Tactical DTC marketing essays

After dozens of audits and close to half a billion in Meta ad spend reviewed this year, there is no perfect structure, cadence, or creative mix.

So much of ad production got commoditized this year. All ads look the same, which means they perform worse and fatigue quicker. On meta, creative moats and creative diversity scales.

So many ads that "work" only work for a few days. The job is finding the ones that work for months.

Sub-KPIs are sensors, not steering wheels. The moment you treat them as goals, Goodhart's Law will come around and bite you.

The tension between creative and media buying is the most expensive unresolved conflict in paid media. Here's a framework to diagnose it and a reality check most creative teams need to hear.

The exact tools, spreadsheet formulas, and weekly workflow I use to manage $30M+/year in ad spend.

What's working, what we're testing, and what we're learning on Meta

Subtitle: A single reference list of everything I check when I audit a brand spending $100k+/mo on paid.

The algorithm is real. The conclusion most people draw from it is wrong.

The brands that scale year-over-year aren't finding better ads. They're building better systems.

How Comfrt's 500-person creator army drove $700M+ in revenue, and how an eight-figure beauty brand adapted the same model for paid social.

Your blended numbers are lying to you. Here's how to isolate what it actually costs to acquire a profitable new customer.

The LinkedIn post went viral. Here's everything I left out.

Structure, budget, status: the only three levers you have.

Creative fatigue is the most expensive problem nobody is measuring. Here's how to diagnose it, quantify it, and fix it.

The 5 reasons some ads scale to $1M+ in lifetime spend, and why most brands will never get there.

A complete framework for understanding where your customers come from, from blended metrics to geo-lift testing.

Meta Creative Formats: The Complete Ecommerce Playbook

3 steps + a creative strategy shift

It starts with a problem someone didn't know they had.