CMO and Co-Founder at Obvi

Ashvin Melwani

I’m Sam, the Co-Founder & CEO of Ready Set—a full-funnel performance creative agency providing compliant and performance-focused video ad creative integrated with media buying.

My story:
→ I was born in Mali, West Africa, and moved to Washington, D.C. when I was 4.
→ I was an avid basketball and soccer player till my knees gave out, and then picked up golf in my late 20s.
→ I’ve been lucky enough to travel and develop relationships with people from all walks of life.

I attended MIT for my undergraduate degree and Stanford for business school.

From riding the dot-com boom to starting the first call center in Ghana, being a bond trader in 2008, and working at Nanigans for 6 years, I’ve seen the ups and downs of it all—and it never scared me away.

Nanigans was the turning point for me. I noticed video ads were taking off—yet no one was producing them.

Marketers struggled to keep up with demand, and video continued to outperform. I needed to fill this gap between traditional brand marketing and performance-driven digital advertising.

So I left in 2019—and have been building Ready Set with my Co-Founder, John since.

Ready Set has fueled over $500 million in spend for compliance-conscious innovators like Hims, Doordash, Robinhood, and Nurx. 

I write about:

→ My journey as a 6-time founder
→ Performance marketing best practices
→ How to produce compliant and creative ads that perform
→ The importance of having a unified platform for video creative and media buying

If any of this sounds interesting to you, let's connect.

Sambou Makalou

Just got back from an invite-only Meta Summit where they broke down what their best-performing advertisers have in common. It's not media strategy, or budget.

It's the operating model underneath the spend. What Eddie Bennett called a creative operating system.

His point: brands that build one have a real competitive advantage right now. Most teams don't have one at all.

Three things that stood out:


1. The algorithm needs range, not just volume.

Meta's ad system isn't one model. It's multiple AI systems running in concert.

What they need to run efficiently is creative volume and diversity. Both were specifically called out as major competitive advantages.

We've seen brands that take this seriously blast out of plateaus they'd been stuck in for months.


2. Creators on retainer, not one-off campaigns.

Creators who perform well for a brand need to stay close to it. This is an emerging trend, and one we're working to operationalize at Ready Set.

Long-term advertiser/creator partnerships build brand fluency over time. And the algorithm is smart enough to pick up on it. We've been proponents of brand for a long time, so it was validating to hear this called a differentiator.


3. Creators are audience discovery infrastructure.

Creators tap into new audiences and reveal new messaging angles by surfacing insights from the bottom up. It's almost like crowdsourcing your message discovery.

Eddie also emphasized something on early adoption I've seen play out time and again...

Early adopters of Meta's latest AI tools and performance creative practices are seeing outsized returns right now. That window won't stay open forever.

None of this was framed as "best practices." It was framed as the baseline for where brands should be operating today.

If your growth has plateaued and you're running the same creative to the same audiences, yesterday's session made it clear: the unlock isn't more spend.

It's a performance system with creative at the core.

Co-Founder & CEO @ Ready Set | Full-Funnel Performance Creative & Media Buying for Scale | $500M+ Deployed | Helping Brands Scale via the 3 Vs Framework

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The Battle

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Sambou Makalou

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Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Sambou Makalou's LinkedIn Performance

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