Happy Sunday!

If you're reading this, I hope you're hydrated, you slept in a little, and you have a few minutes for something that came up twice this week... once on a client call, and once on stage.

First, the stage. On Thursday we hosted the Ecom Founders Q4 Summit at Capitale in New York, and honestly I'm still a little wired from it. A full room of founders and operators, nobody pitching, everybody comparing notes on the next 90 days. I opened the day with Cody Plofker on what it actually takes to win BFCM, and in the afternoon I built a Q4 landing page live from a product brief (more on that in a future issue).

In between I got to sit in the audience for Lo Bosworth on founder-led content, Andrew Silberstein on the Q4 bets he'd repeat and rethink at Solawave, and Elsa Levy and Rob Varon on what their incrementality tests actually changed about how they plan. To everyone who came, spoke, and stayed through happy hour... thank you. Days like that are the whole reason I do this.

One thread kept coming up, on stage and in the hallway: what creators and affiliates actually contribute. Which is funny, because it's the exact thing I spent Monday morning on.

I was on a call with a brand that sells a home wellness product. A few hundred dollars, not an impulse buy. We were talking creators, and the team was thinking about them the way most brands do: as another way to introduce the product. Top of funnel. Awareness.

The point I made was this. A lot of people who see your ad and get interested don't buy right then. They go make a few more searches to make sure this is the right product for them. They open YouTube and type your brand name plus "review." They scroll TikTok to see if a normal person has it in their actual house. Think about the last time you spent $300+ online on something new to you... an Eight Sleep, an Oura ring, a Dyson. You watched somebody's video first. Your ad started the conversation, and now someone else is finishing it... or nobody is.

That's what I want to write about today. Not awareness. The content in between: what an interested person finds when they go looking, who makes it, and how you get it in front of them. Most brands leave this to chance. I think it belongs in the acquisition plan, with a budget and an owner.

Let's get into it. But first...

Vendor of the Week

Alia — my go-to for collecting more emails.

Alia has been my go-to recommendation for collecting as many emails as possible for years now. I’ve used it on every site I’ve built, and my average opt-in rate with Alia was about 10%.

Its Shopify popups can change based on where someone came from and what they’re doing on your site. Alia keeps testing different versions, using revenue and sitewide conversion data alongside signups to help choose what to show.

With Black Friday coming up, I’d get this running now. You’re already paying to bring people to your site, and someone who isn’t ready to buy today could still become a customer during your holiday sale. Collecting their email gives you the next few weeks to introduce your products and build some familiarity before that offer lands.

Book a demo with Alia ahead of BFCM.

Get Smarter about CTV

Tonight, millions of people will tune in as artists like Madonna and Taylor Swift compete for VMAs, live on Paramount+.

Your brand could be there, too.

Imagine that same reach, aimed at shoppers who are already gearing up for the holidays. And, they're 61% more likely to buy after seeing a holiday TV ad.

Sept 30, Kira Federer, Jessica Pelligra, and I are getting tactical: when to start, what to run, how to get in front of moments like this before the holiday window closes.

Join us live or RSVP for the recording.

The ad creates interest, not belief.

Middle-of-the-funnel content is anything that helps someone who's already interested decide whether your product is right for them. It can explain how something works, show it in use, compare it to alternatives, or let someone with relevant experience talk about theirs.

Notice what that definition doesn't include. It's not a platform or a retargeting audience, and it's definitely not a video length. A 20-second clip can answer a serious buying question and a 2,000-word article can dodge one. The same creator video might introduce your product to one viewer and close the sale for another. The stage is defined by the question in the customer's head, not by where the content lives.

Here's the thing. There's a real gap between understanding a promise and believing it applies to you. Someone can fully understand what your product does and still be stuck on a handful of questions:

• Will this work in a situation like mine?

• How is it different from what I already use?

• Why is it this expensive?

• What's setup, maintenance, or day-to-day use actually like?

• Who has actually tried this, and what happened?

Repeating the original promise louder doesn't answer any of those. A second ad with the same claim and a different hook is still the same claim. The customer isn't confused about what you said. They're deciding whether to trust it.

One caveat before anyone builds a nine-step consideration funnel for a $14 refill. Some purchases are simple and fast and should stay that way. The explaining scales with how expensive and unfamiliar the product is.

Give the content a specific job

The brief most creators and publishers get is "make us some content." That's not a brief. A brief starts with a specific doubt and names the evidence that would resolve it. Then you pick the person who can credibly provide it.

You already have the doubts. They're sitting in your customer service inbox, your ad comments, your reviews, and your returns reasons. On that Monday call, this was the actual recommendation: pull those together and turn them into creator briefs. Not a mood board. The exact questions people ask before they buy, in the language they use. (Those sources tell you what people are asking. They don't prove your answer is true. That part is on you.)

Say you sell a $600 countertop appliance. Made-up example, not a client. One buyer is worried about noise, and a general "I love this thing" video does nothing for them. An honest in-kitchen demo does, with the creator saying what they recorded on and how far away they were standing. A second buyer is worried about upkeep. They need to see the cleaning and what the replacement parts cost per year. A third buyer is choosing between yours and the one their sister has. They need a fair comparison of tradeoffs, not a teardown of the competitor. Three different doubts, and one generic endorsement covers none of them.

The source matters as much as the format. Someone who's used the product daily for a month can speak to daily use. A qualified expert can explain the mechanism inside their expertise. A specialist reviewer can put it next to the alternatives. Nobody should be asked to imply experience they don't have, and a script that forces enthusiasm reads like a script.

And no, this isn't a list of trust badges and review widgets. That's page furniture. I'm talking about evidence chosen for a specific decision.

Who makes it: creators, affiliates, blogs, and press

These overlap constantly. A creator can be an affiliate. An editorial site can earn a commission. Don't get hung up on the category. Get clear on what each one is good at.

Creators give the buyer an experience they can inspect. The product in a real kitchen or a real gym bag, someone explaining how they use it and answering the practical stuff. For a specific buying doubt, relevant experience matters a lot more than follower count. A creator with 8,000 followers who's been dealing with the exact problem your product solves will out-convince a lifestyle account with 800,000 that's never touched the category.

The discovery brief and the consideration brief are different deliverables. The first one wants attention. The second one might need a full walkthrough, a two-week trial, a side-by-side, or a straight answer to the question that shows up in every comment section. Decide which one you're commissioning. Supply the facts and the claim boundaries, then give creators room to say what didn't work for them. Paid or gifted, it gets disclosed. Shooting it to look organic is an aesthetic choice, not a disclosure strategy.

Affiliates are useful when they explain the product near the moment of decision. Comparisons, buying guides, honest reviews, demos, answers to product-specific questions... distributed through the audience or search presence they've built. A tracking link on its own makes nothing helpful. There's a big difference between a partner who publishes a 1,500-word "is it worth it" piece and a partner who shows up with a coupon at checkout. Both live in your affiliate program. They are not doing the same work.

And if your reporting treats every affiliate sale as new demand because the last click had a code attached, you're paying commission on customers you already had. Respectfully, that's not a channel. That's a leak. The question for an affiliate is the same as for a creator: do they have hands-on experience with the product and an audience that's in the middle of deciding? And commission-only works great for some categories and not at all for others, so don't assume.

Blogs and specialist publications earn their place with depth and durability. A comparison someone can scan. A proper explanation of how the mechanism works. A guide to choosing between your three SKUs. A permanent answer to the question people ask every week. Written content is still what shows up when someone types the question into a search bar at 11pm, and it's a big part of what the AI answer engines are pulling from too.

Be straight about what it is, though. A brand-owned article is not an independent review, and neither one is a paid advertorial. Hosting your own copy on a different domain doesn't turn it into independent editorial. The version of this I like most is taking approved expert material you already have (your formulator or founder on video explaining why the product is built the way it is) and developing it into a proper written piece, with their name on it because they reviewed it. Same expertise in a second format, and now someone can find it.

Press is the one you control least, and that's the point. Relevant reporting or a substantive review lets someone learn about your product from a source that doesn't work for you. Wirecutter exists because people want exactly that. You can offer a story worth telling, samples, access, and facts you can back up. The publication decides what runs. Paid placements get labeled as paid. A logo in your "as seen in" bar is not a substitute for what the article actually said, and a mention isn't an endorsement of every claim on your PDP. Match the publication to the buyer's question rather than collecting logos.

Put the mix together based on the purchase, and watch for the failure mode where five different sources are all repeating your ad copy back to the customer. That's one reason to believe, said five times. You want each source answering a different doubt.

Have it made, then put it where it can help

This is where the plan usually falls apart. A brand commissions a great creator walkthrough, it goes up on the creator's channel, and everyone hopes the right person happens to search for it. Most of the time they don't. Creation and distribution have to be planned together, before anything gets made.

A proper production brief covers the customer situation, the unresolved question, what the piece needs to show or explain, the facts available to back it up, and what can't responsibly be claimed. It also names where the piece will live and whether you're planning to put paid behind it. Sort that before you commission, because rights get expensive to negotiate once the content already exists. Who publishes it, what you can reuse, whether paid amplification is included, how long you have those rights, who approves the factual claims, and who updates it when the product changes. Keep it to a page. It's not a contract, it's a plan.

Give people what they need to form an opinion of their own: enough product to use it properly, the customer questions you already have, access to your expert. And a real out. If the creator tries it and it's not a fit, they should be able to say so before anything ships. A verdict decided before the box arrives is an ad, and it should be labeled like one.

Then think about two different customers. The first is actively researching. They typed your name plus "vs" or "review" or "worth it." Your content needs to be findable and understandable in that moment, which means a descriptive title and an honest demonstration will beat a campaign slogan every time. Nobody searches for your tagline. The second customer is interested but hasn't searched yet. They're going to see a creator's feed, an affiliate's email, a retargeting placement, or your own follow-up email. Put the useful explanation there. Don't make them go find a blog post before they're allowed to buy. (This is also why I mentioned Alia up top. The person who isn't ready yet has to be on your list for any of that follow-up to reach them.)

So distribution looks something like this. The creator publishes to their audience, and you run an approved cut as a creator-authorized ad or inside your own campaigns. The affiliate distributes through the channels they run (their review site, their newsletter, their YouTube), with an agreed content contribution instead of a link and a prayer. Your owned articles and expert pieces feed your email flows, your PDPs, and paid traffic where it fits, caveats intact. Press gets linked or accurately referenced, and never rewritten into a stronger claim than the journalist made.

One good walkthrough can live in three places: the full version on the creator's channel, a 30-second excerpt answering the most common objection in paid, and the relevant demo sitting right next to the buy button on your site. That's the goal. One useful piece, reused wherever its answer is relevant, instead of five departments commissioning five disconnected things.

Plan the middle when you plan the launch

Here's the operator decision underneath all of this. When you plan a launch or a Q4 push, the question isn't just "what are we running." It's "what will an interested person find when they go looking on day three, and did we make it?" All of the production, partner access, and placements can be organized before that person starts searching.

I'm not going to give you a budget percentage. It depends on how expensive and unfamiliar the product is, what evidence already exists, which partners are realistic, and who you're selling to. On that same Monday call, we talked about how a heavy, expensive product makes broad creator seeding impractical... you can't ship 200 units to find 20 good videos. So the model changes to fewer creators you work with repeatedly and go deeper with. The economics of your product should shape the creator model, not the other way around.

What I will tell you is that someone needs to own the consideration experience end to end. Right now your creator team, your affiliate manager, your PR agency, your content person, and your paid team can all ship their work and still leave the customer's biggest question unanswered, because it fell between them. Every piece in every report should say what question it answers and where a customer will encounter it. If nobody on the team can answer that for a piece, you paid for content, not consideration.

And a simple rule for when you're stuck. If customers understand the promise but still need credible evidence, go build the evidence before you buy more of the same acquisition creative. More reach into the same unanswered doubt is expensive. If the product, the price, or the service is genuinely wrong for the buyer, no amount of content fixes that. You can resolve a doubt. You can't resolve a product nobody wants.

Judge it without inventing attribution

The goal is useful consideration that helps the business, not more content in the search results. So separate "is this useful" from "did this drive sales." Usefulness shows up in the questions people stop asking, what they choose to watch or read, and whether the material reached the audience it was made for. Those are clues, not incremental purchases.

Ask customers where they researched and what helped them decide, and treat the answers as incomplete but directionally real. Use tagged partner links and referral reporting where you have them, knowing people see content in one place and buy somewhere else, later. Where you can, test it properly: a page with and without the demo, a placement with and without the excerpt. A page test answers a narrow question. It won't tell you whether your whole creator program worked, and be skeptical of anyone selling you a formula that claims it can.

Two mistakes I see constantly: counting every assisted touch as incremental revenue, and declaring useful consideration content worthless because it didn't get the last click. Attribution being hard is not permission to spend indefinitely without checking. It's a reason to check in the ways you can.

That's all for this week!

Go back to that customer from the top of this email. They saw your ad and got interested, and now they're on YouTube at 10pm deciding whether to believe you. Whatever they find in the next five minutes was either planned by you or left to chance. Make it part of the plan... what needs explaining, who can credibly explain it, where it lives, how it gets pushed, and who owns it. Right next to the media budget, not after it.

It's Sunday night, so I hope you plan to get a full 9 hours of sleep tonight and have an incredible upcoming week. Q4 is here... take care of yourself, get a walk in, drink some water, get a good sweat in.

I'll see you next Sunday. Same time, same place.

Nik