Happy Thursday!

I recently sat in on a CMO offsite for one of the biggest consumer brands in the world, a company spending over a billion dollars a year on advertising. I walked in expecting a completely different set of problems than the ones I deal with.

Vendor of the Week

Pollen — The easiest way to recruit affiliates, creators, and to whitelist.

It’s no secret, the new playbook for building upper-funnel awareness quickly is by way of creator marketing through affiliates on TikTok and Instagram. However, the process of searching for the right affiliates, messaging them with ease, negotiating rates, then managing the creators and keeping them informed is all fragmented.

Pollen, launching in September, handles the entire process end-to-end. I’ve been a beta user for the last few months and have particularly enjoyed the competitor scanning (you can see who top affiliates are for other brands) and being able to use my Hermes agent to handle all the back-and-forth messaging with creators.

Pollen also integrates directly into Discord, so you can easily onboard new creators and make sure they stay informed about new product and company updates. When a creative takes off, you can use Pollen to run those creatives as whitelisted ads on any ads platform (Meta, YouTube or TikTok).

Pollen launches next month! 6 brands who sign up on this link will get free lifetime access.

What A Billion-Dollar Ad Budget Actually Buys You

The questions in that room were identical to the ones I hear from a $10 million brand. How do we produce enough creative. Why does a landing page take so long to ship. How do we use creators well. More budget doesn't remove the bottleneck, it just changes what the bottleneck looks like.

Listen here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

What I pulled from this one:

1. Scale increases handoffs, not necessarily quality. At a massive company, one test touches strategy, brand, legal, regional teams, and multiple rounds of approval. Each handoff costs time and distorts the original idea, like a game of telephone.

2. Track how long it takes you to learn something. Not a skill, an actual test: idea to live to meaningful result. Two years ago a landing page took weeks. Today the same page can take two hours. The question is whether your process lets you actually capture that speed.

3. Growth is a game of angles, not spend. The fastest growing brands online take one product and sell it to a hundred different people for a hundred different reasons. If you can't name the angles you're currently testing, that's the actual problem.

4. Build a real creative supply chain. Reviews, support tickets, creator content, UGC, competitor gaps, all feeding into briefs, then assets, then tests, then learnings that loop back to the top. Treat it like a supply chain with multiple tracks, not a content calendar with one.

That's all for today

Budget changes the scale of the problem. It never changes the problem itself.

It's Thursday, and it's all downhill from here. Get some rest, drink some water, and I'll see you Sunday.

Nik