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 👇

Leadly

Head Of Agency

Kurve

I’m the lead partner for paid social activities at Kurve. Primarily Facebook ads in Europe.

The industries I focus majority of my time on are:
- Consumer electronics
- Consumer goods
- Health & fitness

I focus on:
- Solving complex problems around attribution
- Incrementality testing
- Creative large scale test & learn
- Optimisation
- The most beautiful reports you’ve ever seen
- Smashing ROI targets so my clients sing praises of me and get a raise from their boss

Performance Marketer

Property Investments UK

Digital Marketing Consultant

SV-Digital

Senior account manager at one the of UK's leading digital marketing agencies. Handling a wide-variety of accounts from different industries including education, e-commerce, health and influencer brands.

Combining buyer psychology and sales with a digital strategy to grow (and help scale) brands and businesses.

Senior Account Manager

Luke Nevill Consultin

I've been working as a digital marketing consultant for the last 3 years specialising primarily in Facebook and Instagram advertising.  Working in primarily the B2C market (small amount of B2B) across multiple verticals. 

As the years have passed my skillset has broadend and I have developed a specialist set of skills which include;
+ Digital strategy 
+ Data analysis & reporting
+ Campaign optimisation and scaling 
+ Clear testing and validation processing
+ Copywriting and creative testing 
+ Market research and competitor insights

I help businesses leverage paid acquisition to increase revenue and bottom line profits.  With a strong emphasis on paid social, I operate in a systematic style whilst heavily focused on campaign performance. I have spent hundreds of thousands in advertising spend whilst helping a large variety of businesses scale as a result.

This is how I work with my clients;
- Understand and analyse your companies best performing channels alongside your competitors performance
- Establish KPI’s on both a channel and company level 
- Analyse the market and develop a strategy to match KPIs
- Manage advertising budget to ensure its spent in the most profitable way
- Curate a range of creatives for all the campaigns that are operating to generate results
- Optimise campaigns accordingly to ensure results are achieved
- Build reports to share and discuss with the team  
The clients I work best with are driven, hard working and they want to see their business impact the world in a positive way. In addition they need to understand the volatility of digital marketing (at times) alongside wanting to work together rather than individually - this will always produce the best results long term.

If you’d like to know a bit more about me here are some career highlights;
- Ran my own gym for 3 years and built it to over 150 members in my hometown of Welwyn Garden City
- Worked my way up from Junior to Senior Account Manager within 6 months at a digital marketing agency 
- Spent millions of pounds on advertising on FB & Instagram

Like the sound of me? Great, send me a message on LinkedIn.

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Chase Mohseni

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