Head of Content @ Motion (Creative Analytics) | Fun Loving Brunette | Growing B2B SaaS Brands

I help SaaS brands build content machines to dramatically ramp up marketing-sourced pipeline.

My experience in 10 seconds: 

+ I've worked in marketing leadership roles at SaaS companies at scale ($200M ARR), traction ($10M to $20M ARR), and seed-level.

+ Currently leading a team of nine people at Motion including content managers, copywriters, and designers.

+ Led a content team of seven including senior copywriters, editors, and managers at Hootsuite.

+ Owned Hootsuite’s thought leadership strategy delivering research reports, event keynotes, and global brand campaigns. 

+ Owned pipeline targets for a Series B SaaS company with a direct revenue contribution from inbound marketing programs.

+ Strong analytical skills including pipeline analysis, customer research, positioning, and messaging strategy. 

+ Previous client work at agencies includes B2B campaigns for Google, Intuit, Thomson Reuters, AppLovin (a mobile ad company acquired for 1.2 billion), Project Makeover by Magic Tavern (the top mobile game in 142 countries with 60M users), and Wealthfront.

Sarah Levinger:

"You need to try 'micro movie' ads like this"



Most ads start with:

Hook, problem, benefit, CTA

Yawn. Been there. Seen that 100 times.

That's the AIDA formula most marketers have been using since 2018. And according to Sarah Levinger, it's why so many ads keep crashing.


Quick background for you:

Sarah is a creative strategist who has been studying what's actually scaling in ad accounts right now. She's watched marketers build ads the same way for years. Start with a hook, go to the problem, state a benefit, end with a call to action. Following the same formula like it's carved into stone.


VS


The brands scaling the hardest are making tiny films.

Sarah calls them "Micro Movies"

A micro movie is not a long ad. It's not about hiring a director or chasing high production value. A micro movie is a 30 to 60 second trailer built on story architecture instead of sales architecture.


Same ingredients real films use:

Setup
Tension or conflict
Emotional payoff


The difference is everything gets compressed. Instead of shoving hooks and benefit bullet lists at people, you give them something their brain already knows how to follow. A familiar story arc with a beginning, middle, and end.

You can think of it like building a movie trailer for your message. A tiny narrative compressed into 30 to 60 seconds.


Why does it work so well?

Sarah's take: the human mind already lives inside stories. Neuroscience and storytelling research back this up. The brain loves a good story because it can latch onto the structure and understand what you're trying to teach.

Traditional scripts, especially AIDA style scripts, are getting flattened by creators who can slip into storytelling mode without the audience realizing it.

The viewer doesn't feel pitched. They feel pulled into a narrative. That's a fundamentally different experience. Story architecture is built into the mind of your customer. It's pattern recognition their brain already knows, likes, and trusts.

Sarah believes this style of performance based storytelling is about to be everywhere. The marketers who figure out how to compress real narratives into 30 to 60 seconds are going to be years ahead of everyone still stuck on traditional formulas.

Think less novel. More movie trailer.

The structure carries the meaning. The length doesn't matter as much as the arc. You can do micro movies in 15 seconds if you get creative with it. You can stretch the emotional arc to fit any runtime that works for you.




P.S. Curious how you can make ads like this?

Check out the Motion (Creative Analytics) YT page to watch Sarah's full breakdown: "How To Script Micro Movie Ads That Scale in 2026 (Step-by-Step)"

James Mulvey

The creative urge to start a new project

with 67 unfinished projects



One of the hardest things about being a creative? 

Knowing when to jump onto a trend

Vs when to avoid it as noise


This is one of the topics we went deep on at the @Motion 2026 Creative Trends summit last Thursday with some of the top tastemakers in advertising and social, giving you their full breakdown on what trends actually matter going into next year. 

Over 26,588 marketers signed up btw!


All the replays are live for you to watch now



You can check them out on our Motion YT page:

"Motion's 2026 Creative Trends Event (Replay Recordings)"

https://lnkd.in/gMNrdhXv

Some spicy takes by these tastemakers:

Alexandra Espinoza
Ashley Rutstein
Dara Denney
Elfried Samba
Jack Appleby
Joanna Wallace (Sloame)
Oren John


Appreciate you all coming out!

Jonas Brothers vs AI Slop for Almond Breeze 😂

"The Pitch"



One of my fav examples bringing Ashley Rutstein's

"Effort Signal" framework in action


Quick context for you:

Ashley joined our Motion (Creative Analytics) 2026 Creative Trends event and introduced this framework. She's a creative director and copywriter with 14 years in the ad agency world. Her thesis is that brands who show their work and prove humans were involved will win in an AI saturated world.

She calls it "The Effort Signal"


There are three core pillars in her framework.

Here's my quick breakdown for you:


1) Effort in Process

The Jonas Brothers were involved in each step of the creative development. This wasn't a celebrity face pasted onto a campaign. They helped shape the creative direction.

They shipped a pretty hilarious AI parody as a result

Omid Amidi, CCO at McKinney, the agency behind the ad went on record to say: "Right now, everyone's racing to use AI, and a lot of what's landing feels interchangeable. We wanted to go the opposite direction and use AI in a way that disarms people instead of impressing them"




2) Effort in Understanding:

The Jonas Brothers said: "Life on the road means being intentional about what we put into our bodies. Partnering with Blue Diamond Almond Breeze felt natural because it's a product we genuinely use and love"

I definitely see UDC ads on a regular basis where the actor clearly doesn't use the product. Consumers have a BS signal of what feels real, and they definitely had a solid choice of casting for a partnership that felt authentic to me anyways.

Which takes me to Ashley's last pillar...


3) Effort in Form

They made a three min film.

A longer format that lets the joke breathe.

P.S. This is part of a larger trend that at Motion we believe will define 2026. What we and Sarah Levinger have been calling "micro movies"


P.P.S. You can watch Ashley's full breakdown on the Motion YT page: "AI Slop DESTROYED Trust in Ads | Here's How to Get It Back in 2026"

EVERYTHING you need to know about Andromeda

(Straight from the VP at Meta behind it)


Caleb Kruse - Mr. Paid Social (Mr. Paid Social) sat down with Matt Steiner, the VP at Meta behind Andromeda, to understand what Creative Strategists need to know heading into 2026.


TLDW for you:

Caleb analyzed $200M+ in ad spend data to understand what's actually driving performance now.

The headline: If your performance dropped in late 2025, it wasn't a new algorithm change. Andromeda fully rolled out in 2024. Your creative strategy just didn't adapt.


📌 Meta's Three Layer System

Most people think "Andromeda" is everything. It's not. Three layers work together:

Lattice is Meta's shared learning system. When your ad performs well in one campaign, that knowledge spreads across your entire account. Every objective, placement, audience. This is why creative quality matters more than campaign structure.

Andromeda is the filtering layer. Meta's AI generates hundreds of variations from every ad you upload. One video can be shown thousands of different ways. Andromeda narrows millions of possible ads to the most relevant ones per user.

GEM is the brain. It predicts the perfect ad for each user in real time. Think ChatGPT for ad delivery, predicting the next best ad based on their entire journey.



Caleb asked Matt directly: "Does account structure even matter anymore?"

Matt's answer: No. Andromeda is horizontal. It doesn't care where your ads live.

What DOES matter: creative diversity, volume, and budget liquidity. Budget liquidity means letting Meta determine which ads get spend. You decide how much to invest, Meta decides distribution.



🎯 The 50-100 Ads Per Month Framework

Stop looking for 1-2 winners to scale. Build a system that continuously tests concepts, hooks, and variations.

GEM needs variety to build personalized ad sequences. You need dozens of ads working together to lower your average CPA.

Launch 10 concepts with 5-10 hook variations each. That's 50-100 ads per month so Meta can match the right creative to the right person.


The Weekly Workflow

Week 1: Launch 3-5 new concepts with 3-5 hook variations. 15-20 ads.
Week 2: Iterate on top performers. 10-15 new variations.
Week 3: Launch 2-3 new concepts plus keep iterating. 15-20 ads.
Week 4: Review data, plan next month.

Total: 50-80 ads monthly.


👀 The Diversity Trap

If you're testing the same angle as a video, static, and carousel, that's NOT concept diversity. Test different emotional angles that feel completely different:

Problem focused: "Are you tired of X?"
Social proof: "10,000 customers can't be wrong"
Contrarian: "Everyone thinks X but actually Y"
Storytelling: Behind the scenes, customer journeys

Each concept should feel completely different, not just a hook swap.


TLDR: Meta built a system for massive creative volume and personalized delivery at scale. Winners in 2026 feed it diverse concepts, multiple variations, and continuous iteration.

Six Creative Strategy resolutions for 2026

(📌 Save for later)


1. Accept that the bar has raised

If performance feels harder, it's not because the platforms broke. Everyone got better.

Oren John has been pushing back on the reflex to blame Andromeda: "The truth is everyone is getting better. There's so much enablement content now. The bar is raised every 60 days."

"If you're asking how to improve performance, 90% of the time it's how the first three seconds perform."

Resolution: Assume old baselines are gone. Sweat the details.



2. Treat organic and paid as one system

Many teams still behave as if organic and paid live in different silos. Oren argues organic is now the top of funnel. It trains the algorithm on who you are. Paid converts the audience you've already earned.

"You cannot grow the middle without filling the top." Meta uses who watches your organic content to decide who sees your ads. Organic and paid feed each other.

Resolution: Design one continuous content ecosystem.




3. Make it obvious that someone cared

Ashley Rutstein put words to the unease we all feel: "Everything is done on social now. Our feeds feel like a simulation."

Her answer is the effort signal: "The brands that will stand out are the ones that put effort into what they're doing and show the people behind it." People are now "actively trying to spot" AI. "So brands need to show their stance on AI or show their work."

Resolution: Choose formats that make it obvious a human made a creative choice.




4. Do less, more better

Most teams don't suffer from a lack of ideas. They suffer from too many. The danger in January isn't creative drought. It's sprawl.

Jack Appleby pulls teams back to reality: If you can't describe what a piece of content is about in five to seven words, it's probably not clear enough to survive the feed.

Resolution: Choose fewer ideas. Give them enough time to become something good.




5. Trade reach for focus

Elfried Samba thinks the instinct to widen the aperture is exactly backward. "You need focus intelligence. Going from trying to be everything to everyone, to being everything to someone."

"Most people trust word of mouth from people they know." The companies that win are where "more people talk about a brand than that brand talks about itself."

Resolution: Mean something unmistakable to someone.




6. Let AI make you faster, not shallower

Alexandra Espinoza says marketers need to know where to draw the line: "AI helps with briefs, not with taste. We use AI to write first drafts, but humans decide what ships."

"Most brands don't fail because they lack ideas. They fail because they don't have workflows. Creative is a supply chain."

Resolution: Let AI accelerate the machine. Keep judgment human.


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P.S. What would you add as # 7?

Lmk below

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