadsheets, I know you can live in ads manager, you're good to go. So that's one side. And on the other side, we have our creative folks who are exactly that, creative and conceptual, can live in the clouds. There's almost a natural tension that's created in this process.

[1:57] Evan Lee: So when I'm referring to creative strategy, what I'm ultimately referring to > [VISUAL: Slide titled "Creative Strategy is the bridge". A Venn-like diagram shows "Creative" and "Performance marketing" as two circles, with "Creative strategy" as the overlapping circle bridging them. An "AI" label is added to the "Creative strategy" circle.] is how do you bridge the gap between these two teams, brains, and minds so we can work together. And now more than ever, as I'm sure you're going to hear from some of the talks today, AI is such a big piece of this process.

[2:14] Evan Lee: But what's funny enough is to solve this problem, what most people are doing right now looks something like this. > [VISUAL: A large, complex spreadsheet with many columns and rows, including color-coded cells (red and green) and long URLs.]

[2:21] Evan Lee: You know what I mean? Like a spreadsheet, y'all. Like we're talking about creative at the end of the day and we're looking at it in a spreadsheet. It makes it super hard. > [VISUAL: A screenshot of the Motion app interface, showing creative assets, performance charts, and an "Analyze with AI Tags" feature. Text overlay: "Demo at the end of the event!"] So for those of you who are interested, stick around at the end. I'm going to be walking you through some fun stuff within Motion, so to show you how we make this easy. > [VISUAL: A humorous image of Evan Lee on a couch, hugging a giant banana and a smiling AI-like character. Text overlay: "Stick around for the after party". The text "CREATIVE STRATEGY WITH AI" is arched over the image.] And in all honesty, it's going to be a party. Stick around for the AP. We're going to talk about what happened today, creative strategy in general, some new releases, and all that good stuff. All right?

[2:46] Evan Lee: So we've reached the time where we get to do this thing, okay? Our first speaker gets to the stage. Now, you might know him as Oren Meets World on social. I know him as your favorite marketer's favorite marketer. Let's welcome Oren to the stage, y'all. Round of applause. Show love in the chat. > [VISUAL: Split screen. Left: Evan Lee, Head of Partnerships, Motion. Right: Oren John, The Internet's Creative Director.]

[3:00] Oren John: How's it going on, y'all?

[3:02] Evan Lee: Hey, Oren.

[3:03] Oren John: All right. Um,

[3:04] Evan Lee: you pop in, do your thing, and I'll catch you at the end, all right?

[3:06] Oren John: All right, perfect.

[3:08] Oren John: All right, so I'm super excited to talk to y'all here today about 2026. Um, I only have 15 minutes and I'm a known yapper, so I am going to get uh right into it directly. So, let's pop into, you know, I'm just going to share my, share my entire screen. We'll see how this goes. > [VISUAL: Oren John shares his screen, showing a Canva presentation. The first slide has a screenshot of his Instagram and YouTube profiles (@orenmeetsworld). The title is "CONTENT" with bullet points: Background, 2026 Hooks, Top of Funnel, Mid-Funnel.] All right, so, starting out, let's get in present.

[3:31] Oren John: All right, so quick background. Uh, I'm @orenmeetsworld on social media. I make content on Instagram and YouTube, a lot about marketing and a lot about taste and creative life. And I'll talk a bit about my background in a second. It'll be relevant to why you should listen to me. But what I'm going to cover here in this presentation is a bit about me. I'm going to talk about 2026 hooks because uh, everyone thinks we talk about hooks too much, but we don't. It's a big part of why we're getting better uh and what people are doing to stand out. I'm going to talk about top of funnel and basically giving the algorithm more tools for organic and for paid uh to be effective. And I'm going to talk a bit about mid funnel. And that's all I think, again, as a yapper, I can realistically get in for you here today. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "MY FOCUSES". On the left are logos for CUT30, Understated Leather (UL), GEL BLASTER, and MORPHE. On the right are bullet points: Organic Social, Paid Media, EMV, Retail Support.]

[4:13] Oren John: Um, but some quick notes, why you should listen to me. So, in addition to making content myself, and I started making content when I was a uh SVP of marketing at a consumer goods company because I wanted to get better at it. And that continues today where a lot of the content I make is me testing things I can apply to other places. But in addition, I also train creators in Cut30. So we're at about 2,000 creators and brands have been trained in this. And the nice part about training so many people and having a really active slack of folks is we actually get to see exactly what's working right now across a lot of people, which has been invaluable in getting insights to share online. Uh in addition to that, I'm the partner in a women's wear brand called Understated Leather where I've run all the meta ads for the last few years. Uh and that's a smaller one. That's one where we don't have any big budgets. We, you know, only can can spend what we make. We've scaled to about a six-figure e-com uh company a month and I've been kind of working through that as well as wholesale and others. And so I know a lot from there. I also worked on Gel Blaster. I was the SVP of marketing there. It was a big uh, we were in Target, Walmart, Costco, as well as big online, big influencer, YouTube, large paid media spend that also had to impact retail. So thinking a lot about that and creative strategy there. And now I work for a uh private equity firm in beauty called Anvest and uh one of our largest companies there is called Morphe. It's a cosmetics company where I am actively part of a uh extended team that works on organic social and paid social briefs, uh campaigns and everything. And so I'm in this both organic and paid every day. And what I'm going to focus on here today is a combo of those two things. We're going to talk about organic strategy going into 2026 and paid and where they overlap. I want to make sure a lot of this is relevant to both since I know a lot of you are starting to look at both hand in hand. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "HOOK RATE OBSESSION" with subtitle "Everyone has learned hooks, every .1s matters, for ads especially." It shows five example video thumbnails for: Animated Titles + Remove Background, Hook graphics, Format Switch, Grid Wipe, Transitions.]

[5:57] Oren John: Um, so quick note starting out. I want to talk about hook rate and hook rate obsession. So, everyone's always, you hear this complaint like, oh, why are our views down? Why are our ads not performing? It's the algo, it's Andromeda, it's any number of excuses. And uh the answer is often, no, it's literally everyone is getting better. There's been so much enablement content, so many good creators, so many amazing editors that you're now basically competing against a bar that is raised every 60 days. And so I want to give some like actual tactics that we are using um in content on brands I work with all the time to improve hook rates because every kind of .1 second matters there. So the first is this animated titles with uh remove background. You may have seen these before, but it's pretty easy. > [VISUAL: Oren John switches to his browser and plays an Instagram video. The video shows a man talking with animated text appearing on screen, sometimes behind him.] I'm going to swap over here and play this. So you will see, this is in Premiere or CapCut, they're just removing the background, pasting a layer over it, and putting the text behind it. But it's an extremely effective hook. > [VISUAL: Oren John plays another Instagram video. A woman is talking, and animated text and graphics appear around her.] We see very similar stuff with content like this where instead of necessarily putting it behind it, they are animating tons of stuff kind of over and around um the content that is being put together. One second, I wasn't my actual link. This one was. > [VISUAL: Oren John plays another Instagram video. A woman is applying makeup. A grid of four images wipes across the screen, showing the final look and inspiration, before the video continues.] where you are seeing inside her first five seconds or so, they are covering a lot of ground visually on what's a pretty typical UGC video. Another tactic um that we're using a bunch in cosmetics is basically a overlay swipe. So she does a standard intro and then basically has that four grid of a mood board of a look or whatever's coming before she launches into it. It's just a good hook retention tactic. > [VISUAL: Oren John plays another Instagram video. A woman shows how to create a swipe and click transition effect on a phone.] And then another one is you're seeing all these creator tools where people are doing transitions. Let me reload this to show the effect. So you can see here, she's swiping through these PNGs. And then she's giving a tutorial of how to do it. But all of these tools where you see creators doing transitions, etcetera, things like that are now becoming more and more in a brand toolkit where you're like, can we have our UGC creators do this? Can we have our editor take what they filmed um and do it as well? > [VISUAL: Oren John returns to his Canva presentation. The slide is titled "RETENTION OBSESSION" with the subtitle "Production is worth it and reusable. Enable your UGC creators and shoot teams!" It shows four example images labeled: AI hooks, Setting, Shelves, Bags.]

[8:44] Oren John: But the second thing to talk about here is that retention obsession. So I think what what the brands I'm working with and why I see a ton of brands doing in 2026 is basically enabling their teams with slightly more production. And that doesn't mean huge expensive things, but you've probably seen a lot of conversation around sets. And that goes into setting or AI hooks or similar. I'm going to explain a bit of what this means. But basically, if you've been making the same content or your UGC creators are always in their same apartment or in it's like a similar place, that isn't enough to to stand out. Like how do you get, you know, more attention from it, no matter how good your video concept is. How do you add things to it to just improve it? And then how do you do that affordably? So one we're seeing a lot is AI hooks, not full AI videos. There's obviously been a blitz of people talking about AI UGC or AI this. Uh, we test everything. That does not work super well in a lot of these ad accounts. What does work is the first couple seconds. An example, Revolve did a whole grip of these um AI ads in different places. I'm not ads, it was organic posts. But they didn't do the right thing in my opinion. They made these and then that was it. That was the extent of the content. But a video of Revolve as the Hollywood sign that leads into something else is an awesome hook. And a way I would think about that purely for paid. If you, you know, in organic, it's a little bit of a different game. And then second is setting. So this is something uh, a real concentration with brands among UGC next year is, hey, can we actually, if we're getting six videos or 10 videos done by a creator for our brand, for ads or for organic, can we also get them a day at a luxury hotel? Can we book them a set on Peerspace where they can shoot? What can we do to elevate it? This is a uh influencer ad for L'Occitane where she is pretty famous, but you don't even see her face for the first five seconds. It is all amazing shots of this overhead in a luxury hotel. Um and that is something where if you're spending, let's say $200 a video for five UGC videos, then you want to basically add another six on top of that to give them a nice rental space or some production that may pay dividend and actually trying to get a winning asset. Similar thing I'm talking about, uh we're doing this with brands I work with right now is getting like shelves and closets. And this opaque one is great because you can kind of see and then it opens and you do a reveal. That's an awesome hook and you can have products on there. But people are basically using one key item, like under $500, they can make a recurring part of their content narrative. Same thing with little objects like bags. I we just used, it was a butter themed campaign I was working on. We used the Frasia butter bag. It's like 200 bucks, but it's kind of an it bag. And it really elevates the video when people notice it or talk about it. And so all of those things where if you're doing a what's in my bag or an unboxing or an open reveal, what are some of those items you can look at in realistic budget or borrow, etcetera, that elevate those assets? > [VISUAL: Slide titled "ORGANIC TOP OF FUNNEL" with subtitle "Organic top of funnel has one goal: the right users seeing it at scale." It shows a funnel diagram labeled "Virality & views" at the top. It also shows examples for "Creative Organic" and "Social shows".]

[11:35] Oren John: So, moving out of the hook conversation, I want to talk about the content funnel. Let me let me check real quick how I'm doing on time. All right, we're doing great. I'll be about the content funnel and what that means for brands and for ad accounts. So, everyone in marketing knows the traditional marketing funnel. You want to attract awareness up top and you want to get down to sales at the bottom. Well, content works the same way. And back to that initial question where people are like, hey, we're not getting enough sales from our social media. We're not getting enough views. Uh we're not getting enough of an audience to scale on meta. A lot of this comes down to your top of funnel. What are you doing purely to get attention at the top of it? And the conversation that um I have a lot that a lot of brands have a hard time wrapping their head around is that all that really matters at the top is virality and views. Organic top of funnel has one goal for the like the right users, who your right consumer is, seeing it at scale. As many of the right person as possible. It doesn't even have to do with your brand. It doesn't necessarily have to have the product in it. It's about getting them inside the algorithm both for ads and for organic. Let me explain. So first for organic, that top of funnel is extra crucial because basically, as all of you know, if you scroll Instagram or TikTok, if you like a video from somebody, you get shown more of it. And if you follow someone, a bunch goes on your feed right away from that person. We're all aware that's how that works. So from a funnel perspective, if there was a skit about my brand that didn't really mention my product, was lightly related, but it got a million views. What happens is a lot more people than normal like that. And then all of a sudden, they're shown your mid-funnel content, one of your other recent performing videos that is probably not like that. It's probably a more product focused video, something you made that's more educational or value driven or more about your brand. And all of a sudden, a certain number of those people graduate down. But you cannot improve the number of people that enter the middle without putting stuff on top. And so two ways that are standing out for this, one is just more creative organic assets where people are actually doing things um like like more artful things or play or I did a video today on my Instagram where I show people like Rains who made games out of their products or Meshki who's doing like they have their models playing tennis in their dresses. It's creative organic clips that are kind of more built for virality. Another method people are doing are these social shows. So Bilt has a show called Roomies. Alexis Bittar is a jewelry brand who has recurring characters who does this. This is a brand called Loewe who does this where they basically are entertaining on their main feed and people are wearing their products. For instance, the Loewe glasses are always kind of prominent on screen, but that is really the only connection point um to the brand besides building the brand lore. But it brings in way more views and content than their other stuff and is part of that top of funnel. So lots of brands are talking about how do they contract people for social shows, how do they get more creative with the organic. And that doesn't always mean more budget, but what it does mean is acting and trying to validate more uh ideas. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "MID FUNNEL" with subtitle "'Value content' is now expert storytelling." It shows three example videos.]

[15:07] Oren John: And with that top of funnel, mid funnel is changing as well. A huge conversation we all had over the last year was about value content, right? You're either providing value or you're entertaining. How do you educate people about how to use your product? How do you um like make sure that they want to bookmark the content you have? That was a huge topic on organic especially this last year. But that's shifted, especially over the last few months to where that is very commodified right now. If you're just giving a tip or showing how to do something, it's only going so far. The new mid funnel is really expert storytelling, often with people involved to be able to do it right, not always. A few examples there. > [VISUAL: Oren John switches to his browser and plays an Instagram video. A woman is giving a recap of Milan Fashion Week.] So this is a resale bag company and they have a creator who does these very well-edited videos about what happened at fashion week, the history behind the a specific Chanel bag, whatever it is, but she is providing real deep storytelling about the things that they sell. And that is their kind of middle of funnel, sometimes top of funnel content. > [VISUAL: Oren John plays another Instagram video. A man is in a workshop, explaining the process of mixing a specific paint color.] Another example here is this kind of viral paint brand where he is explaining and showing how they mix it, what goes on, the thought process behind the color. Uh and they do very large views basically inside their facility with it on set, showing the mixing, talking about the process, but it's a story around it, not just it's this paint and it looks good combined with these two furniture items. > [VISUAL: Oren John plays another Instagram video. A man is explaining the history and vision behind a Tom Ford fashion collection.] Perhaps the best example and arguably the kickstarter of this is this guy Ken Sakata, an excellent creator where he has a clothing brand um where he makes really immaculately thought through clothes. And he then talks about all the core topics. This one's about Tom Ford and Tom Ford finding his vision, but he educates super highly and he uses that as kind of the credibility that builds the brand underneath. But I like to show this because this style of video is becoming very popular with a slight production of the person, they're in a nice environment, they're showcasing lots of images uh like on top of it. They're basically telling a narrative without it, but it's not the hardest thing to edit. It's, you know, straightforward enough. It just requires a good story and a good personality. And that is the new value tips driven content of what we had kind of last year. Let me pop back over to here.

[17:21] Oren John: And stop sharing for a second and then we can we can chat here for a moment. Uh and so the the key thing I want to have everyone take away from this is that in this next year, that organic and paid are more tied together than ever. How do you generate that top of funnel awareness? How can you run both assets across? And to the point of that last slide, how do you develop personalities that have more credibility in ads? So, for instance, you will see that um if you see a creator or an influencer who makes content for a brand, they run that same stuff as an ad, they're leveraging that influencer's credibility. Now, for brands who are able to put their own personality on there or develop a recurring character of, hey, we have our this UGC person we use them every month. If they're creating that organic content and they're creating ad creative and it's going to the same targeting audience, it's going to improve its efficacy. And it has to be thought about within that same story framework. And so if you want to take away anything from this and if I want to highlight the top things I talked about here, it's that hooks are still more important than ever and you need tactics. You need to say, what are we going to apply to these hooks this month or at this content session or at this shoot to make it better? And then same thing with retention. How are we basically putting things within our budgetary framework to make this work? How are we framing organic to like actually get real top of funnel that we can use for targeting, um that we can use to bring more people in? And then how can we use personalities within that to then establish credibility and make sure that all of our assets perform better when those people are used and build kind of real relationships.

[18:50] Oren John: With that, um, that's the end of my rant. I think we're like 12 minutes of of 15 minutes in.

[18:56] Evan Lee: Everybody, you got to show love in the chat. Oren came out absolutely crushed it. Oren, I think we have time for one question if you're down. So one of the

[19:06] Oren John: Yeah, I'm down.

[19:07] Evan Lee: You got it. I think you're reading through. I feel like you can manage it.

[19:09] Oren John: Oh yeah, I was reading through. Someone asked about I'm not talking about services business. I work mostly on products, but I imagine some other people are. I saw that come in. But yeah, Evan, if you have a question, rip it and I'll I'll take it.

[19:17] Evan Lee: That was the exact one that I was going to rip in all honesty. Like there was a question related to specifically like B2B. So we're talking specifically on the product end.

[19:24] Oren John: Yeah, I think this is also the exact same thing. I will point out the things I called out where I was like, hey, you you should buy a shelf or whatever, may not apply as much, but can you establish a person or credibility there? Can that expert tell stories about what the B2B industry is? I used an example of Vanta the other day because Vanta is hiring a head of storytelling. If you don't know Vanta, they do the dullest shit in the world. They're selling like SOC 2 compliance to like companies to be able to like, oh, we want to get a government contract, if they check these 45 boxes, right? Well, look, if their core social media feed was, they're it's like a cybersecurity thriller or it's like ASMR coding videos with like showing off the desktop setups of their top nerds. If it was Damon John explaining SOC 2 compliance, not even him, that's like would require a bigger budget, but like if it's someone interesting who's taking those topics and workshopping it, those same ideas apply uh of developing that personality, building that top of funnel to target against. Uh always B2B and services thinks that all this cool stuff doesn't apply to them, when in fact, if you just do it in a B minus level, you're so far above who you're competing with that you're going to smash.

[20:25] Evan Lee: Oren, man, I love it. I'm going to throw one more at you before we get you out of here. So the question that comes to mind for me is you bang off hooks and concepts just like at the snap of your fingers. For anyone who's tuning in and just getting started, how can they start to train their minds to think in this way?

[20:40] Oren John: Yeah, and so uh I'm a big frameworks person. I like to look at everything and be like, why did it work? Can I break it down? And I spend a lot of time doing those breakdowns. So for instance, um, I have dedicated scrolling. I think this is a good thing for everyone to do. I work in beauty, like I mentioned before. Beauty doesn't come in my feed. I have two 30-minute blocks where all I do is scroll beauty focused account. I take a lot of those top performing videos in my bookmarks and I go like, what happened in the first three seconds? What did they do to retain? And then kind of make a little framework from that where it's like, oh, it's a mood board wipe. And that's the only difference. So okay, that's a thing we can test. And so I think it comes down to um setting that time because every strategist thinks that they can just scroll and when they're on social media, they're helping, but like it's really not if you're not like I need 10 bookmarks by the end of this with a framework. Uh is probably the best advice I have.

[21:23] Evan Lee: I love it. I can speak from firsthand, everyone. I took Oren's course, Cut30. It's a banger. So if you haven't had a chance, check it out. Join the next cohort. Oren, you're the man. Really appreciate you joining us.

[21:31] Oren John: All right, see you all.

[21:33] Evan Lee: So without further ado, I would love, love, love to welcome our next speaker to the stage, Ashley from Stuff About Advertising, who's probably your favorite follow on social. So everybody, let's welcome Ashley to the stage and let's show some love in the chat. > [VISUAL: Split screen. Left: Evan Lee, Head of Partnerships, Motion. Right: Ashley Rutstein, Founder, @StuffAboutAdvertising.]

[21:49] Ashley Rutstein: Hi.

[21:50] Evan Lee: Ashley, welcome to the party. I'm so happy to have you here.

[21:52] Ashley Rutstein: Thank you for having me. The chat is blowing up. I love it.

[21:56] Evan Lee: Super popping. But Ashley, I'm going to pop out, do your thing, and I'll see you at the end, okay?

[22:00] Ashley Rutstein: Amazing. > [VISUAL: Ashley Rutstein's video feed is now on the left, and her presentation appears on the right. The first slide has a crumpled paper background. Title: "Thoughts from the mind of: Ashley Rutstein". Subtitles: "Creative Director", "Founder of @StuffAboutAdvertising".]

[22:03] Ashley Rutstein: All right. So, I am going to share. Okay, so I have like a little thesis for you today that I'm very excited about. Um, just a little about me. I am a creative director and copywriter. Been working in the traditional ad agency world for 14 years now. Um, but I'm also a content creator. I make stuff on Stuff About Advertising where I just talk about the industry. So I have kind of a foot in both the big creative traditional campaign world and the content social world. So the thing I want to talk about today is a little of both. It can apply to both of those worlds. And when I was picking what I wanted to talk about today, I was thinking of something that I personally am really craving from brands. And my cat is going to join us in a second. She has to be involved in every single meeting I have. Um, but yeah, so this is something that I personally have been craving and I think the brands that embrace it next year will be the ones that stand out from the pack. > [VISUAL: Slide with a crumpled paper background. The text "Do it for the gram" is in the center.]

[23:08] Ashley Rutstein: So I would love to see some love in the chat for this old phrase. I might be dating myself here, but who remembers saying, do it for the gram? I know I've definitely said it. > [VISUAL: The slide now says "Do it on the gram", with "on" replacing "for".]

[23:21] Ashley Rutstein: But do it for the gram was all about doing things in real life so that you can go talk about it online. You were doing things that you wanted to go share later on. It was like, we have to have this experience so that we can go talk about it with our friends, family, and community, whether that's in person or online. But over time, we have kind of shifted to doing things on the gram. Everything is done on social now. So instead of documenting real life experiences on social media, we are now only experiencing social media. It's just a very different world. And because of that, all of marketing has turned into this social first need. And because of that, all of our feeds, all of the whole internet feels kind of like a simulation now. Like it doesn't really feel real all the time. And I think that has been driving so much fatigue and desire to just escape the internet and get out of all of that. And then add on top of that, AI, which we are all so familiar with now. So that has just led to this deluge of content and even less humanity in it. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "The Effort Signal". Subtitle: "Proof that there are humans behind the brand (who actually care)".] So I think the brands that will stand out from all of this, from this like simulated and disposable feeling world of social are the ones who will put effort into what they're doing and show the elbow grease and the humanity that goes into what they're putting online. And I'm calling this the effort signal because I'm a copywriter. I have to have a name, a fun name for something. But this is all about showing that your content and your ads and whatever you're putting out there were put together with thought and intention by humans who actually care about what they're doing. > [VISUAL: Slide with three green boxes labeled "1 Effort in the process", "2 Effort in understanding", "3 Effort in the form".]

[25:09] Ashley Rutstein: And I think this can come to life in a few different ways. So I want to talk about these different sort of pillars of how this can manifest, but it's effort in the process, so showing how your ads or your products get made. It's effort in understanding, which is proving that you actually know your audience on a human to human level. And then also putting effort in the form that you choose. So you're choosing formats that require work and intention, whether that's something physical or handmade or just deliberately not optimized for the algorithm. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "1 Effort in the process" with subtitle "Show your (human) hand". It shows two news headlines: "A backlash against AI imagery in ads may have begun as brands promote 'human-made'" and "Spotting AI: Knowing How to Recognise Real vs AI Images".]

[25:46] Ashley Rutstein: So first we'll talk about effort in the process. This is showing your human hand that you actually made something because obviously people are so skeptical about AI. They are actively trying to spot it in everything they look at. Of course, I'm doing it too. > [VISUAL: A screenshot of a Dove campaign pledge titled "Real" which states they will keep beauty real, free of digital and AI distortion, and never use AI imagery in place of real women.] So brands need to be very clear on their stance on AI or showing their work for whatever they're putting out there. And you can do this in a couple different ways. Like Dove just put their stance on AI out there. They said, we are not going to use it to replace real people. So you can do that. You can make your stance on AI known so that then whatever you put out there, people just know, oh, they don't use AI. > [VISUAL: A collage of three images. Left: A close-up of hands painting a small clay figure. Middle: A stop-motion scene of a coffee shop made of clay. Right: A person working on a stop-motion set. It's from Chamberlain Coffee.]

[26:30] Ashley Rutstein: But you can also show the making of whatever you're doing. So like Chamberlain Coffee made this really fun stop motion short video, but they also posted this making of video where you can see the people actually painting these characters, setting up the scenes, doing all of the behind the scenes process to tell people like, hey, we did this by hand. This was not AI. And the caption even says handcrafted just like our coffee. So this process is the proof of the effort that they put into this. > [VISUAL: A collage of two images. Left: A screenshot of a Cocokind ad showing a printed blueprint of their product's ingredients. Right: A screenshot of a Cocokind social post showing a screenshot of their team's Slack channel discussing a new product launch.]

[27:07] Ashley Rutstein: And behind the scenes doesn't just have to mean the making of the ad or the content itself. It can also mean the making of your product because a lot of companies hide the manufacturing process for a bunch of different reasons. But if you can take pride in that, you can give people a glimpse into the human hands, like literal hands in this case, um and thought and care that goes into the process of making this product. And then another example from Cocokind as well is to show there's a behind the scenes of the team itself too. This was a product launch that they were excited about and they just took a screenshot of Slack messages with the team talking about how excited they are. That shows that there are real humans behind this launch and it's not just like this faceless corporation pushing out a product. So that's effort in the process. It's just visible intention in how you're making something, whether it's your ad or your product or whatever it is. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "2 Effort in understanding" with subtitle "Prove you're paying attention". It shows two headlines: "Fandom: The Growth Engine" and "Nearly half of US consumers feel ignored by marketers".]

[28:20] Ashley Rutstein: And then there's effort in understanding. So this is just proof that you actually care enough to get to know your audience. It's crazy with all of the targeting that we have, still half of US consumers feel ignored by marketers. And then 70% of them say that they are more likely to buy from brands that engage in the hobbies and communities that they care about. > [VISUAL: A collage of images. Left: Screenshots of Facebook groups for "Lodge Cast Iron" and "No Reception Clubhouse". Right: An article about brands using Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp, with their logos.] So you need to prove to your audience that you are putting in the time and effort to understand them and their hobbies. And you can do this in a lot of different ways. There are some brands who are putting in the work to actually learn about their audience with things like Facebook groups, like Lodge Cast Iron has a Facebook group. No Reception Club, which they make the best diaper bag ever, highly recommend. They have a Facebook group where they are constantly talking to their customers. Brands are getting involved in things like Facebook groups and subreddits, Discords, WhatsApp groups, just finding these two-way spaces to interact with your people. And then whatever you learn from them, you can use to better communicate to them both in organic and paid content. And then even if you don't want to or can't for whatever reason host your own space like this, you can still get involved in your audience's niche communities and micro communities that they're involved in. Like Jack in the Box, the example on the right, Jack in the Box found this network of Fortnite related Discord servers and sponsored them. So they're not hosting this community, but they found something that their audience cares about and it shows that they took the time and effort to truly understand them. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "3 Effort in the form" with subtitle "Give it weight". It shows headlines about the comeback of fashion catalogs and the rise of "analog" hobbies and pen pals.]

[31:47] Ashley Rutstein: And then last is effort in the form. So obviously people are really craving those tangible, analog, offline experiences. It's just booming right now with stationery, magazines, vinyl records, pen pal, handwritten letters, like it is blowing up. I just got a record player myself just a few weeks ago. People are just dying for tangible things. And with this has come this resurgence of print marketing. I saw this coming a year or two ago, but now with AI, it is just really booming. Brands like J. Crew and Walmart have brought back their physical printed catalogs. And these printed physical things signal that effort and intention from the brand that cares enough to print these things or physically make something. > [VISUAL: A collage of four images showing Spotify's data-driven billboard campaigns with quirky stats about user listening habits.] Like Spotify's data driven campaigns that they've been running for years. This entire campaign is built on a very niche and specific understanding of their audience and their music preferences. And while this is on a very large scale and Spotify obviously has access to an immense amount of data that most of us don't have, you can still try to tap into some of this by just learning about the specific preferences and quirks of your customers and using those as hooks or captions or ways to just talk to them human to human. > [VISUAL: A collage of two images of billboards for Red Wing Shoes. The billboards are physically made of wood and leather, with the text "MADE THE HARD WAY" carved or embossed on them.] Like Red Wing Shoes just made this campaign where they built billboards out of literal lumber and leather saying made the hard way. The form of this is the message here. > [VISUAL: A photo of a fake engagement announcement in a real newspaper, part of a campaign for an A24 movie.] A24 to promote the new movie coming with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, put this fake engagement announcement in a real newspaper. Like they are committing to the bit with a traditional form of media with how engagement announcements are typically put out there. It's unexpected and that effort really shows. > [VISUAL: A screenshot of a J. Crew Instagram post showing a physical catalog with images that come to life as video when the page is turned.] And then like I said with brands bringing back their catalogs, like The Onion went back into print with their satirical newspaper and they brought in 50,000 new subscribers with that print newspaper. It's insane. But when you have this physical object, you can do so much content with it. You can literally just flip through the catalog on a flat lay. You can have people sitting on a couch reading it. You can tear pages out and put it on a wall. If you have a physical object, you can do so much with it. > [VISUAL: A collage of three videos from the fragrance brand Ffern. They show artistic, physical representations of their scents, including a Rube Goldberg-like machine, a giant accordion, and a flower arrangement.] This fragrance brand called Ffern has built an entire content strategy around physical creations. Every quarter or every season, they release a new scent and with that scent, they create so many different physical and visual representations of that scent, which they then turn into social ads. So they make Rube Goldberg machines, flower arrangements, paper art, they made this giant accordion. They make real things and then film them and turn them into ads, which are so eye-catching. > [VISUAL: A collage of three videos. Left: Cocokind's printed infographic. Middle: A satisfying video of a product being squeezed onto fruit. Right: A highly produced video from DedCool featuring the founder.] And sometimes it can be even simpler than that. You don't have to make some giant accordion to do this. Like this first example, they literally just printed an infographic and taped their product onto the wall. But for some reason, it sticks out because it's like, wow, they took the time to print something out. That's more effort than most brands are making right now. The middle example is just showing how the product is used on some different fruit. Like they're literally just cutting up pieces of fruit and putting the product on it. That shows more effort than most brands are putting in. And the last example is an almost four-minute video of the owner of Dedcool, a fragrance brand, just talking about her brand and why she made it and the products. But it shows so much effort because it's almost four minutes long. There's all kinds of fun, silly stuff in there. There's lots of cool editing. It doesn't look like a traditionally polished ad, but you can tell they put a lot of thought and intention into it. > [VISUAL: Slide with text "Effort is your edge" and subtitle "Show it. Know them. Make it real."]`

[35:10] Ashley Rutstein: So, overall, effort is going to be your edge in this world of AI where content is just so easy to make and everyone is so skeptical of everything they're seeing. So with every piece of content you make, just ask yourself, how can we show effort? Even if it's in a very, very small way. What signals can you add in there that help people understand there was a human being that gives a shit who put this together? It is harder, it takes more time, but that's exactly why you will stand out for doing it. > [VISUAL: Slide with social media handles for @StuffAboutAdvertising and Ashley Rutstein's LinkedIn.]

[35:44] Ashley Rutstein: So that's me. That's my thought. That's what I want to see from brands. I hope more people do that. Um, this is where you can find me if you want to talk more about it, but yeah, that's me.

[35:56] Evan Lee: Ashley, you freaking crushed it. You talked about the now, you talked about the future, and you gave us so much nostalgia along the way. Absolutely incredible. Everybody, you have to show love in the chat. And Ashley, you for sure have to go check out the chat after. It's going crazy.

[36:11] Ashley Rutstein: I will.

[36:12] Evan Lee: Thanks a ton. You're the best. I'm going to talk to you soon, okay?

[36:16] Ashley Rutstein: Bye, thank you.

[36:17] Evan Lee: The next speaker we have is Elfried Samba. This guy, I'm so excited to have my admired from afar. Uh, he was the global head of social at Gymshark. Now he's the founder of Butterfly Effect and he's going to bless us with so many insights on what we should be doing in 2026. So without further ado, I would love to welcome Elf to the stage. > [VISUAL: Split screen. Left: Evan Lee, Head of Partnerships, Motion. Right: Elfried Samba, Founder, Butterfly Effect.]

[36:39] Elfried Samba: Hello everybody. How's everyone doing?

[36:41] Evan Lee: Amazing. Elf, I'm going to pop out, do your thing, and I'll see you at the end, okay?

[36:44] Elfried Samba: All right, amazing. > [VISUAL: Elfried Samba's video feed is now on the left, and his presentation appears on the right. The first slide has a blurry background. Title: "TRUST ECONOMY" and "BUILD A BRAND WORTH TALKING ABOUT".]

[36:48] Elfried Samba: Okay, so let me share my screen so we've got something to talk through. I am assuming everybody can see that. Let's see some love in the comments section. Is everybody, can everybody see that? Okay, all good. So, um, what I want to talk about today in this brief, uh, couple of minutes is this concept of building a brand worth talking about in the, in the trust economy. We just talked a lot about AI and the word trust, uh, will play a key factor in, uh, uh, informing your marketing strategies going forward, specifically on the social media platforms. So, I'm going to go straight to it. > [VISUAL: Black slide with white text: "HI, I'M ELFRIED SAMBA".]

[37:25] Elfried Samba: So, as mentioned, my name is Elfried Samba. > [VISUAL: Black slide with white text: "'I scale community for brands and people'".] How I like to describe myself is that I scale community for brands and people. > [VISUAL: A slide showing a map of Africa with the Democratic Republic of Congo highlighted, a photo of Elfried and his family in the snow, a photo of his doctor father, and a photo of his creative mother.] I like to tell a bit of a background story about myself so you realize why you're speaking to a random guy. I'm usually wearing a fedora with my British accent. So, uh, today I'm wearing a cap. So this is the first time I'm actually doing a presentation without my fedora. So, I'm sorry to, uh, uh, short change you, uh, on this presentation. But we'll step into my story. So, uh, for those that don't know, I was born in the Democratic of Republic of Congo. So the center of Africa, hot, tropical. So you can imagine my shock when my family moved us to the UK and we saw snow for the first time. We knew nobody and nobody knew us, but one thing we wanted to do is make the most of our golden ticket of being in the UK. So, all my time, I was obviously had this pressure of becoming a doctor like my dad because obviously if you're African, that's like the greatest honor ever. So you can imagine the disappointment when you realize that I was shit at science and I had to find something else. So, I looked at my mom as a reference. She was an entrepreneur and a creative and I thought that maybe that's where my path could be. And I said, you know what? I'm going to study some of the best in the marketing and uh brand world to see where I can mimic and find some idols uh that I could be like. > [VISUAL: The previous slide's content is now smaller, with photos of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jay-Z added below.] The first person I stumbled onto was a guy called Steve Jobs. The iPhone keynote in 2007, like blew my mind forever. The whole, uh, a thousand songs in your pocket really changed my perspective on the art of storytelling and simplifying very complicated information. And I fell in love with marketing from that day. Uh, then I heard about a guy called Mark Zuckerberg who said no to a billion dollars from Yahoo because he was working on an app called Facebook. I don't know about you, but if I told my mom that I was going to say no to a billion dollars at the age of 21, 22, she'll ship me back to the Congo on the first flight. But whatever. Um, but then that was great. So I found two people that made me fall in love with marketing, social media marketing at the time. But then I needed somebody that looked like me or came from the same backgrounds that I did to be able to really get myself the permission to step into this space. And then I heard about a guy called Jay-Z. And obviously Jay-Z using rap lyrics to give out uh business news and updates, uh really started to storytell in the language that I could understand. His whole concept of women lie, men lie, numbers don't, made me fall in love with the art and science of merging creative with data and making sure that you uh spit facts, as we just said. So, with that, I went into the academic world. > [VISUAL: A photo of Elfried at his graduation with his father. Text overlay: "Goal: 'BE THE REFERENCE'".] And um, I wrote about it in my dissertation about the fact that I felt that large, uh small to medium-sized businesses will take on the larger competitors using social. And it was marked down because of lack of Harvard references. And I said that I was going to be that reference. You can clearly tell that my doctor dad was excited about the fact that he's uh failed doctor son was going to be tweeting for a living. But took that into the um the business world. > [VISUAL: A photo of Gary Vaynerchuk and Ben Francis.] Uh heard about this guy called Gary Vaynerchuk who made was the first person to not make me feel crazy. His whole jab, jab, jab, right hook, the whole concept of giving in advance before asking uh was the whole blueprint to my marketing and social media approach that I use today. I actually used it to get my first real big job in the social media space. > [VISUAL: A photo of a crowd at a Gymshark event. Text overlay: "7 YEARS".] Uh I heard about these two 19-year-olds in Birmingham, UK driving Audi R8s, uh who owned a company called Gymshark that I was a big fan of. And I said, you know what? I'm going to add everybody at Gymshark on LinkedIn. I'm going to do my jabs, send them information that I think will be valuable to them. And lo and behold, I got invited for a job interview and I spent seven years there, right? > [VISUAL: The previous slide's image with text overlays showing Gymshark's growth: "24 > 1000 Employees", "1M > 20M Followers", "£8M > £1.4B Valuation".] So, just to give you uh the ROI of my seven years at Gymshark in numbers and what we were able to achieve uh scaling community for the brand. So, we went from 24 employees to 1,000 employees. We went from 1 million followers to 20 million followers. And then we went from an 8 million pound business to a 1.4 billion pound business, all quarterbacked through social media. Now, that's all great. We were able to do that for a B2C brand. > [VISUAL: A photo of Elfried with his father and brother in front of the Gymshark HQ.] A lot of people ask me, does this apply um in other areas? So I said, you know what? > [VISUAL: A collage of photos showing Elfried and his co-founder Michael with their team and at events.] I'm going to do it. So, my dad was obviously very proud of the fact that uh of my achievements. That's the biggest ROI, of course. And he didn't have just one Samba working for the company. He had two. So we were the talk of the town, two failures, now two heroes, which is amazing. > [VISUAL: A black slide with logos of brands they are "Trusted By", including Nike, Meta, Netflix, Gymshark, FIFA, Google, McDonald's, etc.] Uh, I left Gymshark to set up my company called Butterfly Effect where we wanted to test the theory of whether community marketing applies to different industries. So, uh, that was great. So me and my co-founder Michael decided to leave and start that. We started building a community within our own brands. Not only do we help other brands scale community, which is great, we also do that for our agency itself, proving that this also works in the B2B space, which has been phenomenal. We've worked with some really great brands along this time, which has been great. So trusted by some brands that you don't know at all. > [VISUAL: A screenshot showing Elfried ranked #2 on a list of "Top 200 Creators LINKEDIN - WORLDWIDE".] > [VISUAL: A screenshot showing Elfried ranked #5 on a list of influential people in social media, alongside Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Also, a promo image for his podcast "THE BOTTLENECK PODCAST".] Um, and also, I don't like to be a hypocrite, so I'm a creator myself. So I created on LinkedIn and in 2024, I was ranked by Favicon as the second most engaged uh creator on LinkedIn globally, which is phenomenal. My mom's WhatsApp chat was buzzing that I wasn't a failure. Uh, I also started a podcast with Rory Sutherland, which has been great. He kicks my ass every week uh talking about creativity and marketing, which is phenomenal. And also, I was ranked uh the fifth uh most engaged person or influential person in social by Favicon. Too bad my bank account is nowhere near the guys that I was listed with. But again, um, uh I had to let down a few family members that came asking me for money, uh which I didn't have because I'm a brokey. > [VISUAL: A slide with the text "THAT'S GREAT FOR ME HOW IS THIS RELEVANT TO YOU?".] But that's all great for me. What does this mean for you? One, it tells you that I have the credentials. I I always like to make sure that who the information comes from is somebody that you trust. If I'm going to talk about trust marketing, you have to trust me. You have to know who I am uh before I give you any information. And we're going to step into how we actually made this happen. > [VISUAL: A black slide with white text: "WORLD BUILDING" and subtitle "Building a brand that people don't just buy from. They belong, take part and help shape what the brand stands for."]`

[43:02] Elfried Samba: It's this concept of world building uh that myself and my co-founder talk about. And it's this whole art of building a brand that people don't want to just buy from. They want to feel like they belong to, be a part of, and help shape uh where it goes, right? And I think the simpler way to say this is community. But how actually do you do this and how do you leverage social in the best way possible in 2026 to make this happen? > [VISUAL: A black slide with the question "HOW WAS THIS ACHIEVED?".] > [VISUAL: A black slide with the formula "IQ + EQ + FQ".] First and foremost, um, I talk about this concept of IQ, EQ, and FQ. So IQ is very clear. It's all about intelligence and making sure that you're utilizing the platforms, doing research, etcetera, etcetera. But now with AI, when IQ is becoming democratized and everybody has access to the same stuff, you need to be able to leverage EQ. That's emotional intelligence. Can you get people to stop scrolling and can you make it worth their time? And that's all great. So IQ and EQ is enough to make you stand out from the pack. But the real people that want to start this world building community approach are also focusing on FQ, which is all about focused intelligence. What does that actually mean? > [VISUAL: A black slide with the text "Mindset shift:".] So, it's about a mindset shift. > [VISUAL: The slide now shows "BEING: 'EVERYTHING' TO 'EVERYONE'".] Going from trying to be everything to everyone, > [VISUAL: The slide now shows "BEING: 'EVERYTHING' TO 'EVERYONE'" on the left, and "MEANING: 'EVERYTHING' TO 'SOMEONE'" on the right.] to being everything to someone, right? So this whole mass approach of just like reaching as many people as possible is great. But then if you really want to scale in 2026 going forward, you're going to focus on a on a all your efforts on a small group that they're going to tell everybody else about you. > [VISUAL: A black slide with the text "COMMUNITY = TRUST".] That's a thing that everybody talks about because community equals trust. > [VISUAL: A black slide with the text "88% of people trust 'WORD OF MOUTH' (PURCHASE DECISIONS - Nielsen study)".] And trust is the metric that matters the most, especially in the world where everyone's distrusting of everything. As soon as you see a piece of content, as soon as somebody sends you something, somebody talks about something, you don't trust it automatically. The current state of leadership is not where it needs to be right now. And people need receipts before they can make decisions or before they can give that trust away. And that's what brands need to focus on this year going forward. And how do you actually start to build trust? So a Nielsen study talked about the fact that 88% of people trust word of mouth from people that they actually know.

[45:01] Elfried Samba: And when you start to break that down a little bit more, who are those people? [45:04] Elfried Samba: So 83 to 88% trust um, uh recommendation from friends and family, online reviews is at 70 to 83%, creators is 70%. [45:13] Elfried Samba: That's actually a little bit downer because some creators are working with brands that don't align with because times are hard, you know. [45:19] Elfried Samba: But then really what is really shocking here is that only uh, uh brands only have 30% of the trust, right? [45:25] Elfried Samba: So and a lot of executives, 90% of executives still believe that they hold the trust, right? [45:30] Elfried Samba: So there's an imbalance there. [45:31] Elfried Samba: So the the simple insight there is that it's important to get other people to talk about you instead of you talking about yourself. [45:39] Elfried Samba: It's like me coming here and saying I'm a nice guy. [45:41] Elfried Samba: Really it only works if everybody else says I'm a nice guy. [45:43] Elfried Samba: It's effectively the uh, the humor in that. [45:46] Elfried Samba: But most brands are walking around just saying that they're a nice guy and people should buy from them. [45:49] Elfried Samba: It's not going to work. [45:51] Elfried Samba: So just to give you in a simple phrase, we always talk about the fact that the reason why Gymshark grew the way that it did is because more people talked about Gymshark than Gymshark itself, right? [46:01] Elfried Samba: And I can use a visual um triangle like this. [46:05] Elfried Samba: Most brands, this is what they do. [46:06] Elfried Samba: If you if you can envision this as being like a share of voice or share of conversation about the brand. [46:12] Elfried Samba: Usually they're the dictator of their own narrative and the brand hijacks most of the conversation about itself and they leave only a small amount of noise for people that are not related to the brand. [46:22] Elfried Samba: But top brands that are community-centric, they actually speak the least about themselves and create catalysts for conversations around the brand. [46:30] Elfried Samba: And if you can get to a space where we can leverage creators and work with uh your audience to be able to like increase the noise about the brand, you're more likely to win and you're more likely to be trusted. [46:40] Elfried Samba: And what you can do with that once you've got it is about leveraging the three pillars. [46:44] Elfried Samba: I like to call them the the holy grail if you will, of leveraging influencers, organic and paid to really create that flywheel. [46:51] Elfried Samba: What we did at Gymshark was instead of seeing this as separate organizations, we actually made them work together like a band, right? [46:58] Elfried Samba: They're just playing different instruments as opposed to being like individual singers yelling on top of each other. [47:03] Elfried Samba: We would use creators to create content and test market, we'll then put that content on organic and the best performing content will put on paid. [47:10] Elfried Samba: That flywheel allowed us to make sure that we're only uh expanding content that created more conversation around the brand that people actually cared about and therefore created more and more conversations around the brand as opposed to just trying to convert people uh with ads uh at first interaction. [47:27] Elfried Samba: So another thing that's really interesting that's happening around the world right now, if you look at what's just recently been happening in Meta, I don't know whether this is in the UK, in the US, but in the UK, you can actually opt out of ads, which therefore means that people, if they're are going to keep their ads on, if you're still going to be paying for ads, you need to make sure that they're great. [47:43] Elfried Samba: You need to make sure that it's things that people don't want to opt out from. [47:45] Elfried Samba: So we've already seen that on with YouTube, they've seen that actually like a lot of people have have started to opt out of the ads from that perspective. [47:54] Elfried Samba: We can start to see that happening a little bit on Meta, but still, I've been speaking to a bunch of people that love their ads if they're worth it. [48:00] Elfried Samba: So if you're going to be one of those brands that are going to be leveraging paid, if you're going to be one of those brands that are going to be creating on socials, you've got to make it worth people's time. [48:07] Elfried Samba: You've got to make sure that you're increasing those trust and connection with your brand. [48:10] Elfried Samba: Otherwise, we're just going to opt out and I don't want to see you and it's going to mess it up for everybody. [48:17] Elfried Samba: Uh, we're going to go. [48:18] Elfried Samba: So there's some other metrics that we're going to be looking at now in 2026, but I'm not going to bore you too much. [48:22] Elfried Samba: Really, you have to be asking yourself five questions. [48:25] Elfried Samba: Are we being talked about? [48:27] Elfried Samba: Do people care enough to interact with us? [48:30] Elfried Samba: Are fans proud to talk about us? [48:33] Elfried Samba: Are we fueling the right storytellers? [48:35] Elfried Samba: But then also, are we converting belief into action? [48:38] Elfried Samba: That's super, super important instead of just asking, have we converted? [48:41] Elfried Samba: You should be asking a little bit more than just transactional, uh, almost like uh, focus on your audience. [48:49] Elfried Samba: It's about world building, it's about connecting, it's about making sure that people are not just coming to you to buy, but to interact, to be entertained, to to feel like they're part of something is super, super important. [49:01] Elfried Samba: So, how do you earn trust? [49:02] Elfried Samba: I'm going to fly through this. [49:03] Elfried Samba: I don't want to take up too much more time. [49:05] Elfried Samba: Really, it takes steps, right? [49:07] Elfried Samba: You you can't just like wake up one day and have everybody trusting you. [49:11] Elfried Samba: You have to make sure that you're known, first and foremost, because how can you trust something that you don't know? [49:15] Elfried Samba: Then you have to be liked, which is super important right now, especially in the social era. [49:19] Elfried Samba: But most importantly, you have to be action-led to be able to earn trust, right? [49:23] Elfried Samba: People don't trust your words, they trust your actions, and brands that lead with actions are the ones that win and kick up the world building flywheel. [49:30] Elfried Samba: And I'm going to go really quickly on like examples of how to do that. [49:33] Elfried Samba: So being known, you have to make sure that you know the platform that you're on. [49:36] Elfried Samba: So there's this Dolly Parton meme that talked about the fact that she's four different people on four different platforms. [49:41] Elfried Samba: If one person has four different characteristics on four different platforms, then a one size fits all strategy is not going to work. [49:48] Elfried Samba: Then you have to make sure that you leverage creators, knowing the creators that already have the trust of the audience you want to interact with is super key to make sure that you can rent that trust and then eventually create that follow crossover so that their followers become your followers. [50:00] Elfried Samba: Then leveraging publishers, like a lot of people just talk about uh creators, but then what about publishers? [50:05] Elfried Samba: There's new publishers like Pubity and other publishers that we can mention that also have high trust. [50:10] Elfried Samba: Why not use them as a new canvas for your brand? [50:14] Elfried Samba: And when it comes to being liked, find a a community that's underrepresented and be their uniform, right? [50:19] Elfried Samba: You've seen that with Vans and skateboarders, you've seen that with um, uh with Red Bull and extreme sports, you've seen that with Nike and athletes. [50:27] Elfried Samba: Who is that for your brand and how do you make sure that you get that affinity from them? [50:31] Elfried Samba: Uh, uh unite them on a common cause and nemesis. [50:35] Elfried Samba: Uh document your journey as you go along because people like authenticity. [50:38] Elfried Samba: But then also make sure you have a two-way conversation, not just a dictatorship conversation. [50:42] Elfried Samba: Listen to your audience and respond back to them. [50:45] Elfried Samba: And then when it comes to being action, listen. [50:47] Elfried Samba: I love Whoop. [50:48] Elfried Samba: They showcased that actually one of their their fans were screaming out for a feature, how they launched the feature by getting the CEO to read out mean comments about them and then announcing the fact that they launched the feature finally. [51:00] Elfried Samba: Everybody knows about this with Stanley, the cup that survived. [51:03] Elfried Samba: They got a girl got her car blown up. [51:06] Elfried Samba: The only thing that survived was the Stanley cup and the CEO responded saying they're going to give her a new car and uh obviously shouted out the Stanley. [51:13] Elfried Samba: This is a Gymshark example, getting involved where it matters. [51:16] Elfried Samba: Obviously for those that are in London, they know that knife crime was on the high. [51:19] Elfried Samba: What they did is they used confiscated knives and turned them into gym equipment in sponsorship with a with a charity called Steel Warriors, which was phenomenal. [51:27] Elfried Samba: But then also just create experiences worth remembering. [51:30] Elfried Samba: So using IRL to disrupt URL, real world experience which talked about demonstrating real effort is really important to be able to win in 2026 going forward. [51:38] Elfried Samba: And so to wrap up, I spoke really, really quickly, it's important to make sure that you go away from trying to mean something to everyone to meaning everything to someone, super important. [51:48] Elfried Samba: Get everyone else to talk about you instead of you being the main character of your own narrative. [51:53] Elfried Samba: You don't want to be calling yourself a nice guy. [51:54] Elfried Samba: And also, remember it's important to not just be known, be liked, and be action-led. [52:00] Elfried Samba: Thank you. [52:01] Elfried Samba: Sorry, sped through that. [52:05] Evan Lee: Alf, you crushed it, man. [52:06] Evan Lee: You crushed it. [52:07] Evan Lee: Show love in the chat. [52:08] Evan Lee: This is one where it's like people in the recording or people in the chat are like, I need the recording. [52:12] Evan Lee: And I'm like, yep, everyone needs to watch this back. [52:14] Evan Lee: Everyone needs to watch this back. [52:16] Evan Lee: You are the man, my friend. [52:17] Evan Lee: Thank you so much. [52:18] Elfried Samba: Thank you. [52:18] Evan Lee: I need to catch you another time with a fedora on. [52:20] Evan Lee: Like that's the next version. [52:21] Elfried Samba: Thank you. [52:22] Evan Lee: You're the best. [52:22] Evan Lee: I appreciate you. [52:23] Elfried Samba: Thank you. [52:23] Evan Lee: I appreciate you a ton. [52:25] Elfried Samba: Thank you. [52:25] Evan Lee: See you in a bit. [52:26] Evan Lee: You might know her from YouTube. [52:28] Evan Lee: She's honestly my favorite person in the space. [52:30] Evan Lee: So we have to welcome the one, the only, Dara Denney to the stage, y'all. [52:34] Evan Lee: Let's show some love. [52:36] Dara Denney: Am I really your favorite? [52:38] Evan Lee: In the space. [52:39] Evan Lee: I feel like we're so close. [52:40] Evan Lee: So I I feel like I have to say that every time and I don't feel like I'm being disingenuous. [52:44] Evan Lee: So I appreciate it, Dara. [52:45] Dara Denney: Oh my god, it's such an honor. [52:47] Dara Denney: It's such an honor. [52:48] Dara Denney: I am so, so stoked about this and I can't wait to get started. [52:51] Evan Lee: Amazing. [52:52] Evan Lee: Amazing. [52:52] Evan Lee: Okay, Dara, I'm going to catch you at the end. [52:53] Evan Lee: Do your thing. [52:54] Dara Denney: Hey everyone. [52:55] Dara Denney: I am so, so stoked to get started with you guys today. [52:58] Dara Denney: We're going to get a little tactical today and we're going to talk about trends in creative analysis. [53:04] Dara Denney: And the way that I always love to start these presentations is to actually show you guys two creatives and have you guess which one you think performed best. [53:16] Dara Denney: And I'm only going to show each of these once. [53:18] Dara Denney: So lock in, pay attention, and let's see which one you think performed best. [53:24] Dara Denney: Seborrheic dermatitis really crushed my self-confidence and took away who I really was. [53:28] Dara Denney: It changed my personality because I wasn't confident anymore and it was starting to ruin my life. [53:34] Dara Denney: These And then B. [53:36] Dara Denney: What the fuck is this? [53:39] Dara Denney: If you've ever had flakes like this, I promise it's not dirt, it's not neglect, and it's definitely not your fault. [53:47] Dara Denney: I see an overwhelming amount of you guys saying B. [53:52] Dara Denney: Not many A's, which tells me that for once in this presentation, I got you. [53:57] Dara Denney: The top performing ad here was actually A. [54:01] Dara Denney: And in this presentation, we're going to dive into a little bit more of why that may be. [54:06] Dara Denney: So, for those of you that don't know me, my name is Dara Denney and I've worked as a creative strategist and media buyer for some of the top brands in D2C. [54:14] Dara Denney: And I always like to tell people that today I have three jobs. [54:18] Dara Denney: Number one, I'm a partner at a boutique ad agency. [54:20] Dara Denney: This is my business partner, Miguel. [54:22] Dara Denney: He's definitely in the chat. [54:23] Dara Denney: We work with eight and nine figure brands to supply them performance creative. [54:27] Dara Denney: But I'm also a content creator. [54:30] Dara Denney: Um, so I make content for media buyers and creative strategists and I actually hit 100k on YouTube this year. [54:35] Dara Denney: So thank you so, so much to that community that follows me over there. [54:39] Dara Denney: And then not so secretly, one of my favorites is I am chief evangelist at Motion. [54:43] Dara Denney: Now, Motion really leads the industry in supplying education for the next generation of creative strategists and that's something that is really near and dear to my heart. [54:54] Dara Denney: So today I want to talk a little bit how you should be analyzing creative in this next generation of, you know, creativity that's at everyone's fingertips, right? [55:05] Dara Denney: And what actually ends up surprising people is that I have a four-step analysis process for analyzing creatives. [55:14] Dara Denney: And it's actually the metrics that are the least important part of this process. [55:21] Dara Denney: So, when I am analyzing, hey, which creatives actually worked and which ones didn't, I like dividing those metrics into primary KPIs and storytelling KPIs. [55:32] Dara Denney: Now, your primary KPIs are going to tell you which creatives worked and which ones didn't. [55:39] Dara Denney: That is all. [55:40] Dara Denney: Sometimes I get people who come up to me and they're like, hey, but what about click through rate? [55:43] Dara Denney: Can that be an indication of a creative that's working? [55:47] Dara Denney: No, the creatives that are working on paid social are the ones who are going to get the most amount of spend and results. [55:56] Dara Denney: Everything else is what I like to call storytelling KPIs. [56:00] Dara Denney: So these are going to be able to help tell you the story potentially of why something performed or didn't perform. [56:09] Dara Denney: Which actually brings me to the next step of this process, which is the content. [56:14] Dara Denney: When you are analyzing the actual content of any creative, this is actually the most important part of the analysis process. [56:22] Dara Denney: And again, we're going to be zooming in on content level data. [56:27] Dara Denney: And I always love to start with the format because I think that this is a really easy way for people to ease into starting to analyze creative and why something may or may not be working. [56:39] Dara Denney: So, when I say format, a lot of people initially think, okay, images, videos, carousels, right? [56:45] Dara Denney: But formats actually go a lot deeper. [56:47] Dara Denney: You have your us versus them formats, you have your features point out, your founder's ads, your statistic based ads. [56:54] Dara Denney: All of these formats are things that really can go into making up a creative. [57:01] Dara Denney: But something I always want you to ask yourself is what impact can performance or what impact can format actually have on performance? [57:11] Dara Denney: I don't always find that this is the defining thing that can actually make a creative convert or perform. [57:19] Dara Denney: Something that I find is crucially important is the creator. [57:23] Dara Denney: And we got Oren right there, right? [57:25] Dara Denney: Because I'm telling you, when he's in the ads, those things convert. [57:28] Dara Denney: Your creator and the talent that you work with is more important candidly than the script, the arbitrary hooks that you're making. [57:37] Dara Denney: It is one of the most important choices. [57:39] Dara Denney: And something that I always ask myself when I am trying to reverse engineer creative, especially if they have talent in them, to what to what level is the actual creator that is selected having that impact? [57:53] Dara Denney: The next thing that's going to be crucially important is understanding what type of messaging strategies you're using inside of your creative. [57:59] Dara Denney: And I like to put these into four different buckets. [58:03] Dara Denney: So, number one is going to be what type of human desiring angle are you going after? [58:08] Dara Denney: Are you leaning into the human desire of romance, maybe social connection or tranquility or power? [58:16] Dara Denney: Or maybe you're taking a different approach and really trying to nail a certain demographic. [58:21] Dara Denney: Maybe you're looking at an age, a role they play in their life, certain types of hobbies and jobs that they have. [58:28] Dara Denney: Or maybe you want to take a bigger strategic angle. [58:31] Dara Denney: Maybe you want to go full celebrity campaign like a skims, or maybe you want to lean into negative or taboo marketing or more of a personal history angle. [58:41] Dara Denney: Another really important factor here with your messaging is going to be what part of the user journey you are really focusing on. [58:50] Dara Denney: So, all the way on the right hand side, looking at the most aware, these are people who are already inherently interested in a free masterclass. [58:59] Dara Denney: Whereas you if you look at unaware, these are people that are maybe just slightly interested with what a dating expert has to offer. [59:07] Dara Denney: So, I actually really like mapping out all of my messaging points to all of these different stages. [59:12] Dara Denney: And some formats can also lend themselves to different parts of this stage. [59:17] Dara Denney: And the next thing that we have is of course imagery. [59:21] Dara Denney: Sometimes the specific type of imagery that you use is also going to have a really big impact and is worth in-depthly analyzing. [59:28] Dara Denney: So, this can be things like your production quality. [59:31] Dara Denney: Are you using low-fi? [59:32] Dara Denney: Are you using high-fi? [59:33] Dara Denney: It could also be your setting, the color or movement play, or even your POV shot angles. [59:40] Dara Denney: Now, the big thing that I think is, you know, changing in 2026 is actually how all of these fit together to really bring up one more piece of content level data that I find a lot of advertisers are talking about today, which is all of these go into a certain persona or intended audience. [1:00:03] Dara Denney: Now, this is something that on Motion's actually actual platform that I really love because they now have the ability to look at your creatives and see which intended audiences your creatives are actually meeting. [1:00:16] Dara Denney: And if you're not a motion customer right now, this is something too that you can do with your website reviews. [1:00:21] Dara Denney: So this is an analysis I did for a recent client of mine and I said, hey, I want to look at the different audience segments we need to develop creative for so that we are more accurately speaking to their problems and their and their pain points. [1:00:34] Dara Denney: And we were able to combine those reviews as signals so that we could really zero in on the type of personas that are really going to move the needle for us. [1:00:44] Dara Denney: Now, this is even more important in the age of Andromeda, right? [1:00:47] Dara Denney: Oren touched on it earlier. [1:00:49] Dara Denney: And all that Andromeda does for the meta algorithm is it looks at the millions of potential ads that it could deliver to a single person and actually just makes a smaller group of ads. [1:01:02] Dara Denney: But what a lot of people don't talk about with Andromeda is that it's also grouping these different ads into different personas, which is why every time you're analyzing creative and you're looking at the format, the creator, the messaging, and the imagery, really think about, okay, who are we targeting with this specific creative? [1:01:23] Dara Denney: That's going to be really important for your performance moving into 2026. [1:01:28] Dara Denney: Which then leads me to the last two points of the four-step analysis process with it, which is comparison. [1:01:35] Dara Denney: So your comparison is going to essentially put all of your data into context. [1:01:39] Dara Denney: So you're going to look at your metrics and your content and you're going to be able to compare that to internal and external resources. [1:01:47] Dara Denney: So you can look at your other top performers or your performance as a whole. [1:01:53] Dara Denney: I also really like being able to compare to competitors and really understand, hey, how are our competitors using certain visuals, using certain messaging strategies over and over again so that they can reach their customers? [1:02:08] Dara Denney: This is actually something I like to do on a monthly basis so that I can track it for each of our individual competitors. [1:02:14] Dara Denney: And then the final part of the four-step analysis process is to also look at feedback, of course, and look at the type of comments and engagement your ads are getting because these are things that, you know, really can help show you, hey, this is the next type of ad that we can make potentially, but it can also give you a gut check on how your creative is landing. [1:02:39] Dara Denney: So, the analysis process does not just stop at the data. [1:02:46] Dara Denney: You have to really drill into the content piece and compare that across different data sources and also look at the feedback on those individual creatives. [1:02:57] Dara Denney: And that is all that I have today. [1:02:58] Dara Denney: Thank you so, so much for joining me. [1:02:59] Dara Denney: And if you are interested to learn more about creative strategy and analysis, I do have a creative course that is coming out early next year that I'm redoing. [1:03:08] Dara Denney: Um, it's really my life's mission to teach creative strategy. [1:03:12] Dara Denney: Um, I really love it so much. [1:03:13] Dara Denney: So thank you so much for having me. [1:03:18] Evan Lee: This is everybody's chance to slow clap in the bedrooms, their offices, wherever they're tapping in from. [1:03:24] Evan Lee: Hit that slow clap because Dara, you absolutely crushed it. [1:03:28] Evan Lee: People are like, I screenshot every slide. [1:03:30] Evan Lee: Like I have it and I'm ready to go. [1:03:32] Evan Lee: So everyone's soaking it up even though you were so kind to condense it in the 10 minutes. [1:03:37] Evan Lee: Dara, I think we have time for one question. [1:03:38] Dara Denney: Yeah, let's do it. [1:03:38] Evan Lee: I think we have time for one question if you're cool with it. [1:03:39] Evan Lee: Perfect. [1:03:40] Evan Lee: So one question that I saw pop up in the chat, they were asking, well, someone said, why is Dara so cool? [1:03:45] Evan Lee: But the other one is, what's the difference between strategy angle and formats from a definition perspective? [1:03:51] Dara Denney: Oh yeah, this is a really good question. [1:03:53] Dara Denney: I'd say that the strategy angle is actually something that could be inserted into different formats. [1:04:00] Dara Denney: Like for instance, you can do a piece of celebrity content or a celebrity like big strategy angle in multiple different formats. [1:04:08] Dara Denney: So every time you see a big celebrity campaign, often times you'll also see out of home, so big billboards, TV campaigns. [1:04:15] Dara Denney: The the format is how it's actually showing up on your individual platforms, but the strategy is really something that can go cross platform and something that's just like a little bit more mix and match. [1:04:29] Evan Lee: Incredible. [1:04:29] Evan Lee: Dara, you are the best. [1:04:31] Evan Lee: I'm going to talk to you really soon. [1:04:32] Evan Lee: I appreciate the time. [1:04:33] Dara Denney: Thank you. [1:04:33] Evan Lee: You guys killed it. [1:04:34] Dara Denney: Thank you. [1:04:34] Evan Lee: Thank you. [1:04:35] Evan Lee: Show love in the chat, everybody. [1:04:36] Evan Lee: Show love in the chat. [1:04:37] Evan Lee: I'm so excited to have this guy here. [1:04:39] Evan Lee: Whether you know him from Hoop Talk, letting it fly, or his incredible newsletter, or honestly just being funny as hell in the chat. [1:04:47] Evan Lee: We got Jack Appleby here. [1:04:49] Evan Lee: So everybody, we got to welcome Jack to the stage. [1:04:52] Jack Appleby: I love that hoops comes up before marketing now. [1:04:54] Jack Appleby: I've been in marketing for 15 years and two years of basketball videos and now here we are. [1:05:00] Evan Lee: It's just because it's me. [1:05:01] Evan Lee: I think because like basketball is so near and dear to my heart, it's like I got to. [1:05:03] Evan Lee: I got to. [1:05:04] Evan Lee: Another person who's hooping, have to shout him out. [1:05:06] Jack Appleby: But Jack, I'm going to pop out. [1:05:07] Evan Lee: Do your thing. [1:05:08] Evan Lee: I'll see you at the end, okay? [1:05:09] Jack Appleby: I appreciate it. [1:05:10] Jack Appleby: Um, also in Dara's just like, oh, like that's all I have time for. [1:05:12] Jack Appleby: Like she just threw so much stuff where I'm like, I'm trying to get the recording. [1:05:16] Jack Appleby: I know her personally. [1:05:17] Jack Appleby: I like learned way too much in that 10 minutes right there. [1:05:20] Jack Appleby: So, hi everybody. [1:05:21] Jack Appleby: Uh, lots of talks today. [1:05:23] Jack Appleby: You've heard so much already. [1:05:24] Jack Appleby: Everyone's powering through. [1:05:26] Jack Appleby: Um, and you just saw lots of creative examples from Elfried and Dara and you're going to see absolutely none here. [1:05:32] Jack Appleby: Um, it's going to be a lot of text. [1:05:33] Jack Appleby: We're going to talk about concepts, we're going to talk about ideas, and that is all we're going to talk about here because I really do believe if you're going to make great social content, it's really about having two best practices and that's what's most important here. [1:05:47] Jack Appleby: And you know what, me presenting in this format, we'll we'll lead, this will actually be a tie in here at some point. [1:05:51] Jack Appleby: Um, but if you don't know me, hi, my name is Jack Appleby. [1:05:54] Jack Appleby: I've worked in social media strategy for 15 years now for some of the brands you see on screen, um, as well as a lot more. [1:06:02] Jack Appleby: Usually agency side. [1:06:04] Jack Appleby: And kind of during that time, like worked for brands with $0 and worked on $20 million ad campaigns, $2 million creative social AORs, all every version of social you could possibly have. [1:06:16] Jack Appleby: And I decided to start writing about the industry while doing it. [1:06:19] Jack Appleby: Uh, ended up developing about 80,000 followers on LinkedIn, the same on Twitter, and then about the same in my newsletter Future Social, um, where I write about social media strategy daily on LinkedIn and weekly in my newsletter. [1:06:31] Jack Appleby: And then just for fun, started my adult basketball comeback, uh, as how to hoop forever on Instagram and Tik Tok where I have almost another 200,000 followers who don't know that I've ever worked a day in marketing. [1:06:43] Jack Appleby: So I have two internet presences. [1:06:45] Jack Appleby: Uh, I would love to have you follow either or both depending on which one makes the most sense to you. [1:06:50] Jack Appleby: Um, and before we get into the full weight of the talk, I will say this is normally an hour long talk. [1:06:56] Jack Appleby: So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to publish the full version of the slideshow on my LinkedIn account, like that is my actual God-given name. [1:07:03] Jack Appleby: You can search me on any social platform. [1:07:04] Jack Appleby: There it is. [1:07:06] Jack Appleby: Um, or if you subscribe to my newsletter Future Social, you'll get the full deck version as well as the 150 essays I've written over the last three years about social media strategy. [1:07:17] Jack Appleby: So I would love to have you there. [1:07:18] Jack Appleby: Uh, but we're already three minutes in. [1:07:19] Jack Appleby: So let's get to the meat of this. [1:07:22] Jack Appleby: I really do believe if you want to make great social content, there are only two best practices that actually matter. [1:07:29] Jack Appleby: Uh, there are a lot of lies you've been sold over the last couple years where we think things like platform growth hacks or like perfect pixel sizing and resizing for every single platform. [1:07:40] Jack Appleby: If I hear one more person ask me about optimal post times, I'm probably going to scream at this point. [1:07:44] Jack Appleby: Um, and if you didn't see it, literally an hour ago, Instagram officially announced five hashtags per post. [1:07:50] Jack Appleby: That's all you get now. [1:07:51] Jack Appleby: So I don't even have to answer that question anymore. [1:07:53] Jack Appleby: All of these things, they're interesting, they move you a couple of percentage points maybe, but they are not the most important thing. [1:08:03] Jack Appleby: The two things you really got to focus on if you're making great social content or great advertising campaigns that will then affect your paid content. [1:08:11] Jack Appleby: You got to have really truly great creative ideas. [1:08:15] Jack Appleby: You got to have really truly great creative hooks. [1:08:18] Jack Appleby: Um, I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. [1:08:20] Jack Appleby: When I started working in social, Instagram wasn't on Android, Facebook didn't have video. [1:08:26] Jack Appleby: YouTube had 301 plus, which might be a number many of us don't even remember at this point. [1:08:31] Jack Appleby: The fundamentals of social as many times we had different algorithms or platforms, the fundamentals haven't changed. [1:08:37] Jack Appleby: And that's the most important thing for you to learn if you are a social strategist or a paid advertiser or anybody else making content for these platforms. [1:08:47] Jack Appleby: And this is the one piece of creative that you're going to see in this presentation, uh, because besides my marketing presence and my basketball presence, I may or may not have like a secret emo Tik Tok account where I make content about my old warp tour days. [1:09:00] Jack Appleby: The reason I'm showing you this silliness, uh, is this Tik Tok did several hundred thousand views. [1:09:06] Jack Appleby: There I am painfully sitting here like this. [1:09:09] Jack Appleby: And I'm in front of uh a tweet that is a very hyper niche emo reference. [1:09:15] Jack Appleby: Why am I showing you this right now? [1:09:18] Jack Appleby: Because this comment on that Tik Tok really summarizes like one of my core beliefs about social media. [1:09:24] Jack Appleby: It's not about making perfect looking things. [1:09:27] Jack Appleby: It's about what is the story you're telling, what does the content actually share, what's the emotional value you get from this? [1:09:33] Jack Appleby: Because this is literally a Tik Tok of me green screening in front of a screenshot of an Instagram post that is a screenshot of a tweet. [1:09:39] Jack Appleby: There is not one thing optimized about this, but it did several hundred thousand views because people were able to figure out what we were talking about there. [1:09:48] Jack Appleby: And that is so much more important than perfect production value. [1:09:53] Jack Appleby: So, obviously the question here is, how do you get to great ideas and hooks? [1:09:57] Jack Appleby: What does that even mean for social media content? [1:09:59] Jack Appleby: And again, normally an hour long talk, we're going to power through a handful of these right now. [1:10:05] Jack Appleby: So much of it comes from brainstorming. [1:10:08] Jack Appleby: Like, I do think it's cliche to reference Mr. Beast on one of these kind of meetings, but there's a reason he's the best at this stuff and has a half million uh or 500 million YouTube subs. [1:10:18] Jack Appleby: Brainstorming is everything. [1:10:20] Jack Appleby: And I truly believe we don't spend enough time thinking through ideas at the macro level or the micro level. [1:10:26] Jack Appleby: So what I really hope when you're brainstorming social content, it's not about, oh, I saw this trend or oh, I saw this visual format. [1:10:32] Jack Appleby: It's about what is a belief that you hold as someone who works for the brand? [1:10:36] Jack Appleby: What's the tension that the audience can feel? [1:10:38] Jack Appleby: What's a story that only your brand can tell? [1:10:42] Jack Appleby: And like, maybe it's because I'm 37 now and past my LOL chuckles phase of marketing and life. [1:10:49] Jack Appleby: But I think almost one of the biggest things many people are missing, especially in organic social right now, is focusing on the emotional benefits that your brand or product or even that piece of content can provide the audience. [1:11:02] Jack Appleby: Yes, there's a lot of focus on Gen Z laughter right now within social content. [1:11:07] Jack Appleby: I think we forget that fundamentally, we're trying to make people's lives better with the products that we work for and we are solving a lot of problems that people have. [1:11:16] Jack Appleby: And this is something you learn in a marketing 101 class, but it's not being integrated into modern social a lot of times. [1:11:21] Jack Appleby: So, please, when you're brainstorming, how are you bringing the emotional benefits of your product to life? [1:11:28] Jack Appleby: Which I love that Dara got this question at the end when we talked about campaigns versus tactics versus individual uh concepts. [1:11:36] Jack Appleby: I really hope when you're brainstorming for your brand at a macro level, you need to think in ideas before you think in tactics. [1:11:43] Jack Appleby: What's a tactic? [1:11:45] Jack Appleby: Like, I'm sure for all the paid advertisers here, I'm sure you've talked about the different visual formats, like the screenshot of the text message is like a really common ad, or maybe it's like handwritten or what those might be. [1:11:56] Jack Appleby: Those are tactics and it's good for you to know all the tactics. [1:11:59] Jack Appleby: But you also need to think in the ideas that we talked about. [1:12:02] Jack Appleby: How are you making people's lives better? [1:12:05] Jack Appleby: What is the takeaway we want someone to have from this? [1:12:07] Jack Appleby: What do we want them to action against? [1:12:09] Jack Appleby: You'll have a million tactics. [1:12:10] Jack Appleby: You can scroll and learn a bunch of tactics, but getting as good as possible at brainstorming full ideas that have real emotional resonance, that's where you become a really expert level marketer. [1:12:22] Jack Appleby: And this is one of my favorite like gut checks to use on any piece of social content. [1:12:27] Jack Appleby: If you pretend any Instagram reel, Tik Tok, static post carousel, pretend that you need a YouTube title for that piece of content. [1:12:36] Jack Appleby: The reason why, if you can't summarize what that post is supposed to mean in five to seven words, I would bet that the concept you're trying to portray is not going to come through in that creative. [1:12:48] Jack Appleby: So, always be able to come up with a one liner when you're looking at a piece of creative that you might want to put out in the world. [1:12:53] Jack Appleby: Do people understand it when you say it in that one sentence? [1:12:58] Jack Appleby: Uh, another one of my favorites, learn from creators, not other brands. [1:13:01] Jack Appleby: Uh, when I worked in Telco, I was like, I I don't care what the other telecommunications companies are doing. [1:13:06] Jack Appleby: That's not going to help us. [1:13:08] Jack Appleby: I want to see how people are infiltrating the feed. [1:13:10] Jack Appleby: One of my favorite creative director quotes was uh an old CD at Adidas said like, we're not competing with Nike, we're competing with Netflix. [1:13:17] Jack Appleby: This is about share of attention on social. [1:13:19] Jack Appleby: So go learn from who's doing the best work out there and the most creative work, not necessarily just your competitors. [1:13:25] Jack Appleby: And that's why you should watch what's trending and theorize why it's trending. [1:13:28] Jack Appleby: I stole this from Patty Galloway, he's a YouTube strategist. [1:13:31] Jack Appleby: He encourages everybody to go scroll and think why something is succeeding because that trains that part of your brain to be able to brainstorm better what else might succeed. [1:13:41] Jack Appleby: Sounds simple, sounds super fundamental. [1:13:42] Jack Appleby: I promise it helps. [1:13:43] Jack Appleby: I do this literally every day. [1:13:47] Jack Appleby: Um, and then finally, just do the work over and over and over again. [1:13:50] Jack Appleby: Like I know for the paid advertisers on this call, like you have like you're versioning to death, you're AB testing, you're really good at this. [1:13:57] Jack Appleby: For the organic social folks on this, this is where like when I used to manage bands, which is another side quest I had back in the day. [1:14:03] Jack Appleby: If my band comes into a studio with 12 songs to record a 12 song album, we've done something wrong. [1:14:08] Jack Appleby: You need some B sides, you need some additional material. [1:14:11] Jack Appleby: You got to have more things that you're trying. [1:14:13] Jack Appleby: So just do the work over and over again. [1:14:16] Jack Appleby: And again, these are the places to find me on the internet where I'll publish a lot more of this stuff. [1:14:21] Jack Appleby: That is my like no exhale nine or 10 minute talk. [1:14:25] Jack Appleby: But thank you guys for listening to this. [1:14:27] Jack Appleby: I hope you got something out of it. [1:14:28] Jack Appleby: Uh, appreciate you guys. [1:14:31] Evan Lee: Jack, killed it. [1:14:33] Evan Lee: People in the chat are like, I screenshot every slide. [1:14:36] Evan Lee: Like I have it and I'm ready to go. [1:14:38] Evan Lee: So everyone's soaking it up even though you were so kind to condense it in 10 minutes. [1:14:43] Evan Lee: Jack, I want to ask you a couple questions though since you since you wrapped up on good timing here. [1:14:47] Evan Lee: So the first one that I have is actually referencing your last statement around like there's paid marketers here, then there's organic social people here. [1:14:53] Evan Lee: I'm curious how you think about the overlap these days and like how people are thinking about uh like you talked about hooks of course. [1:15:01] Evan Lee: But outside of hooks, like how are you thinking about the overlap between the two and any higher level thoughts you might have? [1:15:06] Jack Appleby: I mean, I would hope that different people are managing both those because they are different skill sets, right? [1:15:10] Jack Appleby: Um, but the thing that's was tough even when I was at the agency side, both sides can learn from each other. [1:15:16] Jack Appleby: There are things that the paid marketers learn just from again, like volume of paid testing that I can't get to because at the end of the day, I'm only posting once per day per brand. [1:15:26] Jack Appleby: But at the same time, as an organic marketer, there's so many insights I can get to from things that we've tried either for like short form or mid form content or even just the hooks that we should pass along there. [1:15:37] Jack Appleby: Of course, everything needs to fit under one campaign, so it's like a cohesive message. [1:15:40] Jack Appleby: But I just encourage everyone to talk to everyone on all teams. [1:15:44] Jack Appleby: Like you'd be amazed what you can learn and you'd be amazed how infrequently everybody talks. [1:15:49] Evan Lee: Jack, I love it. [1:15:50] Evan Lee: I love how many seasons of life you've gone through too and like bringing some back like now back to the forefront. [1:16:00] Evan Lee: You are the best. [1:16:01] Evan Lee: I sincerely appreciate you uh taking the time. [1:16:03] Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, you got to show love. [1:16:05] Evan Lee: Got to show love and what a better way than LeBron in the chat. [1:16:08] Evan Lee: That's the best way to go out on this one. [1:16:11] Evan Lee: Appreciate you, my friend. [1:16:12] Jack Appleby: Thank you. [1:16:12] Evan Lee: Appreciate you. [1:16:13] Jack Appleby: Thank you. [1:16:13] Evan Lee: The next person that I would love to welcome to the stage is Joanna Wallace. [1:16:18] Evan Lee: She's one of the brightest thinkers in creative strategy and someone I've always quite admired. [1:16:22] Evan Lee: And she's currently the VP of creative strategy at the men's apparel brand, Bird Dogs. [1:16:27] Evan Lee: So everybody, let's welcome Joe to the stage here. [1:16:30] Joanna Wallace: Hello. [1:16:32] Evan Lee: Um, if Evan, God, I want to hire Evan to be my hype person. [1:16:36] Evan Lee: Like every Monday morning, I want Evan to just be like, you got this, Joe. [1:16:40] Evan Lee: Perfect. [1:16:41] Joanna Wallace: Um, I am Joanna and uh what you can know about me is the following. [1:16:49] Joanna Wallace: Um, so I'm currently the VP of paid media creative at Bird Dogs. [1:16:54] Joanna Wallace: Um, you can trust me, um, because I was previously the director of paid media at Hexclad where I built and scaled the internal team, systems and processes from the ground up. [1:17:07] Joanna Wallace: Um, I spent nearly a decade in paid media advertising. [1:17:11] Joanna Wallace: I did my time in agencies, consulting, uh, leading paid media teams managing up to 3.5 million in monthly spend. [1:17:21] Joanna Wallace: Um, I've worked with brands like True Classic and Waterboy and Dr. Squatch. [1:17:26] Joanna Wallace: I host a show called Fix it in Post on YouTube with Recharm, which is my other emotional support, uh, D2C platform. [1:-1:00] Joanna Wallace: Um, and it's about real world challenges and, you know, stuff in the industry and giving advice very much like this, um, with some wit and sarcasm. [1:18:42] Joanna Wallace: Um, but basically the big, the big thing I really care about in this industry is, um, how to get the best out of creative teams while not destroying their will to live. [1:18:50] Joanna Wallace: I think that being a creative is incredibly hard, being a strategist is incredibly hard, and it's important to, uh, know how to lead creatives and and get them, get their best work out of them without them burning out. [1:19:01] Joanna Wallace: So, I want to walk through today, um, a lesson, a case study that we had from Bird Dogs this Q4. [1:19:10] Joanna Wallace: Um, it's about how starting gifting messaging earlier in the season, um, changed and expanded who actually was buying on Black Friday. [1:19:18] Joanna Wallace: And it revealed a lot to us about how we want to think about tent pole events for 2026. [1:19:24] Joanna Wallace: Okay. [1:19:25] Joanna Wallace: Come on, buddy. [1:19:26] Joanna Wallace: Hey, we did it. [1:19:27] Joanna Wallace: Okay, great. [1:19:28] Joanna Wallace: So, let's talk about the common mistake that I've seen people make with tent pole events. [1:19:34] Joanna Wallace: So, yes, we are all trying to fill up the funnel all year, but when it comes to like big sales, people really start, like wait until the sale to tell the story. [1:19:46] Joanna Wallace: We assume that urgency and a discount is going to do all the work for us. [1:19:51] Joanna Wallace: And that's a mistake because by the time you get to a tent pole event like a Black Friday, buyers have often already decided what they're going to buy or at least a large percentage of personas, early planners have decided. [1:20:06] Joanna Wallace: They are just waiting for permission and the moment to strike. [1:20:10] Joanna Wallace: So, if you are starting your messaging when the sale starts, you're late. [1:20:15] Joanna Wallace: Um, and you're asking urgency to create demand instead of just releasing it. [1:20:20] Joanna Wallace: So, this is the trap that this case study helped us avoid. [1:20:26] Joanna Wallace: Okay. [1:20:28] Joanna Wallace: So, the problem we were trying to solve and the question we were trying to answer is how do you bring in a new buyer during peak season without relying on discounts? [1:20:39] Joanna Wallace: So, for some context, Bird Dogs has historically skewed male, which makes sense because it's a men's clothing brand. [1:20:48] Joanna Wallace: But holiday is a gifting moment. [1:20:51] Joanna Wallace: And in gifting moments, the buyer and the consumer, in this case, the wearer, are not often the same person. [1:21:00] Joanna Wallace: So, in particular, Q4 is when women's purchasing power like blows up. [1:21:07] Joanna Wallace: About 62% of Black Friday shoppers in the US are women and they are typically the ones buying the volume of gifts, the gifts for everyone on the list. [1:21:18] Joanna Wallace: Men, listen, it may sound sexist, I'm following the data. [1:21:22] Joanna Wallace: Men usually probably have like one or two gifts that they're doing their girlfriend, their wife, whatever. [1:21:27] Joanna Wallace: The woman of the household is generally doing the bulk of the shopping. [1:21:31] Joanna Wallace: So, if we wanted real growth, we had to figure out how do you speak to that buyer earlier than everyone else during the most competitive moment of the year. [1:21:48] Joanna Wallace: And get them when you hadn't traditionally been even trying to, you know, putting a lot of focus into getting the female buyer. [1:21:58] Joanna Wallace: So, I started at Bird Dogs the last week of September and the first thing my team and I did was gifting messaging. [1:22:06] Joanna Wallace: Like no foundational administrative stuff. [1:22:09] Joanna Wallace: Our spreadsheets were a mess. [1:22:10] Joanna Wallace: It did not matter. [1:22:11] Joanna Wallace: Boom, gifting. [1:22:12] Joanna Wallace: That is the priority. [1:22:13] Joanna Wallace: That's where the money is. [1:22:14] Joanna Wallace: We can have a messy spreadsheet. [1:22:15] Joanna Wallace: So that was intentional and that's because it is the last window that we had with reasonable CPMs and we needed to use that time to learn as much as possible before Black Friday. [1:22:25] Joanna Wallace: So, if women are the biggest gifting audience, they are the priority to go after. [1:22:31] Joanna Wallace: So, everything we did in October and early November was about teaching, not selling. [1:22:36] Joanna Wallace: So, for those of you who watch my Recharm show, I broke this down in like intense detail when I was doing my Q4 prep episode, but now that I have the case study to prove my theories, um, I can, you know, relay this to you now with actual facts. [1:22:49] Joanna Wallace: Um, so Black at people don't wake up on Black Friday and suddenly decide that they need to buy gifts. [1:22:55] Joanna Wallace: They there is an early planner persona that is massive. [1:22:59] Joanna Wallace: Nearly 45% of shoppers start looking before November. [1:23:03] Joanna Wallace: So these are motivated buyers. [1:23:04] Joanna Wallace: These are people in research mode and they are primed to learn about your product. [1:23:08] Joanna Wallace: Like everyone's mom is like this. [1:23:09] Joanna Wallace: We all know this person. [1:23:10] Joanna Wallace: There's a lot of them. [1:23:12] Joanna Wallace: So, we launched gifting and female led messaging really early. [1:23:15] Joanna Wallace: There was no urgency, there was no deal. [1:23:18] Joanna Wallace: It was all about like reassurance, confidence, and the clarity around why Black Friday is a good gift. [1:23:24] Joanna Wallace: I'm sorry, why Bird Dogs is a good gift for Black Friday. [1:23:28] Joanna Wallace: Um, and these ads didn't look like the rest of the ads that we'd run throughout the year because they were not going to men 25 to 34, our traditional bread and butter. [1:23:36] Joanna Wallace: They were tailor made using best practices to convert women, particularly older women because they have all the money and are the biggest purchasers at the moment in this time of year. [1:23:47] Joanna Wallace: So, doing this early gave us time for two really important things. [1:23:52] Joanna Wallace: The first is that it gave the algorithm time to learn a new buyer. [1:23:56] Joanna Wallace: So platforms don't pivot overnight. [1:23:58] Joanna Wallace: They need a few weeks to catch up to the humans. [1:24:00] Joanna Wallace: Um, and second of all, it gave us time to iterate creatively. [1:24:04] Joanna Wallace: So, you know, when you're looking for that amazing, perfect mega ad, it's not usually that first stab. [1:24:10] Joanna Wallace: It's usually like round two or three after you've done some iterations and you've gotten data and you've been able to cobble together based on your metrics, the perfect ad. [1:24:18] Joanna Wallace: And that's what happened to us. [1:24:20] Joanna Wallace: We were able to do two to three rounds of of iterations and we found this mega ad and it just, well, we'll get to how it performed. [1:24:28] Joanna Wallace: But, um, but yeah, so that was the, that is the plan. [1:24:32] Joanna Wallace: And to be clear, none of this is like a brand new concept. [1:24:35] Joanna Wallace: Um, I've seen this framework work before. [1:24:37] Joanna Wallace: I used it at Hexclad as well. [1:24:39] Joanna Wallace: The difference is how it translated in Bird Dogs in a different category, a different customer, and a gifting moment where the the buyer and the wearer are not the same person. [1:24:53] Joanna Wallace: So, we got some early signals. [1:24:59] Joanna Wallace: We could see demand forming before Black Friday. [1:25:02] Joanna Wallace: So that was by looking at the soft metrics. [1:25:05] Joanna Wallace: They were guiding us. [1:25:06] Joanna Wallace: So female click through rate was up 77% year over year. [1:25:10] Joanna Wallace: Hook rates were stronger. [1:25:11] Joanna Wallace: They were outperforming men. [1:25:14] Joanna Wallace: Um, engagement was improving and this is all without any urgency. [1:25:18] Joanna Wallace: So this told us that while people aren't buying yet, they are learning and remembering us. [1:25:22] Joanna Wallace: We're getting into carts. [1:25:23] Joanna Wallace: Um, and that's exactly what we wanted at that stage. [1:25:25] Joanna Wallace: No one's going to buy in October. [1:25:26] Joanna Wallace: You have to let that go. [1:25:27] Joanna Wallace: It's okay. [1:25:29] Joanna Wallace: October is not a conversion month, it's a learning month. [1:25:32] Joanna Wallace: Um, and you need October to give you the signals to crush it in November. [1:25:37] Joanna Wallace: Okay. [1:25:38] Joanna Wallace: We're going the wrong way. [1:25:39] Joanna Wallace: Here we go. [1:25:40] Joanna Wallace: Okay. [1:25:41] Joanna Wallace: So, what happened during Black Friday? [1:25:43] Joanna Wallace: So, one really important clarification here is that we didn't run a traditional sale. [1:25:48] Joanna Wallace: There was no percentage off, there was no sitewide discount. [1:25:51] Joanna Wallace: Um, we were offering a gift aligned deal, which was buy two items, get two free gifts. [1:25:56] Joanna Wallace: So, what happened with performance? [1:25:58] Joanna Wallace: We had a huge increase in new customer purchases, particularly female customers. [1:26:03] Joanna Wallace: And our post purchase surveys confirmed this. [1:26:06] Joanna Wallace: Most buyers were female new customers who had just found out about the brand within the past few weeks, specifically because of an ad. [1:26:13] Joanna Wallace: So this was a major shift from the year before where we had female buyers, but we hadn't truly, you know, really consciously attacked them. [1:26:22] Joanna Wallace: Uh, that sounded violent. [1:26:23] Joanna Wallace: Uh, so what is important is that Black Friday did not introduce the brand. [1:26:27] Joanna Wallace: It converted people who already knew us because of the effort we put in in October and early November. [1:26:37] Joanna Wallace: So, I want to talk about the two types of ads. [1:26:42] Joanna Wallace: These evergreen gifting ads that were already in the account marinating, um, you know, doing their job for a month and then these new Black Friday specific ads. [1:26:52] Joanna Wallace: So, our evergreen gifting ads drove a ton of performance during Black Friday. [1:26:56] Joanna Wallace: They didn't stop working once the sale, once the deal happened. [1:27:00] Joanna Wallace: Um, they continued to acquire new customers throughout the period. [1:27:03] Joanna Wallace: But we'd already proved the product was good. [1:27:05] Joanna Wallace: We weren't relying on a deal to get them to click through. [1:27:09] Joanna Wallace: Um, they weren't just there for the discount. [1:27:10] Joanna Wallace: They genuinely wanted the product. [1:27:12] Joanna Wallace: We had convinced them. [1:27:13] Joanna Wallace: Um, but at the same time, the Black Friday specific ads were much more bottom of the funnel. [1:27:17] Joanna Wallace: They were especially effective at converting returning and high intent buyers and basically providing that final push to act. [1:27:26] Joanna Wallace: So the two things, the two types of ads really worked together is what allowed us to scale without breaking performance. [1:27:35] Joanna Wallace: So, then we get to December. [1:27:37] Joanna Wallace: Um, and it's really important because, you know, the deal is over, but it is still gifting season and this strategy continued to work. [1:27:44] Joanna Wallace: It had legs. [1:27:46] Joanna Wallace: So, evergreen ads have been continuing to acquire new customers and holiday campaigns were about 94% new customer driven. [1:27:53] Joanna Wallace: So, this is how we knew that gifting was the strategy and the deal was just the accelerator.

[1:28:02] Joanna Wallace: Um, so this we'll talk about this demographic shift here. So starting earlier, like I said, changed who bought. When we zoom out year over year, the impact becomes very clear. Um, performance was driven by an increase in female customers. Female the percentage of buyers, uh, that were female increased 13%, but men's the men purchasers still grew. We were not cannibalizing the market. We were expanding it, um, which is really, really important. We did not abandon our core demographic. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "WHAT THIS PROVED". The slide states, "Black Friday Didn't Create Demand. It Released Demand That Already Existed." Bullet points are "October taught new buyers" and "BFCM gave permission to act". The bottom text reads, "This is why performance looked different than 2024."] [1:28:34] Joanna Wallace: And what this proved is that, like I said, Black Friday did not create demand. It released demand that already existed. So, everything before the deal was about teaching and the deal just gave people permission to act. And that's why performance looked so different. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "THE TAKEAWAYS FOR 2026". The slide presents "The repeatable framework: Marinate >> Motivate >> Monetize" with bullet points explaining each step. It also lists where this framework applies: Mother's Day, Father's Day, Back to School, and Holiday.] [1:28:49] Joanna Wallace: So, for 2026, the there's this repeatable framework that we all should think about when we're going into tent pole events like Mother's Day, Father's Day, back to school, holidays, whatever your product like aligns with, whatever tent pole event. And the framework is marinate, motivate, monetize. So, marinate starts about a month before the tent pole event. It's where you teach the buyer. You are not asking them for action. You are just building familiarity and confidence and clarity about why this is a good choice. Then you move to motivate. That's your tent pole window. That's where your urgency or value belongs. This is not education. It's giving a people reason for people to act now. And then monetize is about scaling what's working. So you can keep an evergreen ad on because it's still acquiring new customers and you just layer in your tent pole specific creative to close high intent and returning buyers. So, at that point, you're not guessing, you're just amplifying proven winners. Um, yes. So that > [VISUAL: Slide titled "THE TAKEAWAYS FOR 2026". The slide lists four key takeaways: 1. Start Early Before CPMs Spike, 2. Teach the Real Decision-Maker First, 3. Let the Algorithm Learn Before You Ask it to Scale, and 4. Use Tentpoles to Convert, Not Explain. Each point has sub-bullets with more detail.] [1:29:48] Joanna Wallace: So the final slide to summarize, um, this is how I'm going to be going into 2026 and how I'm going to be thinking about this. So, you start early enough before the pressure hits, before CPMs go up. Once CPMs are up, you are not testing, you're just hoping and praying and, you know, crying. Um, you prioritize the real decision maker. Figure out who that is for that tent pole event. You know, for mothers, maybe it's fathers or kids. For Father's Day, it's probably mothers leading the charge. Um, and you you really you really want to focus on that person. You don't want to go after like these small random personas. Think about who is your money maker and go after them. You are also giving the algorithm time to learn, uh, and creative time to iterate before you ask it to scale because you can't shortcut that. And then finally, you are using tent poles to convert, not explain. So, really, ultimately, the biggest wins for tent pole events don't come from the week everybody's obsessed with and like refreshing Shopify. They come from the weeks before that. So, the performance of your tent pole event isn't about just about the ads you made for it. It's about whether you did your homework leading up to that event. > [VISUAL: The presentation view changes to a Canva editor interface, showing the same "THE TAKEAWAYS FOR 2026" slide. A new speaker, Evan Lee, appears in a video window.] [1:30:57] Evan Lee: Round of applause, everybody. Round of applause. [1:31:02] Joanna Wallace: Thank you. [1:31:02] Evan Lee: Joanna, we have time for one question that popped up. [1:31:04] Joanna Wallace: Awesome. [1:31:05] Evan Lee: Cool. So, I can actually pull this one on screen, but I'll just uh, I'll try my best to summarize what I see. > [VISUAL: A split-screen view appears with Joanna Wallace on the left and Evan Lee on the right. A comment from Kira Llagas is displayed: "For Joanna Wallace: how are your teams producing the creative quickly and efficiently when social platforms require you to pivot fast once you see what's working or not?"] [1:31:13] Evan Lee: So, how are your teams producing the creative quickly and efficiently? [1:31:18] Joanna Wallace: Hmm. Yes. So, I think it's important to, don't wait. There's like this this window between I have enough signal to think that this is doing well and it's got 100,000 spend. It's proven that it's doing well. Now I can officially, you know, uh, scale it. You got to really look at those early indicators and you got to act fast. Um, so for my team, it's very much of what is the light lift way that you can scale while you work in the background on the heavier lifts. So, if something is really working, we can do a quick visual refresh. We can change the POV. Maybe it's male voiceover, now it's going to be female voiceover. Now it's changing to, you know, speaking to older women versus younger women. Um, meanwhile, I'll go and, you know, my team will go and do all the heavy lifting of let's go find a new creator. Let's go think of a new style. Let's go build out graphics. Those things take longer. So you really have to have those light lift ways of like immediate scaling and then you can have your grand plans roll out a little bit slower. [1:32:18] Evan Lee: Joe, you're incredible. The examples and the and especially with the data behind it, absolutely amazing. Thanks a ton. I'm going to talk to you really soon, okay? [1:32:25] Joanna Wallace: Thank you. Thanks so much. [1:32:27] Evan Lee: We have our final speaker of the day. This is going to be such a fun one to cap it off. So, Alexandra is somebody who's spoken about quite a bit within Motion's world. Like is someone who's deeply respected, so I'm always so excited to hear what's going on. So everybody, this is Alex. Welcome her to the stage. The associate director of creative strategy at Monks. Alex, I'm so excited to watch your presentation. > [VISUAL: The screen goes black, then a new split-screen appears with Evan Lee on the left and Alexandra Espinoza on the right.] [1:32:52] Alexandra Espinoza: Okay, let's do this. Let's see if I have good luck doing this. Uh, > [VISUAL: Alexandra's presentation appears. The first slide is a black and white photo of her with handwritten-style text that says "HI, MY NAME IS ALEX" and lists various facts about her.] [1:32:58] Alexandra Espinoza: All right. Got it. Yay. It's happening. [1:33:01] Alexandra Espinoza: Let's see. Okay, so, hi everyone. My name is um Alex and I'm associate director of uh creative strategy at Monks. I'm so excited to be here. Um, so many creative minds and um, yeah, like I am a mom of two dogs and a four-year-old girl. I've been teaching yoga for over 10 years and so I do have a life outside of paid ads. I started out as a media buyer, uh, many years ago and spent most of my career optimizing ads and a lot of time behind uh scenes in ads manager. And over the past few years, I've pivoted more and more into creative strategy and I've launched thousands of ads and managed millions of dollars in ad spend with some of like really incredible brands. And in the past few years, most of the brands I've been working with has been brands that offer a solution through a service versus e-com or like physical product. Um, so like professional services, telehealth, Fintech, um, software. And so if you are in any of those, if you can > [VISUAL: Slide titled "2026 PAID SOCIAL TRENDS" with the subtitle "B2B & DIGITAL BUSINESS EDITION".] [1:34:20] Alexandra Espinoza: associate with any of those, then this is uh going to be interesting for you. We're going to be, okay, here we go. Um, so if you don't have, if your brand doesn't have a physical product and you're optimizing, let's say to lead conversion event or a call schedule or downloads or signups, this is going to be really interesting because um, most of the ad inspo we see out there is for e-com brands. There's a physical product being shown and it's a lot of fun. Um, and there there's definitely there is a gap in the industry and the reality is that > [VISUAL: Slide with the text "B2B ads do not need to be boring." The word "boring" is highlighted in purple.] [1:34:57] Alexandra Espinoza: these types of ads don't need to be boring. > [VISUAL: Slide with the text "B2B decision-makers are people, too! creative elements that work for B2C resonate with B2B".] [1:35:01] Alexandra Espinoza: Because really B2B decision makers are people too. Like they they um all have creative elements that work both for B2C and so my piece of advice is, you know, be playful. > [VISUAL: Slide with three video examples under purple buttons labeled "Be playful", "Be colorful", and "Go lo-fi". The text below each button describes the creative approach.] [1:35:13] Alexandra Espinoza: Like add cartoon imagery, um, use simple language that your grandma would be able to understand, play with memes and lean towards using less text, large visuals, colorful lifestyle photography to help your user to to stand out from all those trustworthy blue or green ads that we see in the in the space. And also my favorite is make lo-fi ads that have this DIY feel and little to no editing like UGCs as part of your evergreen strategy. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "Trend #1: Human-Led Creative". It shows three categories: "Lo-fi Visuals", "Founder Ads + EGC", and "Paid Partnerships", each with a description and a video example.] [1:35:50] Alexandra Espinoza: Which really brings me to trend number one for 2026, which is that according to Meta, creator led ads can boost efficiency by up to 32%, which is really a massive performance win when you're scaling spend. And Nelson reports that 92 about 92% of consumers trust UGC more than traditional ads because it isn't just about someone holding a product. It's about seeing a solution through a more human lens. And in professional environments, that genuine emotion and sort of like third-party perspective speaks louder than any polished brand ad could do. So, again, lean into these less polished ads that embrace real life imperfections and just signal more authenticity and bypass the banner blindness for B2B ads. Next, um, if you haven't already tried a founder ads, I'm a big fan and Dara, I know that you've talked about these before and EGCs. And for those that um don't know what EGCs are, it's employee generated content and it can be really successful and I I highly recommend that you test these if you haven't though. And I I see a lot of founders resist this format because they really get caught up in making it more of like a high production and like get caught up in like a perfect script and the the but the reality is that the more raw and real these are, the more users will connect with the message. And like you can shoot it on a phone and it doesn't need to be, we don't need to over complicate it, right? And because the reality is that people don't trust brands, people trust people and the the last mini trend within this one is all about paid partnerships. And in LinkedIn, these thought leadership ads have delivered two times higher click through rates, which is really great to see. And I've recently seen a lot of brands that I've been working with, um, have really great performance and the performance has been blowing up with partnership ads. Um, and yeah, like they can get expensive quickly, but the reality is that authentic content driven by experts and influencers in your industry and your audience segment really helps to build that awareness, that trust, that credibility a lot faster than any other type of ad can do. So, when putting together UGCs, let the creator drive the storytelling and make sure to add proven direct response best practices, um, like easy to read text overlay, a strong hook, uh, clear CTA, call to action. So all these basic elements, make sure that you have those in there. Um, and you want them to look like native content, like they're scrolling through, they don't even know that it's an ad, but you also want to, you want to build them for conversions. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "Trend #2: Storytelling Content". It shows three categories: "Tutorials", "The Netflix-style Narrative", and "Seasonal Trends", each with a description and a video example.] [1:38:56] Alexandra Espinoza: And that brings me to trend number two, which is all about storytelling. And we've already talked about this a lot today, um, all about storytelling and that's a lot of what we're going to be seeing in 2026, especially in the time of AI that everybody's trying to, um, there's a lot of anti-AI content and and conversations going on. So, bring in storytelling and the first format that we have within this one is tutorials. And no, we're not talking about like a long boring tutorial video. This is really engaging content that briefly guides the users step-by-step on how to use um your tool to achieve a desired result or solve a sort of like a common pain point using your platform or your service or the product that you are providing because um one, the reality is that in this space, one of the most common barriers of entries is that users don't fully understand the capabilities of your product and or or how it will actually make their lives better. And by showing them how to achieve a very specific result, you start to start dissolving some of these barriers. Um, I always say like, just don't tell me what to buy, like show me what it can do for me and do so through storytelling and then it becomes a lot of a better experience overall. And another format of storytelling, I really like this one. It makes me feel like, you know, watching a Netflix shows with episodes and is is, yeah, like share content that has episodes that like match the narrative arc similar to the buyer's specific stage in the journey. And for example, like have a part two narrative hook that like creates this sort of psychological pull and positions your ad as a continuation of the story. This work really well in paid partnerships because you've established this connection with uh let's say a brand ambassador and and you can play a lot with um sequential retargeting for these to make sure that your users view these in sequence. Um, and then lastly, leaning into seasonal trends and giving them a spin to match your brand messaging. I love what GoDaddy did here, um, playing with the spin of of the Spotify wrapped. I know we've already kind of talked about Spotify wrapped this today, but this is like a nice spin-off and just being aware of what people are talking about, what everybody's seeing in their feeds, what they're posting. So it's like you know next year Spotify wrapped is going to come around this time of year, like in early December. So what can you do to leverage those types of seasonal trends? > [VISUAL: Slide titled "Trend #3: Evidence-based copy". It shows two categories: "Proof Ads" and "Oversharing Ads", each with a description, a "Copy Formula", and video examples.] [1:42:22] Alexandra Espinoza: And the next trend is it all it's all about copy. Is really focusing on evidence-based copy and that's what's going to be leading the way next year and moving forward. Like the key here is to test copy that is really measurable, personable, like pain point centric, that is punchy. And it it really replaces vague claims with specific proof. So instead of saying we increase ROI, you know, you can say like see up to 10 times more revenue with this. And it's just really in a feed full of hype, like just using the specific numbers can be um a lot more believable than a round number or like a vague claim. This work really well for both for UGCs and polished brand ads. Um, I like to play with these on statics because people get to to take a little bit of a pause and look at what's happening. Um, and another angle that works specifically well for UGCs is the oversharing ads. Um, and maybe I'm hyper curious, but yeah, like people like it's this stories that people are exposing private data, like money, like weight or age and humans are naturally curious and and like to snoop and that's how you hook them in through that storytelling and smoothly without the user like barely even noticing that you are making the brand part of the story. It becomes a an ad, you know, like let's say that you're selling telehealth services or or financial software, show how the content creator uses your product as one of like, let's say their hacks or their day-to-day. So for example, here on the payday routine ad that you are seeing of the couple, they could share the financial tool that they're using to to budget, right? Or on the habit building video, she could share how she's uh one of the habits that she's building is she's seeing an online dietitian through a telehealth provider and how that's making a huge impact in her life. Um, so those are ways that it can like really be helpful to play with copy and and the script. > [VISUAL: Slide with the text "People don't trust brands. People trust people who use brands." The second sentence is highlighted in purple.] [1:44:48] Alexandra Espinoza: And here's the truth. As I said, people don't trust brands, people trust people who use brands. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "7 AD GUIDELINES FOR B2B + DIGITAL SERVICES".] [1:44:57] Alexandra Espinoza: So, I've put together this seven um ad guidelines for B2B and digital services, um, so that it's really easy for you to like take a screenshot at the end of this slide and take it with you. > [VISUAL: The slide "7 AD GUIDELINES FOR B2B + DIGITAL SERVICES" now shows point 1: "Steal inspiration from behavioral feeds, not just ad libraries".] [1:45:12] Alexandra Espinoza: And the first one is going to be um is to steal um inspiration from behavioral feeds and I'm talking, um, I think Ashley mentioned, yeah, Ashley mentioned already this is monitor Reddit, like look at Discord groups, WhatsApp groups, Substack, look at the comments of your ads and the paid partnerships and other conversational spaces that you get to see what people and your user and your audience are talking about and learn about what's really happening. This really helps you to create ads that are directly addressing conversations happening in private communities and then it helps the audience feel heard, which is so, so important. > [VISUAL: Point 2 appears on the slide: "Focus on thought leadership and brand narrative over hard-sell tactics".] [1:46:14] Alexandra Espinoza: Um, and one of the ways to do this is to directly, for example, you can um answer specific Reddit threads using like a screenshot of the thread as the hook and that kind of gives the signal that we're listening to the community and not just throwing marketing at them. The second one is to > [VISUAL: Point 3 appears on the slide: "Use founder + employee-led POV as a creative format, not a one-off".] [1:46:46] Alexandra Espinoza: is focus on thought leadership and brand narrative over hard sell tactics. And this like really helps to um, justify the creative concepts and focus on building trust. And in > [VISUAL: Point 4 appears on the slide: "When creating branded ads, make it playful or visually distinctive—especially if your category is 'trustworthy blue.'"] [1:47:11] Alexandra Espinoza: the next one is when you do create, because I'm not saying like, oh yeah, like now just only move to human led creative and UGCs within this space. So you're still going to want to use branded ads, you're going to still want to have statics and and just keep the diversity flowing. And but and when you do create branded ads, make it playful or visually distinctive because they can really get lost in in the feed with like the brand colors of like blue or green, for example. > [VISUAL: Point 5 appears on the slide: "Teach workflows, not features (tutorials that sell the outcome)".] [1:47:44] Alexandra Espinoza: Then the next one is to teach workflows, not features. > [VISUAL: Point 6 appears on the slide: "Replace vague claims with proof math".] [1:48:05] Alexandra Espinoza: So, yes, like play with tutorials, show how it works as a story. For example, show the pain, like how the workflow, how it helps you and then what is the result that they get to achieve by using your product. Replace those vague claims, play with copy, proof ads, proof math, use facts, stats, and real quantitative results. > [VISUAL: Point 7 appears on the slide: "Use AI for wild ideas".] [1:48:16] Alexandra Espinoza: And last but not least, definitely, um, use AI for wild ideas. I like to play with Motion AI agents. Uh, if you haven't played with those, definitely recommend. Uh, you can get some really fun ideas from that. And I think is is a really helpful, I mean, AI obviously takes a big part on all of this and wild ideas is one of those because we don't want to be always just copying ads from other ads, right? It becomes in like this never ending cycle. So that's definitely one thing. > [VISUAL: The slide now shows all 7 points of the "7 AD GUIDELINES FOR B2B + DIGITAL SERVICES".] [1:48:53] Alexandra Espinoza: Um, and yeah, so those are some of the guidelines that I have for you. Would love to see if you have any questions. > [VISUAL: Slide with the text "thanks" repeated multiple times, along with the speaker's name, email, and LinkedIn.] [1:49:03] Alexandra Espinoza: Um, and is, you know, overall, play more when it comes to the space. If your brand is not selling a physical product, tap into UGCs, tap into lo-fi content that feels DIY, native to the platform. Don't be afraid. Like the person making the purchasing decision is still a person. Connect with them in that space. [1:49:25] Evan Lee: Crushed it, Alex. Absolutely crushed it. I love how you had that slide at the end too to give the recap and a nice screenshot so everyone's like, okay, I'm making sure I snap that and I'm good to go. You are the best. Thank you a ton for joining and I'm going to talk to you real soon, okay? [1:49:41] Alexandra Espinoza: Thank you.