CMO @ Heatmap.com

Building the future of creative operations @ CreativeOS. Using this machine to make the world a more creative place through less busy work and more time to create!

Chase Mohseni

I've seen brands spend $30K on a video shoot and get beaten by a product shot with three arrows on it.

That's basically what happened here.

Hiya's kids sunscreen ad is two hands holding a tin and three callouts. Headline says "Fits Any Routine." 

There's nothing impressive about it creatively.

But it's doing exactly one job at exactly the right moment - answering the three questions a parent has right before they buy:

Is it messy? No. 
Can I carry it? Yes. 
Does it work for real life? Beach, park, school days - yes.

No desire creation. No lifestyle fantasy. Just objections killed cleanly.

This is what I think about every time a brand asks me why their retargeting isn't converting. 

Nine times out of ten they're running inspiration ads to people who already want the product. 

Those people don't need a mood board. They need one last question answered.

Know what job your ad is doing. 

Everything else follows from that.

Founder/CEO @ CreativeOS - streamlining your creative process.

Tomorrow I am jamming with Sarah Levinger and Matthew Gattozzi
 about all things ads and creative strategy on Creative Playbook from CreativeOS

If you want to get better at turning those impressions into conversions - come join us. (Sign up in the comments)

I keep seeing the same ad creative mistake everywhere.

Broad creative → collection page → zero conversions.

No focus = no conversion.

Here are 3 insights that came up during Creative Playbook this week with Sarah Levinger & Matthew Gattozzi:

1. The fatal mismatch

Everyone is making broad ads with no angle and sending them to the broadest page possible (collections, best-sellers).

Then wondering why nothing converts.

No focus = no conversion.

The fix: Match your creative to your page type. Static ads need deep landing pages. Video ads can work with simpler pages. And collection pages only work when people already know your brand.

2. Sell to the buyer, not the user

This came up on the STEM kit breakdown and it's the mistake most kids product brands make.

Parents don't buy STEM kits because their kids need physics lessons. They buy them to feel like good parents investing in their child's confidence.

Show the kid's face when they crack the code. Show "my kids are asleep—look at what they built tonight."

The parent is the buyer. The kid is the experience. Sell emotional ROI.

3. Category psychology matters more than you think

Jewelry ≠ kids products ≠ supplements. Different products need completely different approaches.

Example: Jewelry is one of the only categories where consumers want it to be expensive. Don't sell attainability—sell exclusivity and craftsmanship. And for the love of god, use harsh lighting to make stones sparkle. Soft lighting kills jewelry ads.

If you’ve made it this far and want to do deeper - get your full breakdown here.

I've been thinking about how all marketing strategy looks the same now.

Same playbooks. Same hooks. Same templates. Same "proven frameworks."

Then I read about Hermes - they've been in business for 186 years.
Worth $220 billion.

No marketing department. No ads. No discounts. Ever.

One sentence from a former CEO explains why:

"We don't have a policy of image. We have a policy of product."

Here's what that means for you today...

In 1837, Thierry Hermès opened a harness workshop in Paris.

He wasn't building a fashion brand.

He was solving a problem: horses' movements were hampered by poorly-sized equipment.

His solution was the saddle stitch — two needles, two waxed threads, tensile opposition. Only done by hand.

One stitch became the foundation of a $220B company.

Not a logo. Not a slogan. A stitch.

By 1919, the automobile was killing the horse industry.

Most equestrian businesses panicked. Pivoted. Chased trends.

Hermès asked one question:

"What can we make with our hands here that will interest our clients today?"

Not: what's trending? Not: what are competitors doing? Not: what does market research say?

What can we make with our hands?

The most iconic bags in luxury fashion history were never designed as fashion.

The Haut à Courroies (1892) — designed to carry saddles.

The Bolide (1923) — first bag with a zipper. Designed so things wouldn't fall out during travel.

The Kelly — designed in 1935 as a "ladies' bag with straps."

No campaign brief. No focus group. No influencer strategy.

They made functional things beautifully. Fashion came later.

Here's what kills me:

Hermès made the Kelly bag for 20+ years before it became famous.

It wasn't even called the Kelly until 1956.

They didn't need the world to validate the product.

They trusted the craft.

While everyone optimizes for speed, Hermès built the opposite model.

One craftsman makes each bag. Start to finish.

A Kelly takes 18-20 hours of handwork.

New artisans don't touch a product for sale until they've apprenticed for 18 months to 4 years.

Slowness wasn't a bug.

It was the brand.

By 1935, Hermès had survived an entire industry dying.

They did it without:

→ A marketing department 
→ A single advertisement 
→ A discount, ever 
→ A product designed by committee

They only asked one question: "How do we make this better?"

The selling took care of itself.

Here's what this means for you today:

Everyone's asking "how do I market this?"

The better question: "Is this good enough that marketing becomes irrelevant?"

In a world of AI-generated everything, craft is the last moat.

Speed is the default. Slowness is the differentiator.

Make things no one asked for — but everyone needs.

Trust the work before the market validates it.

Hermès spent 20 years making bags nobody cared about.

Then they became the most valuable brand on earth.

Patience isn't a weakness. It's the whole strategy.

I recently looked at a funnel from Caraway Home (love them) for their airtight food storage containers.

At first glance, everything feels polished. The brand aesthetic is strong, the product photography is beautiful, and the experience feels premium.

But when you look at the ad → landing page transition, there’s a subtle breakdown that many eCommerce brands make.

The Ad

The creative leads with authority:
“Trusted by the Experts” + Good Housekeeping Award Winner.

It’s a powerful trust signal. The image reinforces the message too - the containers are shown in a real pantry environment, communicating organization, freshness, and everyday usefulness.

So the click motivation is clear:

This is a trusted, expert-approved storage solution.

The Landing Page:

After clicking, the user lands on a standard “Shop Food Storage” category page.

Instead of reinforcing the authority message, the experience immediately shifts to:
• filters
• product grids
• quick shop buttons

The funnel goes from persuasion → browsing.

That’s where the coherence drops.

What Works Well

• The product visuals match the ad perfectly
• The brand aesthetic is consistent (clean, premium, minimal)
• Users can quickly see product options, pricing, and ratings

So visually, the experience is cohesive.

Where the Opportunity Is: The landing page doesn’t continue the story that drove the click.

A few small changes could dramatically strengthen the funnel:

- Carry the authority message forward
- A hero section like “Award-Winning Airtight Storage” with the Good - Housekeeping badge would reinforce the click motivation.
- Introduce the category before the product grid
- A short benefit section explaining freshness, non-toxic materials, and pantry organization would turn the page into persuasion - so it's not not just browsing.
- Highlight a starter set or best-seller first

This reduces decision scroll fatigue and gives users a clear starting point.
The takeaway

This is a common pattern in DTC:

Great ad → solid product page → missing persuasion layer.

The funnel looks coherent, but the message continuity breaks after the click.
Often, the fastest conversion wins come from fixing that moment.

Curious how others handle this:

Do you usually send paid traffic to product pages, bundles, or category pages?

Money printing websites is the goal.

How you do that: Come to Creative Playbook with me, Shaun Brandt, and Taylor Davies from Oddit & CreativeOS.

Learn what makes website great or not so great. There will be plenty of both. 

See you there tomorrow at 11am PST.

Link to sign up in comments.

I used to work in manufacturing during college. Traveled to China. And at the time, the pace of innovation felt genuinely wild.

You could video call a factory in Shenzhen, hold up a camera to show them what you were looking at, share files back and forth in real time, and they’d be prototyping on the floor within hours. 

That felt like magic in 2007, 2008.

Today at CreativeOS , we have our version of that. A customer drops async video feedback. It hits our team channel. 

We jump into a voice room, talk it through, get aligned. 

Someone pulls the specs together, APIs get connected, a design gets rendered, code gets pulled. All of it lands in staging for testing.


Start to finish: a few hours.

What blew my mind two decades ago now feels like table stakes. And I think that’s actually a beautiful thing.

Innovation isn’t a threat when you’re in service of people trying to build something real. (Pls read this again)

It’s just the game moving forward.

Happy Friday.

The brands overthinking creative are losing.

But so are the ones pumping out AI slop.

And somehow nobody's talking about the middle.

Here's what I see running CreativeOS - there are two types of brands getting absolutely crushed right now:

Brand A spends 3 weeks on a single ad. Endless revisions. Pixel-perfect. They launch 1 concept, pray it works, and wonder why CAC keeps climbing.

Brand B discovered AI and now they're shipping 50 ads a week that all look like they were made by a microwave. Same generic hooks. Same stock-looking visuals. Zero brand. Zero soul.

Both are losing to Brand C.

Brand C gets it. They move fast AND they give a damn. They start with proven structures - not a blank canvas, not a ChatGPT fever dream. 

They put their brand into it. Real voice. Real angles. Real creative decisions made by a human who understands their customer.

Then they test at volume.

The difference is massive:

1) speed without slop
2) volume without looking like everyone else
3) templates as a starting point, not a final product
4) AI as a tool, not a replacement for taste

(Hot take: the brands that use AI to SKIP the thinking are going to get wrecked by the brands that use AI to do MORE thinking, faster.)

The bar for creative is about to split in two. The slop merchants will race to the bottom. The brands with real taste and real speed will pull away from everyone.

One more thing.

If your AI slop ads are "working" right now - don't get comfortable. That's arbitrage. You found a window where the bar is low. That window always closes.

The brands building real creative muscle right now are going to eat you alive when it does.

Where are you seeing the most AI slop right now? I have thoughts 👇

Ben Bailey

Gett

Leading growth for London’s Black Taxi App.

VP of Marketing

Freelance | Self-Employed

Start-ups grow faster with my help 🤓 🚀 

High-intensity programs designed to get founders their first customers faster.

Recent wins:

- Grew a startup from zero to £300k monthly revenue in 6 months through Meta ads
- Found a scaleable and profitable growth channel in a competitive Fintech environment
- Helped an international start-up break the UK market by discovering their audience through creative 

Need help figuring out your growth levers? DM me.

Startup growth consultant

LiveMore Mortgages

Led growth in the fight against financial exclusion for the over 50s with groundbreaking new mortgage products.

- Record B2B growth while reducing acquisition cost by >75% through strategy revamp
- Built B2C funnel from scratch, with a creative-led approach, reaching profitability in two months and consistent month-on-month growth

Marketing Director

Even

Founding team, leading the marketing and sales function at a FinTech on a mission to end "Generation Rent" through an interest-free equity loan.

There are two million fewer young homeowners now than there were a generation ago. The rising cost of living coupled with stagnant wages means people are living in housing purgatory. 

Even is here to end “Generation Rent”. With an interest-free equity loan, we can triple a first-time buyer’s deposit without affecting their affordability.

Chief Marketing Officer

Nested

Head of Brand, and later the marketing function at PropTech disrupting the home selling process. 

Covering brand, acquisition and nurture in our mission to build the modern way to move. Notable projects: brand positioning and messaging, creative development and execution across TV, Radio and Social Media.

Nested is led by GoCardless founder Matt Robinson.

Head Of Brand

Studio British

Founder and Marketing Director covering brand, acquisition and customer experience in our mission to slow down fast-fashion. 

studiobritish.com is the home of luxury British fashion.  Successfully launched an MVP with sales to 25 countries and an industry high average order value. Responsible for wide ranging business and marketing strategy through to delivery across channels such as ppc, SEO, social and partnerships.

MyBuilder.com

Part of management team for online marketplace, I led marketing, in charge of acquisition and lifecycle for B2C and B2B. 

MyBuilder.com is an online marketplace dedicated to helping homeowners find quality tradesmen. Since joining we've enjoyed fantastic growth, currently helping 50,000 tradesmen to win work with 90,000 homeowners posting jobs each month.

Player-manager of the marketing function at MyBuilder, reporting to the CEO, with 5 direct reports. Covered a variety of disciplines; strategy, above the line creative development, media planning, agency management, paid search, SEO, content, social media, events, copy and email marketing to name a few. 

Successfully grew the team to help MyBuilder grow significant awareness through use of TV, OOH and PR. We're now the fastest growing company in our space on-track to become the first place a homeowner will think of when they need to hire a tradesman.

Marketing Lead

Zipcar

Grew the newly-established HR function by developing process and structure around recruitment within Zipcar. Developed and took charge of end-to-end recruitment for roles across all disciplines at all levels of seniority.

Talent Acquisition Manager, UK & Europe

Delivered an excellent level of customer service to our membership base of 100,000 of London members, responsible for managing and training the team, high level complaint resolution.

Customer Service Manager

Universal Music Group

Two hit UK singles, big in Japan. Highlights included playing Glastonbury and Brixton Academy, Q Magazine cover story and runner-up single of the week in NME. Several tours including the UK, Europe and the Far East. Occasionally get noticed in the pub.

Musician

Growth 🚀 Marketing 🤓 Start-ups💪🏾

📈 Growth for start-up and scale-ups
🤝 Hands-on people leader
❤️ I build brands people love

I fell into start-ups by joining a shabby outfit above an industrial garage in South Wimbledon, then known as Streetcar. That business exited to Zipcar which eventually sold to Avis for a cool half a billion.

At MyBuilder, it became clear marketing was the function where I could add most impact. We grew that business and exited to IAC (Expedia, Trivago). 

Since then I’ve worked with and advised multiple companies in growth and marketing, with roles like Head of Brand, Head of Marketing, Marketing Director and Chief Marketing Officer. 

I love a bit of stradegee, but will never get tired of hands-on building, whether it’s creative, copywriting, PPC, SEO or paid search. 

Leading the marketing function at a FinTech on a mission to end "Generation Rent" through an interest-free equity loan.

There are two million fewer young homeowners now than there were a generation ago. The rising cost of living coupled with stagnant wages means people are living in housing purgatory. 

Even is here to end “Generation Rent”. With an interest-free equity loan, we can triple a first-time buyer’s deposit without affecting their affordability.

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Chase Mohseni

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The Battle

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