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Hi Marketing Bestie,

I'm loving World Cup vibes on my FYP on TikTok.

Fun fact: Ari, my wife, was the best football soccer in her whole county in LA growing up.

Sorry honey, had to tell people. And you will never guess her number. #67. She started the trend before it was a trend.

What were you good at as a kid that you stopped doing? Reply and tell me. I was good at football (the American type) but I can assure you those days are OVER.

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Sponsored by Kana

Hold up. ✋
How many tabs do you have open right now?

I'm not judging. Sometimes it feels like Marketing = human duct tape between systems that refuse to talk to each other.

It's why I wanted to show you this new writeup from Kana about Agentic AI.
It covers the CONCRETE basics of AI agents.
Specifics on how they can solve your duct tape problems.
Without hand-waving or hyping up.

Inside Understanding AI Agents for Marketing:
--> Differences between chatbots, copilots, and agents.
--> Why 60-80% of Marketing work is Ops (and what to offload first)
--> The 3 levels of agent autonomy + where to start so you don't break anything

Best part: it's written for Marketers. Not engineers.

Get the AI Agent Report

SPARKNOTES FROM THE POD

5 WAYS TO WIN IN THE CREATIVE-FIRST ERA

Reza Khadjavi started with Shoelace. A simple tool to help early Shopify merchants install a Facebook pixel.

But what he noticed changed everything.

The best DTC brands weren't obsessed with targeting. They weren't stacking interest layers and building lookalike audiences.

The best brands were obsessed with creative. And they were winning.

So Reza pivoted. Built Motion around a simple insight: The algorithm got really good at distribution. The limiting factor became creative.

But there was a problem. Growth people spoke numbers. Creative people spoke taste. They had different languages. Different goals.

So a new role emerged. The creative strategist. A bridge between both worlds.

Reza bet the company on this role five years ago when it barely existed. When investors pushed back ("This role doesn't even exist. Why are you betting on it?"), he doubled down.

Now it's everywhere. Every top team has 1.

Motion raised $30M Series B in 2024. Built an AI Creative Strategist Marketplace. Rebuilt the entire platform as AI-native.

And just launched free Creative Research tools for anyone.

Because Reza understands something most don't: In the age of AI, the creative strategist role becomes MORE important, not less.

Listen to the full episode here where Reza breaks down why targeting is dead, how creative strategists became essential, and why proof of real work beats AI slop.

1️⃣. Creative Is The Primary Lever. Not Targeting. Not Audiences. Creative.

Reza's Take: "Those groups understood that the algorithm was just getting really, really good at the distribution side and that the most important lever was going to be creative. The bar for good quality creative and advertising was going up."

For years, performance marketers were obsessed with targeting.

Stack interests. Build lookalike audiences. Get really good at audience segmentation. That was the game.

But the algorithm got better. Meta's distribution machine improved. Suddenly targeting wasn't the bottleneck anymore.

The bottleneck became creative.

You can have a perfect audience. But if your ad is boring, it doesn't perform.

You can have a mediocre audience. But if your creative is incredible, it performs.

The best DTC brands Reza worked with understood this shift before anyone else. They started moving budget from targeting to creative. From audience research to creative testing.

And they won. While everyone else was still obsessing over audiences.

That insight became the foundation for Motion. A platform obsessed with creative analytics, not audience optimization.

Takeaway: Audit your budget allocation.

How much are you spending on audience optimization vs creative development?

If it's 80% audience, 20% creative, it's backwards. Move budget to creative testing.

Run 20 different creative variations. Test different hooks, angles, narratives. Measure which creative performs best. Then scale it.

2️⃣. You Need Someone Who Understands Both Growth Metrics And Creative Excellence.

Reza's Take: "The best teams were trying to fuse those two disciplines. You have these growth people who are obsessed about numbers and revenue and driving performance. And creative people who have really great taste and know how to make something incredible. The creative strategist role is basically going to act as the bridge between the growth world and the creative world."

The problem isn't that growth and creative are at odds.

The problem is that most teams don't have someone fluent in both.

Growth teams understand metrics. What drives conversion. How to optimize for ROAS.

Creative teams understand what resonates. What captures attention. What drives engagement.

The best creative people care about growth. The best growth people care about creative quality.

But they need someone who speaks both languages fluently. Who can read a growth report and translate it into creative direction. Who can see a creative insight and understand its growth implications.

When Reza first talked about the creative strategist role, investors didn't get it. "This role doesn't even exist. Why are you betting on something that doesn't exist?"

But he had conviction. He saw the problem. Growth and creative teams weren't communicating. So he built Motion to bridge that gap.

Now the role is everywhere. Every top team has 1.

Takeaway: If you don't have a creative strategist on your team, hire or develop one.

This person shouldn't choose between growth and creative. They should understand how they reinforce each other.

Growth metrics inform creative decisions. Creative excellence drives growth metrics.

The best creative strategists move fluidly between both worlds. If you can't hire someone new, make it someone's core responsibility.

Give them time to fluently understand both disciplines.

3️⃣. Build Educational Content In Your Discipline.

Reza's Take: "The education part of our business will keep us very close to understanding what the best people in the world are doing. And it becomes a really good input signal into the products that we build. If our customers are the best marketers in the world, and we're gonna build products for them, then we need to really understand this stuff."

Motion runs a Creative Strategy Bootcamp. A Creative Strategy Summit. A free newsletter called Thumbstop. Educational content. All serious.

He doesn't do it to collect emails for a sales pitch. He does it because understanding what new in creative strategy is core to building better products.

By teaching creative strategy deeply, he stays close to what the best marketers are actually doing. What problems they're solving. What's emerging.

That knowledge directly informs what Motion builds next.

This works because teaching forces you to understand things deeply. Creating curriculum means breaking down your discipline into teachable components. You learn what works. What doesn't. What's changing.

It's market research masquerading (I know big word) as education.

And the bootcamp's quality signals to the market that Motion is serious. 80,000+ registrants didn't show up for fluff. They showed up because the curriculum is genuinely excellent.

Takeaway: Create educational content in your space.

A podcast. A newsletter. A bootcamp. A summit.

Make it genuinely good. Not a sales pitch dressed up as education. Real education.

As you build it, you'll discover:

What problems your customers actually have. What's emerging in the industry.

What approaches are working.

What's changing. Use those insights to inform your product roadmap.

You'll build products customers actually want because you understand their world deeply.

4️⃣. In The AI Era, The Creative Strategist Role Becomes MORE Important, Not Less.

Reza's Take: "It's now in the era of AI, like even more important where these like multidisciplinary people who are, who are good at different things, using AI to basically drive incredible value. As we get more into AI, we are getting even more serious about like educating and training the best creative strategists and marketers."

When AI entered the picture, Reza didn't pivot away from the creative strategist role.

He doubled down on it.

Because AI doesn't replace the creative strategist. It amplifies them.

The creative strategist who understands both growth and creative. Who can brief AI. Who can evaluate AI output. Who can spot what's working and what's not.

That person becomes MORE valuable in an AI world, not less.

Because AI can generate a thousand ideas. But which ones should you test? Why? How do you brief the AI to generate the right ideas?

That's the creative strategist's job.

So Reza's response: Get even more serious about training creative strategists. Build tools for them. Create bootcamps. Launch the AI Creative Strategist Marketplace.

The better the creative strategist, the better they can use AI.

Takeaway: Don't assume AI replaces your best people.

It amplifies them.

If you have a strong creative strategist, give them AI tools. They'll do incredible work. I

f you don't have someone who understands both growth and creative deeply, hire 1. Train them.

Give them AI. That combo is unstoppable.

5️⃣. If You're Building For The Best, You Have To Deeply Understand Their Discipline.

Reza's Take: "If our customers are the best marketers in the world, and we're gonna have the audacity to build products for them, then we need to really understand this stuff, because if we don't, we're gonna build products that they're just gonna be like, this is useless."

You can't fake expertise when you're selling to experts.

The best marketers will immediately spot if you don't understand their world.

So Reza made a choice: Stay close to the cutting edge of creative strategy. Understand what the best teams are doing. Learn their workflows. Know their pain points.

That's why he invests so heavily in education. The bootcamp. The summit. The research. The content.

Not because it's a marketing channel. Because it keeps Motion close to what matters.

Every time he teaches creative strategy, he learns something. Every curriculum he builds, he gets smarter about the discipline.

And that knowledge directly informs what Motion builds next.

If Motion tried to build products without deeply understanding creative strategy, their best customers would reject it immediately.

Most product teams skip this step. They build based on assumptions. On what they think customers need.

Reza's team does the opposite. They stays in the trenches. Learning. Teaching. Understanding.

Then they builds.

Takeaway: If you're building for experts, become an expert first or work with experts.

Take courses. Create content. Go deep into the discipline. Your customers will know if you're faking it.

The better you understand your space, the better products you build.

Sponsored by Viktor

AI for Marketing Teams just gave me Marketing Ops flashbacks.
Pulling numbers from Google, Meta, HubSpot into 1 spreadsheet.
Writing Monday recaps from scratch.
The "plumbing work" that ate half my week, EVERY week.

Especially if you're a small team, or team of 1, you should read it.
It tells you how to set up a weekly Marketing loop that runs itself.
Task by task. All the stuff you're holding together with blood, sweat, and caffeinated tears.

Start delegating the plumbing.

READ: The Weekly Campaign Loop That Runs Itself

IN A MEME

I actually was pretty good at basketball as a kid. Then I realized being 6'3" in the post won't get me very far.

Your friend,

Daniel