Essay collection Nº01 / Meta ads & DTC
The Curtis Howland collection.
These are the 18 essays from my Substack that operators keep coming back to, on Meta ads, attribution, creative and DTC unit economics. I've pulled them out of the archive into a single 220-page book you can read end to end.
Get the PDF ↓
Free. PDF, 220 pages.
01
What's inside
- 01What's working on Meta in 2026It's drawn from DTC spend across dozens of accounts.
- 02The DTC static ad systemIt shows what a winning static ad looks like, from the ads in Field study Nº02.
- 03Eight types of attributionIt explains all eight, the three I use and how to set up the stack.
- 04The ecom growth checklistIt lists what a DTC brand should have in place before scaling ad spend.
- 05The creative analysis systemIt explains why I never analyze losing ads, and what I do instead.
- 06The first-time customer P&LIt shows why you shouldn't make scaling decisions off blended MER.
02
Read weekly by operators at
Google, Procter & Gamble, Target, ByteDance, Ritual, Dr. Squatch, Lovevery, Koala, HiSmile, Tinuiti.
Newsletter subscribers, by employer. Their companies haven't endorsed this.
Your posts consistently show a systems-level understanding of Meta rather than surface-level dashboard thinking, and that's pretty rare.
Kartike S., on LinkedIn
03
More field studies
- The DTC landing page teardownField study Nº01. I classified and counted every landing page behind the paid social of 20 DTC brands, 266 pages across 11,999 live ads.PDF + CSV
- The first customer P&LOperator's template Nº01. This fully loaded P&L shows what platform CPA hides.XLSX
- Meta scaling stages 2026Operator's map Nº01. A Meta account goes through four stages, from “$10K a month and nothing sticks” to “$5M a month and boring on purpose.”PDF + XLSX