31 reasons to keep reading …

⬇️ Matt Bertulli on fixing management.

1 word + 3 rules

😍 Connor MacDonald on powerhouses.

3 (us) + 4 (more) faces

🎁 Sean Frank on holiday planning.

7 peaks + 1 valley

🚀 Connor Rolain on scaling new ads.

3 campaigns + 4 steps

And this week’s top-five (5) trending news stories with executive summaries.

THE SPOTLIGHT Connor MacDonald

Don’t Miss (Us!) the Marketing Operators and These Four Creative Powerhouses

Last week, Connor Rolain hyped our upcoming AMA on Black Friday, Cyber Monday & 2025 big bets.

Savannah Sanchez is one of the most respected TikTok & Meta ad creators ever. She’s sharing a flood of all-new winning examples from what’s working for her clients.

Sarah Levinger is known for her psychology-based approach to creative strategy. She’s doing a 60-minute breakdown on how to conduct research with enhanced AI inputs.

Dara Denney is going to interview Ben Yahalom, President of True Classic — the ubiquitous $250 million brand known for its outstanding and hilarious creative content.

It’s free. It’s virtual. ​It’s foolish not to be there.​

THE OPERATION Matt Bertulli

Let’s talk about hiring, management, and leadership.

This has been a huge focus of mine for the last year. More specifically, let’s talk about …

But before we get started, I want to set expectations.

This is more about lower management levels than it is about the C-Suite. As companies grow, they tend to add additional layers of reporting structure — inevitably creating a middle-management layer.

In my experience, the real problem with middle management is what I call “walls of communication.”

Here’s what happens.

Your team is growing. You have momentum.

The future looks bright after all that time getting your ass kicked in the early stages of building your business.

You start adding people to lead the teams that have formed. Totally normal. This is how organizations are structured.

Eventually, you wind up with people who lead the people who manage the teams.

Somewhere along the way, you start to hear things like …

• “We need context.”
• “We could use some clarity.”
• “We should run this by so-and-so’s team.”

You start to notice that meetings are now much larger and far more frequent. Things have slowed down. Decisions aren’t being made as quickly.

Worse, there’s more discussion about making decisions than actual decisions being made.

If any of this sounds familiar, don’t panic. It’s very common in teams that have grown.

The real danger is if you don’t do anything about it.

This is the information trap. It’s where communication hits a wall and stops moving freely between teams.

It’s natural to think that you need more cross-department meetings. More documentation. More process.

While some of that is true, most of the time, you need to focus on getting things back to being simple.

Remember, simple scales. But how?

 1. Less Meetings; More Asynch Comms 

You already have the asynchronous communication tools to keep people informed and collaborating on simple tasks.

• Most meetings should be emails.
• Most emails should be Looms.
• Most Looms should be Slack messages.

Meetings are cheating. Just stop them.

Want fewer meetings? Force it.

 2. Less Mid-Management, More ICs 

Most companies have too many middle management folks; too few people doing the actual work.

This has more to do with individual contributors wanting a career path than what the business needs.

Often, the fix is to remove most of this layer from the business.

Want less middle management?

Rip it out as a requirement for promotion and eliminate extreme levels of company-wide reporting.

You also need an operating system everyone follows (e.g., EOS) to trust that every team is moving in the right direction.

 3. Less Projects, More “No. Not Now.” 

You’re likely working on too many things. This happens with companies as they start to grow.

It takes great discipline to keep the main thing, the main thing.

Companies go wide before they go deep. They die from indigestion — not starvation.

You have to be relentless in cutting the extras.

“No” is more valuable than “Yes.”

THE FEED

​

The Risks and Rewards of Hypergrowth

• ​YouTube​
• ​Apple​
• ​Spotify​

Shane Rostad on the Dos and Don’ts of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

• ​YouTube​
• ​Apple​
• ​Spotify​

THE ADDENDUM Connor Rolain

From E018: Optimizing Your Ad Creative Strategy

Insight: What exactly is creative fatigue?

Besides being generally known as bad for business and loosely tied to worse performance … very few of us in DTC have a functional definition of creative fatigue.

Here’s an example to bring it into focus.

You launch an ad or group of ads that hit targets.

Either they’re driving an in-platform ROAS or CAC that you’ve modeled for profitable, blended growth.

Or they’re performing marginally better than a comparable control metric — like a static creative test against all statics in the account or all statics in testing.

Creative fatigue means profitable or high-performing ads become unprofitable or low-performing.

Controversy: “We just can’t top them.”

That was Cody on JRB’s best-performing ads.

And this isn’t a hard disagree.

Instead, it’s a pushback against the media buying account tactics used to find new top performers.

Launching and scaling creative tests is nuanced.

Yes, finding new creative that eventually outperforms the scale and efficiency of legacy ads is nearly impossible.

But that shouldn’t be the goal.

The goal should be to find winning creative tests … and to turn those tests into winning scaled ads.

If you launch new winners from creative testing within the same set as legacy ads, they won’t spend.

You can scale up the creative test ad set directly, but vertical scaling often hurts performance.

This way, we can duplicate ads into a winners campaign that has much higher spend without them getting completely blocked out by ads we’ve been running for years.

We’re allowing ourselves to find new scaled winners while still getting legs from our legacy performers.

Regret: I wish we’d done this sooner.

Specifically, an ad account structure that allows for new winning creative tests to become winning scaled ads.

1. Creative Testing Campaign​
   ​
   Where we launch all creative tests in their own ad set with minimum spend thresholds.
   ​
2. Scaled Winners Campaign​
   ​
   Where we duplicate all winning creative tests — inclusive of historical legacy ads.
   ​
3. Scaled New Winners Campaign​
   ​
   Where we duplicate winning creative tests — excluding scaled winners from >6 months ago.

We do this to ensure we’re still finding winning ads at scale.

As Connor Mac says, “Creatives have local maximums.”

All ads have this, but the more local maximums (i.e., creative diversity) you tap into … the better.

Shocker: More concepts, fewer variations!

When Connor Mac was at the Facebook creative event, reps told attendees they believed the best way to find creative wins was through more concepts with fewer variations.

Of course, we also produce many different concepts.

But we separate concepts by ad set in our creative testing campaign with at least two variants — sometimes as many as six — from the jump.

Facebook claims it’s better to create one variant per concept and group together under one ad set.

The idea is to find the winning concept. Then, iterate to that concept’s local maximum.

Question: So, which is better?

• Organizing creative tests by concept and having multiple variants per concept?
• Mixing different creative concepts under a single ad set with only one variant per concept?

First, calculate your current “hit rate.” — i.e., what % of creative tests do you launch that you consider a win?

Second, switch out your creative testing structure to the version Facebook is recommending.

Third, let it run for 1-2 months. Fourth, record and compare the new hit rate to the previous structure.

Any brave souls want to test this out?

Hit reply to let me know.

THE RESOURCE Sean Frank

People hate agencies. But Taylor Holiday’s agency put out a solid post on the 7 peaks & 1 valley in Q4. Ridge doesn’t have valleys … but it’s worth checking out.

THE TRENDS

​

This week’s top-five trending news stories, curated by the editor of CPG Wire

1. Shopify Expands Partnership with YouTube: Retail Dive​

According to a joint blog post, qualified Shopify brands can now utilize YouTube’s affiliate program to sell products directly through creators. This move pushes YouTube toward a more TikTok-like native shopping experience and includes brands like HexClad, BK Beauty, and GoPure Beauty.

2. David Raises $10M Ahead of Protein Bar Launch: Axios​

David — a purveyor of high-protein, low-calorie foods — raised $10M in seed funding. The brand’s founder, Peter Rahal, who previously sold RXBAR to Kellogg for $600M, led the round. Other investors include Valor Siren Ventures, Peter Attia, and Andrew Huberman.

3. Topspin Consumer Partners Bets on Carpe: Business Wire​

Consumer-focused private equity firm Topspin acquired a stake in Carpe, a leading seller of sweat management products for the entire body. David Spratte and Kasper Kubica launched Carpe in 2015 and will continue to lead the brand. Carpe competes with a handful of other brands like Duradry and SweatBlock.

4. Great Many Scores $3.6M in Funding: FinSMEs​

Great Many, a New York-based seller of hair growth products and services, raised $3.6M in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Brand Project and included Midnight Venture Partners and Tonic Ventures. Michael Pollak, the co-founder of Heyday, and Steve Klebanow, a former exec at Estee Lauder, launched Great Many earlier this year.

5. Santatera Capital Backs Little Sesame: LinkedIn​

Consumer VC Santatera Capital invested in Little Sesame, a leading organic hummus brand. The dips category currently has a retail value of over $5.6B, and the U.S. hummus market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 8.1% through 2031. Little Sesame is one of the fastest-growing brands in the category.

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Until next time,
The Operators

PS: Special thanks to Motion for backing us as a sponsor even before day one.

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