Oliver Duffy-Lee

Founder of Authority Agency & Komms | 800+ Agencies Mentored | Previous clients include Volvo, Porsche and Unilever

21six is a brand and purpose studio that believe the world needs Brands That Care. More than that, we know that genuinely caring isn't just a slogan, it's a commercial strategy – we call it The Care Advantage™. It’s our simple but powerful system for helping the world’s leading companies grow crowded markets by showing they care – not as a slogan, but as a living, breathing part of how they operate.

We’ve used The Care Advantage™ to help Johnson & Johnson, The North Face, and Philips with global projects, capture new audiences, and create work that actually matters. And we apply it to every brief, from rethinking a brand’s positioning to igniting movements people want to join.

The age of simply churning out campaigns is over. We’re here to transform the way brands connect with people; faster, smarter, and with more humanity than ever before.

Founder

Website: https://www.authorityagency.co.uk

Welcome to the age of Thought Leadership.

Most B2B brands are drowning in a Sea of Sameness, unable to differentiate themselves from their competition.

And so they spend their time:

- Scrapping for low quality opportunities
- Unable to build an audience
- Failing to fill their pipeline
- Struggling to sign new clients 
- Pricing their services too low
- Stagnating and not growing
- Struggling to make pay day

The problem isn’t caused by lead generation, marketing or sales…

It’s a positioning problem.

Strong positioning will:

✅ Differentiate the business
✅ Attract high quality leads
✅ Convert them into high paying clients
✅ Grow the business month on month

And the strongest way to position in 2024?

Build Authority.

If you want help becoming the Go-To Authority Thought Leader in your space, book a call below:

https://content.authorityagency.co.uk/

FINALLY found some time to write a post for LI this week*… Here’s a small update on how our year has started…

1. In Amsterdam this week with one of the most exciting players in Optical Retail 🙏

2. Had a lot of RFP opportunities land so far this year, many of them unexpected. I’ve never had a problem pitching, I actually enjoy it… Never understood the anti-pitch policy many agencies have

3. Also had some really nice new client wins, including TDK, Asus and UCL… Very grateful for these amazing brands putting their trust in us

4. We’re learning to navigate a world where client decisions take longer and involve more stakeholders… This can be challenging, but it’s definitely not changing any time soon

5. More and more we’re productising our IP… Not to sell as it’s own product, but to help explain the value of our strategic thinking - this is definitely an area of the business I’m most excited about

6. Lot of travel to happen this year (all over Europe and Asia)… My view is that international business and expansion is crucial for UK agencies looking to grow. UK market alone isn’t strong enough right now to bank on for strong growth

7. Fascinating to hear the conversations in the agency world on AI influence… It seems to be having an HR impact already, especially in junior positions, but hasn’t transformed our world yet (A convo for another post)

*This is BS btw, it’s about priorities… Content hasn’t been a priority for me recently, but will get back to it. How are things in your world? Let me know 👇

CEO at 21six | The Agency for Brands That Care

Building DTC brands to 8 and 9 figures | Founder of Soar With Us & For You Advertising | CMO of JAQ Group

The rules of DTC growth changed in 2025. In 2026, they're set to change again.

The playbook that got you to £10-30M - broad Meta campaigns, a handful of hero SKUs, one creative style across every touchpoint, is now actively working against you. 

Algorithms reward creative diversity. Attention spans demand psychological precision. 
And TikTok Shop has emerged as a genuine high-volume demand creation channel, not just another place to run ads.

The brands winning today are producing high volumes of distinctly different assets across every awareness stage (problem, solution, product), each built on messaging frameworks that actually drive people to buy. 

Not more creative. Better creative, deployed smarter.

I've spent 7 years in this problem space. My agencies have generated £600M+ in revenue across 250+ DTC brands. 

More importantly, we've built systems that compound, so you're not starting from scratch every creative cycle. Data from 70+ brands and over 4,000+ ads per month. 

A few recent wins we've delivered for our clients:
→ Ekster: 40% increase in profit, 75% YoY growth
→ Spacegoods: New customer orders up 86%, NCPA down 33%
→ AKT London: Tripled new customers and cut CPA by 59% in 6 months
→ Nutrition Geeks: 2,200% growth in 12 months

What makes us different: we build context databases that capture your brand DNA, winning angles, and performance learnings across every campaign. 

When the algorithm shifts or a creative fatigues, we're already three steps ahead, not scrambling to figure out what worked.

If you're a CMO or founder at an 8-figure brand feeling the scaling friction, happy to talk through what's working right now. Connect here or email olly@soarwithus.co

Olly Hudson

I'm giving away our most in-demand strategic resource, the same frameworks behind £600m+ in revenue generated for the DTC brands we work with.

(This will be the last chance to download for free).

The year is 2026, and every consumer now lives inside a personal algorithmic bubble.

Every feed, every search result, every shopping journey is uniquely shaped by micro-behaviours, emotional signals, and past engagement.

Meta, Google and TikTok aren’t matching ads to audiences anymore. They’re orchestrating hyper-personalised experiences at the individual level.

At the same time, consumers are craving something algorithms can’t manufacture: real connection.

For brands, this changes everything. Winning in 2026 won’t come from targeting hacks.

It will come from:
– Creative built around individual triggers
 – AI-powered signal analysis and rapid iteration
 – Systems that compound incrementality
 – And content that still feels deeply human

This playbook breaks down the exact structures we use across Meta, TikTok, AI and Creative to drive compounding growth in this new era.

Like this post and comment "2026" and I'll send it over.

The Creative-Led Paid Acquisition Partner Behind £600M+ in DTC Revenue | Meta & TikTok for 8-9 Figure Brands.

Meta reports that partnership ads deliver 19% lower CPAs and 13% higher CTRs on average vs standard brand ads.

That’s why the most advanced Meta accounts are now allocating 20–50% of spend to partnership ads as a core growth lever.

So we’ve just released our Partnership Ads Playbook (Updated for 2026) built off what we’re seeing actually scale inside Meta accounts right now.

Inside, we break down:

- Why partnership ads outperform (and why it’s not about creators or follower count)
- How Meta actually interprets identity, creative, and signals
- The creative diversity multiplier and how identity unlocks incremental reach
- Benchmarks for CPA, CTR, FTI, frequency, and what “good” really looks like
- When to use founders, team members, existing creators, or persona pages
- How to source creators using Meta’s own tools (without wasting time in DMs)
- What to brief creators so content performs and still feels native
- Exact setup flows inside Ads Manager (including dynamic identity)
- Contract terms, usage rights, and what to negotiate (so you don’t get burned later)
- A full measurement framework to know what to scale, what to kill, and when
- Real examples from brands doing this well and why they work

Want it?
Like this post
Comment “partnership” and I’ll send it over

We’ve built a database which shows you what’s working on TikTok Shop right now, and exactly how to replicate it.

Real ads. Real results. Broken down frame-by-frame to reveal the patterns that drive trust and sales.

Inside the database, you’ll see:
- Real high-performing TikTok Shop ads across niches like Homeware, Fashion and Supplements
- The full creative framework behind each ad - hook, flow, proof, CTA, etc.
- Clear performance hypotheses explaining why the hook stops the scroll, what creates instant trust, why the ad holds attention and converts, etc.
- Shot-by-shot breakdowns
- Script prompts and visual direction
- The repeatable structures TikTok’s algorithm consistently rewards

Built for teams running TikTok Shop ads, affiliate programs, or creative testing.

Want the database?
Like this post
Comment “database” and I’ll send it over!

undefined undefined

BFCM Guide

This is just one page from our 127-page ultimate guide to BFCM. 

If you’d like 126 more pages of ecom gold, join 500+ brands and check this out: https://bit.ly/3RlTHZ4


Plug 1

Newsletter Tease

Ps. Head here if you want to be the first to receive our 2024 ads blueprint this week: https://bit.ly/3YR6HaD


12/03

5 more critical errors to fix: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olly-hudson_use-data-to-fix-your-brands-creatives-and-activity-7168154221719056384-Yn5A?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

13/03

Motion plug

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Borja Lázaro

For AKT London, we increased new customer orders by 300% and lowered CPA by 59%... in just 6 months.

AKT London is a premium UK personal-care brand built for people "Born to Perform". A strong product. A clear brand. Early growth powered by influencer whitelisting and promotions.

But when they partnered with us, the brief was clear: build a sustainable, direct-response growth system across UK & US, without eroding brand equity.

We took on Paid Social, Paid Search, and full creative execution.

In the first six months:
✔️ New customer orders increased 300%
✔️ CPA reduced 59% across channels
✔️ Conversion spend grew 47%
✔️ Meta spend increased 74%
✔️ 456 creatives launched (350 produced by us)
✔️ Google revenue increased 69%
✔️ US ROAS increased 62% following consolidation
✔️ Demand Gen unlocked incremental scale and reduced over-reliance on a single channel

Here’s how we helped them turn early traction into a scalable, cross-channel growth engine.

1. We engineered a media engine built for volume
→ Set up a clean BAU structure across Meta/TikTok
→ Geotargeted for UK vs US cost dynamics
→ Spun up 456 creatives (350+ by us) to keep frequency low and ad freshness high

2. Every ad was pain-point led and insight-backed
→ Ran deep creative research and AI-enabled customer mining
→ Extracted patterns, barriers, and buying triggers
→ Used this to guide every creative decision, not guesswork

3. We diversified demand across channels
→ Built Google Demand Gen to catch non-brand and research traffic
→ Rolled out search & PMax to mop up bottom-funnel and boost blended ROAS
→ Result? 23% lower CPC, 40% increase in ROAS on Google

4. We scaled what was working, fast
→ UK was efficient → scaled hard
→ US was volatile → rebuilt for future scale
→ Continuously iterated creatives to fuel new spends without cannibalising returns

And the best part? We now have a repeatable playbook for cross-market DTC scale without heavy discounting.

We build systems that scale brands, not just spike them.

Apply for a growth roadmap today and get in touch with the team 👉 https://lnkd.in/e42Tvwmu

We've broken down the funnel of a brand doing £20M a year in DTC revenue, and we're giving it away.

Ancient + Brave went from £1M annual revenue to £1M a month almost overnight in late 2022.

By 2023 they'd hit £10M. 2024 they doubled to £20M. They're forecasting £40M+ this year.

90% of that revenue comes from DTC. No aggressive VC pressure. Profitable throughout.

But the numbers aren't the interesting part.

Ancient + Brave built their growth on a framework most supplement brands can't replicate; transitioning health-conscious consumers from "supplements as pills" to a permanent lifestyle of Bio-Optimal Rituals.

That means their entire creative system, their media strategy, their retention model, all of it is built around identity shift, not product features.

They sell through authority, aesthetic ritual, and scientific credibility. B-Corp certified. Clinical trials in-feed. Persona-segmented Meta ads that speak to high-performance professionals and graceful agers in completely different languages.

And we've broken down the funnel to show what that actually looks like in practice when a premium D2C wellness brand commits fully to persona-led growth and creative scale.

Inside this breakdown, we unpack:

- How creative volume and diversity feed Meta's Andromeda system with high-density signals
- Why scaling a luxury wellness product requires a fundamentally different creative strategy than a commodity supplement
- How to maintain premium brand perception while producing the creative variation Meta's algorithm demands
- The role of UGC, high-production, and partnership ads in a sustained performance ecosystem that never compromises on quality
- Why persona-led creative is the only sustainable way to grow a high-ticket D2C product without racing to the bottom on price
- What this approach teaches us about scaling a luxury supplement brand in an increasingly saturated wellness market

If you're responsible for growth, creative, or paid media, this breakdown shows how the winning brands are already operating. 

Want it? 
Like this post
Comment “2026” and I’ll send it over

Seven years ago, we walked out of a meeting with our first real e-comm client.

Ten minutes later, sat in the car, reality hit: we'd just agreed to do three months for free.

That drive back to Tadcaster was chaos in my head.

Half of me was buzzing. We'd actually done it. Walked into a room, pitched our vision for how we could scale their football shirt brand on Meta, and they'd said yes.

The other half was terrified.

Because talking about what you can do and actually having to deliver it are two completely different things.

No safety net. No second chances. Just me and Joe and a brand that had zero reason to trust two lads in their early twenties with no track record.

That night, I called my family.
"We got our first proper client today."
"That's brilliant! What are they paying?"
"...Well, nothing. Yet. But if we hit their numbers, they'll introduce us to other brands."

Silence.

Then: "Right. So... when does the money start coming in?"

I could hear it in their voice. The same concern I'd been hearing from them for months. This agency thing... is it actually going to work?

And honestly? I didn't know.

But I knew this was the moment. Either we'd become another "I told you so" story, or we'd prove we could actually do this.

Week one was brutal. Just manual bidding, a Google Sheet where we'd split out every single audience by hand, and me refreshing the ads manager every hour like my life depended on it.

Week two: 2.9x ROAS on cold traffic.

I remember seeing those numbers and thinking: Holy shit. This might actually work.

By week three, I'd stopped checking the dashboard compulsively. Not because I was relaxed, I was still bricking it, but because something had shifted.

The doubt was still there. But underneath it, there was something new.

Belief.

Not the “fake it till you make it kind”. The real kind. The kind you can only get by actually doing the thing you said you'd do.

That football shirt brand never became our biggest client. The case study didn't change our business overnight. And looking back, the ROAS wasn't even that impressive.

But none of that mattered. Because proving it once, to yourself, to the people who love you but quietly wonder if you've lost the plot, that's the moment everything changes.

The next pitch we took, I wasn't trying to convince myself anymore. I just knew. That free trial gave us something more valuable than revenue. It gave us conviction.

And seven years later, that conviction is what's carried us through every campaign, every scale, every moment of doubt since.

You can't fake that. You have to earn it.

P.S. For the founders reading this, what was your moment? The one where doubt started turning into belief?

Meta invited me to tell their product and marketing team how we approach Facebook differently.

The answer surprised even the agencies 10x our size.

Agencies running massive brand budgets. And there we were, a bootstrapped DTC agency from Yorkshire, obsessed with conversion, testing 100+ creatives a month, and ignoring most of the conventional playbook.

That's exactly why they wanted us there.

The gap between how large brand advertisers think about Meta and how DTC operators use it is significant. Not better or worse, genuinely different orientations.

Most large advertisers still think in terms of:
→ Brand campaigns
→ Funnel splits
→ Top-of-funnel reach
→ Media planning cycles

The 250+ DTC brands we work with think like this:
→ Creative as infrastructure
→ Conversion as the north star
→ Testing velocity as competitive advantage
→ Profitability over vanity ROAS

A few things came out of the discussion that stuck with me:

Creative is the new targeting. As Broad and ASC become the default, the question has shifted from "what audience do we buy?" to "what creative system do we build?" Testing 50 to 100+ assets a month isn't excessive at our scale, it's the mechanism.

Profitability is replacing vanity ROAS. The founders we work with are pushing back on surface metrics. The real conversations are about contribution margin, blended CAC, and whether growth is actually incremental.

Meta has earned its way up the funnel. Reels, broad delivery, and AI-driven placement are doing legitimate brand-building work now, whether brands planned for it or not.

Meta creates demand. Google captures it. They're complementary, not competing.

AI-enabled creative infrastructure is becoming the moat. Agencies and brands building proprietary systems for creative intelligence will compound an advantage that spend alone can't close.

Grateful to be part of the discussion and to see how seriously Meta is thinking about creative, measurement and signal quality. Thanks to the panel Amelia Ensell, Lucia Magadan, Caroline Reynolds

We've officially secured a Meta insider on the podcast.

A Creative Strategist who works directly with the top 1% of brands on the platform.

We spent the episode getting the real picture: how Meta actually reads creative now, why so many brands are unknowingly working against the system, and what the fastest-scaling brands are doing differently.

Best analogy of the episode: Meta used to judge your ad by the cover. Now it reads the entire book.

This is the inside scoop, straight from the source: https://lnkd.in/eyn6PzwN

85 people in the room. Talented people. And a voice in my head asking what I'm doing up here.

I thought imposter syndrome would disappear with progress.

More clients. Bigger wins. A growing team. Surely at some point you just... feel like you belong?

But it didn't disappear. It just changed shape.

Now it shows up in different moments. When I'm presenting a new strategy to the team. When someone asks a question I don't have the answer to. When I look around the room and realise how genuinely good the people around me are.

You think you'll feel "ready" at a certain level. But you don't. You just get better at showing up anyway.

Here's what I've come to understand: imposter syndrome doesn't leave. And maybe it shouldn't.

Because the moment you stop feeling it is probably the moment you've stopped growing.

If I'm expecting everyone else to improve with the business, it's non-negotiable that I'm on the same growth trajectory. Not standing still. Not coasting on what got us here.

The voice in my head that asks "what am I doing up here?" isn't the enemy. It's a reminder to stay accountable. To keep the standard high. To not let comfort replace curiosity.

The shift for me came when I stopped trying to get rid of it. Instead, I started using it as fuel.

Being clear, not perfect. Owning what I don't know. Backing the people who do know. Learning faster than the business is scaling.

Because leadership isn't about having every answer. It's about creating belief and showing up when it counts.

Some days the voice is louder than others. But I show up anyway. Not because I've figured it all out. Because the team deserves a leader who's growing as fast as they are.

P.S. Do you still feel it? Or have you found a way to make peace with the voice that questions if you belong?

We’re moving into a persona-driven era of paid growth, and I don’t think enough teams have internalised what that actually means.

As Meta’s delivery has improved, the constraint inside ad accounts has shifted. The question is no longer, “How do we find the right audience?” but “How many distinct, meaningful personas can we give the algorithm to work with?”

We built a Creative OS around: persona → micro-persona 

At the time, it felt like a strong creative framework. Now it feels like the operating system for scale. As delivery has become more probabilistic and creative-led, we’ve been able to unlock more personas per brand, but only when the research and messaging are strong enough.

What started as macro personas (e.g. “menopause”) is fragmenting into increasingly nuanced segments, moving toward a “soulmate theory” end state where each user sees the version that feels built for them.

You can see this in the strongest accounts. The best brands are mapping the full chain:

Persona → Creative angle → Landing page → Offer framing

They’re not just launching ads. They’re asking, “are we systematically covering the opportunity landscape?”. Which raises a bigger question. Should we start reporting by persona? Spend per persona. CAC per persona. New customer volume per persona. Contribution margin per persona.

If persona is the real growth lever, it arguably needs to become a reporting dimension, not just a creative one.

Most accounts still report by campaign type or funnel stage. But if creative is the new targeting mechanism and persona is the core creative variable, then persona becomes a performance variable. And that changes prioritisation.

Not every persona is equal. They differ in TAM, competitive density, ease of conviction, LTV potential and creative scalability. Some are “easy money.” Others are strategically important but structurally harder.

The real skill becomes answering,“which personas deserve scale capital?”

There’s also an account structure implication. We’ve seen persona-mapped campaign structures work at scale. The question is whether fragmentation intensifies as budgets increase.

Does one macro persona split into three, then seven, then fifteen micro-cohorts? If so, creative strategy, campaign structure, reporting and landing page architecture all need to reflect that.

The upside is that this makes scaling more deliberate. Instead of random angle testing, you’re building structured coverage across defined intent clusters.

But it requires growth teams to move beyond concept testing and think in terms of:
- Persona coverage audits
- Persona saturation
- Persona-level incrementality
- Persona lifecycle value

Which likely means persona should show up in reporting, not just in the brief.

If you're spending serious money on Meta and want to pressure-test how your persona coverage maps to your account structure, that's exactly the kind of work we do at Soar With Us https://lnkd.in/e8Tkwe4q

Pretty exciting to start a new partnership with a brand already growing 129% YoY, sitting in major retailers, and pulling 30m+ organic views a month.

Sunna van Kampen and the team at Tonic Health are building serious momentum and now ready for the next chapter where we double down on the founder-led narrative and turn that clarity and trust into scaled, structured creative output.

Started things off by visiting their pop-up earlier this week and it’s clear how strong the positioning is when you see it in person.

The messaging cuts through because it’s simple and direct. Challenging what the vitamin industry has normalised; under-dosed formulas, sugar where nutrients should be, fillers everywhere. You could literally see it landing. People picking up products. Reading labels properly. Realising what’s actually inside most supplements.

But one of the biggest takeaways already is the power of founder-led brands.

Sunna isn’t just attached to Tonic, he is the brand. When he shows up in the creative, everything changes. People recognise him. They stop. They watch.

It’s not fear-based. It’s clarity-based. And once it clicks, it sticks.

In supplements, trust isn’t built through louder claims. It’s built through truth, consistency, and presence.

There’s serious leverage here.

I’ve genuinely never seen a brand run a persona-led growth strategy like this.

Kind Patches are operating with an insanely segmented creative system - over 3,000 live ads at any one time.

Instead of pushing the brand as one catch-all “wellness” solution, each product is built around a very specific problem: sleep issues, work stress, low energy, screen fatigue, you name it.

That lets them speak directly to clear core personas, busy professionals, anxious sleepers, parents, students, travellers, while also going even narrower with micro-personas like Sunday night scaries or late-night screen users.

For paid social, this is where it really clicks.

Every product becomes its own creative playground.

Different angles. Different hooks. Different formats. Tested at scale.

And that depth of variation is exactly what Meta’s Andromeda system rewards, lots of distinct, high-quality signals instead of one overworked hero idea.

Here's one of their personas broken down:

👉 For those who want better skin and hair

They’re actively trying to look and feel better, and visible results are the main driver. They’re not browsing for fun, they want proof that something actually works.

Most of them are already pretty deep in the journey. They’ve tried serums, supplements, routines, trends… and a lot of it either didn’t work or felt overly complicated.

That’s why they’re often skeptical.

They’re tired of surface-level fixes and big promises with no payoff.

What cuts through for them is simple, outcome-led framing:

- clearer skin
- better elasticity
- stronger collagen
- real hydration

Paired with a routine that feels easy to stick to (“just add this to what you already do”) and an ingredient story that sounds credible, not gimmicky.

They also respond really well to bundles that map to the end goal (glowing skin + healthier hair) because it removes decision fatigue and makes the purchase feel like a complete solution, not another experiment.

These concepts are built very intentionally for a solution-aware audience.

People who already know what the problem is, have tried things before, and are aware that a lot of solutions don’t actually deliver.

The creative assumes that context.

Instead of over-educating or starting from scratch, it focuses on positioning against what they’ve already tried (especially skincare) and reframing why this approach works differently.

It’s less about convincing them they have a problem and more about convincing them they’ve finally found the right fix.

I broke this down in more detail in an article which also includes a link to download our full persona breakdown https://lnkd.in/eN-K-ZQD

Kind Patches Persona Strategy

If scale feels harder than 12 months ago, it’s not just you. We’re seeing it across the board.

Performance is less predictable. Attribution is noisier. Delivery is increasingly AI-driven.

The teams breaking through have rebuilt how they make creative decisions. We've been going deep on this with Triple Whale and here's what we're seeing👇

1️⃣ From demographics → personas
They’re not targeting “male, 25–35, UK.”
But:
- The high achiever chasing productivity
- The stressed operator seeking calm
- The sceptic who needs proof
- The optimiser who wants efficiency
Different fears. Different desires. Different hooks. Same product. Different entry point.

2️⃣ From winner/loser ads → creative portfolios
The old way: Find a winner. Iterate the background. Scale it until it dies.
The new way: Build a creative portfolio. 3–5 personas. 3–5 angles per persona. Multiple vehicles per angle.
You maintain diversity while scaling what works. Because the algorithm rewards signal variety.

3️⃣ The teams winning have process clarity
The biggest difference I see between plateaued brands and scaling brands isn’t budget. It’s creative governance.
Winning teams:
- Know which concepts are driving net-new reach
- Separate “concept testing” from “performance iteration”
- Use creators as a diversity lever, not just a UGC supplier
- Align media + creative + data around one growth constraint
Usually that constraint is incremental reach.

When you solve for that, the rest compounds: Meta → Branded search → CRM → Blended CAC.

The best brands are radically simplifying account structures and reallocating complexity into creative strategy.

4️⃣ And then there’s identity. Partnership ads aren’t a trend. They’re a signal injection mechanism.

New identity = new signal layer = new audience pools.

The brands treating creator identity as a diversity multiplier are seeing consistently lower CPAs and stronger incremental reach.

If scale feels harder than it used to, it’s probably not your offer. It’s your decision system.

On March 3rd at 4pm GMT we’ll be unpacking this with Triple Whale and Underoutfit Inc, discussing how leading brands are rebuilding creative decision-making as delivery becomes more automated.

We’ll go deeper on:
- What platform shifts actually mean for creative performance
- How top teams structure testing today
- How they decide what to launch, scale, and cut
- And how they measure impact without relying on guesswork

If you’re responsible for paid or creative, it should be a useful one. (And yes, I’m a Triple Whale partner).

Register here: https://lnkd.in/eFpbWp27

Collectively, the guests we’ve had on the podcast have built brands doing $400M+ in revenue.

Over the last few months, we’ve had operators who’ve built real businesses and were generous enough to break down exactly what worked.

If you’re pre-launch, at £5M, or pushing toward £50M, there was more usable insight in these episodes than most paid courses.

Here are the tactics worth stealing 👇

Danny Yeung (IM8 Health)
→ Build credibility with experts, not just influencers.
Science-backed brands win when trust is embedded through clinical advisors, not outsourced to marketing.
“We wanted the science to survive the brand for 10–20 years.”

Dan Murray🧠 (Heights)
→ Celebrity ambassadors have to be genuine customers first.
If they already buy, they already trust the product and so will their audience.
“You can’t out-convert a trust issue.”

Thomas Phillips (DTC SEO Agency)
→ AI visibility comes from SEO + authority.
ChatGPT and AI Overviews pull from credible, well-ranked entities.
“It’s early, but growing.”

Jack Rubin (Purdy & Figg)
→ Focus is the growth lever.
One hero SKU. One ICP. One channel.
“Your TAM is a function of your focus.”

Holly Beadle (HERA Clothing)
→ Product is retention.
Build around a small number of core products and stop chasing constant launches.
“Develop more, produce less.”

Mathew & Joe (Pure Pet Food)
→ Do the unscalable work first.
Direct customer contact beats tools, dashboards, and paid spend early.
“We started with £300 and a boot full of dog food.”

Martyn Cook (Noobru)
→ Mission has to be infrastructure.
Tie impact to revenue, not profit, and make it provable.
“If Noobru dies tomorrow, no one can take away the fact we fortified 250 million meals.”

Dylan Ander (heatmap)
→ Your site should match your best ad.
Familiarity increases conversion.
“Test offers like you test ads.”

Alex Cooper (Adcrate)
→ Customer research comes before AI.
Without insight, prompts are guesses.
“AI won’t do the research for you.”

Matthew Kelly (Spacegoods)
→The jump from £10M to £50M forces you to professionalise the brand.
Matt was clear: you don’t scale that stage by just doing more of what worked before.

Ashvin Melwani (Obvi)
→ Organic before paid.
Warm demand makes paid work easier.
“Build awareness first, then scale it.”

ellie carlile (byellie)
→ Show the failures, not just the wins.
Posting daily, sharing mistakes, stock issues, and behind-the-scenes moments turned TikTok into a community engine, not just a growth channel.
“People buy from people. Let them see everything.”

Sarah Levinger (Tether Insights)
 → Creative strategy should start with psychology.
 Understanding emotions, heuristics, and mental models is what makes creative resonate.
 “Psychology applies to everything.”

Mark Rushmore (SURI)
 → Scale comes from fundamentals.
 SURI scaled by nailing category choice, product design, and performance storytelling.

Even bigger things to come in 2026.
https://lnkd.in/gY6Azqx4

Investor I CEO I Entrepreneur I Advisor I Astronaut

IM8 Health

Girl Dad | Co-Founder of Heights I Angel Investor In Over 100 Startups I Follow For Daily Posts on Health, Business & Personal growth from UK’s #1 ranked health creator (apparently)

Heights

Scaling Ecom Brands Through Search | DTCSEOAGENCY.COM

DTC SEO Agency

Co-founder & CEO Purdy & Figg | Scaling a Sunday Times Top 10 Fastest-Growing UK Brand | 1M+ Households | Building a Better Future | Forbes 30u30

Purdy & Figg

Co-Owner & CEO at HERA Clothing

HERA Clothing

Founder & CGO - Pure Pet Food

Growth Director at Pure Pet Food

Pure Pet Food

Founder at @noobru 🧠⚡️Host at Smarter Destiny Podcast

Noobru

3 exits. $5B+ in online revenue optimized. 12+ years in marketing. 1 book published.

heatmap

AI & advertising. Helping you make better direct response creatives. Co-Founder @ Adcrate.

Adcrate

founder @spacegoods 🍄🎨

Spacegoods

CMO and Co-Founder at Obvi

Obvi

Founder of byellie | FEBE 2025 watch list

byellie

Helping you get off the creative testing treadmill. 🧠 Psych-driven frameworks that turn customer insights into ads that actually stick. Founder @ Tether Insights. FREE Skool: Skool.com/tether-lab

Tether Insights

Co-Founder @ SURI | Sustainable Rituals

SURI

Inside every macro persona are 3 completely different buyers. Most creative speaks to all of them at once. Here's how to map them.

(Busy Dad is not a persona. It's three completely different buyers wearing the same label).

Macro personas tell you who to reach. Micro personas tell you why they actually buy. Most brands never make it to the second step.

Allocating spend at the persona level is powerful, but the real advantage comes from signal precision within each persona. If persona is the growth lever, micro persona is the efficiency lever.

Most teams are allocating spend by WHO. Modern delivery systems optimise around WHY. That gap is where performance gets diluted.

Macro personas are still necessary, they're how you structure spend buckets and organise coverage. But inside every macro persona are multiple psychological tensions, and those tensions behave very differently in-feed. 

That's where the real leverage sits.

Take "The Busy Dad." Time-poor. Career driven. Wants energy. Wants to be present with his kids.

But inside that single persona are very different psychological tensions:
- The Control Seeker: wants predictability and measurable safety 
- The Skeptical Analyst: wants proof and transparency 
- The Quiet Normaliser: wants dignity and normalcy

Same life-stage, same product, but completely different emotional drivers. And those drivers behave differently in-feed.

When you speak to "Busy Dads," you blend those signals. When you isolate the dominant tension, you create clarity.

Cleaner tension → clearer engagement pattern → stronger delivery → more stable scale.

If persona is the growth lever, micro persona is the precision instrument and that's where the real optimisation happens.

Most brands stop at WHO. But modern delivery systems respond to WHY.

We do this for DTC brands every day. Get in touch and we'll show you how we'd map your brand https://lnkd.in/eqqDp-xu

We're going through a full brand and positioning project at Soar Group and looking for the right agency or freelancer to bring it to life.

We've put together an RFP so if you're a branding agency or freelancer who fancies taking a look, drop me a message with your portfolio and I'll send it over.

Or if you know someone who'd be perfect for this, give them a tag below - would really appreciate it.

Meta just said it publicly. Insight diversification over creative diversification.

We've been running this exact framework for the past year, and now we have the data to prove it works.

Working directly with Meta, we tested what actually happens when you build creative around persona-driven insights rather than production volume, 
25 variants vs 5 variants, same spend: 
171 more purchases 
59,000 fewer people reached 
15% lower cost per conversion

Partnership Ads vs BAU only: 
800 incremental conversions vs 520 
Cost per incremental conversion: $25.63 vs $39.34

The mechanism isn't surprising once you understand Andromeda. The algorithm isn't rewarding volume. It's rewarding signal diversity. Different insights unlock different audience clusters. Different motivators reach people BAU creative never touches.

What most brands are doing wrong: producing more ads anchored to the same insight. Louder, not different.

What the top 1% are doing: building a systematic process to surface new insights first, then activating creative from those.

We wrote up the full methodology and results with Campaign UK   https://lnkd.in/gyFcQ-Fs

Forget creative diversification. Think insight diversification.

The industry has been obsessed with volume.
More ads. More variants. More creative.
The logic: more creative = more chances to win.

But if 1,000 ads are built on the same insight, you're not diversifying.
You're just saying the same thing a thousand times.

Here's the shift that actually matters:
Creative diversification asks: how many ads can we make?
Insight diversification asks: how many insights can we test?

One is a production problem. The other is a strategy problem.

The best operators are flipping the ratio. 
80% finding the right insight. 20% activating it. 
Insight is becoming the job.

The algorithm handles volume now.
Dynamic creative. AI. Automated variants.
Execution is becoming automated.

The insight isn't.
The pain points. The motivators. The barriers.
The exact words people use to describe their wants, needs, problems.

The brands winning aren't the ones with the most ads.
They're the ones with the most angles.

We built an AI UGC ad and we're giving away the prompt that made it possible.

Most people waste time trying to engineer the perfect video generation prompt from scratch. Getting the cinematography right, the character description, the dialogue format, the camera motion. Sora 2 is incredibly specific about what it needs to produce consistent, hyper-realistic output. Get the prompt wrong and the footage looks off.

This template removes that entirely.

The Claude prompt takes that basic information and structures it into the exact format Sora 2 needs: character description, cinematography, camera motion, lighting, dialogue, audio, authenticity keywords. Everything.

It sits at step one of our AI UGC workflow. And it matters because everything downstream depends on it.

Get this right and your Sora 2 output is hyper-realistic UGC style footage with good camera shake and audio that sounds like it was actually shot on an iPhone. From there you take that output into ElevenLabs to clone the voice. Then into ChatGPT to create a JSON prompt for subject consistency. Then Nano Banana to place your subject into new scenes. Then Kling to bring those scenes to life as B-roll.

The whole workflow starts here.

We gave this away on this week's D2C Diaries episode. Dropping it here too.

Like this post and comment PROMPT below and we'll send it across.

Meta just committed $115–135bn to AI infrastructure and for the first time, tied it explicitly to commerce.

Buried in Zuckerberg’s investor call was the real signal: agentic shopping tools.

In plain terms, Meta wants AI agents that discover, compare, and purchase products on behalf of users.

Not using search history like Google or relying on purchase history like Amazon. But something neither of them truly has: personal context.

In theory, these agents won’t just know what you buy. They’ll know why, for whom, when and probably what you’ll regret buying.

This announcement was a response to investor pressure on massive AI spend, and an attempt to anchor AI ROI back to Meta’s real business: ads and commerce.

And Meta isn’t alone. Google, Amazon, OpenAI… everyone is racing toward AI-mediated commerce, where humans don’t really browse anymore. Agents do.

For DTC brands on Meta, this doesn’t mean “optimise for agents” tomorrow. It does mean Meta will increasingly decide who gets shown, why, and when.

Today, Meta predicts which ad a human might click. Next, it helps an agent decide which product to buy. That changes the job of ads.

Ads aren’t just persuasion anymore, they’re signals into an AI decision system. The system needs confidence to recommend you.

That’s why clarity beats creativity-for-creativity’s-sake.

Ads that clearly explain:
- who the product is for
- what problem it solves
- how it’s different
- where it sits on price/quality
will outperform brand.

Same with product data. Agentic shopping runs on answers. If your PDPs and feeds can’t clearly state who it’s for, what it does, and what it’s not for, you won’t get recommended.

Brand still matters, just structurally, not emotionally.

Trust, consistency, proof, predictability > aspiration.

Price arbitrage also dies fast. Agents compare instantly.

If your edge is “people don’t realise this is cheaper elsewhere”, it won’t last.

The takeaway is simple: Meta is moving toward AI-mediated buying decisions.

Brands that optimise for clarity, coherence, and explainable value will win. Those optimising only for short-term CPMs won’t.

We’ve spent over £100M on Meta for our clients in the last year. The number one mistake we see isn't budget misallocation or bad targeting, it's optimising for the wrong metric entirely.

Most brands track ROAS, CPA, and blended efficiency, but under Andromeda, those metrics only tell you what happened after Meta already made its decision about your creative.

By the time CPA spikes, Meta has already decided your creative isn’t worth scaling.

You’re reacting too late.

That’s why we’ve shifted how we benchmark creative performance across every account we manage.

We now treat CPMr as a delivery diagnostic, not a buying metric.

We track it:
→ At the account level (trend over time, not day-to-day noise)
→ At the format level (UGC vs static vs narrative-led)
→ At the persona level (motivator × demographic)

Here's why this matters 👇

Under Andromeda, Meta decides who sees your ads before it decides whether those people will convert. That decision is driven by creative signals, not downstream efficiency. Think of CPMr as a creative quality score in disguise.

Low CPMr → Meta sees your ad as distinct, engaging, and worth distributing

Rising CPMr → Your creative is being flagged as repetitive, low-signal, or unexciting

When CPMr creeps up, the answer is almost never "push bids" or "wait it out." 

It's usually a creative and structural problem:
- Not enough creative differentiation
- Too much asset similarity
- Too much spend behind too few ideas
- Or frequency building through messy account structure

Your ads aren't suddenly bad. They're being quietly deprioritised by signals you're not watching.

And when we see it moving in the wrong direction, we use Aggero to understand why before we lose the budget finding out the hard way.

It analyses the visual, audio, and structural signals across your ads to:
- Spot signal similarity early
- Predict which videos are likely to earn distribution vs get deprioritised
- Design real creative differentiation at scale, not cosmetic variation

Real results so far:
→ 1.7x revenue without increasing spend
→ 45% sales lift from the same budget
→ 28% CTR uplift by aligning with Meta's scoring model
When CPMr rises, it’s rarely a media problem. It’s a signal problem.

And Aggero gives you visibility into those signals, while you still have time to fix them.

If you want to give it a go for yourself, drop “CPMr” in the comments and I’ll send it over.

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