CMO @ Heatmap.com

Building the future of creative operations @ CreativeOS. Using this machine to make the world a more creative place through less busy work and more time to create!

Chase Mohseni

I've seen brands spend $30K on a video shoot and get beaten by a product shot with three arrows on it.

That's basically what happened here.

Hiya's kids sunscreen ad is two hands holding a tin and three callouts. Headline says "Fits Any Routine." 

There's nothing impressive about it creatively.

But it's doing exactly one job at exactly the right moment - answering the three questions a parent has right before they buy:

Is it messy? No. 
Can I carry it? Yes. 
Does it work for real life? Beach, park, school days - yes.

No desire creation. No lifestyle fantasy. Just objections killed cleanly.

This is what I think about every time a brand asks me why their retargeting isn't converting. 

Nine times out of ten they're running inspiration ads to people who already want the product. 

Those people don't need a mood board. They need one last question answered.

Know what job your ad is doing. 

Everything else follows from that.

Founder/CEO @ CreativeOS - streamlining your creative process.

Tomorrow I am jamming with Sarah Levinger and Matthew Gattozzi
 about all things ads and creative strategy on Creative Playbook from CreativeOS

If you want to get better at turning those impressions into conversions - come join us. (Sign up in the comments)

I keep seeing the same ad creative mistake everywhere.

Broad creative → collection page → zero conversions.

No focus = no conversion.

Here are 3 insights that came up during Creative Playbook this week with Sarah Levinger & Matthew Gattozzi:

1. The fatal mismatch

Everyone is making broad ads with no angle and sending them to the broadest page possible (collections, best-sellers).

Then wondering why nothing converts.

No focus = no conversion.

The fix: Match your creative to your page type. Static ads need deep landing pages. Video ads can work with simpler pages. And collection pages only work when people already know your brand.

2. Sell to the buyer, not the user

This came up on the STEM kit breakdown and it's the mistake most kids product brands make.

Parents don't buy STEM kits because their kids need physics lessons. They buy them to feel like good parents investing in their child's confidence.

Show the kid's face when they crack the code. Show "my kids are asleep—look at what they built tonight."

The parent is the buyer. The kid is the experience. Sell emotional ROI.

3. Category psychology matters more than you think

Jewelry ≠ kids products ≠ supplements. Different products need completely different approaches.

Example: Jewelry is one of the only categories where consumers want it to be expensive. Don't sell attainability—sell exclusivity and craftsmanship. And for the love of god, use harsh lighting to make stones sparkle. Soft lighting kills jewelry ads.

If you’ve made it this far and want to do deeper - get your full breakdown here.

I've been thinking about how all marketing strategy looks the same now.

Same playbooks. Same hooks. Same templates. Same "proven frameworks."

Then I read about Hermes - they've been in business for 186 years.
Worth $220 billion.

No marketing department. No ads. No discounts. Ever.

One sentence from a former CEO explains why:

"We don't have a policy of image. We have a policy of product."

Here's what that means for you today...

In 1837, Thierry Hermès opened a harness workshop in Paris.

He wasn't building a fashion brand.

He was solving a problem: horses' movements were hampered by poorly-sized equipment.

His solution was the saddle stitch — two needles, two waxed threads, tensile opposition. Only done by hand.

One stitch became the foundation of a $220B company.

Not a logo. Not a slogan. A stitch.

By 1919, the automobile was killing the horse industry.

Most equestrian businesses panicked. Pivoted. Chased trends.

Hermès asked one question:

"What can we make with our hands here that will interest our clients today?"

Not: what's trending? Not: what are competitors doing? Not: what does market research say?

What can we make with our hands?

The most iconic bags in luxury fashion history were never designed as fashion.

The Haut à Courroies (1892) — designed to carry saddles.

The Bolide (1923) — first bag with a zipper. Designed so things wouldn't fall out during travel.

The Kelly — designed in 1935 as a "ladies' bag with straps."

No campaign brief. No focus group. No influencer strategy.

They made functional things beautifully. Fashion came later.

Here's what kills me:

Hermès made the Kelly bag for 20+ years before it became famous.

It wasn't even called the Kelly until 1956.

They didn't need the world to validate the product.

They trusted the craft.

While everyone optimizes for speed, Hermès built the opposite model.

One craftsman makes each bag. Start to finish.

A Kelly takes 18-20 hours of handwork.

New artisans don't touch a product for sale until they've apprenticed for 18 months to 4 years.

Slowness wasn't a bug.

It was the brand.

By 1935, Hermès had survived an entire industry dying.

They did it without:

→ A marketing department 
→ A single advertisement 
→ A discount, ever 
→ A product designed by committee

They only asked one question: "How do we make this better?"

The selling took care of itself.

Here's what this means for you today:

Everyone's asking "how do I market this?"

The better question: "Is this good enough that marketing becomes irrelevant?"

In a world of AI-generated everything, craft is the last moat.

Speed is the default. Slowness is the differentiator.

Make things no one asked for — but everyone needs.

Trust the work before the market validates it.

Hermès spent 20 years making bags nobody cared about.

Then they became the most valuable brand on earth.

Patience isn't a weakness. It's the whole strategy.

I recently looked at a funnel from Caraway Home (love them) for their airtight food storage containers.

At first glance, everything feels polished. The brand aesthetic is strong, the product photography is beautiful, and the experience feels premium.

But when you look at the ad → landing page transition, there’s a subtle breakdown that many eCommerce brands make.

The Ad

The creative leads with authority:
“Trusted by the Experts” + Good Housekeeping Award Winner.

It’s a powerful trust signal. The image reinforces the message too - the containers are shown in a real pantry environment, communicating organization, freshness, and everyday usefulness.

So the click motivation is clear:

This is a trusted, expert-approved storage solution.

The Landing Page:

After clicking, the user lands on a standard “Shop Food Storage” category page.

Instead of reinforcing the authority message, the experience immediately shifts to:
• filters
• product grids
• quick shop buttons

The funnel goes from persuasion → browsing.

That’s where the coherence drops.

What Works Well

• The product visuals match the ad perfectly
• The brand aesthetic is consistent (clean, premium, minimal)
• Users can quickly see product options, pricing, and ratings

So visually, the experience is cohesive.

Where the Opportunity Is: The landing page doesn’t continue the story that drove the click.

A few small changes could dramatically strengthen the funnel:

- Carry the authority message forward
- A hero section like “Award-Winning Airtight Storage” with the Good - Housekeeping badge would reinforce the click motivation.
- Introduce the category before the product grid
- A short benefit section explaining freshness, non-toxic materials, and pantry organization would turn the page into persuasion - so it's not not just browsing.
- Highlight a starter set or best-seller first

This reduces decision scroll fatigue and gives users a clear starting point.
The takeaway

This is a common pattern in DTC:

Great ad → solid product page → missing persuasion layer.

The funnel looks coherent, but the message continuity breaks after the click.
Often, the fastest conversion wins come from fixing that moment.

Curious how others handle this:

Do you usually send paid traffic to product pages, bundles, or category pages?

Money printing websites is the goal.

How you do that: Come to Creative Playbook with me, Shaun Brandt, and Taylor Davies from Oddit & CreativeOS.

Learn what makes website great or not so great. There will be plenty of both. 

See you there tomorrow at 11am PST.

Link to sign up in comments.

I used to work in manufacturing during college. Traveled to China. And at the time, the pace of innovation felt genuinely wild.

You could video call a factory in Shenzhen, hold up a camera to show them what you were looking at, share files back and forth in real time, and they’d be prototyping on the floor within hours. 

That felt like magic in 2007, 2008.

Today at CreativeOS , we have our version of that. A customer drops async video feedback. It hits our team channel. 

We jump into a voice room, talk it through, get aligned. 

Someone pulls the specs together, APIs get connected, a design gets rendered, code gets pulled. All of it lands in staging for testing.


Start to finish: a few hours.

What blew my mind two decades ago now feels like table stakes. And I think that’s actually a beautiful thing.

Innovation isn’t a threat when you’re in service of people trying to build something real. (Pls read this again)

It’s just the game moving forward.

Happy Friday.

The brands overthinking creative are losing.

But so are the ones pumping out AI slop.

And somehow nobody's talking about the middle.

Here's what I see running CreativeOS - there are two types of brands getting absolutely crushed right now:

Brand A spends 3 weeks on a single ad. Endless revisions. Pixel-perfect. They launch 1 concept, pray it works, and wonder why CAC keeps climbing.

Brand B discovered AI and now they're shipping 50 ads a week that all look like they were made by a microwave. Same generic hooks. Same stock-looking visuals. Zero brand. Zero soul.

Both are losing to Brand C.

Brand C gets it. They move fast AND they give a damn. They start with proven structures - not a blank canvas, not a ChatGPT fever dream. 

They put their brand into it. Real voice. Real angles. Real creative decisions made by a human who understands their customer.

Then they test at volume.

The difference is massive:

1) speed without slop
2) volume without looking like everyone else
3) templates as a starting point, not a final product
4) AI as a tool, not a replacement for taste

(Hot take: the brands that use AI to SKIP the thinking are going to get wrecked by the brands that use AI to do MORE thinking, faster.)

The bar for creative is about to split in two. The slop merchants will race to the bottom. The brands with real taste and real speed will pull away from everyone.

One more thing.

If your AI slop ads are "working" right now - don't get comfortable. That's arbitrage. You found a window where the bar is low. That window always closes.

The brands building real creative muscle right now are going to eat you alive when it does.

Where are you seeing the most AI slop right now? I have thoughts 👇

I’m Barry Hott, and I help brands scale profitably with high-performing paid media strategies, creative testing systems, and conversion-focused insights.

I’ve personally managed over $600 million in paid media spend since 2008, overseeing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn campaigns for brands like True Classic, Harry’s, Happy V, Lone River, The Perfect Jean, and many more. I specialize in scaling direct-to-consumer and startup brands spending $200K+ per month on ads with strategies grounded in first principles, logic, and contextualized data insights (tracking what the system sees that you can’t).

I’m known for making ugly ads that convert. Clients trust me to optimize every aspect of their acquisition, from raw creative that cuts through the noise to counterintuitive buying strategies that maximize ROI.

Recent brands I’ve helped grow include Happy V, Keeps, Nuts.com, UrbanStems, MoneyLion, Lumin, Cerebral, Wandering Bear Coffee, Mirror, Athletic Greens, and Spartan Race. In 2020, I helped launch Lone River Ranch Water, which was acquired by Diageo in 2021. All three companies I worked with in 2021 were acquired: Lone River, Thesis, and Jump450.

If you’re a decision maker who wants profitable, scalable ad growth, shoot me a DM.

Barry Hott

The biggest waste of time in modern Meta media buying? 

Manually controlling ad-level budget allocation.

I see so many advertisers punishing their high-spend ads because the CPA (or worse, CPM or CPC lol) is higher than other ads 🤦‍♂️

1. Ad-level CPA and ROAS is irrelevant! 

The system isn't trying to get you the best CPA on every individual ad, it's trying to get you the most possible conversions for your overall budget. 

It might spend more on ad A with a higher CPA so that ad B (and C, D, E, F, etc) can have lower CPAs, lowering the overall ad set, campaign, and account CPA.

This is the breakdown effect in action. 

2. The more you spend on an ad, the worse CPA is going to be.

3. The ads that get the most spend are the ones most likely to wear the scars of other/external performance shifts. Don't punish them for it.

4. The system already handles all of this for you! Stop worrying about ad level budget allocation, the system handles that better than any human can because the system has black box data that humans don't.

5. You're better off spending your time doing more qualitative and empathetic analysis on ads to see things like negative comments piling up on ads, and consider pruning comments and/or recreating the ad fresh, or iterating on it.

Focus on the creative quality. Let the system focus on the delivery quantity.

Growing businesses with ugly ads, streamlined execution, and deep consumer empathy.

Advice for anyone getting starting with Meta ads from scratch (from a guy with who's spent over $1 billion on the platform):

There's no exact "right" setup and structure.

Keep it simple.

Don't overcomplicate, overthink, or overdo it.

Just focus on the overall user journey and experience from ad to sale, and keep making it better.

Always be improving the creative, copy, landing pages, website, offer, etc.

When you get to a larger scale and sense some issues with the setup, then you can worry more about an "optimal" setup and bring in expert help, but that optimal setup should still be kept quite simple.

The hardest part of media buying isn’t strategy.

It’s staying calm and not touching anything while everyone else panics and starts changing things.

Great media buyers don’t flinch.

New project in the works... I think you'll love it:

URL Love It

The blindspot monitor for online business.

URL Love It monitors your pages, competitors, and search results for changes that affect your business and ad performance.

When something changes, we'll catch it before it costs you.

Coming soon...

New IG ads feature caught in the wild!

Landing page loads inside the comments.

Pretty smart way for Meta to shift high intent users from comments to the site annnnd maybe inflate link click numbers.

I have so many questions and a couple thoughts...

Questions:

1. Was anyone notified about this?
2. At what point exactly does this count as a "link click" in Ads Manager? When the full page takes over the whole screen?
3. How is this impacting external tracking? This will surely track more visits and bounces...
4. Is this a new trick for Meta to gobble more externally measured attribution credit?
5. What determines if your page gets shown here or doesn't? I'm still seeing ads that don't do this.

Thoughts:

A. Seems like landing pages with highly relevant and potent headlines and imagery will help win here.
B. Don't let your cookie consent bar block your entire page's content in this view little view.

Stop comparing your PDP's CVR against your landing pages.

Your landing page only gets paid traffic. Your PDP gets organic, email, Google, direct... all of it. Those sources have completely different intent levels, and that changes everything.

High intent sources like Google, email, and ChatGPT convert way higher than Meta or TikTok. Like, not even close.

Those people came in already looking for a solution. They're problem-aware, brand-aware, ready to buy.

Meta and TikTok audiences weren't looking for anything. They stumbled on your ad mid-scroll. They need more education, more proof, more convincing before they'll buy.

The mistake is expecting those pages to perform the same.

What works for a high-intent visitor is not what works for a colder social audience. They need different pages, different structure, different messaging.

Segment your data by traffic source to better understand the differences.

Build pages for the audience that's actually landing on them.

Try not to freak out about the Meta ad overspend issue. This is a clear outage that happened last night.

I expect refunds to get sent once the dust settles.

Say what you want about Meta, but they don't want to actually screw you out of your money. (They also don't want to lose the trust of (and get sued by) every advertiser)

Here's what to do/expect in the coming days/weeks:

After yesterday's outage, based on past experience with similar issues (I basically copy/pasted this from a 2024 issue), I would expect Meta to pay out refunds in 4-8 weeks, buuuuuuut if you want to increase the likelihood of a refund for you and for everyone, you must report the issue to Meta reps and/or support.

To make it simpler for you, I've put together instructions, screenshots, and what you can say to support. Please bookmark and share this!

The only way Meta can understand the scope of this issue is if we all report it.

If you have a rep, complain and demand a refund.

If you don't have a rep, please go through the support channel.

Be persistent once it goes to emails. Never give up, never let it drop off the radar.

Paste in this bit (or something like it) here:

"My campaigns overspent their budgets and seemed to ignore their cost caps yesterday due to a confirmed widespread Meta ad delivery outage, causing campaigns to spend more than expected and did so extremely inefficiently, causing me to lose money."

You should then see this option to "claim refund for ad spend":

Then you choose your ad account, and pick "other ad issue"

You'll then be able to write another message, where I would just paste the same blurb from earlier and then include a screenshot of the Meta Status Page:

Start the chat with support where you should confirm your ad account ID and again paste the same blurb from above, and I would also include something like this:

"I understand that spend and performance can naturally fluctuate, however this was a widespread outage that caused significant financial losses for every advertiser I know. I expect my accounts to be refunded for the amounts of overspend and inefficient spend."

Start uploading any screenshots of evidence of your bad performance.

If you have multiple accounts, you might want to provide all of the account ID's in case they can help for more than just one.

Then politely answer any questions support asks and remember that they probably are not as familiar with Meta ads as you are and are likely not aware of the outage yesterday.

Hopefully you'll get to a point where they ask for the amount you are requesting for a refund. If you have estimates of what you think was lost, share that amount, but don't be greedy, use a realistic estimate based on recent performance.

This is our best chance at getting the refunds we deserve.

I hope you found this helpful! Please repost or share this with your peers, and if you don't already follow me, please do!

Help! What should I wear on my panel tomorrow for "The Future of Apparel Marketing: What's Working Now vs. What's Coming"?

I'm thinking something like this:

If you run Meta ads for DTC annnnd your brand is on Amazon: your in-platform metrics are missing tons of sales.

Meta drives a massive halo effect of Amazon sales that your dashboard will never see.

If you aren't looking at your Blended CAC inclusive of Amazon, you're underspending on your best growth engine and missing massive value.

taplio

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The Battle

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