Building DTC brands to 8 and 9 figures | Founder of Soar With Us & For You Advertising | CMO of JAQ Group

The rules of DTC growth changed in 2025. In 2026, they're set to change again.

The playbook that got you to £10-30M - broad Meta campaigns, a handful of hero SKUs, one creative style across every touchpoint, is now actively working against you. 

Algorithms reward creative diversity. Attention spans demand psychological precision. 
And TikTok Shop has emerged as a genuine high-volume demand creation channel, not just another place to run ads.

The brands winning today are producing high volumes of distinctly different assets across every awareness stage (problem, solution, product), each built on messaging frameworks that actually drive people to buy. 

Not more creative. Better creative, deployed smarter.

I've spent 7 years in this problem space. My agencies have generated £600M+ in revenue across 250+ DTC brands. 

More importantly, we've built systems that compound, so you're not starting from scratch every creative cycle. Data from 70+ brands and over 4,000+ ads per month. 

A few recent wins we've delivered for our clients:
→ Ekster: 40% increase in profit, 75% YoY growth
→ Spacegoods: New customer orders up 86%, NCPA down 33%
→ AKT London: Tripled new customers and cut CPA by 59% in 6 months
→ Nutrition Geeks: 2,200% growth in 12 months

What makes us different: we build context databases that capture your brand DNA, winning angles, and performance learnings across every campaign. 

When the algorithm shifts or a creative fatigues, we're already three steps ahead, not scrambling to figure out what worked.

If you're a CMO or founder at an 8-figure brand feeling the scaling friction, happy to talk through what's working right now. Connect here or email olly@soarwithus.co

Olly Hudson

I'm giving away our most in-demand strategic resource, the same frameworks behind £600m+ in revenue generated for the DTC brands we work with.

(This will be the last chance to download for free).

The year is 2026, and every consumer now lives inside a personal algorithmic bubble.

Every feed, every search result, every shopping journey is uniquely shaped by micro-behaviours, emotional signals, and past engagement.

Meta, Google and TikTok aren’t matching ads to audiences anymore. They’re orchestrating hyper-personalised experiences at the individual level.

At the same time, consumers are craving something algorithms can’t manufacture: real connection.

For brands, this changes everything. Winning in 2026 won’t come from targeting hacks.

It will come from:
– Creative built around individual triggers
 – AI-powered signal analysis and rapid iteration
 – Systems that compound incrementality
 – And content that still feels deeply human

This playbook breaks down the exact structures we use across Meta, TikTok, AI and Creative to drive compounding growth in this new era.

Like this post and comment "2026" and I'll send it over.

The Creative-Led Paid Acquisition Partner Behind £600M+ in DTC Revenue | Meta & TikTok for 8-9 Figure Brands.

We've broken down the funnel of a brand doing £20M a year in DTC revenue, and we're giving it away.

Ancient + Brave went from £1M annual revenue to £1M a month almost overnight in late 2022.

By 2023 they'd hit £10M. 2024 they doubled to £20M. They're forecasting £40M+ this year.

90% of that revenue comes from DTC. No aggressive VC pressure. Profitable throughout.

But the numbers aren't the interesting part.

Ancient + Brave built their growth on a framework most supplement brands can't replicate; transitioning health-conscious consumers from "supplements as pills" to a permanent lifestyle of Bio-Optimal Rituals.

That means their entire creative system, their media strategy, their retention model, all of it is built around identity shift, not product features.

They sell through authority, aesthetic ritual, and scientific credibility. B-Corp certified. Clinical trials in-feed. Persona-segmented Meta ads that speak to high-performance professionals and graceful agers in completely different languages.

And we've broken down the funnel to show what that actually looks like in practice when a premium D2C wellness brand commits fully to persona-led growth and creative scale.

Inside this breakdown, we unpack:

- How creative volume and diversity feed Meta's Andromeda system with high-density signals
- Why scaling a luxury wellness product requires a fundamentally different creative strategy than a commodity supplement
- How to maintain premium brand perception while producing the creative variation Meta's algorithm demands
- The role of UGC, high-production, and partnership ads in a sustained performance ecosystem that never compromises on quality
- Why persona-led creative is the only sustainable way to grow a high-ticket D2C product without racing to the bottom on price
- What this approach teaches us about scaling a luxury supplement brand in an increasingly saturated wellness market

If you're responsible for growth, creative, or paid media, this breakdown shows how the winning brands are already operating. 

Want it? 
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Comment “2026” and I’ll send it over

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BFCM Guide

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If you’d like 126 more pages of ecom gold, join 500+ brands and check this out: https://bit.ly/3RlTHZ4


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12/03

5 more critical errors to fix: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olly-hudson_use-data-to-fix-your-brands-creatives-and-activity-7168154221719056384-Yn5A?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

13/03

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We mapped the full persona-led creative system we run for 8 and 9-figure DTC brands and it's yours.

Persona-led creative strategy has been the single biggest topic of conversation in our world over the last 6 months - across our client work, our podcast, our Meta partnership, and the broader DTC community we're part of.

The problem is that the conversation has been scattered.

So we built this.

Everything on this board reflects what we are actively doing right now for the 8 and 9-figure DTC brands we work with - from the AI research stack we use to build personas, to the brief structure, to the testing tiers and optimisation rules we run in accounts every day.

It's informed by our own data, our official Meta partnership research, and the conversations we've had with people like Maxime - Meta's Creative Strategist for Disruptor brands - who gave us a rare look at how Andromeda actually works from the inside.

A single, chronological walk-through of the full persona-led engine - so you can see not just what to do, but why each step feeds the next.

Want it? Like this post and comment "persona" and I'll send it over!

🚨 We're giving away our free UGC 2.0 playbook, built with Insense | TikTok & Meta Partner. Everything we know about scaling creative across Meta and TikTok in 2026, in one free resource.

Meta's Andromeda doesn't care about your targeting settings. It cares about creative signals. And if you're still producing 3-5 assets a month hoping one becomes a hero ad, you're not giving the algorithm enough to work with.

CPA doesn't spike randomly. It spikes because Meta has found everyone it can reach with the signals you've already given it, and your production system can't keep up.

The playbook covers:

- The reason the hero ad is dead and what the algorithm actually needs from you now
- How to mine your own funnel data to identify micro-personas before you brief a single creator
- Full-funnel architecture across UGC, high-production, static, and partnership ads
- Hook, body, and CTA structures working right now
- The feedback loop habits that separate brands compounding at 8-figures from everyone else

You can download our free playbook here: https://lnkd.in/esPS2rns

We've pulled everything we know about incremental reach into one guide. Here's how to diagnose it, measure it, and fix it.

Your CPA doesn't spike randomly. It spikes because your account ran out of new people to show ads to. 

Incremental reach is the one Meta metric that predicts problems before they show up in your CPA. Most brands aren't tracking it. They find out they have a saturation problem when costs have already risen and scaling has already stalled.

It covers how Meta's AI (Andromeda, GEM, and Lattice) creates saturation at scale without you realising, the three ways to actually measure your incremental reach today, and the six levers we use with 8 and 9-figure brands to grow it - in the right order.

If your CPAs are creeping up, your new creative is fatiguing faster than it used to, or scaling spend just isn't moving the needle - this is where to start.

Want it? 
Like this post
Comment “incremental reach” and I’ll send it over

Seven years ago, we walked out of a meeting with our first real e-comm client.

Ten minutes later, sat in the car, reality hit: we'd just agreed to do three months for free.

That drive back to Tadcaster was chaos in my head.

Half of me was buzzing. We'd actually done it. Walked into a room, pitched our vision for how we could scale their football shirt brand on Meta, and they'd said yes.

The other half was terrified.

Because talking about what you can do and actually having to deliver it are two completely different things.

No safety net. No second chances. Just me and Joe and a brand that had zero reason to trust two lads in their early twenties with no track record.

That night, I called my family.
"We got our first proper client today."
"That's brilliant! What are they paying?"
"...Well, nothing. Yet. But if we hit their numbers, they'll introduce us to other brands."

Silence.

Then: "Right. So... when does the money start coming in?"

I could hear it in their voice. The same concern I'd been hearing from them for months. This agency thing... is it actually going to work?

And honestly? I didn't know.

But I knew this was the moment. Either we'd become another "I told you so" story, or we'd prove we could actually do this.

Week one was brutal. Just manual bidding, a Google Sheet where we'd split out every single audience by hand, and me refreshing the ads manager every hour like my life depended on it.

Week two: 2.9x ROAS on cold traffic.

I remember seeing those numbers and thinking: Holy shit. This might actually work.

By week three, I'd stopped checking the dashboard compulsively. Not because I was relaxed, I was still bricking it, but because something had shifted.

The doubt was still there. But underneath it, there was something new.

Belief.

Not the “fake it till you make it kind”. The real kind. The kind you can only get by actually doing the thing you said you'd do.

That football shirt brand never became our biggest client. The case study didn't change our business overnight. And looking back, the ROAS wasn't even that impressive.

But none of that mattered. Because proving it once, to yourself, to the people who love you but quietly wonder if you've lost the plot, that's the moment everything changes.

The next pitch we took, I wasn't trying to convince myself anymore. I just knew. That free trial gave us something more valuable than revenue. It gave us conviction.

And seven years later, that conviction is what's carried us through every campaign, every scale, every moment of doubt since.

You can't fake that. You have to earn it.

P.S. For the founders reading this, what was your moment? The one where doubt started turning into belief?

Meta just changed how click attribution works. Here's what it actually means for your campaigns.

Click-through attribution will now only count link clicks, not likes, shares, comments, or saves.

Those non-link interactions are moving into a renamed bucket: "engage-through attribution" (formerly engaged-view). Worth noting, unlike engaged-view which only applied to video, engage-through now applies to all ad formats.

Two other changes:
The engaged-view threshold for video drops from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. Meta's own data shows 46% of Reels purchase conversions happen within the first 2 seconds, that window was already overdue.

Northbeam and Triple Whale are being brought into the fold to incorporate both clicks and views into their attribution models.

For most accounts, the practical impact is minimal short-term. Your click-through numbers will drop slightly and engage-through will absorb the difference. If you want to see exactly where conversions are moving, you can break it out using the Compare Attribution Settings feature or the Breakdown by Attribution Setting in Ads Manager.

This closes the gap between Ads Manager and third-party tools like GA4. That discrepancy has been used to dismiss Meta's numbers for years. Less ammunition for sceptics, more confidence in the data.

The accounts that should pay attention are those who manually switched off engaged-view attribution. You may see a drop in reported totals. Worth reviewing your settings before this rolls out fully.

Attribution is still imperfect. But this is a cleaner signal than we had yesterday.

Meta invited me to tell their product and marketing team how we approach Facebook differently.

The answer surprised even the agencies 10x our size.

Agencies running massive brand budgets. And there we were, a bootstrapped DTC agency from Yorkshire, obsessed with conversion, testing 100+ creatives a month, and ignoring most of the conventional playbook.

That's exactly why they wanted us there.

The gap between how large brand advertisers think about Meta and how DTC operators use it is significant. Not better or worse, genuinely different orientations.

Most large advertisers still think in terms of:
→ Brand campaigns
→ Funnel splits
→ Top-of-funnel reach
→ Media planning cycles

The 250+ DTC brands we work with think like this:
→ Creative as infrastructure
→ Conversion as the north star
→ Testing velocity as competitive advantage
→ Profitability over vanity ROAS

A few things came out of the discussion that stuck with me:

Creative is the new targeting. As Broad and ASC become the default, the question has shifted from "what audience do we buy?" to "what creative system do we build?" Testing 50 to 100+ assets a month isn't excessive at our scale, it's the mechanism.

Profitability is replacing vanity ROAS. The founders we work with are pushing back on surface metrics. The real conversations are about contribution margin, blended CAC, and whether growth is actually incremental.

Meta has earned its way up the funnel. Reels, broad delivery, and AI-driven placement are doing legitimate brand-building work now, whether brands planned for it or not.

Meta creates demand. Google captures it. They're complementary, not competing.

AI-enabled creative infrastructure is becoming the moat. Agencies and brands building proprietary systems for creative intelligence will compound an advantage that spend alone can't close.

Grateful to be part of the discussion and to see how seriously Meta is thinking about creative, measurement and signal quality. Thanks to the panel Amelia Ensell, Lucia Magadan, Caroline Reynolds

Partner, Digital at OMD UK | Media Week 30 Under 30 2022

Entertainment, Media and Tech Marketing - Strategy, Leadership, Execution, and Commercial

Partner | Global Chief Performance Officer

We’re moving into a persona-driven era of paid growth, and I don’t think enough teams have internalised what that actually means.

As Meta’s delivery has improved, the constraint inside ad accounts has shifted. The question is no longer, “How do we find the right audience?” but “How many distinct, meaningful personas can we give the algorithm to work with?”

We built a Creative OS around: persona → micro-persona 

At the time, it felt like a strong creative framework. Now it feels like the operating system for scale. As delivery has become more probabilistic and creative-led, we’ve been able to unlock more personas per brand, but only when the research and messaging are strong enough.

What started as macro personas (e.g. “menopause”) is fragmenting into increasingly nuanced segments, moving toward a “soulmate theory” end state where each user sees the version that feels built for them.

You can see this in the strongest accounts. The best brands are mapping the full chain:

Persona → Creative angle → Landing page → Offer framing

They’re not just launching ads. They’re asking, “are we systematically covering the opportunity landscape?”. Which raises a bigger question. Should we start reporting by persona? Spend per persona. CAC per persona. New customer volume per persona. Contribution margin per persona.

If persona is the real growth lever, it arguably needs to become a reporting dimension, not just a creative one.

Most accounts still report by campaign type or funnel stage. But if creative is the new targeting mechanism and persona is the core creative variable, then persona becomes a performance variable. And that changes prioritisation.

Not every persona is equal. They differ in TAM, competitive density, ease of conviction, LTV potential and creative scalability. Some are “easy money.” Others are strategically important but structurally harder.

The real skill becomes answering,“which personas deserve scale capital?”

There’s also an account structure implication. We’ve seen persona-mapped campaign structures work at scale. The question is whether fragmentation intensifies as budgets increase.

Does one macro persona split into three, then seven, then fifteen micro-cohorts? If so, creative strategy, campaign structure, reporting and landing page architecture all need to reflect that.

The upside is that this makes scaling more deliberate. Instead of random angle testing, you’re building structured coverage across defined intent clusters.

But it requires growth teams to move beyond concept testing and think in terms of:
- Persona coverage audits
- Persona saturation
- Persona-level incrementality
- Persona lifecycle value

Which likely means persona should show up in reporting, not just in the brief.

If you're spending serious money on Meta and want to pressure-test how your persona coverage maps to your account structure, that's exactly the kind of work we do at Soar With Us https://lnkd.in/e8Tkwe4q

We built an AI UGC ad and we're giving away the prompt that made it possible.

Most people waste time trying to engineer the perfect video generation prompt from scratch. Getting the cinematography right, the character description, the dialogue format, the camera motion. Sora 2 is incredibly specific about what it needs to produce consistent, hyper-realistic output. Get the prompt wrong and the footage looks off.

This template removes that entirely.

The Claude prompt takes that basic information and structures it into the exact format Sora 2 needs: character description, cinematography, camera motion, lighting, dialogue, audio, authenticity keywords. Everything.

It sits at step one of our AI UGC workflow. And it matters because everything downstream depends on it.

Get this right and your Sora 2 output is hyper-realistic UGC style footage with good camera shake and audio that sounds like it was actually shot on an iPhone. From there you take that output into ElevenLabs to clone the voice. Then into ChatGPT to create a JSON prompt for subject consistency. Then Nano Banana to place your subject into new scenes. Then Kling to bring those scenes to life as B-roll.

The whole workflow starts here.

We gave this away on this week's D2C Diaries episode. Dropping it here too.

Like this post and comment PROMPT below and we'll send it across.

Excited to share that on March 9th I’ll be speaking at The eCommerce Acquiror Conference 2026. 

📍1 Liberty Street, NYC.

The event is the leading global event for investors and acquirors focused on eCommerce-led consumer brands.

It’s a unique opportunity to gain insights from top dealmakers, founders, and strategics driving M&A in the lower middle market.

The event is completely free to join for acquirors in the space. Don’t miss out on connecting with industry peers and uncovering new opportunities.

Reserve your spot today: https://lnkd.in/eqUzy_VH

Looking forward to an incredible lineup of sessions and discussions. See you there!

We’ve put together a playbook of proven Meta strategies that are working right now for 8 and 9 figure DTC brands.

Meta advertising has changed more in the last two years than in the five before it. The algorithm is smarter, the competition is heavier, and the old playbook (stack your targeting, run your best creative, scale what works) doesn’t cut it anymore.

The brands pulling away from the pack aren't spending more. They're thinking differently.

They've shifted from audience-first to persona-first, from volume to variety, from optimising individual ads to building creative systems. They're feeding the algorithm better signals and getting better results in return.

This is a comprehensive guide of what those brands are actually doing right now - the strategies, structures, and thinking that are moving the needle on Meta right now. 

Here’s what you can expect:
1️⃣ Understand how Meta actually works in 2026 - learn how Andromeda's individual-level ad matching has changed the rules of creative strategy, and what it means for how you build, structure, and scale your account.
2️⃣ Build a persona framework that drives real incremental reach - go beyond demographics into the psychological fears, desires, and cognitive biases that tell Meta exactly who to find, and stop wasting spend reaching the same people repeatedly.
3️⃣ Create ads that stop the scroll - discover the creative principles, narrative structures, and emotional frameworks behind the highest-performing Meta ads right now, with real case studies and measurable results.
4️⃣ Scale without starting from scratch - learn the systems, hierarchies, and portfolio thinking that the fastest-growing DTC brands use to keep creative output fresh, efficient, and compounding over time.

Get a full-funnel playbook you can apply immediately - from account structure and partnership ads to AI tools, organic strategy, and multi-channel thinking, every chapter is built around what's working right now.

Want it? 
Like this post
Comment "meta guide" and I'll send it over

Loukas just dropped one of our most requested masterminds.

A full mastermind on micro personas, a live demo of a persona build, how it maps into scripting, and why most brands are leaving incremental reach on the table without even knowing it.

This is the internal Hambi Media framework. What we use across our 7 and 8 figure brands. Awareness levels, cognitive biases, valence zones, soulmate theory in practice, all of it. With a live walkthrough of how it feeds directly into creative concepts and scripts.

If you're spending seriously on Meta and your reach has plateaued, this is the session to watch https://lnkd.in/epyhGaXA

Inside every macro persona are 3 completely different buyers. Most creative speaks to all of them at once. Here's how to map them.

(Busy Dad is not a persona. It's three completely different buyers wearing the same label).

Macro personas tell you who to reach. Micro personas tell you why they actually buy. Most brands never make it to the second step.

Allocating spend at the persona level is powerful, but the real advantage comes from signal precision within each persona. If persona is the growth lever, micro persona is the efficiency lever.

Most teams are allocating spend by WHO. Modern delivery systems optimise around WHY. That gap is where performance gets diluted.

Macro personas are still necessary, they're how you structure spend buckets and organise coverage. But inside every macro persona are multiple psychological tensions, and those tensions behave very differently in-feed. 

That's where the real leverage sits.

Take "The Busy Dad." Time-poor. Career driven. Wants energy. Wants to be present with his kids.

But inside that single persona are very different psychological tensions:
- The Control Seeker: wants predictability and measurable safety 
- The Skeptical Analyst: wants proof and transparency 
- The Quiet Normaliser: wants dignity and normalcy

Same life-stage, same product, but completely different emotional drivers. And those drivers behave differently in-feed.

When you speak to "Busy Dads," you blend those signals. When you isolate the dominant tension, you create clarity.

Cleaner tension → clearer engagement pattern → stronger delivery → more stable scale.

If persona is the growth lever, micro persona is the precision instrument and that's where the real optimisation happens.

Most brands stop at WHO. But modern delivery systems respond to WHY.

We do this for DTC brands every day. Get in touch and we'll show you how we'd map your brand https://lnkd.in/eqqDp-xu

Meta just said it publicly. Insight diversification over creative diversification.

We've been running this exact framework for the past year, and now we have the data to prove it works.

Working directly with Meta, we tested what actually happens when you build creative around persona-driven insights rather than production volume, 
25 variants vs 5 variants, same spend: 
171 more purchases 
59,000 fewer people reached 
15% lower cost per conversion

Partnership Ads vs BAU only: 
800 incremental conversions vs 520 
Cost per incremental conversion: $25.63 vs $39.34

The mechanism isn't surprising once you understand Andromeda. The algorithm isn't rewarding volume. It's rewarding signal diversity. Different insights unlock different audience clusters. Different motivators reach people BAU creative never touches.

What most brands are doing wrong: producing more ads anchored to the same insight. Louder, not different.

What the top 1% are doing: building a systematic process to surface new insights first, then activating creative from those.

We wrote up the full methodology and results with Campaign UK   https://lnkd.in/gyFcQ-Fs

Forget creative diversification. Think insight diversification.

The industry has been obsessed with volume.
More ads. More variants. More creative.
The logic: more creative = more chances to win.

But if 1,000 ads are built on the same insight, you're not diversifying.
You're just saying the same thing a thousand times.

Here's the shift that actually matters:
Creative diversification asks: how many ads can we make?
Insight diversification asks: how many insights can we test?

One is a production problem. The other is a strategy problem.

The best operators are flipping the ratio. 
80% finding the right insight. 20% activating it. 
Insight is becoming the job.

The algorithm handles volume now.
Dynamic creative. AI. Automated variants.
Execution is becoming automated.

The insight isn't.
The pain points. The motivators. The barriers.
The exact words people use to describe their wants, needs, problems.

The brands winning aren't the ones with the most ads.
They're the ones with the most angles.

The gap between what people post about Meta and what actually works inside the accounts is massive. D2C Diaries exists to close it.

When Loukas and I started the podcast, the pitch was simple: two agency founders talking about what's actually working in accounts.

4,000 subs and 18 months later, we're sitting across from Maxime. A creative strategist at Meta whose job is to work with the most disruptive brands on the platform. The top 1%.

That conversation wouldn't have happened without the platform D2C Diaries has become.

Here are the four biggest lessons from that episode:

1️⃣ Meta is no longer about interrupting attention. It's about earning it.
Maxime's framing: Meta has moved from disturbing attention to curating a feed people actually want to be in.
His analogy for Andromeda: "Think of it as a super intelligent librarian. The old system judged ads by the cover. Andromeda goes inside the book."
The algorithm isn't reacting to formats or surface-level edits. It's interpreting sentiment, narrative, context. That's why small iterative tweaks stop working. If the story hasn't changed, the system hasn't learned anything new.

2️⃣ Creative diversity is how the system learns.
If all your ads tell the same story, from the same perspective, in the same structure, you're starving the algorithm of information.
Diversity isn't volume. It's giving the system new meaning to work with. Different angles, different voices, different framings all expand Meta's ability to match creative to individuals.
One winning ad no longer scales the way it used to.

3️⃣ Partnership ads work because they change how the algorithm understands the creative. Not because the creator has a big audience or because it feels more native. Because identity and perspective shift the meaning of the creative.
Where brands go wrong: same script, same message, different face. To Andromeda, that's not new information. It's the same book, reprinted.

4️⃣ AI isn't the advantage, creative judgment still is.
Maxime's warning: AI becomes a problem when brands use it as a replacement for thinking. If everyone uses the same tools in the same way, everything starts to look the same. And when everything looks the same, the algorithm has nothing new to learn from.
The brands winning with AI aren't asking "how do we automate creative?" They're asking "how do we use AI to amplify strong creative judgment?"
That distinction matters more than most brands realise.

Everything Maxime described requires a strategy layer most brands don't have.

We built the Creative Intelligence Report to build it for you.

A full audit of your creative performance, persona and messaging frameworks built from research, and a ROI-ranked roadmap of exactly what to fix and in what order. 

4 weeks.  One-time fee. No retainer commitment.

Get in touch to find out more: https://lnkd.in/eHGwf6e8

CEO of Hambi Media | Co-Founder of For You Advertising | CCO of Soar Hold Co | your DTC brand’s one stop destination for Performance Creative

Creative Strategist @ Meta | Ex-TikTok | Brand & Creative Strategy Director

We're going through a full brand and positioning project at Soar Group and looking for the right agency or freelancer to bring it to life.

We've put together an RFP so if you're a branding agency or freelancer who fancies taking a look, drop me a message with your portfolio and I'll send it over.

Or if you know someone who'd be perfect for this, give them a tag below - would really appreciate it.

Rory Sutherland said something at MAD//FEST that most D2C founders in the room probably glossed over.

Guinness, he argued, has crossed a threshold almost no brand ever reaches.

It no longer needs to explain itself. The herd has decided. The social norm is set. And once you're there, individual persuasion becomes largely irrelevant. The culture does the selling for you.

That should reframe how you think about growth.

We spend our time obsessing over ROAS, conversion rates, perfect targeting. Those things matter. But they're not what separates the brands that break through from the ones that plateau.

The brands that genuinely win aren't just outperforming on performance metrics. They've made buying them feel socially normal. Safe. Obvious.

Because people don't buy on logic. They buy on social reinforcement. We aren't loyal to products, we're loyal to our networks. And underneath almost every purchase decision, however rational it feels, is one quiet question: how does this make me look?

That's why community isn't a nice-to-have for D2C brands. It's structural.

UGC isn't just content. It's proof that the herd has already decided. Influencer and partnership ads don't work because of reach. They work because of perceived similarity and trust.

The brands that win the next five years won't just have the best product. They'll be the ones that engineer the conditions for collective momentum, and make choosing them feel like the most obvious thing in the world.

Cheers, Rory. 🍺

Vice Chairman at Ogilvy UK | TED Global speaker | Author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power Of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

MAD//FEST

Here’s how we helped Nuovva scale from zero to five figures in monthly spend within a few months.

We onboarded Nuovva in August 2025. Zero paid advertising history. No pixel data, no audience insights, no creative learnings. They had a strong Amazon presence, but their DTC arm was starting from scratch.

Here's what we did.

Foundations
- Before a single ad went live, we built the data infrastructure: conversion tracking configured between Shopify and Google Ads, Triple Whale onboarded for clean cross-channel attribution, and Meta Pixel, CAPI, and catalogues all set up and verified to ensure reliable data flow from day one.

Meta
- Launched a structured Creative Testing campaign that isolated individual creative variants and copy combinations simultaneously, generating signal fast rather than testing sequentially and wasting early spend.
- Top performers were identified within weeks and pushed into a dedicated scaling campaign, giving us proven assets to put budget behind rather than running broad from the start.
- Remarketing opened two weeks later, targeting mid and bottom-funnel audiences with messaging tailored to where they sat in the consideration journey.

Google
- We began with an optimised product feed to maximise match rates and search visibility before layering in campaign types.
- Launched Brand Search to capture the awareness being generated by paid social activity, alongside a Performance Max campaign structured around Nuovva's core product collections.
- Dedicated Standard Shopping campaigns for Knives, Utensils, and Storage pushed into additional revenue streams, with a DSA campaign running in parallel to mine keyword data and inform longer-term search strategy.

Creative
- Starting from zero meant assumptions weren't an option. Our AI-assisted research process guided the first round of creatives, building personas and identifying pain points and purchase motivations before briefing a single asset.
- Early output leaned towards upper-funnel content to build a strong signal base, before scaling into high-production, UGC, and static formats.
- Three angles proved consistent performance drivers across the funnel: savings and value framing, aspirational aesthetic messaging, and the versatility proposition of replacing your entire kitchen setup with one pan.

Results
- DTC revenue 10x in 180 days, growing from almost nothing to consistent 6-figure months.
- On Google, purchases grew by 111%, revenue by 171.5%, and profit by 666% comparing the first two months to the following two, with ROAS improving 32.6% as the account matured and spend scaled.
- On Meta, ROAS improved every single month from launch, growing over 100% from September to January, with remarketing delivering a 2.5x ROAS uplift over top-of-funnel activity alone.

Nuovva is now targeting a further doubling of monthly revenue. If you want us to do the same for your brand, get in touch here: https://lnkd.in/eRcbUZ8q

We tripled new customer orders for AKT London in under 6 months. CPA dropped 59%.

Not through bid optimisation. Not through budget reallocation. Through creative volume and signal diversity.

The full breakdown is inside the new "How to Move the Needle in 2026" playbook, put together by Customers Who Click alongside some of the best operators in ecommerce right now.

Our contribution walks through the exact creative-first growth architecture we built for AKT: AI-driven customer research, high-velocity testing across UGC, high-production and graphic-led formats, geo-split account structures, and full-funnel diversification onto Google Demand Gen.

The result was a 74% increase in Meta spend with a 3.5% CTR and 40% overall ROAS uplift.

If you want to see how creative diversity actually moves the numbers at scale, this is worth reading. Great insights from some brilliant partners including:

OctaneAI, PostPilot, Littledata, Rebuy Engine, Flare - Scheduled Delivery, Videowise, Growthub, Zigpoll, Intelligems, KnoCommerce, Soar With Us, Sweet Analytics, Leaf Signal, Nosto, Order Editing

🚨 Copy of the playbook here: https://lnkd.in/eDYPXzEp

Paolo Emilio Zanini

Paolo Emilio Zanini is a media entrepreneur, investor, and CEO of Acumen Media, one of the world’s leading film production companies specializing in B2B storytelling, executive interviews, and award-winning documentaries. Under his leadership, Acumen has become a powerhouse in global storytelling, working with major organizations producing over 400 documentaries annually across four continents.

Paolo is a visionary in media innovation, redefining how businesses tell their stories through high-impact filmmaking. He understands how narrative, technology, and brand strategy intersect, helping organizations create content that doesn’t just inform but inspires action. His work sits at the cutting edge of business, storytelling, and digital transformation, making him one of the most influential voices in corporate media production today.

Beyond Acumen, Paolo is a passionate advocate for purpose-driven content, leveraging the power of film to highlight key global issues in sustainability, healthcare, and technology. His ability to blend cinematic storytelling with corporate strategy has positioned Acumen as a global leader in high-quality, mission-driven media.

Paolo is also an active investor and advisor, supporting innovative startups and businesses at the intersection of media, technology, and storytelling. He is a sought-after speaker at international conferences, sharing insights on the future of media, the evolution of brand storytelling, and the power of film in shaping industries.

With a global presence and a relentless drive to push storytelling beyond traditional media, Paolo  continues to lead the charge in transforming corporate narratives into compelling, impactful films that resonate worldwide.

Chief Executive Officer

Working with a team of great of exceptional film makers and strategic thinkers to help tell the key stories of Businesses and Corporates from around the world. 

More and more businesses are becoming active stakeholders within our societies and have an need to tell the world how they are positively impacting our societies and the work they are doing. 

That is our mission and we believe that it is a very important one.

Paolo Zanini

Mean what you say and say what you mean.

Today, I spent a few hours on the phones and meeting with our brilliant executive producers in London.

What we realized was that people had fallen into the age-old trap of just presenting and explaining, but not persuading.

I’ve talked about this numerous times, but it’s worth reiterating.

If you sell anything over the phone or in person, you need to understand the importance of HOW you say things as opposed to just WHAT you say.

A genuine sense of conviction is mandatory, but also a full and deep comprehension of what you are offering at a fundamental level.

Don’t overtalk or overcomplicate. 
Persuade. 
A sophisticated and elegant way of communicating goes a lot further than just presenting information.

As a professional persuader, it’s your job to get someone to buy into you and the product, not simply for them to understand what you are offering.

Persuade, charm, and build trust.

#Charm #Communication #Persuasion #Sales

Entrepreneur/Investor/Real Estate Developer CEO of Acumen International Media

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The Battle

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