Happy Sunday!

If you're reading this, I hope you got some sleep this weekend, drank some water, and have a few minutes to sit with something I've been thinking about across almost every consumer brand I talk to. Today's newsletter is going to feel a little bit like a talk because it's a stream of consciousness that actually helped me come up with a talk that I gave in front of a bunch of founders this past week.

Winning social commerce used to mean winning Facebook ads. Find the right audience, match the hook to the pain point, put a good offer behind it, and let the machine spend. That still matters. But it is not enough anymore. The brands winning right now are not simply better at buying attention. They are better at representing themselves inside culture. Most brands still treat creators like a channel. Send a box. Negotiate a post. Hope the content works.

But before we get into that…

Vendor of the Week

RetailClub AI Festival — the Boardwalk to discuss the impact of AI in retail

Every retail exec I know has the same complaint about industry events. You fly in. You sit through panels in a dark room. You try to have a real conversation in a loud hallway. You leave with a tote bag and zero idea if any of it was worth the trip. Well, the founders of ShopTalk are changing that with RetailClub.

At the center of RetailClub is the Boardwalk. A one-third-mile open-air promenade along Huntington Beach's coastline, with the ocean as a backdrop (it's built to do the opposite of what a convention center does). The AI Playground with live demos and mastermind sessions lives on it. The Ocean and Horizon stages, where the big ideas about where AI is headed actually get debated, live on it.

The whole thing is designed so that the right conversations can't help but happen. The space does the work, so the experience feels effortless. People show up with a level of honesty and openness that doesn't exist at other events, and you feel it the moment you arrive.

RetailClub is September 22-24 in Huntington Beach. Retailers and brands can apply for a free ticket on their website here!

Grab your spot here.

Persona’s are to Performance Marketers, what Micro-Cultures are to Creators.

Performance marketers have always understood personas. The tired parent. The runner with knee pain. The traveler who cannot sleep. The person who has tried every greens powder and still hates the taste.

You can scroll past ten pillow ads, then one finally says it fixes the shoulder pain waking you up every night. You click because the message feels like it was written for you. That same matching logic has moved into culture.

A creator does not just bring a face or an audience. They bring language, references, aesthetics, behaviors, and trust. They already belong to a group of people who see themselves a certain way and talk about their problems a certain way.

Creators are micro-cultures.

When a brand tries to enter those conversations (i.e. tries to activate within cultural moments) directly, it usually sounds like an awkward advertiser. A creator already belongs there. They can introduce the product in a way that feels native because the context is already built in. This is the real shift. Social commerce is no longer just a question of how efficiently you can buy reach. It is how convincingly you can represent your brand across dozens, and eventually hundreds, of cultural pockets.

The sponsored post is dead

I do not mean influencer marketing is dead. I mean the old transaction is dead. Paying $25,000 for one Instagram post. Sending a creator a box and hoping they mention it on Stories. Picking people because of follower count. Running a creator program over here and a paid media program over there, with neither team speaking to the other.

That model assumes the audience is the main thing you are buying. For paid creative, it often is not.

Back in 2017, I worked with Sara Dietschy, a New York-based YouTuber who could talk to a camera like she was talking JUST to you. We turned her content into a paid ad, ran it through her account, and sent people into a dedicated product experience. The CPA came down materially.

The campaign itself was not complicated. Sara had the face and the message. Paid distribution gave us reach. The landing page carried the same context into a variety-pack offer instead of dropping the customer on a generic homepage. Creator, ad, page, and offer all felt like one experience.

Naturally, I thought I had found an influencer goldmine. Find more creators, borrow more audiences, print more money. Then we tested more people and learned the actual lesson.

Some creators had bigger audiences and worse performance. Some looked perfect on paper and the creative simply did not work. The missing variable was not reach. It was whether the creator could make the person watching feel like they were getting a recommendation instead of sitting through an ad.

The creators who win in paid are not always the ones with the biggest following. They are the ones who can make one person on the other side of the screen feel like the message was made for them.

You are borrowing a face. The algorithm can find the audience.

That does not mean audience never matters. Organic distribution still matters. Credibility still matters. Existing trust still matters. But once the content moves into Meta or TikTok paid distribution, the creator's ability to communicate the message can matter more than the size of the audience they already built. That changes what you recruit for. Stop looking only for reach. Start looking for people who can sell an idea without sounding like they are selling.

The persona is the funnel

Finding the creator is only the first step. The bigger mistake happens after the click. A creator talks about shoulder pain, then the ad sends you to a generic homepage selling six products to five customer types. A mom explains how the product fits into her morning, then the landing page opens with polished brand language that sounds nothing like her. The creator earns the click, and the website throws away the context.

The customer should not feel that handoff. If the creator represents a persona, preserve that persona through the ad, listicle, landing page, offer, bundle, proof, and PDP. Same problem. Same language. Same reason to believe.

Do not just run the creator's ad. Build the entire funnel behind them.

This is where creator marketing stops being a content expense and becomes an acquisition asset. One winning creator can front paid ads, a dedicated landing page, a publisher-style review, email creative, retargeting, and a TikTok Shop offer built around the same use case. The persona is the funnel.

Go back to the pillow example. If the creator wins because she talks about waking up with shoulder pain, the next page should not lead with "premium sleep, reimagined." It should keep talking about shoulder pain. Show how the pillow supports side sleepers. Use reviews from customers who had the same problem. Put the right size or bundle in front of them. Answer the questions that person is already having.

Then build another version for the person who sleeps hot. Another for the traveler. Another for the husband whose wife is ready to throw his old pillow out the window. Same product, different entry point, different proof, different funnel.

This is persona maxing. You are not asking one piece of creative to explain the entire brand. You are building enough matched journeys that more customers eventually see a face, problem, and use case that mirrors their own.

What the machine actually looks like

The brands that are great at this run the same operating loop over and over:

1. Find people who communicate naturally. Not people who merely look good holding the product. Look for someone who can explain a discovery like they are texting a friend.

2. Test the content organically. Give creators enough room to find the language, hooks, demonstrations, and use cases that feel native to them.

3. Watch for real signal. Sales are the cleanest signal, but comments, saves, engagement, and repeated questions can show you where a message is hitting.

4. Move winners into paid. Whitelist the creator, secure the usage rights, and put the content inside the acquisition system.

5. Build the matched funnel. Carry the persona, problem, proof, bundle, and offer through the entire customer journey.

6. Keep the relationship. Repeat winners should become long-term partners, not names you rediscover in a spreadsheet six months later.

7. Repeat across more micro-cultures. One creator is a winning ad. Coverage across dozens of creators is a growth system.

Every step needs an owner and a number. How many creators did you contact? How many accepted product? How much content came back? How many pieces went live? How many moved into paid? Which personas and angles are still missing? Which creators deserve another brief this week?

If nobody can answer those questions on Monday morning, you do not have a creator operating system. You have activity.

Comfrt is a useful example of the relationship layer. Hudson doesn’t treat the best creators like a giant anonymous affiliate list. There is a smaller core group, regular communication, founder visibility, product feedback, and creators helping other creators get better. The brand studies winning hooks and deliberately reproduces what works across more people and more platforms. That is the difference between managing posts and building infrastructure.

And this is where most brands are two years behind. They have a seeding spreadsheet, a list of discount codes, and someone on the team sending follow-ups. They do not have weekly targets for outreach, content received, content tested, creators moved into paid, funnels launched, and winners retained. A creator program without an operating cadence is not a program. It is a pile of DMs.

The $3 million founder does not need 4 growth strategies

If you are running a $3 million brand with four people on the team, every channel feels urgent. DTC needs work. Amazon needs work. TikTok Shop is sitting there. A retail buyer wants a meeting. Your Meta account needs more creative. Your email team wants a promotion calendar.

You cannot ignore the places customers want to buy. DTC, Amazon, and TikTok are increasingly table stakes. But that does not mean each channel deserves equal strategic attention every day.

The two systems I would focus on are the creator army and the paid funnels.

Creators generate the language, hooks, demonstrations, testimonials, and use cases. Paid funnels take the winners and scale them. Those two systems feed DTC, TikTok Shop, Amazon, email, and even the retail story because they create demand and show you what the customer actually responds to.

Everything else is distribution. Important, yes. But distribution does not replace demand.

The TikTok Shop offer also should not automatically be the same as your DTC offer. Every channel has a price and bundle range that works. Your job is to find the product, price, and demonstration that a creator can sell natively there without blowing up the economics everywhere else.

Keep the channels open. Keep the operating focus narrow.

Borrowed fame does not fix a bad business

The same rule applies at the celebrity level. Reach creates a spike. It does not create a durable consumer brand. IM8's partnership model is interesting because Danny Yeung structures it around duration, ownership, reusable marketing rights, activations, and a founder-level relationship. Giannis Antetokounmpo reportedly chose 100% equity compensation instead of cash. That feels different from renting a famous face for launch week because it is different.

But even the strongest celebrity partnership cannot rescue weak product quality, bad gross margins, broken inventory, or nonexistent repeat purchase. After the launch spike, it is a real brand again. The consumer can feel the difference between "I own this and believe in it" and "I was paid to post this."

When funnels get cheap, trusted content gets expensive

AI is making the mechanical parts of growth cheaper fast. Ads are faster to make. Landing pages are faster to code. Offers are faster to test. The cost of producing the pieces is collapsing. That does not mean every brand wins. It means the scarce asset changes.

When everyone can build the funnel, the advantage moves to whoever has the most trusted content feeding it. Content that creates awareness. Content that answers the annoying middle-funnel questions. Content that handles objections. Content that gives someone the final reason to buy.

This is where people get the AI prediction wrong. If every brand can make 100 ads before lunch, having 100 ads is not an advantage. If every brand can code a landing page in an hour, owning a landing page is not an advantage either.

The advantage is knowing which person should deliver the message, which cultural pocket it belongs in, which objection the content needs to answer, and what the customer should see next. AI can help you produce and iterate the pieces. It cannot make a generic message culturally relevant by exporting 50 versions of it.

AI makes production cheap. It does NOT make cultural relevance cheap.

The brand with the deepest body of credible, useful, culturally native content has more ways to be discovered, evaluated, recommended, and converted. Not because it made the most AI ads. Because it built the best system for earning attention through people.

That's all for this week!

This is one of those shifts that looks like a marketing tactic until you see the entire operating system underneath it. The creator army and the paid funnels feed each other. If you build both, you stop starting from zero every month. It feels like waking up after your subscriptions have been billed… seriously.

It's Sunday night, so I hope you get a full 9 hours of sleep tonight and have an incredible upcoming week. We’re in peak Summer right now, World Cup (I’m writing this before the game so I don’t know what happened yet), summer weather, conferences… it’s all happening together. Make sure like any other week, stay hydrated, get a good sweat in, and take care of yourself.

I'll see you next Sunday, same time, same place!