Motion's $30M Raise, Creative Research, and More - Highlights from the Creative Strategy Summit

Alysha Boehm: I was working as a designer for a D2C company and one of my jobs was to make their Facebook ads and send them to the media buying team. And in doing that, I kind of found this new passion, um, that I later found out was called creative strategy.

Alysha Boehm: And then I got an email from Motion with a PDF called Becoming a Creative Strategist, read it from top to bottom and just had a light bulb moment where I realized, oh my god, I want to be a creative strategist when I grow up. Like this is, this is the direction of my career. And I'm so much happier in this career because I just feel like my design has a purpose and creates results and gives me the opportunity to dive into two things that I'm really passionate about, which is design and creative, but also data and performance. I can see how powerful it's become and uh, how important it's become to so many different brands to have this role and this perspective in their teams.

Adam Bedford: Paid social has been incredibly important to us as a business. We are a bootstrap brand and from day one we had to focus on first order profitability and being really judicious about our cash flow.

Adam Bedford: So we were spending about a million dollars a month on, on Facebook and we knew that in order to grow and to, to grow profitably, we needed to improve our creative. We were looking for someone both creative and data-driven and I didn't frankly know what that role was. We realized that there is such a thing as a creative strategist and immediately realized that we should be hiring someone in that role. It, it's hard to imagine that every brand won't have a creative strategist. It feels like an integral role and it certainly has become one for us. It's allowed us to, to grow and unlock the next level of of scale uh, in our ad accounts. And I can't imagine that other brands won't be hiring for this role soon.

Reza Khadjavi: Over the last few years, the creative strategist has gone from a role that very few people knew about to now the fastest growing job in performance marketing.

Reza Khadjavi: Today, we're here to celebrate the rise of the creative strategist. The creative strategist has a unique combination of skills. They are as analytical as they are creative, and they bring the art and science of advertising into perfect harmony. Creative has become the biggest driver of success in paid social. But creativity alone doesn't cut it. You also need the rigor of an analyst to consistently ship winning creative. And that's why the world needs more creative strategists.

Reza Khadjavi: Since day one, Motion has been committed to pushing the creative strategist role forward. We built a product that is loved by thousands of creative strategists all over the world.

Reza Khadjavi: We've created educational content to help accelerate the careers of tens of thousands of people in our community. But I'm very excited to share some announcements today that represent a huge leap forward for Motion as a company and for our ecosystem as a whole. First up, I'm thrilled to share that Motion has raised $30 million in Series B financing from an incredible group of investors.

Reza Khadjavi: This fundraise is a confirmation that the creative strategist era is here and that the market is taking notes. Our mission is to serve the creative strategist. So we've raised this capital to accelerate our product roadmap and to build more amazing features for you faster. So far, Motion has been laser focused on building the absolute best creative analytics platform out there. Our customers are some of the most prominent advertisers in paid social.

Reza Khadjavi: Brands like HexClad, Vuori, True Classic, and thousands more use Motion to analyze over $6 billion of media spend every year.

Reza Khadjavi: Doing research well is a critical part of the creative strategist workflow. That's why I'm very excited to announce a suite of tools that we've built to help you here.

Reza Khadjavi: Introducing Creative Research, a brand new product area within Motion that pairs nicely with the creative analytics that you know and love. Creative Research has three main components: Brand Intel, Collections, and Swipe File.

Reza Khadjavi: Brand Intel helps you track your competitors and brands you respect to learn from the creative they're producing.

Reza Khadjavi: Collections help you get inspired by trending ads that are curated by our team at Motion, as well as experts in our community.

Reza Khadjavi: And finally, you can build your own swipe file of creatives you love and easily share them with your team.

Reza Khadjavi: Creative Research is now available to everyone and it's entirely free to use. I can't wait for you to try it. We are investing heavily in this new area of our product, so you can expect it to just keep getting better and better over time. We know the creative strategist role is new, so there's a lot to learn. We want Motion to be the best training resource in the world for anyone who wants to master the craft of creative strategy. So I have one more announcement to share. To help us push the boundaries of our content and help us train the next 100,000 creative strategists, I'm very excited to announce Motion's new Chief Evangelist, Dara Denney.

Dara Denney: Hey guys.

Dara Denney: Thank you, Reza. I am so excited to be officially partnering with Motion after all of these years.

Dara Denney: Motion has been such a champion of the creative strategist role. With this new partnership, we're going to be delivering three things for creative strategists. One, I'll be working with Motion to create some of the best creative strategy training that the world has ever seen. Motion's education is already top-notch and we're going to level things up even more. Two, I'll be advising Motion's product team on new features. I'm very excited about this. I've been a power user of Motion since the beginning and I am so excited about what we are building right now. Three, I'm going to spend even more time with you guys, Motion's customers. And we've got some plans for more in-person events, workshops, and opportunities to learn and grow from each other. We've got so much planned, but for now, let's start the live show.