Happy Sunday!

If you're reading this, I hope you had a great week, got some time in the sun this weekend, and built something new with AI. If you’re in New York City, join me at the Social Commerce Summit on Thursday and Hudson’s Mastermind on Friday. It’s going to be an active week in NY!

This past week I had the pleasure of joining one of the biggest brands’ global CMOs in one room. All their operating countries CMOs fly in for a week of discussion, and today’s newsletter is what I wanted to share from it.

This brand has more data, people, agencies, process, and media dollars than most brands will ever have. I expected the questions to be sophisticated, which they were. But what surprised me was how familiar they sounded.

We talked about landing pages. Creative testing. Creator output. Email flows. Offer testing. Customer reviews. Celebrity partnerships. Team structure. AI automation. Brand consistency. Attribution that refuses to fit neatly into a dashboard. Basically, the same conversations I have every week with founders and marketers running companies at a fraction of the size. With growth, the scale changes, but the problems stay the same.

A company spending $100,000 a month and a company spending more than $1 billion a year are both competing for the same thing: attention. Both want to acquire it more efficiently, turn it into revenue, keep the customer longer, and do it again before their competitor figures it out. But, before we get into that...

Vendor of the Week

Trybe... You’ve heard of “The Hudson Method” (how Comfrt scaled to >$1B)... Trybe is how you run it.

One of my good friends is Hudson Leogrande, the founder of Comfrt, and maybe the greatest to ever do eCommerce. His trojan horse was his approach to building a creative supply chain using content creators, and doing so with an affiliate model, not just paying for content.

The difference is that he doesn’t pay $2,000 for a video, he only pays if it drives sales. Then if it works there, he can take the same piece of creative and run it on Meta. The creator still gets compensated fairly. It’s a win-win-win (the creator, the brand, the customer who got a relatable ad).

The orchestration behind the program (the recruiting, messaging, affiliate management, sample requests, creator communication channels, creator leaderboards, payouts/smart contracts, creative management tool, etc) all get handled by Trybe. Hudson is also on the board of Trybe building it as his own.

If you’re thinking about building or scaling a UGC/creator program, give Trybe a look and see how they can become your creator operating system.

The 14 things $1 billion marketing teams still struggle with

The problems don't disappear when the budget gets bigger

Small brands tend to imagine the biggest marketers have everything figured out. They do not. They have better data, more talent, larger budgets, and more leverage. They also have old workflows that became normal because nobody stopped to ask whether they still made sense.

One of the most honest parts of the conversation was how often we came back to basic execution discipline. Can the team build a page quickly? Can it test enough creative angles? Are the email flows current? Is the customer-review library being used? Does a major partnership produce enough assets to justify what it cost?

These are operating questions, and they get more expensive as the company grows. A slow landing-page process is painful when you spend $100,000 a month. At more than $1 billion a year, every week spent waiting on a page, offer, or creative test carries a completely different number of commas.

The lesson is not that scale doesn't matter. Scale makes the fundamentals matter more. Ask yourself: Which “small company problem” has your team accepted because the current process feels normal?

Speed is a growth channel

The biggest blocker that came to mind when I was asked what holds mature marketing organizations back was simple: they cannot make and launch pages fast enough. That sounds tactical because it is tactical.

If a team can produce research, customer insights, angles, copy, wireframes, offers, and creative in a day, but publishing the page takes four weeks, development is now the growth constraint. If every test needs a request ticket, three teams, an agency, a sprint, legal review, and a month of waiting, you do not have a testing program. You have a request queue.

AI makes this gap more obvious. We can turn a customer-review dump into angle ideas almost instantly. We can create copy variations, page structures, static concepts, and initial designs before lunch. None of that matters if the organization still moves at the speed of the slowest approval layer.

This is where smaller companies have a real advantage. You may not be able to outspend a billion-dollar advertiser, but you can outlearn one. A founder can hear an idea Monday morning, build the page that afternoon, and have real customer data by dinner. That is not a consolation prize. That speed of execution is a growth channel.

Growth is a game of angles

The brands winning right now are not discovering secret channels. They are finding more ways to explain the same product to different people.

IM8 does this extremely well. The brand has broad awareness, but underneath that awareness are highly specific paths for athletes, trainers, nutrition-focused customers, and other pockets of demand. Same core product. Different reason to care.

Feastables built enormous awareness and paired it with distribution everywhere the customer already shops. Grüns found messaging angles, validated them, then gave the winners their own creative, funnel, bundle, offer, and lifecycle experience. That is the move.

Start with a defined customer. Map 10 or 12 deliberate angles around their motivations, fears, jobs, identities, and moments. Validate those angles through creators, organic content, or Meta. When one rises above baseline, extend it. New landing page. New bundle. New name. New offer. New email journey. Then take it into additional channels.

Sometimes a new headline unlocks an entirely new pocket of demand. You do not always need a new product. You may need a new framing.

A lot of teams say a channel is “broken” when the real issue is that the creative going into it is random, repetitive, or written for an internal strategy deck instead of a customer. The marketer still has to define the customer and map the relevant angles. Then let Meta find that audience through the creative. Intentional strategy upstream. Algorithmic distribution downstream.

Build a creative supply chain, not a creative calendar

I call this the creative supply chain. Creative is not one thing, and it should not arrive as a monthly folder from one agency. It comes from internal designers. Video editors. Static production. Customer UGC. Seeded creators. Paid creators. Affiliates. Whitelisted content. Cultural partnerships. Hand-drawn formats. Lo-fi videos. Old assets recut with new hooks. One good photo turned into 100 variations.

The question is not, “How many ads did the agency deliver?” The question is, “How many independent creative inputs and learning loops does our company operate every week?”

A real supply chain includes sourcing, production, rights, editing, testing, measurement, reuse, and a way to feed the winners back into production. Most media buyers do not have a media-buying problem. They have an input problem. There are not enough distinct ideas entering the system, and the ideas that do enter are not being tested methodically.

List every source of new creative entering your account this month. If the answer is one internal team or one agency, the supply chain is fragile.

A creator program should become infrastructure

The fastest-growing consumer brands are not buying six polished UGC videos every week and hoping one works. They are building creator networks.

It’s also why I mentioned Trybe above. The strategy itself is not complicated. The operational layer is, and that is where most brands get stuck.

Seed product widely. Pay an initial group enough to guarantee consistent output. Make the early affiliate economics attractive. Watch for content that performs above each creator's normal baseline. Secure the rights, whitelist the winner, put paid behind it, and let the creator participate when the content scales. Then repeat it until the program creates its own gravity and creators start coming to the brand.

The most interesting example from the conversation was a brand with one person operating a creator program that generates hundreds of posts a day. One owner. One system. More shots on goal than many brands get from a stack of agency retainers.

Not every company needs that volume. The point is that creator production should be a recurring operating system, not a series of disconnected campaigns. And before you find another creator, start with the people who already love the product.

Look at positive reviews from the last 90 days. Find customers who uploaded photos or videos. Search TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram for unsolicited demos. Offer product, a discount, an affiliate opportunity, or a clear trade for additional content and usage rights.

Your happiest customers already understand the product. They have already volunteered proof. Most brands leave them sitting inside a review platform while paying strangers to manufacture authenticity. Respectfully, that is lazy and expensive.

One partnership should produce thousands of assets

The room spent a lot of time on celebrity and cultural partnerships because the pattern is familiar. A brand spends heavily on talent. It gets a hero video, a photoshoot, a few cutdowns, a press release, and maybe 50 usable assets. If the first two ads do not work, everyone concludes the partnership failed.

The partnership may not have failed. The production plan did.

Before the shoot, map the hooks, objections, talking points, demonstrations, endings, offers, and calls to action. Capture vertical and horizontal. Capture stills with negative space. Get behind-the-scenes footage, reactions, close-ups, audio fragments, GIF moments, alternate intros, and enough raw material to keep testing for months. Then recut it. Resize it. Reframe it. Pair the same image with 20 headlines. Use one good headshot across 100 static variations. Turn every winning combination into another brief.

For a major multi-month partnership, 50 or 60 assets sounds like a lot until you realize the real requirement may be measured in the thousands. Paid media should be designed into the partnership from day one. PR is nice. A six-month testing library is what extracts the value.

Brand consistency does not mean every ad looks the same

This became one of my favorite parts of the conversation. The best brands have deep brand books built for hundreds of digital executions. A few recognizable colors. Shapes. Typography. Product styling. Verification marks. Trust elements. Components that can travel across a website, email, app, checkout, creator ad, and retail screen.

IM8 is consistent because a few key elements survive every touchpoint. The ads themselves can be radically different. That is the distinction.

Prospecting creative should stretch. It may look editorial. It may come from a creator's account. It may run from a category handle. It may borrow the visual language of the platform instead of the homepage. Once the customer clicks, the landing page, email, offer, checkout, and post-purchase experience should feel coherent.

Diversity at the point of attention. Consistency throughout the journey.

Too many brands confuse consistency with repetition. They make every ad look identical, then wonder why creative fatigue arrives faster every month.

Most brands have not built the middle of the funnel

Companies organize around acquisition and retention. The middle gets ignored. That middle is where the customer leaves your landing page and starts doing their own homework. They search Google. Read Reddit. Watch six YouTube reviews. Check TikTok. Look at your reviews. Compare alternatives. Open an email. Leave again. See another ad. Ask a friend. Return when a promotion gives them a reason.

I learned this most clearly working with Eight Sleep. Nobody sees one ad for a multi-thousand-dollar sleep system and buys it five seconds later. The conversion happens across a chain of touchpoints, often over days or weeks.

But this is not only a high-ticket problem. Customers do the same thing for supplements, apparel, skincare, food, and everything else. The cycle is just shorter. Paid acquisition creates demand. The middle of the funnel either converts it or leaks it.

The job is not to repeat the same line everywhere. The customer should encounter a coherent argument that gets more useful as they learn.

Search your brand like a skeptical customer. What do they see after leaving your site? Does Google reinforce your claim? Does Reddit destroy it? Are the YouTube reviews current? Do your landing page, product reviews, and welcome flow sound like three different companies? The dashboard wants one source of truth. The customer does not behave that cleanly.

Lifecycle should continue the acquisition conversation

Most email programs are still set-and-forget. Everyone gets the same welcome flow. Everyone gets the same education. Everyone gets the same reactivation sequence. The only personalization is a first-name token and maybe a recommendation block. That is not personalization.

If someone entered through a weight-loss angle, continue that conversation. If they came from an ad about feeding a family, teach them through that lens. If they watched a creator talk about convenience, do not send them a generic founder story as the first follow-up. Use the ad, landing page, creator, product interest, acquisition source, and audience angle to determine what happens next.

The first priority should be the point where most people fall off. The second should be reactivation. In both places, the question is not only, “How do we sell again?” It is, “What would make this email worth opening?”

Teach them something. Entertain them. Give them a stat or story worth screenshotting and sending to someone else. A good email gives the customer something to talk about at dinner. A bad one reminds them there is 15% off again.

Every channel has its own creative language

Meta is still the dominant paid acquisition engine for many consumer brands, but a winning Meta ad cannot be pasted everywhere else. TikTok is creator-led discovery. Strong TikTok creator content can often travel back to Meta. A polished Meta ad usually cannot travel to TikTok untouched.

YouTube behaves closer to television. Evergreen creator integrations can convert for years through search and recommendations. TikTok Shop can create discovery, conversion, and creator participation at the same time, but the product, bundle, and price may need to be built for the platform.

Distribution does not remove the need for channel-native creative. Same brand. Different customer posture. Different pacing, proof, format, and conversion window.

Testing beats conference-room certainty

Teams can debate a price, discount, bundle, value-add, or brand-perception concern for weeks. Or they can put it in market.

Build three pages. Put the first offer on one, the second on another, and the third on the last. Split traffic. Read conversion rate, revenue, engagement, and heat maps. Then decide.

Yes, a small number of customers may see a different price later. Customer service can handle the edge case. Fear of inconsistency cannot become an excuse to avoid learning. Large organizations need more controls, but size should improve the quality of the test, not eliminate the test.

Not everything will fit neatly into attribution

I appreciated how honest the room was about this. Field marketing, out-of-home, television, partnerships, and cultural activations can make the rest of marketing work better while remaining difficult to measure perfectly.

Capture customer records when you can. Watch geographic traffic. Branded search. Direct traffic. Social engagement. Email signups. “How did you hear about us?” responses. Match event participants to later customers when possible.

Use the proxies honestly. Do not invent precision because the dashboard wants a clean number. The more familiar a customer is with the brand before seeing the paid social ad, the easier paid social gets. That lift is real even when the exact contribution refuses to sit inside one row.

Sometimes the correct answer is, “We know this helps, we know roughly how, and we cannot pretend the attribution is perfect.” That is better than forcing certainty where none exists.

Protect good people from bad work

Winning teams are getting leaner, but lean should mean concentrated ownership. Not fewer people doing three jobs each and spending Friday updating spreadsheets.

One clear owner per major channel or function. Small groups of capable doers underneath. Heavy investment in designers, editors, developers, and the people who make things. Offshore talent can support research, operations, reporting, production, and back-office work. Agencies can still help, but the company should be careful about outsourcing the learning loop it needs to own.

The best designer does not want to spend half the week building status decks. The best marketer does not want to copy numbers into Slack every Friday. The best developer does not want every idea turned into a six-week ticket. At Sharma Brands, every time we found a recurring reporting or admin task, we tried to automate it. Client updates. Weekly reporting. Research. Anything that pulled good people away from useful work.

AI makes that easier now. Project-specific agents can consume the right calls, emails, analytics, documents, news, and task history. They can synthesize updates, draft pages, organize research, and break large assignments into smaller work streams. Start with administrative drag. Not creative judgment.

Every recurring task should trigger the same question: Does a talented person need to keep doing this manually?

Virality starts with the conversation

I admitted something in the room that I think more marketers should admit: I have never really cracked the traditional friend-referral program. “Give $5, get $5” sounds clean in a deck. In reality, most customers are not logging into an account, finding a referral URL, copying it, and sending it to a friend for five bucks.

The better starting point came from the room itself: script the dinner-table conversation. What do you want one customer to tell another? What do you want them to screenshot? What belongs in the group chat? What makes the person sharing it look informed, funny, helpful, early, or interesting? Then work backward.

What product moment creates that sentence? What creator explains it? What piece of content carries it? What claim gives the customer social equity for sharing it? Do not start with the referral widget. Start with the conversation.

The uncomfortable truth: most companies already know

The most uncomfortable observation from the entire conversation was not about creative, creators, AI, attribution, or landing pages. It was that companies often hire outside help to make them do what they already know they should do.

They know they need more creative angles. They know the email list needs cleaning. They know the lifecycle flows are stale. They know the landing-page process is too slow. They know the creator-seeding program needs an owner. They know a major partnership needs a better content plan. They know reporting is eating the team's week. The gap is not information. It is operating discipline.

The company that wins is usually not the one with the most sophisticated strategy deck. It is the one that built a system capable of doing the obvious work quickly, repeatedly, and at a high standard.

A billion-dollar marketing budget does not remove the need for better creative, faster testing, stronger systems, clear ownership, and more relevant customer experiences. It increases the cost of getting those things wrong.

A smaller brand cannot outspend one of the largest advertisers in the world. It can outlearn one. Fewer approvals. Less legacy. Shorter feedback loops. A founder can see an idea in the morning, build it in the afternoon, and have real customer data by dinner. That is your advantage. Use it.

Take this list and audit your processes:

• How long does it take us to launch a new landing page?

• Can we name the audience and angle behind every active creative test?

• How many independent sources of new creative enter the account each month?

• Does one major shoot become hundreds of usable variations?

• Is our creator program a system or a collection of one-off deals?

• Are we recruiting happy customers into content production?

• What does a customer see on Google, Reddit, YouTube, and reviews after leaving our site?

• Does lifecycle messaging continue the acquisition conversation?

• Are we adapting creative to the language of each channel?

• Which offer debate could we settle with a live test?

• Which recurring reports or administrative tasks should be automated?

• What exact conversation do we want customers to have about us?

• What do we already know we should do but keep postponing?

That's all for this week!

Pick one thing your team already knows it should fix. Do not schedule another meeting about it… just deploy a faster way to fix it. When speed of execution matters, efficiency is your best friend.

It’s Sunday night, so make sure you get 9 hours of sleep tonight (the great weekly reset!). If you’re in New York, I’ll see you at the Social Commerce Summit or Hudson’s Mastermind; Have a great upcoming week!