TikTok

Head of Lifestyle Retail & eCommerce

Vertical Manager - eComm & Retail

VidMob

Director Of Partnerships EMEA

Head of Direct Response EMEA

Facebook

Client Solutions Manager, Retail/E-Commerce

Account Manager, Global Marketing Solutions

Flubit Limited

Business Development: Flubit Ireland

Social Media Marketing Manager

The Wright Venue

Assistant Marketing & Events Manager

Eightball Promotions and Media

Promoter & Events Manager

Cook Medical

Marketing Executive

Dave has worked in the Tech and Retail/eCommerce industry for 15 years, across Big Tech and startups. With a passion for creativity, culture and commerce.

At Meta, Dave helped grow the world’s leading brands like HUEL, Alibaba, LEGO, Very and Gymshark. 

At TikTok he led the Retail and eCommerce Lifestyle team, overseeing the growth of the likes of The Hut Group, Wonderskin, P.Louise, Wild, Represent, SharkNinja, Essence Vault and hundreds more. 

A keynote speaker across notable conferences like eComm Live, Dublin Tech Summit, IRX, eCommerce Expo, NextMBA. Recently inducted to the Performance Marketing World Powerlist 2025.

And most recently he released the book “Grow Like Tech”, which unearths the mindset and playbooks for growing like the most successful companies of all time: https://bit.ly/growliketech

Currently working as a growth consultant with brands, agencies and technology partners to unlock growth across digital channels, formulating go to market strategies and fostering a growth mindset culture.

Dave Morrissey

The world doesn’t need another consultancy.

It needs fewer buzzwords, fewer charlatans — and more people who actually give a proper shit.

I built SCEAL for that reason.

For brands, partners and founders who are tired of polished decks that say nothing, and ChatGBT’d “strategies” that never touch the ground.

I’ve seen the inside of the biggest platforms and culture-shaping brands.

I’ve seen what works - and what’s just theatre.

Anyone who has worked with me will know I like to get to the reality of the thing quickly.

Regardless of how beautiful or horrible that reality is.

To figure out what works and doesn’t. To call it how it is.

So I wanted to build something different, to serve with care.

I’ll weed out the bullshit. And not claim I have all the answers.

But I’ll try to get to the truths, that matter for your growth.

And if I’m shit, call me out.
I’ll get better, to serve better.

I’ve no time for charlatans - I don’t want to be another.

Let’s do the right things for the right reasons, together.

I will push you to go bigger.

Be better.

And with a lot of laughs along the way.

This is SCEAL.

A consultancy that drives for startup speed, creative soul, and cultural curiosity.

Built for growth and culture driving. That transforms business results.

If that sounds like your kind of growth - let’s have a chat: www.sceal.net

P.S: where the name comes from... 

It’s a play on words."Scéal" is the Irish word for "story", but SCEAL is pronounced like scale with regard growth. 

Storytelling and growth. Culture and growth. SCEAL.

Growth & Culture Consultant @ SCEAL / Author “Grow Like Tech” / ex-TikTok, ex-Meta

Pumped to have joined the Technology for Marketing advisory board!

With a bunch of industry leading legends, we are working to shape the future of the conference. Providing the greatest learnings on big macros trends like AI and creators for instance. Enhancing critical thinking amongst the AI slop was a topical piece of our first chat that jumped out.

Great to partner with these wonderful minds on this board: Sophia Angelis, Andy Isaacs, Kian Bakhtiari, Gracie Tullio, Brian Flanagan.

And to Alyssia Smith and the lovely team for bringing us all together, legends!

Grow Like Tech audiobook dropping shortly. Warm up your gorgeous ears…

No alternative text description for this image

Landed in Manc taking the stage at The Customer Experience Conference at 14.40…

Anyone on this thing at it do holler!

AI leadership ass kicking, Irish gold on the rise, CFOs and CMOs needing to get into bed together and more in here...

A right bloody pleasure to jump on StudioForty9's Functional and Fabulous podcast with two of my favourite gents of the eComm game Gerard Keohane and Gordon Newman!

Big big thanks to Roger Overall, Elaine Smith and Triona Foley for bringing this wicked pod together. 

Links to hit up…

Functional and Fabulous Website →https://lnkd.in/eivfABHb
YouTube Podcasts → https://lnkd.in/eekzXt2G
Apple → https://lnkd.in/evKTfmM3
Spotify → https://lnkd.in/ehmHFPb6

Want to grow across markets? Don't be tight with the ads spend

Something the best brands I've worked with have the mindset to "spend as much as we can, within reason", a mindset many brands need to adopt to truly grow.

More bits chatted about on the Functional and Fabulous podcast in the links in the comments...

Every brand should be a content machine to compete these days. Create, create, create.

Was a right joy to chat on the Commerce Beyond Borders podcast with the lovely legends Renee Hartmann and Chris Baker.

Renee nicely surmised what we chatted about:  

- Don’t chase trends. Live shopping is powerful, but it’s not for everyone—and there are often easier ways to make money.
- The TikTok Shop success stories are almost all founder-led, community-first brands. People buy from people.
- Content is the game. Algorithms handle delivery; the brands who win are the ones who can produce consistent video at volume.
- AI should make humans better, not replace them. Use it for scripting, localization, and listening—but keep real people on camera.
- The hardest things are becoming the new moat: building community, showing up on live regularly, doing the unscalable work to get closer to the customer.

Grab that juicy link in the comments to listen…

I was dubious. Cynical, even.
About ChatGPT and Commerce.

“ChatGPT won’t change how we shop. Calm yourself.”

That was my stance. As we’ve spent decades building trust with certain channels and platforms.

We go to Amazon for everything. Pretty confident we could one click buy a car and it will turn up tomorrow.

I have my regular go to’s for tech bro black t-shirts (True Classic), nice smellys (The Essence Vault Ltd), “look like I can do actual hard work” (Carhartt WIP (Work In Progress)). 

Habitual buying built through repetition, reliability, muscle memory. But now there is something that could warp all decision making in ecommerce.

It’s a flattering, sycophantic personal shopper, that never sleeps.

It tells you what suits you, what will make you the belle of the ball, what you should buy - and does it with the confidence of a best friend who knows your taste better than you do.

Amazon doesn’t say “you would look stunning in that”, ASOS.com doesn’t say “beautiful choice, gorgeous for you”.

No channel or interface has ever “talked” to us like this. Look at all the poor f*ckers falling in love with ChatGPT, it’s becoming an epidemic. That same flattery put into shopping is a game-changer.

It’s no wonder we are seeing data from ThoughtMetric that showed ChatGPT achieving a 6.7% conversion rate compared to Google Search's 3.9%. And that conversion rate will climb, it’s still relatively early days. 

And then OpenAI dropped the Shopping Research tool into ChatGBT this week, of all weeks, when consumer capitalism gives its biggest roar of the year. Quite the statement of intention for their entry to this space.

Essentially, ChatGPT is now the Suits You Sir from the Fast Show, across the entire internet.

This week's content nuggets…

Back in action with these weekly drops of inspiration and nice things for your eyes and ears.

Links to all in the comments...

The rise of AI content raises two existential questions for brand-side marketers:

Is there still a need for a media agency to simply deliver the media?

More importantly, shouldn't every brand focus on becoming a content engine or content machine internally to consistently feed these algorithms and achieve performance at the backend?

Two questions I got to pose to the industry in this Performance Marketing World piece by Robin Langford along with some other musings.

An honour to be able contribute amongst these mighty industry heads: Issy Chambury, Fernando Fernandez, Luke Townsin, Joe Adsett, Thomas Walters, Paul Goodman, Olu Balogun

Link below!

Tech culture is, usually, open...

"Good fences make good neighbours, but take the fence away and you have a bigger lawn. Get a few more neighbours involved and soon you’ve got a park." – Adam Grant

Hiding best practices. Stealing customers. Sharing nothing. Working in silo from other parts of the company. 

These are the horrible traits of non-innovative laggard companies. 

Tech leans towards the opposite, where companies aspire to be as open as possible across their departments, processes and culture at large. And it all stems from a technical approach, which has evolved into a mindset. Open source.

The term open source refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible. The term originated in the context of software development to designate a specific approach to creating computer programs. 

Today, however, open source designates a broader set of values – what we call ‘the open-source way’. Open-source projects, products or initiatives embrace and celebrate principles of open exchange, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy and community- oriented development.

Openness and sharing in tech originate from the hacker community, which originated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. John Carmack, the programmer legend behind computer games Doom and Quake , gushed about the ethos behind hacking on the Lex Fridman podcast:

"There is this sense of the hacker ethic. It was about sharing information. Being good. Not keeping it yourself. And that it’s not a zero sum game. You can share something with another programmer, and it doesn’t take it away from you, you then have somebody else doing something. It’s to take joy in somebody else’s accomplishments."

HubSpot are almost giddy in their explanation of how openly they operate internally:

"We share (almost) everything. We make uncommon levels of information available to everyone in the company."

It goes so far that they boast about the quality of their wiki – a wiki being a portal that tech companies build for internal use, where company documents, org structures, FAQs and so on are stored for access by employees. HubSpot claim to have ‘the most active wiki on the planet’, and here is what is shared and discussed in there:

-	Financials (cash balance, burn rate, P&L, etc.)
-	Board meeting decks
-	Management meeting decks
-	‘Strategic’ topics
-	HubSpot lore and mythology

Openness is a virtue, and of incredible value to work cultures.

Author “Grow Like Tech” / ex-TikTok, ex-Meta

Clever bit of behavioural economics at play here...

Was just checking into a Ryanair - Europe's Favourite Airline flight and it's the first time I've been hit with this bad boy. 

It's a masterclass in the practice:

- Loss aversion: We’ll pay more to avoid pain than to gain comfort.
- Negative framing: The copy triggers anxiety (“stuck in the middle”) then offers instant relief.
- Anchoring: £3 feels like nothing compared to hours squeezed between two strangers.
- Scarcity: “ONE TIME OFFER” adds fake urgency — you’re nudged to act now.
- Emotional imagery: The masked, miserable passenger makes it feel real.
- Choice architecture: The “Add” button is bold and frictionless; “No thanks” feels like opting into misery.

Rory Sutherland and Michael O'Leary must have banging Whatsapp thread on the go with this stuff. Bravo lads.

Joe Marston 🚀

Co-Founder

Scaling e-commerce brands to 7 and 8 figures 🚀 | LU Entrepreneur of The Year Award Winner | Founder of The Leading TikTok Marketing Agency and an Award Winning Full Service Ecom Growth Agency.

3x Agency Founder.

We scale brands to 7 and 8 figures with creative, paid traffic, retention and funnel optimisation.

In 2024, having a great product is one thing…

But scaling a brand to £10M is a another.

You need a simple roadmap for profitably attracting and converting customers, at scale.

Because when you get that right…

- You stand out from competitors in the market
- You build a community around your brand
- You acquire customers at will (profitably)
- You turn customers into raving fans 

Giving you complete control over your growth.

We help our clients do exactly that with our proven system that guarantees growth.

1. Initial diagnostic to identify bottlenecks in your business
2. Developing a bespoke growth strategy for your brand
3. Creative ideation and production 
4. Unique UGC collaborations
5. Targeted advertising (Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat)
6. Email marketing 

And having generated over £100M+ in sales across 200+ brands, we’ve know the ecommerce game inside out.

🚀 Mystery Shirt In A Box grew from £5K to £2.6M in just one year with our help
🚀 The Essence Vault is hitting 7 figure months in its second year since launch
🚀 Vintage Threads tripled their revenue working with us with a 6x ROAS
🚀 AIRfreshh went from 0% to 52% of revenue from email in 2 months!
🚀 Bene Culture saw their revenue grow 6x in 6 months with our help
🚀 The Oodie generated £2M on TikTok alone in their first year
🚀 UN:IK’s first quarter of 2023 was up 88% on 2022
🚀Grew Liam and Co. 500% year on year

Don’t put up with unpredictable, unsustainable or underwhelming growth any more.

If you want to see how we could help scale your brand, send me a DM saying ‘SOAR’

If you're not ready yet, I post daily educational content to give you all the secrets.

Founder

E-commerce growth agency offering bespoke services to online businesses looking to increase their sales and scale their brand.

Some DTC brands are exiting at just 3x EBITDA. Others are hitting 12x. That’s a £90M difference on a £10M EBITDA business.

A few weeks ago, I co-hosted a private event in Dubai with Emmett Kilduff at The Fortia Group, one of the top M&A advisors in eCom.

Room full of 8-9 figure operators. 

One takeaway came up again and again:

The biggest exit premium isn’t from brand.
It’s from how early you start planning.

We broke down:
- Why DTC brands are leaving millions on the table at exit
- What actually moves your multiple (hint: it’s not your ROAS)
- The 8-part framework Fortia use to engineer $100M+ exits

It’s all in the deck. And I’m giving it away.

If you’re doing £10M+ and thinking ahead 12–36 months, this will save you millions.

Drop “EXIT” below and I’ll send it over.

Building DTC brands to 8 and 9 figures | Founder of Soar With Us & For You Advertising | Triple Whale's "Agency of The Year" Winner

We’ve stopped using ROAS and CPA as our north stars. Here’s why.

Since the Andromeda rollout, Meta’s algo is making delivery decisions before ROAS or CPA ever show up.

Which means:

→ If you’re still using CPA to spot winners, you’re already too late.
→ If you're scaling on ROAS alone, you're scaling old data.

We’ve rebuilt how we benchmark creative across every account and replaced the old north stars with these two:

1️⃣ CPMR: Cost Per 1,000 Reached Accounts

This tells us how efficiently we’re reaching net new people, not just blasting the same warm pool.

→ High CPMR = your creative looks repetitive, low-signal, or unengaging
→ Low CPMR = Meta sees your ad as scroll-stopping, high-signal, and worth delivering

We track this by:

→ The account level (trend over time)
→ Format level (UGC vs static vs story-style)
→ Persona level (motivator x demo)

2️⃣ New Visitor %

Cheap reach means nothing if it’s not fresh.

This tells us how well a creative is breaking out of its bubble and unlocking new demand.

→ High CTR but low New Visitor %? You're just retargeting your existing crowd.

→ Low CPMR + high New Visitor %? Signal to scale.

→ High CPMR + low New Visitor %? Scrap it. Meta’s not even trying with that asset.

This metric = your clearest look at creative incrementality.

We’ve now built both metrics into every client dashboard.

They're how we:
- Spot early winners
- Catch creative fatigue before performance tanks
- Scale without flying blind

Most brands won’t adapt fast enough. But Andromeda is live. And Meta’s already deprioritising ads that don’t play by the new rules.

You can build a business with anyone.
But you can only succeed for six years
and scale it to seven figures in profit
with someone you genuinely trust.

Everyone told us that being friends in business was a recipe for disaster.
Yet here we are.
Six years later.
Still good friends.
Still building.
Leading the agency game.
Multiple businesses together.
Nowhere near finished.

We’ve been friends since our early teens.
We failed twice before Soar.
We lived together for two years.
We learned each other’s strengths the hard way.

Then we moved to different cities.
And that’s where most Co-Founder friendships fade.
Not because of conflict.
Because every call becomes a work call.
And the friendship slowly disappears.

So we do the opposite.
We intentionally protect the relationship that built the business.

Olly flew out to Dubai last week.
No heavy agenda.
No rush.
Just space to reset properly.

Half work.
Half downtime.
One of the most productive weeks we’ve had all year.

We hosted a private Ecom roundtable with The Fortia Group.
Shared what we’re seeing in the market.
Answered questions.
Then kept the discussion going over dinner.

We organised a supplier for our new brand launch next year (more details on that soon).

We caught up with agency friends we’d only spoken to online.
Face-to-face made everything sharper and more actionable.

Random conversations turned into strategy.
Breaks turned into breakthroughs.
The quiet moments gave us clarity heading into 2026.

And the friendship got stronger again.
Which always makes the business stronger.

Founder lesson:
If you don’t protect the friendship,
you won’t protect the business.

Keep the relationship alive.
That’s how you survive long term.
And that’s where the real profit comes from.

Feeling overwhelmed with gratitude right now… 😄

This is our agency 2025 Black Friday social.

4 years ago this was a handful of people.

Now we have over 70 people in one room and that’s not even everyone…

So grateful for everyone who’s helped us on this journey

We audit 8-9 figure brands each week and we still see this one common mistake. 

👇THIS is the reason why your ad performance is tanking right now:

Your funnel is misaligned as you’re speaking “Product Aware” to a “Problem Aware” market.

So many brands try to scale on guesswork. They don’t know what their audience knows, so they can’t build creative that actually converts.

📉 Ads fatigue faster.
📉 CPA creeps up.
📉 New customer revenue stalls.

So we’ve built a fix: a Funnel Awareness Framework built around 5 levels of audience awareness—refined through 50+ accounts and decades of classic advertising theory.

Inside the playbook:

✅ The 5 audience awareness stages:
✅ Messaging strategies that actually match where your audience is
✅ Creative vehicles that cut through at each funnel stage
✅ Tactical breakdowns on how to rework your split to unlock scale

If you’re wondering:
- Why scale feels more expensive every month
- Why your top ads burn out in 7 days
- Why your funnel performance is stuck...

Start here.

Like this post
Comment “FUNNELS” and I’ll send over the resource.
(Make sure you’re following so I can DM you).

We’ve scaled 8 and 9-figure brands where one founder-led ad outperformed everything in the account and generated £2million in revenue.

When it’s raw, real, and structured right, founder content becomes a scaling lever, not a brand play.

But most brands get it wrong.

Either they overscript and kill authenticity… Or they throw up iPhone clips with no strategy.

So we built a framework that fixes that.

A simple cheat sheet that breaks down:

- The 9-part emotional arc behind every high-converting founder ad
- The exact storytelling structure that hooks, converts, and builds trust
- Plug-and-play hooks that stop the scroll
- Real examples from top-performing brands
- The best questions to ask to pull founder story gold

It’s punchy, practical, and built for scale.

If you're a founder (or you're running a brand where the founder *is* the story), this will help you turn your origin story into real revenue.

Like this post
Drop “founder” in the comments and I’ll send it over
(Make sure we’re connected so I can DM you).

Meta just launched the biggest creative update in years and most of you haven’t even realised.

We uploaded 20 new ads into an account. Meta grouped 15 of them as the same ad.

→ Same Entity ID
→ Same learnings
→ Zero new reach

Loukas just dropped a masterclass on how to avoid this penalty...

Here’s the biggest takeaways from the episode:

1. Meta now tracks ads using Entity ID
It doesn’t matter how many variations you upload.
If your visuals look similar (same text, same persona, same framing) Meta will group them.
That means one thing: creative similarity = performance decay.

2. Minor tweaks no longer count as iterations
Old method: change the headline, try a new voiceover, maybe shorten the clip.
New method: change the format, vehicle, and persona or don’t bother.
We now run fewer iterations per sprint, but each one is a bigger swing.

3. Visual change is the most important layer
Your first 3 seconds must be visually different.
→ A new creator in the same kitchen? Penalised.
→ Different script, same framing? Penalised.
→ Same product shot on marble with a new caption? Still penalised.

If Meta can’t visually tell the difference, it won’t give you a new Entity ID. And without that, your reach is throttled.

4. Iterate like this instead
We’ve replaced our iterative testing model with this stack:
→ Format: Static, UGC, high-prod, hybrid
→ Vehicle: Reddit native, podcast, founder VSL, testimonial
→ Persona: 40+ men, 50+ menopausal, Gen Z wellness, etc.
→ Hook angle: pain-point, fear, discovery, curiosity, etc.

Every winning message should now be run through 3 - 4 completely different vehicles, not just line edits.

5. Whitelisting becomes even more powerful
Each whitelisted ad uses a different Page = different Entity ID.
Which means Meta treats it as completely fresh.
Whitelisting now unlocks creative reach and performance diversity, not just social proof.

The takeaway? Your creative process needs to evolve.

→ More upfront persona research
→ More vehicle variety
→ Less lazy iteration
→ Higher volume of truly differentiated ads

Catch the ep here: https://lnkd.in/eZPN9sT7

some people wake up at 4am
run 30 miles
ice bath
no excuses

you see david goggins
and suddenly normal feels weak
average feels like failure

when i was younger
focus was impossible
discipline felt like a myth

I bounced between ideas
half finished everything
always distracted
always chasing the next hit of motivation

I thought success meant becoming extreme
superhuman
wired different

but the truth is quieter

you do not need perfect focus
you need daily progress
one small action
one hard choice
one uncomfortable task

not heroic
just consistent
today’s world makes it harder to stay steady
endless noise
constant comparison
highlight reels everywhere

so i stopped trying to be extraordinary overnight
and started trying to be better than yesterday

one focused hour
one hard email
one real workout
one honest decision

done daily
that stacks
that compounds
that changes everything

discipline is not a personality
it is a habit
repeated long enough
to transform into identity

clear lesson
you win by moving forward a little every day
not by trying to become goggins overnight

Last month, GMV jumped from £200 to £6,000/day in under a week.

And the biggest driver? A creative format we didn’t expect to work on TikTok at all. 

High-production, Meta-style assets.

Specifically, the founder answering FAQs direct to cam, layered with an AI voiceover. Originally built for Meta. 

We assumed it would feel too polished, too “ad-like” for TikTok.

But it’s now outperforming everything and driving 90%+ of total paid spend.

Yes, the brand’s also scaling through affiliates, which is bringing fresh eyes. But the real volume? It’s coming from these signal-rich, high-prod assets.

It’s made us rethink our assumptions around cross-platform creative.

What we thought would only work on Meta is now a top performer on TikTok.

We’re 100% testing this across more accounts.

What’s actually converting on Meta right now (Q4 trends from high-spend accounts):

If performance is flat heading into peak, it's probably not your product.

You're just not building for how Meta works today.

Here’s what’s cutting through right now:

1️⃣ Statics still scale

- Bold text, stat-led headlines and timelines are outperforming generic benefit copy.
- We’re seeing AI-style visuals + punchy copy drive scroll-stopping CPMs.
- Think: big numbers, human tone, ad that feels like a post.
- Native-feeling carousels work too, but only if you drop the polished brand voice.

2️⃣ Hooks > polish on HPs

- The best-performing hooks right now feel ripped from organic:
  "Here's what most brands get wrong..." or "Why I stopped doing X..."
- We’re leaning into founder/influencer POVs stitched into scripted flows.
- Objection-led HPs convert, especially “vs” style frameworks (us vs them, old vs new).

3️⃣ UGC is less about format, more about diversity

- The TikTok Shop-style raw look is working, but only when you mix creator POVs.
- Our top UGC ads use 4–5 creators hitting the same problem from different angles.
- Voiceless demo ads are creeping back into rotation too. Worth testing again.

In short:
→ Statics need specificity and visual edge
→ HPs win on story, not polish
→ UGC scales through multiple voices, not one creator

Can’t believe we’re sharing this for free…

This episode is INSANELY valuable.

Listen to how our MD went from employee number 1 to leading a company of 70+ in 6 years.

Shoutout to Matt Lewis 

Give it a watch on YouTube. D2C diaries

This is the difference between an £80k and £500k BFCM weekend👇
(And I’ve got the unlock most brands don’t even know exists).

Black Friday’s 4 weeks out.

Your CPA is down. AOV’s up. Ads are finally cracking.

Then Stripe delays a payout. Inventory’s tight.

And your biggest window of the year gets blocked, by cash.

We’ve seen it happen to 8-figure brands spending £250k+/month. Not because performance isn’t there. But because finance can’t move at the speed of growth.

Wayflyer gets it.

They’ve funded Wild, Cuts, True Classics, Dock & Bay, and 5,000+ others, so they never have to miss momentum.

💰 They’re giving ambitious DTC brands $25K in upfront capital for $1.8K total cost on the run up to BF/CM (that’s 1.2% per month over 6 months). No equity. No hidden fees. Just the fuel to move when it matters most.

Here’s what that unlocks:

✅ Scale your best creatives while they’re pumping
✅ Restock fast movers before they sell out
✅ Get approved in hours, Shopify, Amazon, whatever your stack

The brands that win BFCM don’t have the deepest pockets. They move fastest.

If your ads are landing, don’t let cashflow slow you down.

👉 Apply here and get $25k next week: https://lnkd.in/eJRUWJ-P

There’s a moment every founder hits where growth isn’t the problem - it’s everything underneath it.

You’ve scaled revenue. You’ve built a team. But everything else starts to crack.

That’s exactly where we were 18 months ago.

This week, we sat down with Matt Lewis, our Managing Director at Soar Group, to unpack how we rebuilt the *infrastructure* behind our agency as we scaled to 80+ people.

They talk through:

→ What changed operationally as we scaled to 80+ people
→ Over-focusing on revenue growth
→ How feedback loops were operationalised
→ The forecasting model Matt built
→ Using role-specific KPIs that ladder up to the P&L
→ Matt’s origin story as employee #1

Behind the scenes, Matt’s been one of the most important drivers of how we operate today.

If you’re building a team or running into growth pains, this one will land.

🎧 Catch the full episode here https://lnkd.in/eFkcg6b9

We 3x’d spend in 14 days, by adding one persona.

Most brands hit a wall, not because the product’s capped, but because the person they’re selling to is.

We see it every month:

– CTRs plateau
– Spend stalls
– Everyone’s panicking over hooks and formats

When the real unlock isn’t messaging. It’s who you’re talking to.

That was the case with a health brand we scaled recently.

They were stuck in a loop: iterating on the same 25–35 demo, same UGC styles, same offer.

Solid CPA, but volume was capped. Nothing new was scaling. So we stopped optimising and started diversifying.

We pulled Reddit threads, X searches, Google Trends.

One insight that stuck out: 30% of women going through menopause struggle with severe bloating and most “gut health” brands weren’t speaking to them at all.

We reframed everything around that one pain point:

– Built 3 new persona storyboards
– Validated the angle with live convo data
– Refreshed visuals + format for 45+ demos
– Decreased editing pace by 20–30%
– Layered in soft CTAs every 10s to build trust

Result? 3x spend in 14 days, with CPAs -18% vs BAU.

Meta rewards net-new impressions. That’s why “persona-first creative” is outperforming hook-first testing across most top-spending accounts.

Because every persona = a new pool of distribution, and a new window of scale.

And your best audience might not be who you built the brand for.

Want a deeper dive of this? Head to the podcast where the guys break it down further: https://lnkd.in/e8vS_2Xi

Over the last 3 years, my 2 agencies For You and Soar With Us have collectively managed £40million in ad spend and shipped over 20,000 creatives on TikTok alone.

This guide outlines our creative system that we’ve used to help 150 brands scale predictably and profitably.

We’ve laid out the exact 5-phase flywheel we use to operationalise creative for the most ambitious DTC brands:

1. Research – Trends, AI, reviews = clear direction
2. Strategy – Align creative to product economics
3. Execution – Modular assets built to scale
4. Testing – Isolate what moves the needle
5. Iteration – Build feedback loops that compound

🔄 TikTok isn’t an ad platform. It’s a creative ecosystem where content, commerce and community feed each other. And this guide will show you how.

Want the playbook?

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We were too focused on growth, not out of stupidity but out of naivety.

This year we ran Soar With Us completely differently.

We stopped chasing volume.
We stopped hiring reactively.
We stopped pretending top-line growth meant success.

Here’s how we actually ran the business in 2025 and why it's been our most important year yet:

Forecasting became a strategic weapon.
No more gut-feel growth targets.
We built full-funnel forecasting across revenue, client mix, hiring, and profit targets, driven by a balance of commercial ambition and team capacity.
It's removed chaos and clarified decision-making across every department.

Culture got rebuilt from the inside out.
We didn't write values in a vacuum.
We ran a full-day offsite with the entire team to rewrite our mission, values, and behaviours, then operationalised them into hiring, reviews, and even client relationships.
Result? Better people, better work, better culture.

Client strategy > client volume.
We halved onboarding capacity and focused on deeper, higher-value partnerships.
That means fewer clients, more strategic impact, and significantly higher retention.
We’re finally seeing the compounding effects.

Feedback became a competitive advantage.
We built a culture of kind candour, rolled out 360 feedback across the company, and trained every manager on how to receive and close the loop on feedback.
It’s helped us level up faster than ever before.

Revenue came from within.
For too long, we were addicted to new business.
Now, 40%+ of our growth is from client expansion - cross-sells, up-sells, and moving partners through value tiers.
It’s lower friction, higher trust, and way more profitable.

Most people assume the next level of growth comes from more work, more ads, more hiring.

For us, it came from subtraction.
→ Less noise
→ Fewer distractions
→ Clearer intent

We’re ending 2025 leaner, smarter, and more strategic than ever before.
2026 is about scaling with that same clarity.

If you’re in agency leadership and you’re scaling fast, but feeling stretched thin, here’s the blueprint that helped us get here: https://lnkd.in/eFkcg6b9

We’ve scaled pet & homeware brands in markets with 100+ competitors.

Here’s what actually cuts through.
(and it’s not a better product)

→ “Us vs them” outperforms pain-led messaging
These categories don’t trigger visceral problems so instead of selling relief, we’re seeing brands scale by positioning their solution as the elevated choice.

→ Homeware scales when you stop talking about the product and start showing the life it upgrades
Think luxury, ease, or emotional enhancement of a space.
The goal is: “This makes my life feel better.”

→ Pet content is all about aspiration, not need.
The core motivator? “My pet deserves the best.”
Not health stats. Not price. Just pure emotional resonance.

→ Convenience is the untapped lever
Especially for homeware brands speaking to maternal or over-capacity personas. If it saves time, stress, or mental load, say that clearly. It works.

→ Don’t ignore the saturated market reality
There’s no shortage of pet food or homeware options.
What wins is category contrast. Your creative should say:
“We’re not like the rest and here’s why.”

If your pet or homeware brand is stuck explaining the product, zoom out.

Start showing what it means for the person using it.

Working in another niche and want a breakdown like this?

Drop me the category and I’ll tell you what’s converting right now.

Meta just made creative volume 10x harder and this (👇) is the only thing that makes it scalable.

Here’s where creative strategy is heading in 2026

1️⃣ Creative similarity penalties make AI non-negotiable
Meta now groups “similar” ads under one Entity ID.

→ Minor tweaks = same learnings
→ Visual sameness = limited reach
→ Iterations = wasted budget

Without AI, creative cost balloons trying to brute-force variation.
With AI, we’re getting 10x the output at 30–40% of the cost.

2️⃣ AI is solving the creative similarity problem
We’re seeing 70% of ad iterations get grouped under the same Entity ID. That’s a massive waste of output. Using AI helps us inject visual diversity at scale, without tripling post-prod costs.

→ Sora / VEO for visual metaphors and VO hooks
→ Nano for high-scale statics + brand visuals
→ Gemini to analyse video and guide variation strategy
→ Frame 4.0 to organise and deploy assets at scale

You wouldn’t ask an editor to shoot the ad. So why are your strategists still prompting raw?

3️⃣ Asset warehousing becomes your competitive edge
You can’t scale creative if you can’t find it.

We’re building a library of every product B-roll, VO hook, and visual format, tagged, labelled, and instantly promptable through Frame 4.0.

At the same time, we’re warehousing ad performance data, call logs, and internal learnings and feeding that into LLM workflows to automate creative direction.

The better your data layer, the smarter your AI outputs.

The takeaway:
→ Treat AI like a production department
→ Build creative systems that scale visual diversity
→ Train AI with real data
→ Give your strategists new tools, not new roles

🎙 Catch the full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/eAwJAcMV

One of our best-performing ads came from a menopause stat we pulled off X and it unlocked over £40K in spend.

👇 This is how we got there and it’s the most overlooked step in creative strategy.

Everyone wants to jump straight into execution (more ads, new hooks, new creators), but if you skip the research phase, you’re not optimising.

Every signal you need already exists. You just have to extract it → interpret it → structure it.

We’re using a Grok + X stack to build creative angles from live audience sentiment.

In this case, the prompt surfaced a clinical study showing women going through menopause are 30% more likely to suffer from bloating.

Then it got interesting:

→ Pulled real Twitter convos around the pain point

→ Surfaced the emotional language people actually use

→ Mapped funnel stages (unaware → problem aware → solution aware)

→ Uncovered a totally untapped, high-intent angle

We built around it. New persona. New message. New positioning.

That ad crushed.

Once you understand the human drivers behind conversion (the objections, motivations, and phrases people actually use) you can build creative that just makes sense.

Want the prompt that unlocks different personas like the example in the image?

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If you can help with hiring the BEST Creative Strategist talent please comment below.

A-players only. Must have experience with D2C.

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