Zachary Murray

Foreplay.co

Improve your creative workflow with foreplay. Save ads, build briefs and produce high converting ads at scale without compromising quality.

Founder

Triple Whale 🐳

Creative Director / Growth Design

Leading design of both product and marketing for the future of eCommerce.

Head Of Design

Nomadic Fabrics

Niche D2C home decor brand selling canvas wall art and bohemian-inspired decor pieces.

Co-Founder - Acquired

Vanquished Media

Animated Explainer Videos and Web Development Studio.

Bootstrapping the fuck out of foreplay.co

Daniel James

Flight Performance

We accelerate growth for ambitious brands.

Enabling you to acquire more customers, more profitably at greater scale, and build lasting customer loyalty.

Founder & CEO @ Flight Performance

Bitesized Podcast

A weekly podcast and newsletter created by & made for entrepreneurs, growth marketers, and brand owners.

CROSSNET

Angel Investor

Obvi

CALIWATER Cactus Water

Spudsy

Social Chain Agency US

Amobee

Senior Strategic Account Lead

Turn

Senior Account Manager

Founder & CEO @ Flight Performance: Accelerating growth for eCommerce brands with Growth Strategy, Customer Acquisition & Customer Retention | Host of Entrepreneurship, Brand Building & Marketing Podcast Bitesized🎙

Ex: Client Strategy lead MySpace, AOL & Turn, before launching my own performance marketing agency in 2019.

Founder of Flight Performance: we help brands acquire more customers, more profitably, at greater scale & building lasting customer loyalty.

Brands we have helped drive profitable growth include Represent Clo, Kappa, Huel, Rockstar Originals, Ghost Golf, Oh Polly, Crown Affair, Before You Speak Coffee, Diet Starts Monday + more.

Core Capabilities Include: 

Customer Acquisition: Growth Strategy, Performance Creative, Media Buying
Customer Retention: Email, SMS, Subscription & Loyalty

To learn more about how we can work together shoot us an email at hello@flightperformance.co

Testimonials:

"We partnered with Flight Performance for over 2 years and they were foundational in our ability to scale as fast and successfully as we have. Their expertise in creative strategy, media buying and retention marketing made them an invaluable partner to Ghost Golf, and a true extension of our team. Highly recommend" - Andy Nalla, Founder & CEO Ghost Golf

“From the outset, Flight Performance demonstrated a deep understanding of our business goals and objectives. Their data-driven and strategic approach to customer acquisition and customer retention contributed significantly to the growth Crown Affair has been able to achieve over the last 3 years of working together” - Elaine Choi | President Crown Affair

“The Flight Performance team's ability to reduce our Customer Acquisition costs, lead by creative strategy, & Influencer content was really impressive. They worked hard to understand our goals and executed against the game plan, with great communication and results to support” - Howie Zisser | Marketing Director Public Rec


Host of Bitesized:

A weekly podcast featuring top entrepreneurs, brand builders & marketers giving actionable insights you can apply today.

Listen on Spotify: tinyurl.com/Bitesized-Spotify
Listen on Apple: tinyurl.com/Bitesized-Apple
Watch on YouTube: tinyurl.com/Bitesized-YouTube

“One of my favorite podcasts. Great content packed with actionable insights.” - Neal Goyal | Tapcart
"Hands down one of the most valuable podcasts I listened to in this field" - Ben Simons

Founder & CEO

mint is a full-service performance marketing agency. we help disruptive dtc/ecommerce brands accelerate growth with cutting edge strategies across creative, influences, paid media, email & sms. 

Last Friday I visited one of our clients new HQ's here in LA.

We've been working with them now for 3 years, this will be our 3rd Q4 with them and they will do more revenue this month, than in the entire first year where we started working with them in Q3.

Its mind blowing the size of operation needed to support a $100M+ fashion brand & over the years, visiting their offices and warehouses just continue to expand and expand.

Outside of great product, great marketing & collaboration, one thing stands out as to why this partnership has now extended over that timeframe. 

Its not just performance. It's trust.

We have had down months & performance challenges along the way, but they never doubted our ability to be the team to navigate through the good and the challenging.

In part, that trust has been earned and given due to the growth we have collectivley achieved.

But its also the fundamentals of how you/we show up every day.

You either rise or fall to the level of expectations & standards you set for your team… and then accept.

Out-care,
Out-learn,
Out-own every challenge & outcome.

Here's to another monster Q4. Lets see how big next years warehouse is.

Founder @ Flight Performance: Helping fashion & apparel brands acquire more customers, more profitably at greater scale & build lasting customer loyalty | Host of Entrepreneurship & Brand Building Podcast @ Bitesized🎙

How To Win On META

So often we hear:

- We cant scale
- When we try and scale performance drops

And it nearly always comes down to the same fundamental issues.

- Overly fragmented campaigns and budget
- No clarity on audience definitions/segmentation
- CBO, ABO, Cost Caps - all and every manual tinkering applied
- No structured creative strategy
- Optimized against ROAS, not business metrics
- Siloed channel execution and measurement

Treating paid media like they are day trading on the stock market: chasing short-term wins, reacting to every fluctuation, rebuilding campaigns daily.

The winners in 2025–2026 will be those who build data-driven creative systems, & treat META as part of the broader customer acquisition ecosystem, anchored to actual business results not in platform performance.

The way to maximize your META performance, as part of your broader acquisition ecosystem: 

- Creative Testing Framework

Stop testing 100 ads that say the same thing & look the same.
Start testing different concepts, unique narratives, hooks, and tones that speak to specific audience mindsets.

Think about creative layering: 

Cold: discovery & narrative validation
Engaged: Angle reinforcement & social proof
Repeat: Offer testing, product education, retention triggers

For fashion & apparel brands specifically, collection ads, instant experience ads, how you 'merchandize' in your ads is crucial.

- Creative Diversity

Meta’s algorithm rewards diversity over pure volume. 
Volume comes in waves: higher volume of diverse creative to find winners, narrow down and scale whats working, adding more volume through iteration/new concepts. Rinse and repeat.

- Data Consolidation

Day Trading mentalities don't just keep you in a perpetual state of making decisions on todays and yesterdays performance; they encourage constant in platform tinkering.

Consolidate your ad account to prioritize creative testing & scaled campaigns based on winners. This can be product specific, category specific, collection specific - depends on the brand/products.

Your goal is to maximize the signals fueling the AI/Machine learning, minimize fragmentation of campaigns and budget, and limit time spent in learning phases. 

- Anchor to Business Goals

The biggest thing with Meta outside of creative priority & data consolidation is to anchor it into your broader customer acquisition strategy. 

Your ROAS doesn't mean jack shit if its not driving new customer acquisition at the overall target nMER/MER.

You cannot execute META in a vacuum to your other channels and be so beholden to daily in platform performance fluctuations. 

Case in point for this sports apparel brand we started working with in September.
Increased revenue, increased MER/nMER, Decreased ACoS.

TL;DR:

- Stop day-trading your ad account against todays and yesterdays performance.
- Optimize performance to broader business objectives & omni-channel metrics
- Creative Diversity > Volume to achieve the right blend of both

“Hire smart people and get out of their way” sounds like great leadership advice.

The problem? It’s oversimplified and in practice, it often leads to chaos, not high performance.

True leadership isn’t about disappearing once you’ve hired talented people.

It’s about creating the right balance between autonomy, coaching, and alignment.

I use the 10:80:10 framework:

10%: Give clarity up front. Define the problem, set direction, and connect it to company goals.

80%: Let your team run. This is where smart people thrive, executing, iterating, and solving.

10%: Step back in. Review, coach, and refine to ensure work ties back to the broader mission.

And sometimes, that mix shifts. Maybe it’s 20:70:10 or 20:50:30 depending on the person, project, or stage of growth.

The point is:

👉 Great leadership isn’t “hands-off.”
👉 It’s structured delegation that empowers people to perform while still driving continuous improvement and alignment.

“getting out of the way” without coaching or alignment doesn’t make you a good leader.
It just makes you absent & even the smartest individuals need and likely want coaching & challenging.

Our Biggest Black Friday Ever.

$31,250,368 in revenue achieved on $7,149,055 in spend for our clients at an avg 18% ACoS. We beat forecasts, hit our ACoS targets and were on average up 32% up YoY.

A huge collaborative team effort across the board from the flight performance team and our clients. Still analyzing some aspects, however some quick high level takeaways:


1. Brands went early, consumers went late. 

We were pacing slightly behind on some brands leading into Friday, but the surge was huge.  Consumers are getting more and more savvy. They are not tricked by false urgency. They know Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) will be the biggest actual offers.
 
This is something brands will have to re-strategize & forecast around in future years. 


2. The months leading into Black Friday are crucial. 

Building demand, how you manage your media spend against new, engaged, existing, in the build up to big marketing moments, how you balance your email/sms cadence, in the months (and really, across the entire year) have meaningful impacts on big marketing moments such as BFCM. 


3. Price isn't the only variable.

Discounts work. Value works better. It's all in how you position. 
The key thing here is do not just take a blanket approach to everything. 
How you treat VIPs, new customers, engaged segments, lapsed... the goal of BFCM is not to sell everything at such a discount it kills any margin...
Its to push fence sitters over the line, its to increase LTV of existing customers, its to convert built up demand of new audiences, and sure... shift some overstock of inventory and clear the shelves for the new year.

4. Evergreen Ads + Billboards

I mentioned this in a pre-BFCM post: keep your evergreen ads on and run billboard style promotional ads. This worked incredibly well for us across the board. Existing ads have learnings, the billboard ads punch people in the face with the offer. We set things up in a way to guarantee delivery of the BFCM only posts, while being able to maintain performance across evergreen.

From an agency perspective:

- We tripled our ad and email output for the month
- Had 24/7 coverage for clients to leave no stone unturned on performance
- Morning, Afternoon, Evening optimization check in points, strategic decisions made, client updates sent

Massive shoutout to the whole Flight Performance team, our clients, and the partners that support us.

Whats Something You Once Believed To Be True, That You No Longer Believe?

I don't recall where I heard this, but I started using this in interviews with potential employees of my companies, and I love it for so many reasons, but mainly as it highlights someones ability to change beliefs or approaches based on new or updated information.

Why is that important?

Because growth, whether personal, professional, or organizational, is rooted in adaptability.

The best people I’ve ever worked with can update their views & approaches when new data, perspectives, or experiences prove that what used to be true… no longer is.

They don’t cling to old systems out of ego.
They don’t double down just to be right.
They adapt.

In a world where data changes daily, platforms shift weekly, and consumer behavior evolves quarterly, the ability to unlearn, rethink, and relearn is everything.

So when I ask that question in an interview, I’m not looking for a “perfect” answer.
I’m looking for how someone thinks, not what they know.

Do they see change as a threat, or as a sign of progress?
Can they separate identity from opinion?
Can they evolve fast enough to keep up with the environment they operate in?
Can they use new information and data to stay ahead in an ever changing world?

That’s the mindset that builds enduring, adaptable, coachable teams.

TL;DR:
The people & teams who can evolve what they believe, grow what they know, and adapt how they operate, are the ones who win long-term.

Whats something you once believed to be true, that you no longer believe? 
Drop a comment 👇

We’re in a Data-Rich, Clarity-Poor Ecosystem.

Let’s take a 9-figure brand’s marketing ecosystem.

Minimum, they’re running 6 figures in paid media daily across Meta, Google, TikTok, CTV, Programmatic, OOH...

Add to that:

- Thousands of influencers and affiliate agreements
- Owned social platforms, PR, SEO, podcast ads, newsletters
- Sophisticated email & SMS retention programs
- Billboards, pop ups, sponsorships
- POS across DTC, TikTok Shop, owned stores, retail, app channels.

They’ve got a BI tool, an attribution platform, GA4, creative analytics dashboards, and in-platform data from every channel.

Add to THAT:
- Silod execution of all channels listed
- No single strategic and metric objective
- No unified execution of core performance channels

Thats the common scenario of brands that we initially audit and work with at Flight. Successful, growing, but on hard mode.

The challenge with a data rich environment is, every source tells a story. None of them tell the same one. Execution is mostly anchored to making INDIVIDUAL channels 'successful'

Data-rich, clarity-poor. Silod execution.

Here’s the real issue:

It’s not a lack of data. It’s a lack of structure around it & interpretation to make the correct decisions. 

Data paralysis sets in where more time is spent trying to make the data make sense, than is spent asking the right questions of the data, to make better decisions.

Most brands have the data to make better decisions they just haven’t built the framework that connects it to meaningful action, nor are they asking the right questions.

The best growth marketers and teams simplify data. The unify strategy and execution across ALL channels, held to key north star metrics. 

They ask the right questions of the data & use it to both: understand where you are, and what levers to pull to get you to where you need to be.

What are the right north star metrics?

- Customer Acquisition: what’s driving profitable new customer growth.
- Customer Retention: what’s sustaining it through repeat behavior.
- LTV: what’s compounding it over time.
- Contribution Margin.

Everything else creative analytics, media metrics, platform data should anchor up into those.

If you can’t answer:

What’s driving efficient new customer acquisition?
What’s driving higher repeat behavior and LTV?
How do these connect across your channels?

Then you don’t need more data.
You need a better omni channel strategy & data clarity.

TL;DR:
- We don’t have a data problem in marketing, we have a clarity problem.
- The best marketers are the ones who ask the right questions of simplified data sets.
- Silod execution will keep you in data rich clarity poor mode.
- Unify acquisition, retention and treat channels as levers to achieve north star metrics.

The Best Growth Marketing Teams Do This ONE Thing Better Than Others:

As a growth marketing company, our job is to drive profitable customer acquisition at scale and drive higher repeat rates and CLTV for our clients.

Initial analysis is always historical.

What have you done, to get to where you are.

This provides context on how effective and efficient a brand has been at driving the right business outcomes through paid media & email/sms.

Where most come unstuck however is their analysis lands them on tactics.

- Implement x ad account structure
- Test y type of creative
- Send more emails

It's what I call the 'day trading' approach to growth marketing. Forever reactionary to todays and yesterdays performance.

The best growth marketers use this information to create a roadmap for your acquisition and retention ecosystem.

The apply predictive modeling to forecast future business results - the tactics are then levers to attain them.

How this looks like in practice at a high level.

Day Trading: 

A brand is spending $10k per day at a 4 MER - thats good lets spend more today and see how it goes.

Growth Strategy:

1. How has spend influenced nMER, MER and your repeat customer cohorts?

This information provides the foundation for budgeting and forecasting against a revenue goal - both at the channel level and inter-channel audience segmentations.

Day Trading:

Lets test more statics and videos and see what works.

Growth Strategy:

1. The main drivers of performance have been x static, y video on xyz products.

This information is used, in correlation with product sales velocity data to align creative strategy with hero products, collections, categories. Creative strategy and diversification is then applied based on this information, and differentiated against based on funnel stage (hello correct audience segmentations in platform to be as accurate as possible).

TLDR:

- You cant 'day trade' your way to sustainable and scaleable growth.
- The best growth marketers predict & shape future growth as a cohesive ecosystem
- The best growth marketers use creative, budgets, channels etc as levers to attain that goal

As a growth marketing company, our #1 operational directive is to operate like an internal team, not a service provider.

Brands need and want a growth partner who moves with the same urgency, context, and accountability as their own team.

Here’s how we aim to make that real inside Flight Performance 👇

1️⃣ Communication → High frequency, not high friction
We don’t hide behind “weekly reports.”
We run dedicated Slack channels with every client,  daily touchpoints, Loom updates, and live dashboards.
The goal is real-time visibility, & action. Not retroactive reporting.
When growth is moving fast, speed of context is everything.

2️⃣ Planning → Treating deliverables like internal ops
Every account has a rolling 4-week deliverable calendar, mapped inside Monday.
That means everyone from creative, media, retention, & the client knows what’s being deployed, tested, and optimized next. We even review optimization frameworks and scenarios: we will do X if Y, A if B...
No “agency side” and “brand side.” Just one operating rhythm.

3️⃣ Decision-Making → Fast feedback loops
We build systems so we can make decisions daily, not monthly.
Performance standups.
Ad hoc creative iterations.
Instant budget shifts when the data tells us to.
Speed matters and capturing rainbows are important for breakout growth

4️⃣ Strategy → Embedded, not outsourced
We sit inside your Slack.
We build your reporting frameworks.
We help define your KPIs, not just report on them.
Our strategists think like operators, not vendors, every conversation links back to the brand’s commercial goals, not campaign vanity metrics.

5️⃣ Accountability → Internal standards, external partnership
We apply internal Flight scorecards to every client account — speed, quality, performance, communication.
We evaluate our delivery against the same expectations we hold internally.
That’s how we maintain high touch and high output.

This model isn’t easy, many agencies have restrictive scopes of work, restrictive communication SLAs, but my vision for the company is not to be one that aims to limit potential, but maximize it with relentless communication, transparency, and pace.

IMO: It’s the only way to win in modern growth marketing.

When you operate like an internal team, you stop playing the agency game. You start driving outcomes like an owner.

As a growth team, your job isn’t to react to every daily data point and try to 'Day Trade' your way to daily success.

It’s to build the structure that ensures sustainable, scalable growth over time.

It starts with forecasting and predictive modeling. 

Mapping where you are, where you want to be, and what needs to happen between those two points.

Every forecast, budget, and performance model should anchored to the targets that make acquisition and retention sustainable, not arbitrary YoY or MoM %’s, but grounded in:

👉 Historical analysis, current trajectory, and future state goals.
👉 On-hand inventory, upcoming re-stocks, and new product drops.
👉 Forecasted marketing moments — launches, promos, seasonality — balanced against evergreen performance.

You might miss the bullseye on a given day, that’s part of the process.

But if your forecasting framework and lever structure are right, you won’t miss the broader weekly, monthly, or campaign targets that matter.

That’s where having your system set up to pull the right levers with intention becomes critical. It’s what separates teams planning for sustainable growth from those “day trading” their marketing, chasing daily spikes, losing sight of compounding performance.

Your base levers remain the same:

- Spend
- Spend allocation to audience segments (cold, engaged, repeat)
- Omni-channel splits (Meta, TikTok, Google, etc.)
- Creative by funnel stage
- Email & SMS campaign structure

Each anchored to your core growth model: revenue, spend, allocation, nMER, MER, and ACoS targets, projected daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly.

When those models are predictive, not reactive, you build elasticity. You can flex your spend, shift your allocation, or amplify creative velocity without losing control of profitability or pace.

The goal of forecasting isn’t perfection, it’s predictability.

You might miss the bullseye, but if you’ve built your system right, you won't miss the target.

The TLDR is: 
- Not having a data backed approach to forecasting, budgeting & performance metrics is like finger in the air forecasting & planning - pointless. 

- Having a day trading approach to performance marketing will make you miss the target when you don't hit the bullseye 

- Control the set up of your levers so you can accurately and effectively pull them to attain the goal

Creative Is The Variable.

But that only tells a very small part of the puzzle.

Too many brands misinterpret that truth in one of two ways:

1️⃣ Run as many ads as possible and hope something sticks.
2️⃣ Spend months developing a “hero concept” and only test a handful of executions.

One approach lacks direction and specificity.
The other lacks speed and volume.

Neither builds a repeatable system for learning or scaling.
The best brands now treat creative like a supply chain.

Not random ideas, structured flow.
Not sporadic tests, systematic iteration.
Not “content creation”, creative operations.

It’s a process that moves from:
Insight → Concept → Volume → Test → Learn → Iterate → Scale → Repeat

Every step feeds the next, building intelligence as you go. Creative testing in the new era of performance marketing isn’t about finding a “winning ad.” 

It’s about building an engine that constantly produces learnings to inform the next iteration of creative, messaging, and distribution.

It’s how you collapse feedback loops between creative, media, and data teams.


TL;DR
- Creative is the variable, but structure is the differentiator.
- The future of performance is creative operations that move at speed, learn relentlessly, and turn creative from chaos into a system for compound growth.


And as we are talking creative, some killer ads and emails from the FP team 🔥 🤌

JSESSIONID

li_at

linkedin.com

Why 'Day-Trading' Approaches To Growth Marketing Will Always Fail

As a growth team, we are responsible for providing each and every client with a forecast & budget, anchored to the target performance metrics that make customer acquisition & retention scalable & sustainable.

There are so many factors that go into this that make sure forecasts are not arbitrary YoY or MoM %’s yet with the right foundation, you can actually achieve the desired YoY & MoM growth.

To name a few:

- Historical analysis, current trajectory, desired future state of the business & performance channels that support it.
- On-hand inventory, restocks & new product drops.
- Marketing moments (launches, promos, etc).

A key thing with how you execute against forecasts is, you might not hit the bullseye every day but you're not optimizing for that, you're optimizing to hit the target. 

A day trading approach keeps you stuck constantly reacting to yesterday’s numbers. Making 'course correction' moves on a daily basis to make every day a bullseye day. Forever reactionary to today’s or yesterday’s performance.


Why It Matters:

A data-backed forecasting and growth model isn’t about perfection, it’s about precision & predictability. It’s about understanding the difference between hitting the bullseye (a daily metric) and hitting the target (the broader strategic outcome).

The Core Levers of Predictable Growth:

- Spend total/channel mix
- Spend allocation to audience segment (cold, engaged, repeat)
- Omni-channel splits (Meta, TikTok, Google, etc)
- Creative by funnel stage
- Email campaign strategy & structure

All of these anchor up into your Revenue, nMER, MER, and ACoS targets

How Day Trading vs Growth Strategy show up:

Day Trading:

“We spent $10K yesterday at a 4 MER, that’s good! Let’s spend more today and see how it goes.”

Growth Strategy:

“How has spend influenced nMER, MER, and your repeat customer cohorts?”

That approach changes everything.

That information provides the foundation for budgeting and forecasting against a revenue goal, both at the channel level and across inter-channel audience segmentations.

The best growth marketers create a roadmap for your acquisition and retention ecosystem.

They apply predictive modeling to forecast future business results and use tactics as levers to attain those results.

They understand that: Performance marketing ≠ daily trades. Forecasting ≠ guessing. Optimization ≠ reacting.


TL;DR

- Not having a data-backed approach to forecasting, budgeting & performance metrics is like finger-in-the-air planning. Pointless.

- Having a day trading approach to performance marketing means you optimize for the daily bullseye, & miss the target.

- The best growth marketers predict & shape future outcomes as a cohesive ecosystem, using creative, budgets, and channels as levers to attain the goal.

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