Motion's 2026 Creative Trends (Full Event)

Welcome to the party, y'all. I'm so happy to have you. This is actually our third time that we've run this creative trends event. This one, we have 26,000 people registered to this thing. So, give yourselves a round of applause because this is going to be straight facts, no fluff. People are going to come up here for 10 to 15 minutes and by the end of this next two hours, you're going to have your playbook for 2026. All right. Amazing. But first, before we welcome some speakers onto the stage here, I want to say a little

bit about motion and why we host events like this. So, first thing I wanted to note here is that we've been doing this since 2021 and supporting the community trying to at least from the best of our ability. We've literally written the book on creative strategy as you can see and we've hosted events where hundreds of thousands of people have been able to Attend and level up their knowledge of creative strategy. And outside of education, we're lucky enough to work with the best of the best brands every single day. So, we actually manage over 14

billion in ad spend annually, which is mind-blowing to me. But we help them make the best creative decisions possible every single day. But some of you are probably wondering, Evan, what the heck is this creative strategy thing exactly? So, let's start with a quick Definition here. All right, so first things first, creative is the number one lever for success in your paid ads. If you don't have amazing creatives, you're not going to make it. it's not going to be able to scale. And how we help brands is that we want to be able to give

them their direct response playbook, which involves two things. Number one, we want to understand what messaging crushes it. And number two, we want then want to tell that message in as many visually Diverse ways as possible. But y'all, here's the thing. To make amazing creative, there's a couple different types of teams, people, and brains involved. So, on one side of this thing, shout out to our analytical heads in the chat. I know you can live in spreadsheets. I know you can live in ads manager. you're good to go. So that's one side. And on the

other side, we have our creative folks who are exactly that, creative and conceptual, can live in the Clouds. There's almost natural tension that's created in this process. So when I'm referring to creative strategy, what I'm ultimately referring to is how do you bridge the gap between these two teams, brains, and minds so we can work together. And now more than ever, as I'm sure you're going to hear from some of the talks today, AI is such a big piece of this process. But what's funny enough is to solve this problem, what most people are doing

right now looks Something like this, you know what I mean? Look, a spreadsheet, y'all. Like, we're talking about creative at the end of the day and we're looking at in a spreadsheet. It makes it super hard. So, for those of you who are interested, stick around at the end. I'm going to be walking you through some fun stuff within motion so to show you how we make this easy. And in all honesty, it's going to be a party. Stick around for the AP. We're Going to talk about what happened today. Creative strategy in general, some

new releases, and all that good stuff. All right, so we've reached the time where we get to do this thing. Okay, our first speaker gets to the stage. Now, you might know him as Orin Meets World on social. I know him as your favorite marketer's favorite marketer. Let's welcome Orin to the stage, y'all. Round of applause. Show love in the chat. >> Yeah. What's going on, y'all? >> All right. Um, >> you pop in, do your thing, and I'll catch you at the end. All right. >> All right. Perfect. All right. So, I'm super excited

to talk to y'all here today about 2026. Um, I only have 15 minutes and I'm a known yapper, so I am going to get uh right into it directly. So, let's pop into, you know, I'm just going to share my share my entire screen. We'll see how this goes. All right. So, Starting out, let's get present. All right. So, quick background. I'm meet on social media. I make content on Instagram and YouTube. a lot about marketing and a lot about taste and creative life. And I'll talk a bit about my background in a second. They'll

be relevant to why you should listen to me. But what I'm going to cover here in this presentation is a bit about me. I want to talk about 2026 hooks because uh everyone thinks we talk about hooks too Much, but we don't. It's a big part of why we're getting better uh and what people are doing to stand out. I'm going to talk about top offunnel and basically giving the algorithm more tools for organic and for paid uh to be effective. And I'm going to talk a bit about midfunnel and that's all I think again

as a yapper I can realistically get in for you here today. Um but some quick notes why you should listen to me. So, in addition to making content myself, Uh, and I started making content when I was a, uh, SVP of marketing at a consumer goods company cuz I wanted to get better at it. And that continues today where a lot of the content I make is me testing things I can apply to other places. But in addition, I also train creators in Cut 30. So, we're at about 2,000 creators and brands have been trained

in this. And the nice part about training so many people and having a really active Slack of folks is we Actually get to see exactly what's working right now across a lot of people which has been invaluable in getting insights to share online. Uh in addition to that I'm a partner in a women's wear brand called understated leather where I've run all the meta ads for the last few years. Uh and that's a smaller one. That's one where we don't have any big budgets. We you know only can can spend what we make. We've scaled

to about a six-f figureure ecom uh company a month And I've been kind of working through that as well as wholesale and others and so I know a lot from there. I also worked on gel blaster. I was the SVP of marketing there. It was a big uh we were in Target, Walmart, Costco as well as big online big influencer YouTube large paid media spend that also had to impact retail. So thinking a lot about that and creative strategy there and now I work for a private equity firm in beauty called Anvest and uh one

of our largest Companies there is called Morphe. It's a cosmetic company where I am actively part of a extended team that works on organic social and paid social briefs, uh, campaigns and everything. And so I'm in this both organic and paid every day. And what I'm going to focus on here today is a combo of those two things. We're going to talk about organic strategy going into 2026 and paid and where they overlap. I want to make sure a lot of this is relevant to both since I know a lot of you are starting to

look at both handinand. Um, so a quick note starting out, I want to talk about basically hook rate and hook rate obsession. So everyone's always you hear this complaint like, oh, why are our views down? Why are our ads not performing? It's the algo, it's Andromeda, it's any number of excuses. And uh, the answer is often no. It's literally everyone is getting better. There's been so much enablement content, There's so many good creators, there's so many amazing editors, you're now basically competing against a bar that is raised every 60 days. And so I want to

give some like actual tactics that we are using um in content on brands I work with all the time to improve hook rates because every kind of 0.1 second matters there. So the first is this animated titles with uh remove background. You may have seen these before, but it's pretty easy. I'm going to swap over here And play this. So you will see this is in Premiere or Cap Cut. They're just removing the background, pasting a layer over it, and putting the text behind it. but is an extremely effective hook. We see very similar stuff

with content like this where instead of necessarily putting it behind it, they are animating tons of stuff kind of over and around um the content that is being put together. One sec, it wasn't my actual link. This one was where you are seeing inside her First 5 seconds or so, they are covering a lot of ground visually on what's a pretty typical UGC video. Another tactic um that we're using a bunch in cosmetics is basically a overlay swipe. So she does a standard intro and then basically has that four grid of a mood board of

a look or whatever's coming before she launches into it. It's just a good hook retention tactic. Um and then another one is you're seeing all these creator tools where people are doing Transitions. Let me reload this to show the effect. So you can see here she's swiping through these PGs and then she's giving a tutorial of how to do it. But all these tools where you see creators doing transitions, etc., things like that are now becoming more and more in a brand toolkit where you're like, can we have our UGC creators do this? Can we

have our editor take what they filmed um and do it as well? Popping back to this presentation. Uh, and then one that I want to talk about that I I love that we did all holiday is this format switch. I didn't have a link for this cuz his is kind of extended, but basically starts as a green screen the content where they're floating on screen and then goes into a standard tutorial. So basically he shows this look he's going to do and then gives the tutorial of how to do it. But if you are uh

looking at how am I going to improve my ad performance? How am I Going to improve my organic performance? 90% of the time it comes down to how does the first 3 seconds of the video do? These are some pretty concrete tactics for you to use inside of that. all of which um are are doable in Cap Cut uh and and apps like that. But the second thing to talk about here is that retention obsession. So I think what what the brands I'm working with and why I see a ton of brands doing in 2026

is basically enabling their teams with Slightly more production. That doesn't mean huge expensive things, but you've probably seen a lot of conversation around sets and that goes into setting or AI hooks or similar. I'm going to explain a bit of what this means, but basically if you've been making the same content or your UGC creators are always in their same apartment or in like a similar place that isn't enough to to stand out, like how do you get, you know, more attention from it, no matter How good your video concept is? How do you add

things to it to just improve it? And how do you do that affordably? So, one we're seeing a lot is AI hooks, not full AI videos. There's obviously been a blitz of people talking about AI UGC or AI this. Uh, we test everything. That does not work super well in a lot of these ad accounts. What does work is the first couple seconds. Um an example, Revolve did a whole grip of these um AI ads in different places, not ads, was Organic posts, but they didn't do the right thing in my opinion. They made these

and then that was it. That was the extent of the content. But a video of Revolve as the Hollywood sign that leads into something else is an awesome hook. And a way I would think about that purely for paid if you you know in organic it's a little bit of a different game. And then second is settings. This is something uh the real concentration with brands among UGC next year is hey Can we actually if we're getting six videos or 10 videos done by a creator for our brand for ads or for organic can we

also get them a day at a luxury hotel can we book them a set on pure space where they can shoot what can we do to elevate it this is a uh influencer ad for laane where she is pretty famous but you don't even see her face for the first 5 seconds it is all amazing shots of this overhead inside like a luxury hotel. And again, that is something Where if you're spending, let's say, $200 a video for five UGC videos, then you want to basically add another six on top of that to give them

a nice rental space or some production that may pay dividends and actually trying to get a winning asset. Similar thing I'm talking about, uh, we're doing this with brands I work with right now, is getting like shelves and closets, and this opaque one is great because you can kind of see and then it opens and you do a reveal. That's an awesome hook. And you can have products on there, but people are basically using one key item like under $500. They can make a recurring part of their content narrative. Same thing with little objects like

bags that we just used. There's a butter themed campaign I was working on. We used the Fraasia butter bag. It's like 200 bucks, but it's kind of an it bag. And it really elevates the video when people notice it or talk about it. And so all those Things or if you're doing a what's in my bag or an unboxing or an open reveal, what are some of those items you can look at in realistic budget or borrow etc that elevate those assets? So moving out of the hook conversation, I want to talk about the content

funnel. Let me let me check real quick how I'm doing on time. All right, we're doing great. A little bit about the content funnel and what that means for brands and for ad accounts. So, everyone in Marketing knows the traditional marketing funnel that you want to attract awareness up top and you want to get down to sales at the bottom. Well, content works the same way. And back to that initial question where people are like, "Hey, uh, we're not getting enough sales from our social media. We're not getting enough views. Uh, we're not getting enough

of a audience to scale on meta." A lot of this comes down to your top of funnel. What are you doing purely To get attention at the top of it? And a conversation that um I have a lot that a lot of brands have a hard time wrapping their head around is that all that really matters at the top is virality and views. Organic top of funnel has one goal for the like the right users who your right consumer is seeing it at scale as many of the right person. It doesn't even have to do

with your brand. It doesn't necessarily have to have the product in it. It's about getting them Inside the algorithm both for ads and for organic. Let me explain. So first for organic that top of funnel is extra crucial because basically as all of you know if you scroll Instagram or Tik Tok if you like a video from somebody you get shown more of it and if you follow someone a bunch goes on your feed right away from that person. We're all aware that's how that works. So from a funnel perspective say that there was a

skit about my brand That didn't really mention my product was lightly related but it got a million views. What happens is a lot more people than normal like that and then all of a sudden they're shown your midfunnel content. one of your other recent performing videos that is probably not like that. It's probably a a more product focused video, something you made that's more educational or valuedriven or more about your brand and all of a sudden a certain number of Those people graduate down. But you cannot improve the number of people that enter the middle

without putting stuff on top. And so a few ways to think about that um I'll get into in a second. But this matters for paid too, right? Because paid needs to understand the world available to your brand. It needs to meta needs to put together an audience of who your brand is. And one thing that it always has access to to help do that is who is viewing and Following your content on social media. So as your organic top of funnel expands, so does your ability for Meta to target and scale more people. It goes

hand inand and it's an immensely effective way to look at things and to get those teams working together. So, two ways that are standing out for this one is just more creative organic assets where people are actually doing things um like like more artful things or play or I did a video today on my Instagram Where I show people like Reigns who made games out of their products or Meshki who's doing like they have their models playing tennis in their dresses. It's creative organic clips that are kind of more built for virality. Another method people

are doing are these social shows. So, Built has a show called Roomies. Alexis Betar is a jewelry brand who has recurring characters who do it. This is a brand called Low House uh who does this where they basically are Entertaining on their main feed and people are wearing their products. For instance, the Low House glasses are always kind of prominent on screen, but that is really the only connection point um to the brand besides building the brand lore, but it brings in way more views and content than their other stuff and is part of that

top of funnel. So, lots of brands are talking about how do they contract people for social shows, how do they get more creative with the Organic and that doesn't always mean more budget, but what it does mean is acting and trying to validate more uh ideas. And with that top of funnel, midfunnel is changing as well. A huge conversation we all had over the last year was about value content, right? You're either providing value or you're entertaining. How do you educate people about how to use your product? How do you um like make sure that

they want to bookmark the Content you have? That was a huge topic on organic, especially this last year. But that's shifted, especially over the last few months, to where that is very commodified right now. If you're just giving a tip or showing how to do something, it's only going so far. The new midfunnel is really expert storytelling, often with people involved to be able to do it right. Not always. Um, a few examples there. So, this is a resale bag company and They have a creator who does these very well-edited videos about what happened at

fashion week, the history behind the specific Chanel bag, whatever it is. But she is providing real deep storytelling about the things that they sell and that is their kind of middle ofunnel sometimes top offunnel content. Another example here is this kind of viral paint brand where he is explaining and showing how they mix it, what goes on, the thought process behind the color. uh and They do very large views basically inside their facility with it on set showing the mixing talking about the process but it's a story around it not just it's this paint and

it looks good combined with these two furniture items perhaps the best example and arguably the Kickstarter of this is this guy Ken Sakata an excellent creator where he has a clothing brand um where he makes really immaculately thought through clothes and he then talks about all the Core topics like this one's about Tom Ford and Tom Ford finding his vision, but he educates super highly and he uses that as kind of the credibility that builds the brand underneath. But I like to show this because this style of video is becoming very popular with a you

know slight production of the person. They're in a nice environment. They're showcasing lots of images uh like on top of it. They're basically telling a narrative without it. But it's not the Hardest thing to edit. It's, you know, straightforward enough. It just requires a good story and a good personality. And that is the new value tipsdriven content of what we had kind of last year. And let me pop back over to here and stop sharing for a second and then we can we can chat here for a moment. Uh and so the the key thing

I want to have everyone take away from this is that in this next year that organic and paid are more tied together than ever. How do you Generate that top offunnel awareness? How can you run both assets across? And to the point of that last slide, how do you develop personalities that have more credibility in ads? So for instance, you will see that um if you see a creator or an influencer who makes content for a brand, they run that same stuff as an ad, they're leveraging that influencers's credibility. Now for brands who are able

to put their own personality on there or develop a Recurring character of, hey, we have our this UGC person, we use them every month. If they're creating that organic content and they're creating ad creative and it's going to the same targeting audience, it's going to improve its efficacy and it has to be thought about within that same story framework. And so if you want to take away anything from this and if you want to highlight the top things I talked about here, it's that hooks are still more important than Ever. And you need tactics. You

need to say, what are we going to apply to these hooks this month or at this content session or at this shoot to make it better? And then same thing with retention. How are we basically putting things within our budgetary framework to make this work? How are we framing organic to like actually get real top of funnel that we can use for targeting um that we can use to bring more people in? And then how can we use personalities Within that to then establish credibility and make sure that all of our assets perform better when

those people are used and build kind of real relationships with that. Um that's the end of my rant. I think we're like 12 minutes of of 15 minutes in. Everybody, you got to show love in the chat. Orin came up. Absolutely crushed it. Orin, I think we have time for one question if you're down. So, >> yeah, go ahead. >> No, no, you got it. I think you're reading through. I feel like you can manage. >> I was reading through, but someone asked about I'm not talking about services business. I work mostly on products, but

I imagine some other people are. I saw that come in, but yeah, Evan, if you have a question, rip it and I'll I'll take it. >> That was the exact one that I was going To rip in all honesty. Like, there was a question related to specifically like B2B. So, we're talking specifically on like the >> and this is also the exact same thing. I will point out the things I called out where I was like, "Hey, you you should buy a shelf or whatever may not apply as much, but can you establish a person

or credibility there? Can that expert tell stories about what the B2B industry is?" I used an example of Vanta the other day Cuz Vanta's hiring ahead of storytelling. If you don't know Vanta, they do the dullst in the world. They're selling like sock 2 compliance to like companies to be able like, "Oh, we want to get a government contract. Have to check these 45 boxes, right?" Well, look, if their core social media feed was there, it's it's like a cyber security thriller or it's like ASMR coding videos with like showing off the desktop setups of

their top nerds. If it Was Damon John explaining Sock 2 compliance, not even him, that's like would require a bigger budget, but like if it's someone interesting who's taking those topics and workshopping it, those same ideas apply uh of developing that personality, building that top of funnel to target against um always B2B and services think all this cool stuff doesn't apply to them. When in fact, if you just do it in a Bminus level, you're so far above who you're competing with That you're going to smash. >> All right, man. I love it. I'm going

to throw one more at you before we get you out of here. So the question that comes to mind for me is like you bang off hooks and concepts just like at the snap of your fingers for anyone who's tuning in and just getting started. How can they start to train their minds to think in this way? >> Yeah. And so uh I'm a big frameworks person. I like to look at everything and Be like why did it work? Can I break it down? And I spend a lot of time doing those breakdowns. So for

instance um I have dedicated scrolling. I think this is a good thing for everyone to do. I work in beauty like I mentioned before. Beauty doesn't come in my feed. I have two 30-minute blocks where all I do is scroll beauty focused account. I take a lot of those top performing videos, my bookmarks, and then I go like, what happened in the first three seconds? What did they do to retain? And then can I make a little framework from that where it's like, oh, it's like a mood board wipe. And that's the only difference. Okay,

that's a thing we can test. And so, I think it comes down to um setting that time because every strategist thinks that they can just scroll and when they're on social media, they're helping, but like it's really not. If you're not like, I need 10 bookmarks by the end of this with a Framework. It's probably the best advice I have. >> I love it. I can speak from firsthand, everyone. I took Orin's course, Cut 30. It's a banger. So, if you haven't had a chance, check it out. Join the next cohort. Orin, you're the man.

Really appreciate you joining us. >> So, without further ado, I would love love love to welcome our next speaker to the stage, Ashley from Stuff About Advertising, who's probably your Favorite follow on social. So, everybody, let's welcome Ashley to the stage and let's show some love in the chat. >> Hi, >> Ashley. Welcome to the party. I'm so happy to have you here. >> Thank you for having me. The chat is blowing up. I love it. super popping in. But Ashley, I'mma pop out, do your thing, and I'll see you at the end. Okay. >>

Amazing. [clears throat] All right. So, I am going to share. Okay. So, I have like a little thesis for you today that I'm very excited about. Um, just a little about me. I am a creative director and copywriter. Been working in the traditional ad agency world for 14 years now. Um, but I'm also a content creator. I make stuff on stuff about advertising where I just talk about the industry. So I have kind of a foot in both the big creative Traditional campaign world and the content social world. So the thing I want to talk

about today is a little of both. It can apply to both of those worlds. And when I was picking what I wanted to talk about today, I was thinking of something that I personally am really craving from brands. And my cat is going to join us in a second. She has to be involved in every single meeting I have. Um, but yeah, so this is something that I have personally been Craving and I think the brands that embrace it next year will be the ones that stand out from the pack. So I would love to

see some love in the chat for this old phrase. I might be dating myself here, but who remembers saying do it for the gram? I know I've definitely said it, but do it for the gram was all about doing things in real life so that you can go talk about it online. You were doing things that you wanted to go share later on. It was like We have to have this experience so that we can go talk about it with our friends, family, and community, whether that's in person or online. But over time, we have

kind of shifted to doing things on the gram. Everything is done on social now. So instead of documenting real life experiences on social media, we are now only experiencing social media. It's just a very different world. And because of that, all of marketing has turned into this social first need. And because of that, all of our feed, all of the whole internet feels kind of like a simulation now. Like it doesn't really feel real all the time. And I think that has been driving so much fatigue and desire to just escape the internet and get

out of all of that. And then add on top of that AI which we are all so familiar with now. So that has just led to this delusion of content and even less humanity in it. So, I think the brands that will stand out from all Of this, from this like simulated and disposable feeling world of social, are the ones who will put effort into what they're doing and show the elbow grease and the humanity that goes into what they're putting online. And I'm calling this the effort signal because I'm a copywriter. I have to

have a name, a fun name for something. But this is all about showing that your content and your ads and whatever you're putting out there were put together with thought and Intention by humans who actually care about what they're doing. And I think this can come to life in a few different ways. So I want to talk about these different sort of pillars of how this can manifest. But it's effort in the process. So showing how your ads or your products get made. It's effort in understanding which is proving that you actually know your audience

on a humanto human level and then also putting effort in the form that you choose. So you're Choosing formats that require work and intention whether that's something physical or handmade or just deliberately deliberately not optimized for the algorithm. So first we'll talk about effort in the process. This is showing your human hand that you actually made something because obviously people are so skeptical about AI. They are actively trying to spot it in everything they look at. Of course, like I'm doing it too. So brands need to Be very clear on their stance on AI or

showing their work for whatever they're putting out there. And you can do this in a couple different ways. Like Dove just put their stance on AI out there. They said we are not going to use it to replace real people. So you can do that. You can make your stance on AI known so that then whatever you put out there people just know like oh they don't use AI but you can also show the making of whatever you're doing. So, Like Chamberlain Coffee made this really fun stop motion short video, but they also posted this

making of video where you can see the people actually painting these characters, setting up the scenes, doing all of the behind thescenes process to tell people like, "Hey, we did this by hand. This was not AI." And the caption even says, "Handcrafted just like our coffee." So this process is the proof of the effort that they put into this. And behind the scenes doesn't just have to mean the making of the ad or the content itself. It can also mean the making of your product. Because a lot of companies hide the manufacturing process for a

bunch of different reasons. But if you can take pride in that, you can give people a glimpse into the human hands, like literal hands in this case, um, and thought and care that goes into the process of making this product. So, this was just a very simple video from Coco Kind, and they showed a couple different clips of hands putting these products together and the conveyor belts and things and how people are involved in this process. Um, and another example from Coco Kind as well is to show there's a behind the scenes of the team

itself too. This was a product launch that they were excited about and they just took a screenshot of Slack messages with the team talking about how excited they are. That shows that there are real Humans behind this launch and it's not just like this faceless corporation pushing out a product. So that's effort in the process is just visible intention in how you're making something whether it's your ad or your product or whatever it is. And then there's effort in understanding. So this is just proof that you actually care enough to get to know your audience.

It's crazy with all of the targeting that we have still half Of US consumers feel ignored by marketers. And then 70% of them say that they are more likely to buy from brands that engage in the hobbies and communities that they care about. So you need to prove to your audience that you are putting in the time and effort to understand them and their hobbies. And you can do this in a lot of different ways. There are some brands who are putting in the work to actually learn about their audience with things Like Facebook groups

like Lodge Castiron has a Facebook group. No reception club, which is they make the best diaper bag ever. Highly recommend. They have a Facebook group where they are constantly talking to their customers. Brands are getting involved in things like Facebook groups and subreddits, Discords, WhatsApp groups, just finding these two-way spaces to interact with your people. And then whatever you learn from them, you can use to better communicate To them both in organic and paid content. And then even if you don't want to or can't for whatever reason host your own space like this, you can

still get involved in your audienc's niche communities and micro communities that they're involved in. Like Jack in the Box, the example on the right, Jack in the Box found this network of Fortnite related Discord servers and sponsored them. So, they're not hosting this community, but they found something that Their audience cares about, and it shows that they took the time and effort to truly understand them. An example on a much larger scale is Spotify's datadriven campaigns that they've been running for years. This entire campaign is built on a very niche and specific understanding of their

audience and their music preferences. And while this is on a very large scale, when you see yourself in one of these little stats or pieces of niche Preferences, it feels like you are seen. Like you feel like you found your people. It's like you're in on this inside joke. And while this is a large scale and Spotify obviously has access to an immense amount of data that most of us don't have, you can still try to tap into some of this by just learning about the specific preferences and quirks of your customers and using those

as hooks or captions or ways to just talk to them humanto human. And my last Example for this is showing at a more granular level. You can show effort by of knowing your audience in tiny little things like hooks and captions. Like this first example, the fact that this brand pulled out a review that said, "Those poops are kurplunking." Like that is so specific and so human. You know, a person behind the brand picked that out and said, "Yes, this is it. This is how we want to talk to people." That's so good. And the

second example with good Soup, that's such an inside joke internet meme that you know a human who also loved that meme put this ad together. So it's the true mentality of the ones that get it get it. Like the brands who take time to get their audience and put the effort in to get them will get the reward. And then last is effort in the form. So obviously people are really craving those tangible analog offline experiences. It's just booming right now With stationery magazines, vinyl records, pen pal, handwritten letters. Like it is blowing up. I

just got a record player myself just a few weeks ago. People are just dying for tangible things. And with this has come this resurgence of print marketing. I saw this coming a year or two ago, but now with AI, it is just really booming. Brands like J Crew and Walmart have brought back their physical printed cataloges. And these printed physical Things signal that effort and intention from the brand that cares enough to print these things or make physically make something. Like Redwing Shoes just made this campaign where they built billboards out of literal lumber and

leather saying made the hard way. The form of this is the message here. A24 to promote the new movie coming with Zenaia and Robert Patson put this fake engagement announcement in a real newspaper. Like they are committing to The bit with a traditional form of media with how engagement announcements are typically put out there. It's unexpected and that effort really shows. And then, like I said, with brands bringing back their cataloges, like The Onion went back into print with their satirical newspaper. And they brought in 50,000 new subscribers with that print newspaper. It's insane. But

when you have this physical object, you can do so much content with it. You can literally Just flip through the catalog on a flatlay. You can have people sitting on a couch reading it. You can tear pages out of it and put it on a wall. If you have a physical object, you can do so much with it. This fragrance brand called Fern has built an entire content strategy around physical creations. Every quarter or every season they release a new scent and with that scent they create so many different physical and visual Representations of that

scent which they then turn into social ads. So they make Rube Goldberg machines, flower arrangements, paper art. They made this giant accordion. They make real things and then film them and turn them into ads, which are so eye-catching. And sometimes it can be even simpler than that. You don't have to make some giant accordion to do this. Like this first example, they literally just printed an infographic and taped their Product onto the wall. But for some reason, it sticks out because it's like, wow, they took the time to print something out. That's more effort than

most brands are making right now. The middle example was just showing how the product is used on some different fruit. Like they're literally just cutting up pieces of fruit, and putting the product on it. That shows more effort than most brands are putting in. And then the last example is a almost 4minute video of the Owner of Deadpool, a fragrance brand, just talking about her brand and why she made it and the products. But it shows so much effort because it's almost four minutes long. There's all kinds of fun, silly stuff in there. There's lots

of cool editing. It doesn't look like a traditionally polished ad, but you can tell they put a lot of thought and intention into it. So, there's a lot you can do here. But overall, effort is going to be your edge in this world of AI where content is just so easy to make and everyone is so skeptical of everything they're seeing. So, with every piece of content you make, just ask yourself, how can we show effort? even if it's in a very very small way. What signals can you add in there that help people understand

there was a human being that gives a who put this together? It is harder. It takes more time, but that's exactly why you will stand out for doing it. So, that's me. That's my thought. That's what I want to see from brands. I hope more people do that. Um, this is where you can find me if you want to talk more about it. But, yeah, that's me. Ashley, you freaking crushed it. You talked about the now. You talked about the future. And you gave us so much nostalgia along the way. Absolutely incredible. Everybody, you have

to show love in the chat. And Ashley, you for sure have to go check out the chat after Going crazy. [gasps] >> Thanks a ton. The best. >> I'm gonna talk to you soon. Okay. >> Bye. Thank you. >> The next speaker we have is Alfred Samba. This guy I'm so excited to have admired from afar. uh he was the global head of social at Gym Shark. Now he's the founder of Butterfly Effect and he's going to bless us with so many different insights on what we should be doing in 2026. So without further ado,

I would love to welcome Al to the stage. >> Hello everybody. How's everyone doing? >> Amazing. Al, I'm gonna pop out, do your thing, and I'll see you at the end. Okay. >> All right. Amazing. Okay. So let me share my screen so we've got something to talk through. I am assuming everybody can see that. Let's see some love in the comment section. Is everybody can everyone see That? Okay. Oh, good. So, um what I want to talk about today in this brief uh couple of minutes is this concept of building a brand worth talking

about in the the trust economy. We just talked a lot about AI and the word trust uh will play a key factor in uh uh your informing your marketing strategies going forward specifically on the social media platforms. So, I'm going to go straight to it. So, as mentioned, my name is Alfred Samber. How I like to Describe myself is that I scale community for brands and people. Um, I like to tell a bit of a background story about myself so you realize while you're speaking to a random guy. I'm usually wearing a fedora uh with

my British accent. So, today I'm wearing a cap. So, this is the first time I'm actually doing a presentation without my fedora. So, I'm sorry to uh uh short change you uh on this presentation, but we'll step into my story. So uh for those that Don't know I was born in the Democratic of of Republic of Congo. So the center of Africa hot tropical. So you can imagine my shock when my family moved us to the UK and we saw snow for the first time. We knew nobody and nobody knew us. But one thing we

wanted to do is make the most of our golden ticket of being in the UK. So all my time I I was obviously had this pressure becoming a doctor like my dad because obviously if you're African that's like the greatest Honor ever. So you can imagine the disappointment when you realize that I was at science and had to find something else. So I looked at my mom as a reference. She was an entrepreneur and a creative and I thought that maybe that's where my path could be. And I said, you know what, I'm going to

study some of the best in the uh marketing and uh brand world to see whether I can mimic and find some idols that I could be like. The first person I stumbled on To was a guy called Steve Jobs. The iPhone keynote in 2007 like blew my mind forever. The whole uh a thousand songs in your pocket really changed my perspective on the art of storytelling and simplifying very complicated information and I fell in love in marketing from that day. Uh then heard about a guy called Mark Zuckerberg who said no to a billion dollars

from Yahoo uh because I was working on an app called Facebook. I don't know about you Uh but if I told my mom that I was going to say no to a billion dollars at the age of 21 22 she'll ship me back to the Congo on the first flight. But whatever. Um but then that was great. So, I found two people that made me fall in love with marketing. So, social media marketing at the time, but then I needed somebody that looked like me or came from the same backgrounds that I did to be

able to really give myself the permission to step into the space. And Then I heard about a guy called Jay-Z. And obviously Jay-Z using rap lyrics to give out uh business news and updates. Uh really started to storytell in the language that I could understand. his whole concept of women lie, men lie, numbers don't made me fall in love with the art and science of merging creative with data and making sure that you uh spit facts as we just said. So with that I went into the academic world and um I wrote about it in

my dissertation about The fact that I felt that large uh small to mediumsiz businesses will take on the larger competitors using social and it was marked down because of lack of Harvard references. Uh and I said I was going to be that reference. You can clearly tell that my doctor dad was excited about the fact that he's um failed doctor son was going to be tweeting for a living. But took that into the um the business world. Uh heard about this guy called Gary Vaynerchuk Who made was the first person to not make me feel

crazy. His whole jab jab jab ride hook. The whole concept of giving in advance before asking uh was the whole blueprint to my marketing and social media approach that I use today. I actually used it to get my first real big job in the social media space. Uh, I heard about these two uh 19-year-olds in Birmingham, UK driving Audi R8s, uh, who owned a company called Gym Shark that I was a big fan of. And I said, you know What? I'm going to add everybody at Gym Shark on LinkedIn. I'm going to do my jabs,

send them information that I think will be valuable to them. And lo and behold, I got invited for a job interview and I spent seven years there. Right? So, just to give you uh the ROI of my seven years at Gym Shark and numbers and what we're able to achieve uh scaling community for the brand. So uh we went from 24 employees to a,000 employees. We went from a 1 million Followers to 20 million followers. And then we went from an 8 million pound business to 1.4 billion pound business. All could have backed through social

media. Now that's all great. We're able to do that for a BDC brand. A lot of people asked me does this apply um in other areas. So I said you know what I'mma do it. So my dad was obviously very proud of the fact that uh of my achievements. That's the biggest ROI of course. and he didn't have just one Sambber working for the company at two. So we were the talk of the town. Two failures now two heroes which is amazing. Uh I left Gym Shark to set up my company called Butterfly Effect where

we wanted to test the theory of whether community marketing applies to different industries. So uh that was great. So me and my co-founder Michael decided to leave and start that. Uh we started building a community within our own brands. Not only do we help other brands Scale community which is great, we also do that for our agency itself. proving that this also works in the B2B space uh which has been phenomenal and we've worked with some really great brands along this time which has been great. So trusted by some brands you can you don't know

at all. Um and also I don't like to be a hypocrite so I'm a creator myself so I created on LinkedIn and in 2024 I was ranked by Favicon as the second most engaged uh creator on LinkedIn globally Which is phenomenal. My mom's WhatsApp chat was buzzing that I was in a failure. Uh I also started a podcast with Rory Sutherland which has been great. He kicks my ass every week uh talking about creativity and marketing which is phenomenal. And and also I was ranked uh fifth uh most engaged person, influential person in social by

Fabricon. Too bad my bank account is nowhere near the guys that I was listed with. But again um uh I had to let down A few family members that came asking me for money uh which I didn't have cuz I'm a brokie. But that's all great for me. What does this mean for you? One, it tells you that I have the credentials. I I always like to make sure that who the information comes from is somebody that you trust. If I'm going to talk about trust marketing, you have to trust me. You have to know

who I am uh before I give you any information. And we're going to step into how we actually made This happen. It's this concept of world building uh that myself and my co-founder talk about and it's this whole art of building a brand that people don't want to just buy from. They want to feel like they belong to be a part of and help shape uh where it goes. Right? And I think the simpler way to say this is community. But in how actually do you do this and how do you leverage social in the

best way possible in 2026 to make this happen? First and foremost um I talk about this concept of IQ, EQ and FQ. So IQ is very clear. It's all about intelligence and making sure that you're utilizing the platforms doing research etc etc. But now with AI when IQ is becoming democratized and everybody has access to the same stuff you need to be able to leverage EQ. That's emotional intelligence. Can you get people to stop scrolling and can you make it worth that time? And that's all great. So IQ and EQ Is enough to make you

stand up from the pack that but the real people that want to start this worldbuilding community approach are also focusing on FQ which is all about focus intelligence. What does that actually mean? So it's about a mindset shift going from trying to be everything to everyone to being everything to someone, right? So this whole mass approach of just like reaching as many people as possible is great, but then if you really want to Scale in 2026 going forward, you're going to focus on a on a all your efforts on a small group that they're going

to tell everybody else about you. That's a thing that everybody talks about because community equals trust and trust is the metric that matters the most especially in the world where everyone's this trusting of everything. As soon as you see a piece of content, as soon as somebody sends you something, something talks about something, you Don't trust it automatically. the current state of leadership is not where it needs to be right now and people need receipts before they can make decisions or before they can give that trust away and um that's what brands need to focus

on this year going forward and how do you actually start to build trust so a Neielson study talked about the fact that 88% of people trust word of mouth from people that they actually care about and when you start to break that Down a little bit more who are those people so 83 to 88% trust um uh recommendations from friends and family online reviews is at 70 to 83% creators is 70%. That's actually a little bit downer because some creators are working with brands they don't align with because times are hard, you know, but then

really what is really shocking here is that only uh uh brands only have 30% of the trust, right? So, and a lot of executives, 90% of executives still Believe that they hold the trust, right? So, there's an imbalance there. So, the simple insight there is that it's important to get other people to talk about you instead of you talking about yourself. It's like me coming here and saying I'm a nice guy. really it only works if everybody else says I'm a nice guy is effectively the uh the humor in that but most brands are walking

around just saying that they're a nice guy and people should buy from them. It's not Going to work. So just to give you in a simple phrase we always talk about the fact that the reason why Gym Shark grew the way that it did is because more people talked about Gym Shark than Gym Shark itself. Right? And I can use a visual um triangle like this. Most brands this is what they do. If you if you can envision this as being like a share of voice or a share of conversation about the brand, usually they're

the dictator of their own Narrative and the brand hijacks most of the conversation about itself and they leave only a small amount of noise for people that are not related to the brand. But top brands that are communitycentric, they actually speak the least about themselves and create catalysts for conversations around the brand. And if you can get to a space where you can leverage creators and work with uh your audience to be able to like increase the noise about the brand, You're more likely to win and you're more likely to be trusted. And what you

can do with that once you've got it is about leveraging the three pillars. I like to call them the the holy grail, if you will, of leveraging influencers, organic, and paid to really create that flywheel. What we did at Gym Shark was instead of seeing as se separate organ um departments, we actually made them work together like a band, right? they're just playing different Instruments as as opposed to being like individual singers yelling at top of each other. It would use creators to create content and test market would then put that content on organic and

the best performing content will put on paid. That flywheel allowed us to make sure that we're only uh expanding content that created more conversation around the brand that people actually cared about and therefore created more and more conversations around the brand As opposed to just trying to convert people uh with ads uh at first interaction. So another thing that's really interesting that's happening around the world right now if you look at what's just recently happening in meta I don't know whether this is in the UK in the US but in the UK you can actually

opt out of ads which therefore means that people if they are going to keep the ads on if you're still going to be paying for ads You need to make sure that they're great to make sure that it's things that people don't want to opt out from. So we've already seen that on with YouTube and they've seen that actually like a lot of people have have started to opt out of the ads from that perspective. You can start to see that happening a little bit on Meta. But still, I've been speaking to a bunch of

people that love their ads if they're worth it. So, if you're going to be one of those brands That going to be leveraging paid, if you're going to be one of those brands going to be creating on socials, you got to make it worth people's time. You got to make sure that you're increasing those trust and connection with your brand. Otherwise, people just going to opt out and not want to see you and it's going to mess it up for everybody. Uh, we're going to go. So, there's some other metrics that we're going to be

looking at now in 2026, but I'm not Going to bore you too much. Really, you have to be asking yourself five questions. Are we being talked about? Do people care enough to interact with us? Are fans proud to talk about us? Are we fueling the right storytellers? But then also, are we converting belief into action? That's super super important. Instead of just asking, have we converted, you should be asking a little bit more than just transactional uh almost like uh focus on your audience. It's about world building. It's about connecting. It's about making sure that

people are not just coming to you to buy, but to interact, to be entertained, to to feel like they're part of something is super super important. So, how do you earn trust? I'm going to fly through this. I don't want to take up too much more time. Really, it takes steps, right? You you can't just like wake up one day and have everybody trusting you. You have to make sure that You're known first and foremost because how can you trust somebody that you don't know? Then you have to be liked, which is super important right

now, especially in the social era. But most importantly, you have to be action led to be able to earn trust, right? People don't trust your words, they trust your actions. And brands that lead with actions are the ones that win and kick up the world building flywheel. And I'm going to go really quickly on like Examples of how to do that. So being known, you have to make sure that you know the platform that you're on. So there's this Dolly Parton meme that talked about the fact that she's four different people on four different platforms.

If one person has four different characteristics on four different platforms, then a one-sizefits-all strategy is not going to work. Then you have to make sure that you leverage creators. Knowing the Creators that already have the trust to the audience you want to interact with is super key to make sure that you can ren that trust and eventually create that follower crossover so that their followers become your followers. Then leveraging publishers like a lot of people just talk about uh creators but then what about publishers? There's new publishers like Puberty and other publishers we can mention

that also have reality trust. Why not use them as a new Canvas for your brand? And when it comes to being liked, find a a community that's underrepresented and be that uniform, right? You've seen that with Vans and skateboarders. You've seen that with um uh with Red Bull and extreme sports. You with Nike and athletes. Who is that for your brand and how do you make sure that you get that affinity from them? Uh uh unite them on a common cause and nemesis. Uh document your journey as you go along because People like authenticity, but

then also make sure you have a two-way conversation, not just a dictatorship conversation. listen to your audience and respond back to them. And then when it comes to being action, listen, I love Whoop. They showcased that actually one of the the fans were screaming out for a feature, how they launched the feature by getting the CEO to read out mean comments about them and then announcing the fact that they launched the feature Finally. Everybody knows about this with Stanley, the cup that survived. They got a girl got her car blown up. The only thing that

survived was the Stanley Cup and the CEO responded saying they're going to get her a new car. And uh obviously shouted out to Stanley. This is a Gym Shark example. Getting involved way matters. Obviously for those that are in London, they know the knife crime was on the high. What they did is they used confiscated knives and turned them Into gym equipment in sponsorship with a the charity called Steel Warriors, which is phenomenal. But then also just create experiences worth remembering. So using IRL to disrupt URL, real world experience. We talked about demonstrating real efforts

is really important to be able to win in 2026 going forward. And so to wrap up, I spoke really, really quickly. It's important to make sure that you go away from trying to mean something to Everyone to meaning everything to someone. Super important. Get everyone else to talk about you instead of you being the main character of your own narrative. You don't want to be calling yourself a nice guy. And also remember, it's important to not just be known, be liked, and be actionled. Uh, thank you. Sorry, sped through that. >> Alf, you crushed it,

man. You crushed the show. I love it chat. This is one where it's like people in the recording Or people in the chat are like I need the recording and I'm like yep everyone needs to watch this back. Everyone needs to watch this back. You are the man, my friend. Thank you so much. I need to catch you another time with a fedora on. Like that's the next version. But you're the best. I appreciate you. I appreciate you a ton. >> Thank you. See you in a bit. >> You might know her from YouTube. She

is honestly my favorite person in the Space. So we have to welcome the one, the only Dar Denny to the stage. Y'all, let's show some love. Am I really your favorite [laughter] >> in this space? I feel like we're so close. So, uh I I feel like I have to say that every time and I don't feel like I'm being disingenuous, so I appreciate it. >> Oh my god, it's such an honor. It's such an honor. I am so so stoked about this and I can't wait to >> Amazing. [clears throat] Amazing. Okay, Darl, I'm

going to catch you at the end. Do your thing. >> Hey everyone, I am so so stoked to get started with you guys today. We're going to get a little tactical today and really talk about trends in creative analysis. And the way that I always love to start these presentations is to actually show you guys two creatives and have you guess which one you think performed best. And I'm only going to Show each of these once. So lock in, pay attention, and let's see which one you think performed best. >> Seic dermatitis really crushed my

self-confidence and took away who I really was. It changed my personality because I wasn't confident anymore and it was starting to ruin my life. these >> and then B. >> What the is this? >> If you've ever had flakes like this, I promise it's not dirt, it's not neglect, And it's definitely not your fault. >> I see an overwhelming amount of you guys saying B. Not many A's, which tells me that for once in this presentation, I got you. The top performing ad here was actually a. And in this presentation, we're going to dive into

a little bit more of why that may be. So, for those of you that don't know know me, my name is Da Denny and I've worked as a creative strategist and media buyer for some of the top brands in DTOC. And I Always like to tell people that today I have three jobs. Number one, I'm a partner at a boutique ad agency. This is my business partner, Miguel. He's definitely in the chat. We work with eight and nine figure brands to supply them performance creative, but I'm also a content creator. Um, so I make content

for media buyers and creative strategists and I actually hit 100K on YouTube this year. So, thank you so so much to that community that follows me Over there. And then not so secretly, one of my favorites is I am chief evangelist at Motion. Now, Motion really leads the industry in supplying education for the next generation of creative strategists. And that's something that is really near and dear to my heart. So today I want to talk a little bit how you should be analyzing creative in this next generation of you know creativity that's at everyone's fingertips

right and what actually ends Up surprising people is that I have a four-step analysis process for analyzing creatives and it's actually the metrics that are the least important part of this process. So when I am analyzing, hey, which creatives actually worked and didn't work? I like dividing those metrics into primary KPIs and storytelling KPIs. Now your primary KPIs are going to tell you which creatives worked and which ones didn't. That is all. Sometimes I get people who come up To me and they're like, "Hey, but what about click-through rate? Can that be an indication of

a creative that's working?" No. The creatives that are working on paid social are the ones who are going to get the most amount of spend and results. Everything else is what I like to call storytelling KPIs. So, these are going to be able to help tell you the story potentially of why something performed or didn't perform. Which actually brings me to the next Step of this process, which is the content. When you are analyzing the actual content of any creative, this is actually the most important part of the analysis process. And again, we're going to

be zooming in on content level data. And I always love to start with the format because I think that this is a really easy way for people to ease into starting to analyze creative and why something may or may not be working. So when I say format, a lot of people Initially think, okay, images, videos, carousels, right? But formats actually go a lot deeper. You have your us versus them formats. You have your features point out, your founders ads, your statistic base ads. All of these formats are things that really can go into making up

a creative. But something I always want you to ask yourself is what impact can performance or what impact can format actually have on performance? I don't always find that this is the Defining thing that can actually make a creative convert or perform. Something that I find is crucially important is the creator. And we got Orurin right there, right? Because I'm telling you, when he's in the ads, those things convert. your creator and the talent that you work with is more important candidly than the script, the arbitrary hooks that you're making. It is one of the

most important choices and something that I always ask myself when I am Trying to reverse engineer a creative, especially if they have talent in them. To what to what level is the actual creator that is selected having that impact? The next thing that's going to be crucially important is understanding what type of messaging strategies you're using inside of your creative. And I like to put these into four different buckets. So number one is going to be what type of human desire angle are you going after? Are you leaning into the Human desire of romance? Maybe

social connection or tranquility or power. Or maybe you're taking a different approach and really trying to nail a certain demographic. Maybe you're looking at an age, a role they play in their life, certain types of hobbies and jobs that they have. Or maybe you want to take a bigger strategic angle. Maybe you want to go full celebrity campaign like a ski. Or maybe you want to lean into negative or taboo marketing or more of a Personal history angle. Another really important factor here with your messaging is going to be what part of the user journey

you are really focusing on. So all the way on the right hand side looking at the most aware these are people who are already inherently interested in a free master class whereas you if you look at unaware these are people that are maybe just slightly interested with what a dating expert has to offer. So I actually really like Mapping out all of my messaging points to all of these different stages. And some formats can also lend themselves to different parts of this stage. And the next thing that we have is of course imagery. Sometimes the

specific type of imagery that you use is also going to have a really big impact and is worth in-depthly analyzing. So this can be things like your production quality are you using lowfi? Are you using hi-fi? Could also be your setting, the color or Movement play or even your POV shot angles. Now the big thing that I think is you know changing in 2026 is actually how all of these fit together to really bring up one more piece of content level data that I find a lot of advertisers are talking about today which is all

of these go into a certain persona or intended audience. Now, this is something that on Motion's actually actual platform that I really love because they now have the ability to Look at your creatives and see which intended audiences your creatives are actually meeting. And if you're not a motion customer right now, this is something too that you can do with your website review. So, this is an analysis I did for a recent client of mine. I said, "Hey, I want to look at the different audience segments we need to develop creative for so that we

are more accurately speaking to their problems and their and their pain points." And we Were able to combine those reviews as signals so that we could really zero in on the type of personas that are really going to move the needle for us. Now, this is even more important in the age of Andromeda, right? Orin touched on it earlier. And all that Andromeda does for the meta algorithm is it looks at the millions of potential ads that it could deliver to a single person and actually just makes a smaller group of ads. But what a

lot of people don't talk about With Andromeda is that it's also grouping these different ads into different personas. Which is why every time you're analyzing creative and you're looking at the format, the creator, the messaging in the imagery, really think about, okay, who are we targeting with this specific creative? That's going to be really important for your performance moving into 2026, which then leads me to the last two points of the four-step analysis process With it, which is comparison. So, your comparison is going to essentially put all of your data into context. You're going to

look at your metrics and your content and you're going to be able to compare that to internal and external resources. So, you can look at your other top performers or your performance as a whole. I also really like being able to compare to competitors and really understand, hey, how are competitors using certain visuals, using Certain messaging strategies over and over again so that they can reach their customers? This is actually something I like to do on a monthly basis so that I can track it for each of our individual competitors. And then the final part

of the four-step analysis process is to also look at feedback, of course, and look at the type of comments and engagement your ads are getting because these are things that you know really can help show you, hey, this is the next Type of ad that we can make potentially. But it als it can also give you a gut check on how your creative is landing. So moving forward into 2026, my final piece is is that you know the analysis process does not just stop at the data. You have to really drill into the content piece

and compare that AC across different data sources and also look at the feedback on those individual creatives. And that is all that I have today. Thank you so so much for joining Me. And if you are interested to learn more about creative strategy and analysis, I do have a creative course that is coming out early next year that I am redoing. Um, it's really my life's mission to teach creative strategy. Um, I really love it so much. So, thank you so much for having me. >> This is everybody's chance to slow clap in their bedrooms,

their offices, wherever they're tapping in from. Hit that slow clap cuz Dar, you absolutely Crushed it. People are like in on IG after they're like too much knowledge need to digest. >> I think we have time for one question. I think we have time for one question if you're cool with it. Perfect. >> So one question that I saw pop up in the chat. They were asking well someone said why is Dar so cool? But the other one is what's the difference between strategy angle and formats from a definition perspective. >> Oh yeah this is

a really good question. I'd say that the strategy angle is actually something that could be um inserted into different formats. Like for instance, you can do a piece of celebrity content or a celebrity like big strategy angle in multiple different formats. So every time you see a big celebrity campaign, oftentimes you'll also see out of home, so big billboards, TV campaigns. The the format is how is actually showing up on your individual Platforms, but the strategy is really something that can go crossplatform um and something that's just like a little bit more mix and match.

>> Incredible. Dra, you are the best. I'm gonna talk to you really soon. I appreciate the time. You guys killed it. >> Thank you. >> Show love in the chat, everybody. Show love in the chat. I'm so excited to have this guy here. Whether you know him from Hoop Talk, letting it fly, or his Incredible newsletter, or honestly just being funny as hell in the chat, we got Jack Apple here. So, everybody, we got to welcome Jack to the stage. >> I love that hoops comes up before marketing. Now, I did marketing for 15 years

and two years of basketball videos and now here we are. Um, >> it's just because it's me, I think, because like basketball's so near and dear to the heart. It's like I got to I got to another person who's hooping. Have to shout them out. [laughter] But Jack, I'm going pop out. Do your thing. I'll see you at the end. Okay. >> I appreciate it. Um, also, and D is just like, oh, like that's all I have time for. Like she just threw so much stuff. I'm like, I'm trying to get the recording. I know

her personally. I like learned way too much in that 10 minutes right there. So, hi everybody. Uh, lots of talks today. You've heard so much already. Everyone's powering through. Um, and you just saw lots of creative examples from Alfred and D. And you're going to see absolutely none here. Um, it's going to be a lot of text. We're going to talk about concepts. We're going to talk about ideas. And that is all we're going to talk about here because I really do believe if you're going to make great social content, it's really about having two

best practices and that's what's most important here. And you know what, me presenting in this Format, we'll we'll lead this will actually be a tie-in here at some point. Um, but if you don't know me, hi, my name is Jack Applebee. I've worked in social media strategy for 15 years now for some of the brands you see on screen. Um, as well as a lot more, usually agency side. and kind of during that time like worked for brands with zero dollars and worked on $20 million ad campaigns, $2 million creative social aos, all every version

of social you Could possibly have and decided to start writing about the industry while doing it. Uh ended up developing about 80,000 followers on LinkedIn, the same on Twitter, and then about the same in my newsletter, Future Social, um where I write about social media strategy once daily on LinkedIn and weekly in my newsletter. Uh, and then just for fun, started my adult basketball comeback, uh, as how to hoop forever on Instagram and Tik Tok, where I have almost another 200,000 followers who don't know that I've ever worked a day in marketing. So, I have

two internet presences. Uh, I would love to have you follow either or both depending on which one makes the most sense to you. Um, and before we get into the full weight of the talk, I will say this is normally an hourong talk. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to publish the full version of the slideshow on my LinkedIn account. Like, that is my actual god-given name. You Can search me on any social platform. There it is. Um, or if you subscribe to my newsletter, Future Social, you'll get the full deck version

as well as the 150 essays I've written over the last three years about social media strategy. So, would love to have you there. Uh, but we're already three minutes in, so let's get to the meat of this. I really do believe if you want to make great social content, there are only two best practices that actually matter. Uh there Are a a lot of lies you've been sold over the last couple years where we think things like platform growth hacks or like perfect pixel sizing and resizing for every single platform. If I hear one more

person ask me about optimal post times, I'm probably going to scream at this point. Um and if you didn't see it, literally an hour ago, Instagram officially announced five hashtags per post. That's all you get now. So now I don't even have to answer That question anymore. All of this these things, they're interesting. They move you a couple of percentage points maybe, but they are not the most important thing. The two things you really got to focus on if you're making great social content or great advertising campaigns that'll then affect your paid content, you got

to have really truly great creative ideas and you got to have really truly great creative hooks. Um, I mean, I've been doing this for a long Time. When I started working in social, Instagram wasn't on Android. Facebook didn't have video. YouTube had 301 plus, which might be a number many of us don't even remember at this point. The fundamentals of social, as many times we've had different algorithms or platforms, the fundamentals haven't changed. And that's the most important thing for you to learn if you are a social strategist or a paid advertiser or anybody else

making content for these Platforms. Uh, and this is the one piece of creative that you're going to see in this presentation. Uh, because besides my marketing presence and my basketball presence, I may or may not have like a secret emo Tik Tok account where I make content about my old Warp Tour days. The reason I'm showing you this silliness uh, is this Tik Tok did several hundred thousand views. There I am painfully sitting here like this and I'm in front Of a tweet that is a very hyper [snorts] niche emo reference. Why am I showing

you this right now? Because this comment on that Tik Tok really summarizes like one of my core beliefs about social media. It's not about making perfectl looking things. It's about what is the story you're telling? What does the content actually share? What's the emotional value you get from this? Because this is literally a Tik Tok of me green screening in front of a Screenshot of an Instagram post that is a screenshot of a tweet. There is not one thing optimized about this. but it did several hundred thousand views because people were able to figure out

what we were talking about there. And that is so much more important than perfect production value. So obviously the question here is how do you get to great ideas and hooks? What does that even mean for social media content? And again, normally an hourong Talk. We're going to power through a handful of these right now. So much of it comes from brainstorming. Like I do think it's cliche to reference Mr. beast on one of these kind of meetings, but there's a reason he's the best at this stuff and has a half million uh or 500

million YouTube subs. Brainstorming is everything. And I truly believe we don't spend enough time thinking through ideas at the macro level or the micro level. So, what I Really hope when you're brainstorming social content, it's not about, oh, I saw this trend, or oh, I saw this visual format. It's about what is a belief that you hold as someone who works for the brand. What's the tension that the audience can feel? What's a story that only your brand can tell? And like maybe it's because I'm 37 now and past my like lol chuckles phase of

marketing and life, but I think almost one of the biggest things many people Are missing, especially in organic social right now, is focusing on the emotional benefits that your brand or product or even that piece of content can provide the audience. Yes, there's a lot of focus on Gen Z laughter right now within social content. I think we forget that fundamentally we're trying to make people's lives better with the products that we work for and we are solving a lot of problems that people have and that's been taught in a marketing 101 Class but it's

not being integrated into modern social a lot of times. So please when you're brainstorming how are you bringing the emotional benefits of your product to life which and I love that DA got this question at the end when we talk about campaigns versus tactics versus individual uh concepts. I really hope when you're brainstorming for your brand at a macro level, you need to think in ideas before you think in tactics. What's a tactic? Like I'm sure for all the paid advertisers here, I'm sure you've talked about the different visual formats like the screenshot of the

text message is like a really common ad or maybe it's like handwriter. What those might be. Those are tactics and it's good for you to know all the tactics, but you also need to think in the ideas that we talked about. How are you making people's lives better? What is the takeaway we want someone to have from This? What do we want them to action against? You'll have a million tactics. You can scroll and learn a bunch of tactics, but getting as good as possible at brainstorming full ideas that have real emotional resonance, that's where

you become a really expert level marketer. Um, and then this is one of my favorite like gut checks to use on any piece of social content. If you pretend any Instagram reel, Tik Tok static post Carousel, pretend that you need a YouTube title for that piece of content. The reason why if you can't summarize what that post is supposed to mean in five to seven words, I would bet that the concept you're trying to portray is not going to come through in that creative. So, always be able to come up with a oneliner when you're

looking at a piece of creative that you might want to put out in the world. Do people understand it when you say it in that One sentence? Uh, another one of my favorites, learn from creators, not other brands. Uh, when I worked in telco, I was like, I I don't care what the other telecommunications companies are doing. That's not going to help us. I want to see how people are infiltrating the feed. One of my favorite creative director quotes was an old CD at Adidas said like, "We're not competing with Nike. We're competing with Netflix.

This Is about share of attention on social." So, go learn from who's doing the best work out there and the most creative work, not necessarily just your competitors. Uh, and that's why you should just watch what's trending and theorize why it's trending. I stole this from Patty Galloway. He's a YouTube strategist. He encourages everybody to go scroll and think why something is succeeding because that trains that part of your brain to be able to brainstorm Better what else might succeed. Sounds simple, sounds super fundamental. I promise it helps. I do this literally every day. Um,

and then finally, just do the work over and over and over again. Like I know for the paid advertiser on this call, like you have like you're versioning to death. You're AB testing. You're really good at this. For the organic social folks on this, this is where like when I used to manage bands, Which is another side quest I had back in the day. If my bands come into a studio with 12 songs, record a 12 song album, we've done something wrong. You need some bides. You need some additional material. You got to have more

things that you're trying. So just do the work over and over again. And again, these are the places to find me on the internet where I'll publish a lot more of this stuff. That is my like no etale nine or 10 minute talk. But Thank you guys for listening to this. I hope you got something out of it. Uh appreciate you guys. Jack killed it. People in the chat are like I screenshotted every slide. Like I have it and I'm ready to go. So everyone's soaking it up even though you were so kind to condense

it to the 10 minutes. Jack, I want to ask you a couple questions though since you since you wrapped up on good timing here. >> So, the first one that I have is Actually referencing your last statement around like there's paid marketers here, then there's organic social people here. I'm curious how you think about the overlap these days and like how people are thinking about uh like you talked about hooks of course, but outside of hooks, like how are you thinking about the overlap between the two and any higher level thoughts you might have? >>

I I mean I would hope that different people are managing both those because They are different skill sets, right? Um, but the thing that's was tough even when I was at the agency side, both sides can learn from each other. There are things that the paid marketers learn just from again like volume of paid testing that I can't get to because at the end of the day, I'm only posting once per day per brand. But at the same time, as an organic marketer, there's so many insights I can get to from things that we've tried

either for like short Form or mid-m content or even just the hooks that we should pass along there. Of course, everything needs to fit under one campaign so it's like a cohesive message. But I just encourage everyone to talk to everyone on all teams. Like you'd be amazed what you can learn and you'd be amazed how infrequently everybody talks. Jack, I love it. There's one final question that I want to slip in here too is like there's a lot of people who are just beginning This journey, whether it be on organic, paid content creation, all

the above. One of the things I'm curious about is like you've developed a strong opinion over time on on what will work and what doesn't. So, what I'm curious about is like how do you train your brain to start thinking this way and do the research on these brands? >> Why were there multiple laughs backstage at Jack? You've developed opinions. Why did I see that? >> No, I mean this is where like I encourage anyone like whether like you want to have public presence or like just the professionals working in the space like you are

paid to be an expert and I know some rooms are scary and I know we all have hierarchies and bosses but like you're paid to be there and have an opinion. like always come in solutions-based and like you should whether it's proactive or reactive to any need like the way to train your Brain is you should always be able to present a new idea like quick quick weird anecdote about songwriting Ryan Tedar singer for one in Republic um something he talks about and trained songwriters to do is you don't show up to the songwriting session

with nothing you do 50 minutes of prep and you come in with three ideas of stuff and you look like the genius in the room because you actually did your homework and then you it ends up being your song do the Homework ahead of time. Do the research you have. And and I will say the best way to start up having opinions is just be encyclopedic about this stuff. Consume it. Figure out what it is and why it works. And if you can articulate what it is and why it works to anybody, that's how I

I grew fast in my agencies was my seniors couldn't do that. And I was just like, here's all the content I'm seeing and what I like about that. >> Jack, I love it. I love how many seasons Of life you've gone through, too. And like bringing some back like now back to life. You are the best. I sincerely appreciate you taking the time. Everybody in the chat, you gotta show love. Gotta show love. And what a better way than LeBron in the chat. That's the best way to go out on [laughter] this one. >> Appreciate

you, my friend. Appreciate you. >> Thank you. >> The next person that I would love to welcome to the stage is Joanna Wallace. She is one of the brightest thinkers in creative strategy and someone I've always quite admired. And she's currently the VP of creative strategy at the men's apparel brand Bird Dogs. So everybody, let's welcome Joe to the stage here. Hello. Um, if Evan God, I want to hire Evan to be my hype person. Like every Monday morning, I want Evan to just be Like, "You got this, Joe." [laughter] >> I got you. I

got you. We can set it up a couple times. I'll join a couple meetings and everyone knows the vibe and they're good to go. >> Perfect. Um, I am Joanna and uh what you can know about me is the following. Um, so I'm currently the VP of paid media creative at Bird Dogs. Um, you can trust me uh because I was previously the director of paid media at Hexclad where I built and scaled the internal team from scratch, processes, systems, team, everything. Um, I spent nearly a decade in paid media advertising. I did my time

in agencies consulting, uh, leading paid media teams with up to 3.5 million spend a month. Um, I've worked with brands like True Classic and Water Boy and Dr. Squatch. Um, I host a show called Fix It and Post on YouTube with Recharm, which is my other emotional support, uh, DTOC platform. And, um, it's about real world Challenges and, you know, stuff in the industry and giving advice very much like this, um, with some wit and sarcasm. Um, but basically the big the big thing I really care about in this industry is, um, how to get

the best out of creative teams while not destroying their will to live. I think that being a creative is incredibly hard. Being a strategist is incredibly hard and it's important to uh know how to lead creatives and and get them get their Best work out of them without them burning out. So, I want to walk through today um a lesson a case study that we had from bird dogs this Q4. Um it's about how starting gifting messaging earlier in the season um changed and expanded who actually was buying on Black Friday. and it revealed a

lot to us about how we want to think about tentpole events for 2026. Okay, come on buddy. Hey, we did it. Okay, great. So, let's talk about the common mistake that I've seen people make with temple events. So, yes, we are all trying to fill up the funnel all year, but when it comes to like big sales, people really start like wait until the sale to tell the story. We assume that urgency and a discount is going to do all the work for us. And that's a mistake because by the time you get to a

temple event like a Black Friday, buyers have often already Decided what they're going to buy or at least a large percentage of personas early planners have decided. They are just waiting for permission and like the moment to strike. So if you are starting your messaging when the sale starts, you're [gasps] late. Um and you're asking urgency to create demand instead of just releasing it. Um so this is the trap that this case study helped us avoid. Okay. So the problem we were trying to Solve and the question we are trying to answer is how do

you bring in a new buyer during peak season the most competitive time of year without relying on discounts. So for some context, Bird Dogs has historically skewed mail, which makes sense because it's a men's clothing brand. But holiday is a gifting moment. And in gifting moments, the buyer and the consumer, in this case, the wearer, are not often the same person. So, in particular, Q4 is when Women's purchasing power like blows up. About 62% of Black Friday shoppers in the US are women, and they are typically the ones buying the volume of gifts, the gifts

for everyone on the list. Men, listen, it may sound sexist. I'm following the data, usually probably have like one or two gifts that they're doing, their girlfriend, their wife, whatever. the woman of the household is generally doing the bulk of the shopping. So if we wanted real growth, We had to figure out how do you speak to that buyer earlier than everyone else during the most competitive moment of the year and get them when you hadn't traditionally been even trying to, you know, putting a lot of focus into getting the female buyer. So I started

at Bird Dogs the last week of September and the first thing my team and I did was gifting messaging. like no foundational administrative stuff. Our spreadsheets were a mess. It did not Matter. Boom. Gifting. That is the priority. That's where the money is. We can have a messy spreadsheet. So that was intentional and that's because it is the last window that we had with reasonable CPMs and we needed to use that time to learn as much as possible before Black Friday. So [snorts] if women are the biggest gifting audience, they are the priority to go

after. So everything we did in October and early November was about teaching, not Selling. So for those of you who watch my Recharm show, I broke this down in like intense detail when I was doing my Q4 prep episode, but now that I have the case study to prove my theories, um I can, you know, relay this to you now with actual facts. Um so anyway, black people don't wake up on Black Friday and suddenly decide that they need to buy gifts. They there is an early planner persona that is massive. Nearly 45% of shoppers

start looking before November. So these are motivated buyers. These are people in research mode and they are primed to learn about your product. Like everyone's mom is like this. We all know this person. There's a lot of them. Um so we launched gifting and femaleled messaging really early. There was no urgency. There was no deal. It was all about like reassurance, confidence, and the clarity around why Black Friday is a good gift. I'm sorry. why bird dogs is a good gift for Black Friday. Um, and These ads didn't look like the rest of the ads

that we'd run throughout the year because they were not going to men 25 to 34, our traditional bread and butter. They were tailor made using best practices to convert women, particularly older women, because they have all the money and are the biggest purchasers at the moment in this time of year. So, doing this early gave us time for two really important things. The first is that it gave the algorithm time to learn A new buyer. So platforms don't pivot overnight. They need a few weeks to catch up to the humans. Um and second of all,

it gave us time to iterate creatively. So, you know, when you're looking for that amazing perfect mega ad, it's not usually that first stab, it's usually like round two or three after you've done some iterations and you've gotten data and you've been able to cobble together based on your metrics the perfect ad. And that's what happened To us. we were able to do two to three rounds of of iterations and we found this mega ad and it just well we'll get to how it performed but um but yes that was the that is the plan

and to be clear none of this is like a brand new concept um I've seen this framework work before I used it at Hexcloud as well the difference is how it translated in bird dogs in a different category a different customer and a gifting moment where the the buyer and the wearer are not the Same % um come on buddy. Here we go. Um here we are. Okay. So, >> [snorts] >> uh we got some early signals. We could see demand forming before Black Friday. So, that was by looking at the soft metrics. They were

guiding us. So, female click-through rate was up 77% year-over-year. Hook rates were stronger. They were outperforming men. Um engagement was improving. And this is all without any urgency. So this told us that while people aren't buying yet, they are learning and remembering us. We're getting into carts. Um, and that's exactly what we wanted at that stage. No one's going to buy in October. You have to let that go. It's okay. [laughter] October is not a conversion month. It is a learning month. Um, and you need October to give you the signals to crush it in

November. Okay. So what happened during Black Friday? So, one really important clarification here is that we didn't run a traditional sale. There was no percentage off. There was no sitewide discount. Um, we were offering a gift align deal, which was buy two items, get two free gifts. So, what happened with performance? We had a huge increase in new customer purchases, particularly female customers. And our post-purchase surveys confirm this. Most Buyers were female new customers who had just found out about the brand within the past few weeks, specifically because of an ad. So this was a

major shift from the year before where we had female buyers but we hadn't truly you know really conscientiously attacked them. Um that sounded violent. Uh so what is important is that Black Friday did not in introduce the brand. It converted people who already knew us because of the effort we put in in October and Early November. Wait, we're going the wrong way. Here we go. Okay. So, I want to talk about two types of ads. These evergreen gifting ads that were already in the account marinating um you know doing their job for a month and

then these new Black Friday specific ads. So, our evergreen gifting ads drove a ton of performance during Black Friday. They didn't stop working once the sale once the deal happened. Um they continued to acquire New customers throughout the period, but um we'd already proved the product was good. We weren't relying on a deal to get them to click through. Um, they weren't just there for the discount. They genuinely wanted the product. We had convinced them. Um, but at the same time, the Black Friday specific ads were much more bottom of the funnel. They were especially

effective at converting returning and high intent buy uh high intent buyers and basically providing That final push. So, the two thing the two types of ads really work together is what allowed us to scale without breaking performance. So then we get to December um and it's really important because you know the deal is over but it is still gifting season and this strategy continued to work. It had legs. So evergreen ads have been continuing to acquire new customers and holiday campaigns were about 94% new customer-driven. So this is how we knew That gifting was the

strategy and the deal was just the accelerator. Um so this we'll talk about this demographic shift here. So starting earlier like I said change to bot when we zoom out year-over-year the impact becomes very clear. Um performance was driven by an increase in female customers. Female the percentage of buyers uh that were female increased 13%. But men's the men purchasers still grew. We were not cannibalizing The market. We were expanding it. Um which is really really important. We did not abandon our core demographic. And what this proved is that like I said, black black Friday

did not create demand. It released demand that already existed. So everything before the deal was about teaching and the deal just gave people permission to act. And that's why performance looked so different. So for 2026, the there's this repeatable Framework that we all should think about when we're going into tentpole events like Mother's Day, Father's Day, back to school, holidays, whatever your product like aligns with whatever tent pole event. And the framework is marinate, motivate, monetize. So marinate starts about a month before the tentpole event. It's where you teach the buyer. You are not asking

them for action. You are just building familiarity and confidence and clarity about why this is a good choice. Then you move to motivate. That's your tent pole window. That's where your urgency or value belongs. This is not education. It's giving a people reason for people to act now. And then monetize is about scaling what's working. So you can keep an evergreen ad on because it's still acquiring new customers and you just layer in your tentpole specific creative to close high intent and returning buyers. So at that point, you're not guessing, you're just Amplifying proven winners.

Um, yes. So that Yes. And so the final slide to summarize, um, this is how I'm going to be going into 2026 and how I'm going to be thinking about this. So you start early enough before the pressure hits, before CPMs go up. Once CPMs are up, you are not testing. You're just hoping and praying and, you know, crying. Um, you prioritize the real decision maker. figure out who that is for that tentpole Event. You know, for mothers, maybe it's fathers or kids. For Father's Day, it's probably mothers leading the charge. Um, and you you

really you really want to focus on that person. You don't want to go after like these small random personas. Think about who is your money maker and go after them. You're also giving the algorithm time to learn uh and creative time to iterate before you ask it to scale because you can't shortcut that. And then finally, You are using tentples to convert, not explain. So really, ultimately, the biggest wins for tentpole events don't come from the week everybody's obsessed with and like refreshing Shopify. They come from the weeks before that. So the performance of your

tentpole event isn't about just about the ads you made for it. It's about whether you did your homework leading up to that event. >> Round of applause, everybody. Round of applause. >> Thank you. >> Time for one question that popped up. Awesome. >> Cool. So, I can actually pull this one on screen, but I'll just uh I'll try my best to summarize what I see. >> So, how are your teams producing the creative quickly and efficiently? >> H yes. So, I think it's important to don't wait. There's like this this window between I have enough

signal to Think that this is doing well and it's got a $100,000 spend. It's proven that it's doing well. now I can officially, you know, uh, uh, scale it. You got to really look at those early indicators and you got to act fast. Um, so for my team, it's very much of what is the light lift way that you can scale while you work in the background on the heavier lifts. So if something is really working, we can do a quick visual refresh. We can change the POV. Maybe It's male voice over. Now it's going

to be female voiceover. Now it's changing to, you know, speaking to older women versus younger women. um meanwhile I'll go and you know my team will go and do all the heavy lifting of let's go find a new creator let's go think of a new style let's go build out graphics those things take longer so you really have to have those light lift ways of like immediate scaling and then you can have your grand plans roll out a little bit Slower >> Joe you're incredible the examples and the especially with the data behind it absolutely

amazing thanks a ton I'm gonna talk to you really soon >> thank you thanks so much >> we have our final speaker of the day. This is going to be such a fun one to cap it off. So, Alexandra is somebody who's spoken about quite a bit within Motion's world, like is someone who's deeply respected. So, I'm always so Excited to hear what's going on. So, everybody, this is Alex. Welcome her to the stage. The associate director of creative strategy at Monks. Alex, I'm so excited to watch your presentation. >> Okay, let's do this. Let's

see if I have good luck doing this. Uh, all right. Got it. Yay. It's happening. Uh, let's see. We are here. Okay. So, hi everyone. My name is um, Alex and I'm associate director of uh, creator creative strategy at Mungs. I'm so excited to be Here. Um, so many creative minds and um, yeah, like I am a mom of two dogs and a four-year-old girl. I've been teaching yoga for over 10 years and so I do have a life outside of paid ads. I started out as a media buyer um many years ago and spent

most of my career optimizing ads and a lot of time behind uh scenes and ads manager and over the past years I've pivoted more and more into creative strategy and I've launched thousands of ads and managed millions of dollars in Ad spend with some of like really incredible brands and in the past few years most of the brands I've been working with have been brands that offer a solution through a service versus ecom or like physical product um sourced like professional services, teleaalth, fintech, um software and um so if you are um in any of

those if you can associate with any of those then this is uh going to be interesting for you. We're going To be okay let me see. Okay, here we go. Um, so if you don't if your brand doesn't have a physical product and you're optimizing, let's say to lead conversion event or call schedule or downloads or signups, this is going to be really um interesting because um most of the ad info we see out there is for ecom brands. There's a physical product being shown and it's a lot of fun. Um, and there there's definitely

there is a gap in the industry. And the reality is That these types of ads don't need to be boring because really B2B decision makers are people too. Like they they um all have creative elements that work both for BTOC. And so my piece of advice is, you know, be playful like add cartoon imagery. Um, use simple language that your grandma would be able to understand. Play with memes and lean towards using less text, large visuals, colorful lifestyle photography to help your user and like to to stand out from All those trustworthy blue or green

ads that we see in the in the space. And also my favorite is make lowfi ads that have this DYI feel and little to no editing like UGC's part of your evergreen strategy. Which really brings me to trend number one for 2026 which is that according to meta uh creator lead ads can boost efficiency by up to 32% which is really a massive performance win when you're scaling spend. And Neielson reports that 90 to About 92% of consumers trust UGC more than traditional ads because it isn't just about someone holding a product. It's about seeing

a solution through a more human lens. And in professional environments, that genuine emotion and sort of like third-party perspective, it speaks louder than any other polish brand ad could do. So again, lean into these less polished ads that embrace real life imperfections and just signal more authenticity and bypass the banner Blindness for B2B ads. Next, um if you haven't already tried founder ads, I'm a big fan and Darra, I know that you've talked about these before and EGC's. And for those that um don't know what EGC's are, these are employee generated um content and it

can be really successful. And I I highly recommend that you test these if you haven't though. Um, I I see a lot of founders resist this format because they really get caught up in making it more of like a high production And like get caught up in like a perfect script and the the but the reality is that the more raw and real these are, the more users will connect with the message be and like you can shoot it on a phone and it doesn't need to be we don't need to over complicate it, right?

Um because the reality is that people don't trust uh brands. People trust um people and the the last mini trend within this one is all about paid partnerships. And in LinkedIn, these Thought leadership ads have delivered two times higher click-through rates, which is really great to see. And I've recently seen a lot of brands um that I've been working with um have really great performance and the performance has been blowing up with partnership ads. Um and and yes, like they can get expensive quickly, but the reality is that authentic content driven by experts and influencers

in your industry and your audience segment really helps to Build that awareness, that trust, that credibility a lot faster than any other type of ad can do. So, when putting together UGC's, let the creator drive the storytelling and make sure to add proven direct response best practices, um, like easy to read text overlay, a strong hook, uh, clear CTA, call to action. So, all these basic elements, make sure that you have those in there. Um, and you want them to look like native content, like they're scrolling Through, they don't even know that it's an ad.

But you also want to you want to build them for conversions. And that brings me to trend number two, which is all about storytelling. And we've already talked about this a lot today. Um, all about storytelling. And that's a lot of what we're going to be seeing in 2026, especially in the time of I that everybody's trying to um, you know, there's a lot of anti-AII content and and conversations going on. So, Bring in storytelling. Um, and the first format that we have within this one is tutorials. And no, we're not talking about like a

long boring tutorial video. This is really engaging content that briefly guides the users step by step on how to use um your tool to achieve a desired result or solve a sort of like a common painoint using your platform or your service or um the product that you are uh providing because um one the reality is that in this space one of the Most common barriers of entries is that users don't fully understand the capabilities of your product and or or how it will actually make their lives better. And by showing them how to achieve

a very specific result, you start to start dissolving some of these barriers. Um, I always say like just don't tell me what to buy, like show me what it can do for me and and do so through storytelling and then it becomes a lot of a better experience overall. And another format of storytelling, I really like this one. Um it it makes me feel like you know watching Netflix shows with episodes and is is yeah like share content that has episodes that like match the narrative arc similar to the buyer specific stage in the journey.

And for example, like have like a part two narrative hook that like creates this sort of psychological pull and positions your ad as like a continuation of the story. This work Really well in paid partnerships because you've established this connection with uh let's say a brand ambassador and and the you can play a lot with uh sequential retargeting for these to make sure that your users view these in sequence. Um and then lastly leaning into seasonal trends and giving them a spin to match your brand messaging. I love what GoDaddy did here. Um, playing with

the spin-off of the Spotify wrapped. I know we've already kind of Talked about Spotify wrapped this today, but this is like a nice spin-off and just being aware of what people are talking about, what everybody's seeing in their feeds, what they're posting. So, it's like, you know, next year Spotify wrapped is going to come around this time of the year, like in early December. So, what can you do to leverage of those type of seasonal trends? And I did leave some little bullet points here um like kind of like actions for everybody in the space

that you can do um next quarter or in 2026 when you get a chance uh to try out. And next trend is um it all it's all about copy is really focusing on evidencebased copy and that's what's going to be leading the way next year and moving forward. Like the key here is to test copy that is really measurable, personable, like painpoint ccentric, That is punchy and and it it really replaces vague claims with specific proof. So instead of saying we increase ROI, you know, you can say like see up to times more revenue with

this. And it's like it's just really in a feedful of hype like just using the specific numbers can be you know more a lot more believable than a round number or like a vague claim. This work really well for both for UGC's and polish brand ads. Um I like to play with these on Statics because people get to take a little bit of a pause and look at what's happening. Um, and another angle that works specifically well for UGC's and it is the oversharing ads. Um, and maybe I'm hyper curious, but yeah, like people like

it's the stories that people are exposing private private data like money, like weight or age and and humans are naturally curious and and like to snoop and and that's how you hook them in through that storytelling and Smoothly without the user like barely even noticing that you um are making the brand part of the story. It's just becomes a an ad. You know, let's say that you're selling teleaalth services or or financial software. Show how the content creator uses your product as one of like let's say their hacks or their day-to-day. So, for example, here

on the payday routine ad that you are seeing of the couple, um [snorts] they could share the financial tool that they're using to To budget, right? or on the habits building video, she could share how she's uh one of the habits that she's building is like she's seeing an online dietitionian through a tellaalth provider and how that's making a huge impact in her life. Um, so those are ways that it can like really be helpful to play with copy and and the script. And here's the truth. As I said, people don't trust brands. People trust

people who use brands. So I've put together These seven kind of ad guidelines for B2B and digital services. Um so that it is really easy for you to like take a screenshot at the end of this slide and take it with you. Um and the first one is going to be is to steal um inspiration from behavioral feeds. And I'm talking um I think Ashley mentioned Yeah, Ashley mentioned already this is monitor Reddit like look at Discord groups, WhatsApp groups, Substack. Look at the comments of your ads and the paid Partnerships and other conversational spaces

that you get to see what people and your user and your audience are talking about um and learn about what's really happening. This really helps you to create ads that are directly addressing conversations happening in private communities and then it helps the audience feel heard which is so so important. Um, and one of the ways to do this, um, is to directly, for example, you can, um, answer a specific Reddit Thread using like a screenshot of the thread as the hook. And that kind of gives the signal that we're listening to the community and not

just throwing marketing at them. The second one is to um is is focus on thought leadership and brand narrative over hard sell tactics. And this like really helps to you know like um justify the creative concepts and focus on building trust and in and it's just Like I think just like a really great way to connect with with the audience then use the founder employeeled uh point of view as a creative format not just oneoff like make this part of your of your dayto-day. Um I I think that this is really important and you can

add this as a format same that you use like okay I have my testimonial ads I have my promo ads make this one of the formats that you're constantly testing. The next one is when you do create because I'm Not saying like oh yeah like now just only move to human le creative and UGC's within the space. You're still going to want to use branded ads. You're going to still want to have statics and and just keep the diversity flowing and but and when you do create branded ads, make it playful um or or visually

distinctive because they can really get lost in in the feed with like the the the brand colors of like blue or green for example. Then the next one is to teach Workflows not future. So yes, like play with tutorials, show how it works as a story. Like for example, show the pain, like how the workflow, how it helps you and then what is the result that they get to achieve by using your product. Um, replace those vague claims, play with copy, prove ads, prove math, use facts, stats, and real quantitative results. And last but not

least, definitely um use AI for wild ideas. I like to play with motion AI agents. Uh If you haven't played with those, definitely recommend. Uh I you can get some really fun ideas from that and um I think is is um really helpful. I mean AI obviously takes a big part on all of this and while ideas is is one of those because we don't want to be always just copying ads from other ads right it becomes then like this never- ending cycle so that's definitely one thing um and uh yeah so those are some

of the guidelines that I have for you I would Love to see if you have any questions um and is, you know, overall play more when it comes to the space. If your brand is not selling a physical product, tap into UGC's, tap into lowfi content that feels DYI, native to the platform. Don't be afraid like the person making the purchasing decision is still a person. Connect with them in that space. >> Crushed it, Alex. Absolutely crushed it. I love how you had that slide right at the end too to give the recap and a

nice Screenshot so everyone's like, "Okay, I'm making sure I snap that and I'm good to go." You are the best. Thank you a ton for joining and I'm gonna talk to you real soon. Okay. >> Thank you. Bye-bye.