In the past we used to advertise broad messages to broad audiences on billboards and newspaper spreads but now, thanks to the advent of PPC (pay-per-click) and social advertising, we’re able to advertise specific messages to specific audiences to achieve a much greater impact - which is where I come in. I put brands and businesses directly in front of their target audience with highly targeted paid advertising campaigns on platforms such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat in order to drive sales and leads.

About me:

I’m a super ambitious, motivated and dedicated business leader passionate about all things business and marketing. I get a kick out of problem solving, thinking outside the box, learning new things and creating value for businesses. I’m also an advocate for remote working, a healthier planet and a happy balance.

Whilst I have a knowledge and interest in all things marketing, I chose to specialise in PPC advertising because I see it as The Business End of Digital Marketing. So I founded Vagabond Digital to help businesses and brands put their products and services directly in front of their target audience. We use a combination of automation and brain power to successfully drive sales and leads into businesses of all sectors. We’re a little different in that we’re a remote business, which means we have neither office locations nor restrictions. This enables us to work with the most impressive talent around the globe, offer flexibility to our staff and improve communication channels - all the while delivering a premium service to our clients.

We offer flat rate fees, great value for money and a high level of expertise.

I’d love to hear from anyone interested in marketing, collaborating or growing their business. Drop me a message and we can arrange a virtual coffee chat - tj@vagabonddigital.co.uk

The books I recommend most often: 

Shoe Dog, Tools of Titans, Think and Grow Rich and for some fiction - East of Eden.

TJ Lee

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.

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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

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https://motionapp.com/

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

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

AKT London

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 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

We mapped the full persona-led creative system we run for 8 and 9-figure DTC brands and it's yours.

Persona-led creative strategy has been the single biggest topic of conversation in our world over the last 6 months - across our client work, our podcast, our Meta partnership, and the broader DTC community we're part of.

The problem is that the conversation has been scattered.

So we built this.

Everything on this board reflects what we are actively doing right now for the 8 and 9-figure DTC brands we work with - from the AI research stack we use to build personas, to the brief structure, to the testing tiers and optimisation rules we run in accounts every day.

It's informed by our own data, our official Meta partnership research, and the conversations we've had with people like Maxime - Meta's Creative Strategist for Disruptor brands - who gave us a rare look at how Andromeda actually works from the inside.

A single, chronological walk-through of the full persona-led engine - so you can see not just what to do, but why each step feeds the next.

Want it? Like this post and comment "persona" 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?

We've pulled everything we know about incremental reach into one guide. Here's how to diagnose it, measure it, and fix it.

Your CPA doesn't spike randomly. It spikes because your account ran out of new people to show ads to. 

Incremental reach is the one Meta metric that predicts problems before they show up in your CPA. Most brands aren't tracking it. They find out they have a saturation problem when costs have already risen and scaling has already stalled.

It covers how Meta's AI (Andromeda, GEM, and Lattice) creates saturation at scale without you realising, the three ways to actually measure your incremental reach today, and the six levers we use with 8 and 9-figure brands to grow it - in the right order.

If your CPAs are creeping up, your new creative is fatiguing faster than it used to, or scaling spend just isn't moving the needle - this is where to start.

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

Meta just changed how click attribution works. Here's what it actually means for your campaigns.

Click-through attribution will now only count link clicks, not likes, shares, comments, or saves.

Those non-link interactions are moving into a renamed bucket: "engage-through attribution" (formerly engaged-view). Worth noting, unlike engaged-view which only applied to video, engage-through now applies to all ad formats.

Two other changes:
The engaged-view threshold for video drops from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. Meta's own data shows 46% of Reels purchase conversions happen within the first 2 seconds, that window was already overdue.

Northbeam and Triple Whale are being brought into the fold to incorporate both clicks and views into their attribution models.

For most accounts, the practical impact is minimal short-term. Your click-through numbers will drop slightly and engage-through will absorb the difference. If you want to see exactly where conversions are moving, you can break it out using the Compare Attribution Settings feature or the Breakdown by Attribution Setting in Ads Manager.

This closes the gap between Ads Manager and third-party tools like GA4. That discrepancy has been used to dismiss Meta's numbers for years. Less ammunition for sceptics, more confidence in the data.

The accounts that should pay attention are those who manually switched off engaged-view attribution. You may see a drop in reported totals. Worth reviewing your settings before this rolls out fully.

Attribution is still imperfect. But this is a cleaner signal than we had yesterday.

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

Partner, Digital at OMD UK | Media Week 30 Under 30 2022

Entertainment, Media and Tech Marketing - Strategy, Leadership, Execution, and Commercial

Partner | Global Chief Performance Officer

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

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.

Founder of Tonic Health

Tonic Health

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

Excited to share that on March 9th I’ll be speaking at The eCommerce Acquiror Conference 2026. 

📍1 Liberty Street, NYC.

The event is the leading global event for investors and acquirors focused on eCommerce-led consumer brands.

It’s a unique opportunity to gain insights from top dealmakers, founders, and strategics driving M&A in the lower middle market.

The event is completely free to join for acquirors in the space. Don’t miss out on connecting with industry peers and uncovering new opportunities.

Reserve your spot today: https://lnkd.in/eqUzy_VH

Looking forward to an incredible lineup of sessions and discussions. See you there!

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.

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

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.

Rory Sutherland said something at MAD//FEST that most D2C founders in the room probably glossed over.

Guinness, he argued, has crossed a threshold almost no brand ever reaches.

It no longer needs to explain itself. The herd has decided. The social norm is set. And once you're there, individual persuasion becomes largely irrelevant. The culture does the selling for you.

That should reframe how you think about growth.

We spend our time obsessing over ROAS, conversion rates, perfect targeting. Those things matter. But they're not what separates the brands that break through from the ones that plateau.

The brands that genuinely win aren't just outperforming on performance metrics. They've made buying them feel socially normal. Safe. Obvious.

Because people don't buy on logic. They buy on social reinforcement. We aren't loyal to products, we're loyal to our networks. And underneath almost every purchase decision, however rational it feels, is one quiet question: how does this make me look?

That's why community isn't a nice-to-have for D2C brands. It's structural.

UGC isn't just content. It's proof that the herd has already decided. Influencer and partnership ads don't work because of reach. They work because of perceived similarity and trust.

The brands that win the next five years won't just have the best product. They'll be the ones that engineer the conditions for collective momentum, and make choosing them feel like the most obvious thing in the world.

Cheers, Rory. 🍺

2023 was the worst year for global M&A in 30 years.  That's changed. The window is open and the founders who've spent the last two years building are in the best position they've been in a long time.

We sat down with Paul Hanley from the The Fortia Group, one of the leading e-commerce M&A advisory firms globally, to understand exactly what that window looks like and how to make the most of it

https://lnkd.in/eCkVQuqU

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The Battle

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