Fanatical in working out and reading a book with chamomile tea and a scented candle.

My day usually starts with a run or a high-intensity workout, a cold shower and a 10-minute meditation session. After that, I dive into working at my agency D-DOUBLEU MEDIA.

We help 7-9 figure Ecommerce businesses scale through performance creatives and paid media.

Dennis W.

You're not a creative strategist.

You're someone who screenshots competitor ads and calls it "research."

Strategy is understanding why something works.

Copying what works is not strategy.

It's plagiarism with a marketing title.

If your entire creative process is "let's try what they're doing" — you're a copycat, not a strategist.

Build original angles or admit you're just remixing other people's homework.

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Slashing acquisition costs via performance creatives and paid media for 7-9 figure Ecommerce brands.

Unpopular opinion:

Most founders shouldn't be running their own ads.

Not because they can't learn.

Because the opportunity cost is insane.

Every hour you spend in Ads Manager is an hour you didn't spend on product, team, or strategy.

You're not saving money by doing it yourself.

You're spending your most valuable resource on your lowest-leverage activity.

Hire it out. Stay in your zone.

Dennis Willeboordse 👨🏼‍🦰

True story:

Brand came to us spending $2K/day. Stuck. Couldn't scale past it for 5 months.

Their diagnosis: "The market is saturated."

Our diagnosis: One winning ad carrying the entire account. No system to find more winners.

We didn't touch the budget.

We rebuilt their creative process from scratch. Research-driven angles. Structured testing. Iteration system.

90 days later: $8K/day. Same market. Same product.

The market wasn't saturated.

Their creative system was.

The 5 reasons people don't buy:

1. They don't know you exist
2. They don't understand what you sell
3. They don't believe it works
4. They don't believe it works for them
5. They don't believe it's worth the price

Your ads should solve ONE of these per awareness level.

Unaware? Solve #1.
Problem aware? Solve #2.
Solution aware? Solve #3.
Product aware? Solve #4.
Most aware? Solve #5.

One ad trying to solve all five converts no one.

Focused ads convert everyone they're meant for.

Every winning ad answers one of these:

1. Why should I care? (Hook)
2. Why should I believe you? (Proof)
3. Why should I buy now? (Offer)
4. Why should I buy from you? (Differentiation)

If your ad doesn't answer at least one clearly — it won't convert.

If it answers all four, it'll scale.

That's the whole game.

Hot take:

Most ecom brands shouldn't be running ads at all.

Weak product. No differentiation. Negative margins at scale.

Ads just expose the problem faster.

You're not one winning creative away from success.

You're one honest conversation away from realizing your business model doesn't work.

Paid ads are gasoline.

If your house is on fire, more gas won't help.

UGC is not a strategy.

It's a format.

Brands hiding behind "authentic content" because they're too lazy to do real research.

Most UGC is just pretty people holding products saying nothing.

That's not authenticity. That's aesthetic laziness with a trendy name.

The UGC that works? Built on customer research and real angles.

The rest is just technically acceptable garbage.

This will upset people.

Good.

I'm not here to validate bad business models.

Dropshipping can be a starting point. But if you're still running the same operation 2 years in with zero moat, you're not building, you're gambling.

The market rewards people who solve problems.

Not people who find products before others do.

Your creative team is brainstorming hooks.

Your competitors are studying the ad library.

The brands printing money are reading 3-star Amazon reviews.

Here's what nobody tells you about reviews:

5-star reviews are useless for ads. Written by fans who were already sold.

1-star reviews are useless for ads. Written by people who should never have bought.

3 and 4-star reviews? That's where your next winning angle lives.

These are written by skeptics who bought anyway. People who had real objections but something convinced them.

They'll tell you:
→ What almost stopped them from buying
→ What finally pushed them over the edge
→ What surprised them about the product
→ Who the product is actually for

That's not a review. That's a creative brief.

I wrote a full breakdown on how to extract angles from reviews and turn them into ads that convert.

Your competitors are studying the ad library. Your agency is "brainstorming" hooks. Meanwhile, the brands printing money are reading 3-star Amazon rev

The Gold Mine Everyone Ignores: Why 3-Star Reviews Are Worth More Than Your Entire Creative Team

A client asked me last week: "What's the one thing that matters most for scaling?"

I gave them a boring answer. But it's the truth.

Customer research.

Not the creative. Not the media buying. Not the offer.

The research that informs all of it.

Every winning ad I've ever seen started with an insight about the customer. Something specific. Something emotional. Something most competitors miss.

The brands that scale aren't more creative.

They're more curious.

They talk to customers. Read reviews obsessively. Mine Reddit threads. Study cancellation surveys.

Then they turn that into ads that feel like mind-reading.

That's not talent. It's process.

And almost nobody does it.

The "UGC creator" industry is a scam and nobody wants to say it.

Most UGC is just attractive people reading scripts they don't understand to audiences they've never researched.

That's not authenticity. That's acting with extra steps.

The UGC that works is built on customer research, real angles, and strategic briefs.

The rest is just technically acceptable content that makes brands feel like they're doing something.

Harsh? Maybe.

True? Absolutely.

Unpopular opinion:

Most media buyers are just expensive button pushers.

They optimize what's already there.
They don't create what should be there.

A great creative strategist will outperform a great media buyer 10 to 1.

But media buyers are easier to hire.

So brands keep buying the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

You're not an entrepreneur.

You're a Shopify store owner with a supplier in China and a prayer.

Entrepreneurship is solving real problems.

Dropshipping the same product as 400 other stores with slightly different branding is not a business.

It's a coin flip with extra steps.

If your entire competitive advantage is "better ads" you don't have a business.

You have a temporary arbitrage that's about to collapse.

Build something defensible or get out.

"We're testing."

No. You're guessing with a budget.

Testing has hypotheses.
Testing has structure.
Testing has learning built in.

What you're doing is throwing creatives at the wall and praying.

That's not testing.

That's gambling with a content calendar.

You're not a media buyer.

You're a dashboard watcher who occasionally changes a number.

Adjusting budgets and blaming CPMs is not a skill.

It's babysitting with extra tabs open.

You're not "building a brand."

You're running a Shopify store with a Canva logo and an inconsistent Instagram grid.

A brand has:
- A point of view
- A reason to exist beyond profit
- Customers who would miss it if it disappeared

If your customers would switch for 10% off elsewhere, you don't have a brand.

You have a transaction with aesthetic packaging.

"Our product is for everyone."

Then it's for no one.

You're not being ambitious. You're being lazy.

Picking a niche is scary because it means saying no.

But saying yes to everyone means your message is so diluted it resonates with nobody.

The riches are in the niches isn't a cliché.

It's math.

Narrow the target. Sharpen the message. Watch conversions climb.

"Everyone" is not a customer segment.

It's a cope.

Eugene Schwartz wrote about awareness levels in 1966.

Brands still don't get it.

They run one message to everyone. Then blame the algorithm.

Here's reality:

Someone ready to buy needs an offer.
Someone comparing needs proof.
Someone exploring needs positioning.
Someone hurting needs hope.
Someone asleep needs a wake-up call.

Five different people. Five different messages.

You're running one ad and wondering why it doesn't scale.

It's not the platform.
It's not the product.
It's not the market.

It's you. Talking to everyone. Resonating with no one.

Fix this and watch your "saturated market" open up.

The dirty secret about "scaling agencies":

Most of them scale your spend, not your profit.

Higher budgets = higher retainers.

Your ROAS drops but their invoice doesn't.

Then they show you "total revenue" screenshots while your net margin bleeds.

Revenue is vanity.
Profit is sanity.
Your agency reports are designed to hide the difference.

Ask for profit metrics. Watch them squirm.

Why your retargeting doesn't convert:

You're showing the same ad to people who already said no.

That's not retargeting. That's nagging.

Smart retargeting:

- Different angle than the first ad
- Addresses why they didn't buy
- New proof, new objection handling
- Feels like a conversation, not a repeat

If someone didn't buy after seeing your ad 3 times, showing it a 4th time won't help.

Change the message. Answer what's holding them back.

Founder @Blue Water Marketing | eCommerce & Digital Marketing Nerd

Hey, I’m Chris Marrano.

I’ve spent the last 15 years in the trenches of digital marketing, starting at Mullen (Boston) working with brands like Match.com and LendingTree, then going client-side at Harvard Business School before launching Blue Water Marketing from the ground up.

Today, I run an eCommerce growth agency that helps Shopify brands scale from 7 to 8 figures—without bleeding budget.

We do this by combining Meta Ads, Google Ads, Klaviyo, and content at scale with deep financial visibility (think MER, aMER, CAC, and contribution margin). We don't just run ads, we integrate into your brand’s systems and decision-making so growth is profitable.

I'm also building ADIQ.AI, an AI-powered SaaS platform that helps brands analyze creative performance in real time—because in this market, "creative testing" without data is guesswork.

Outside of business, I live in South Florida with my wife Taylor and our two boys. I’m a family-first operator. Weekends usually involve beach days, t-ball games, and building something in the garage (usually with a goldendoodle supervising).

If you're a DTC founder looking to:
✅ Turn creative chaos into profitable customer acquisition
✅ Build predictable growth systems backed by numbers
✅ Actually understand what's driving your MER

Let’s connect.

Chris Marrano

I have been auditing eight figure ecommerce ad accounts with the same Claude skill.

No dashboards.
No new tools.
No custom reporting.

Just a simple export from Facebook Ads Manager dropped into Claude.

Every time I do this, the reaction is the same.

“Wait… how did it see that?”

Patterns jump out that are almost impossible to spot when you are clicking around Ads Manager. Things that feel obvious once you see them, but are completely invisible before.

It does not tell you what to do.
It shows you what you cannot unsee after.

If you are running a seven or eight figure Shopify brand and want the exact audit skill I use, comment SKILL and I will send you the MD file.

Scaling 7 & 8 Figure DTC Brands Profitably | Building AI-enhanced systems | Founder@BlueWaterMarketing | Founder@ADIQ.AI

Most brands are tracking 47 different creative metrics.

And they still can't tell you which ads are actually working.

I've audited hundreds of Meta accounts. The ones drowning in data almost always have the same problem: they're measuring everything and understanding nothing.

Here's where we start every diagnosis:
- Hook rate. Are people stopping? If less than 25% watch past 3 seconds, nothing else matters. Your ad isn't even getting a chance.
- Hold rate. Are they staying? ThruPlays divided by 3-second views. This tells you if your message lands after the hook.
- Creative diversity. How much spend is concentrated on your top 3 ads? Above 60%? Andromeda is starving for fresh concepts.

Those three numbers tell you if an account is healthy or dying.

But knowing the problem isn't the same as fixing it.

To actually improve, you need to track performance at the concept level — not the ad level. You need to see trends over 7, 14, 30 days. You need to know which hooks are working, which CTAs are converting, and which concepts deserve more iterations.

That's why we built a Creative Performance Scorecard.

One sheet that tracks concept-level performance over time — built around the metrics that actually predict winners under Andromeda.

It's how we answer "which concepts should we make more of" across every client account.

Comment "SCORECARD" and I'll send it over.

Most brands still check performance by logging into Ads Manager. (Free Resource)

We just ask our AI.

Over the last nine months, we rebuilt how we operate internally by plugging AI agents directly into our Meta ad accounts.

Now our team can ask questions in Slack or through voice and get instant answers like:
- What are our top performing ads by CTR this week
- Which creatives are creeping above our CAC threshold
- What trends are actually moving performance across ASC

The system pulls live data, compares it to historical benchmarks, and responds in plain English. If needed, it generates a visual report automatically.

This is not a dashboard. This is not automation for the sake of automation.
It is an operating system for performance marketing.

When creative is the only real edge, speed of decision making matters more than ever.

You cannot move fast if your data lives behind clicks, exports, and lag.

We are not replacing humans. We are replacing delay.

If you want to see how we built this and how you could adapt it for your team, comment AI OPS and I will send the walkthrough.

We’re rolling out our AI Agent and AI Media Buyer Chatbot to beta users next week.

The internal team has been testing it for the past few weeks.

The feedback is insane.

The Agent monitors all your Meta accounts 24/7 like a junior buyer who never sleeps. Generates pause, scale, and alert recommendations and actually learns from every decision you make. 

Approve a rec that crushes? Confidence goes up. Reject one as too aggressive? Thresholds adjust.
It gets smarter the more you use it.

The Chatbot is like having a senior media buyer on call at 2am.
- “CPM spiked 40%—what do I check first?”
- “Should I kill this ad set or give it more runway?”
- “Client wants to know why ROAS dropped. Help me diagnose.”

Real answers. Based on your actual data. No waiting.

One works while you sleep.

One answers when you’re stuck.

We’re only letting in a handful of beta users. Drop “AGENT” in the comments if you want early access.

I had the chance to sit down with Dave Ten on his latest podcast, and we went deeper than surface level AI talk.

We unpacked the AI infrastructure we’re building, how Meta’s Andromeda update quietly changes how ads are selected and scaled, and where I believe AI is actually headed in marketing.

My core belief hasn’t changed.

The advantage is no longer clever account structure.
It’s signal quality, creative volume, and fast feedback loops.

AI is not here to replace teams.
It’s here to collapse learning cycles and make systems more resilient as platforms evolve faster than operators can react manually

If you’re building for the next version of ecommerce and paid media, this conversation is worth your time.

Check out the episode in the comments below.

Summer 2025 broke a lot of Meta ad accounts for Shopify brands

We had clients hitting their best months ever in August. By September, some dropped from 3.2x ROAS to 1.6x.

Same creative. Same offer. Same budgets. Just... didn't work anymore.

The culprit: Andromeda's final rollout.

Here's what changed: → Interest targeting? Basically useless now → Lookalike audiences? Severely diminished → ABOs with 3-5 ads? Fatigue in days, not weeks

The algorithm is now 10,000x faster at processing creative variations. It doesn't care about your targeting anymore—it cares about what you're showing people.
So we rebuilt everything.

New testing structure: 15-30 ads per test instead of 3-5.

Creative diversity isn't optional anymore. It's the entire strategy.

And we leaned hard into AI. 3,200+ automations running weekly. What used to take 8 hours now takes 20 minutes.

Just gave a talk breaking all of this down—what happened, why it happened, and the exact systems we're using now.

Full video is live. Link in comments.

What did you see this summer? Drop your experience below.

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