How AI Is Rebuilding Every DTC Creative Team
In this episode of the Scalability School podcast, hosts Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Reza, co-founder of Motion, for a deep dive into how AI is fundamentally reshaping the way DTC creative teams operate. Reza shares his perspective on the widening gap between data-driven media buyers and creative producers, and why the most valuable professionals in the space are the ones who can bridge both worlds.
The conversation covers the evolution of the creative strategist role from simple brief-writing to a full-stack function that blends paid social performance analysis, creative concepting, and now AI-powered agent workflows. Reza introduces a powerful mental model: every knowledge worker should think of themselves as an allocator of AI tokens, and the goal is to push agents to work for longer and longer stretches autonomously.
The episode also explores practical use cases for AI agents in creative strategy, including analyzing thousands of agent conversations using swarms of AI workers, iterating on top-performing ads using existing footage, and how Motion’s AI agent (Runneth) is processing and categorizing every ad creative to surface actionable insights. Reza drops a provocative prediction: in the near future, the only job left will be allocating AI tokens, and if you’re not building that muscle now, you’re falling behind.
Our new “After Hours” segment dives into hooks as the DNA of creative performance, why brand teams are increasingly disconnected from the direct response engine that actually drives revenue, and how creative strategists are becoming the real mini-CMOs of DTC companies.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
What if your only job is being an allocator of AI tokens?
Are you still thinking of AI as a chatbot instead of a workforce?
Is your creative strategist actually a mini-CMO?
Why hooks are the DNA of your entire creative system.
Is your brand team holding back your direct response engine?
What would you do if you had to spend $2,000 in AI credits this week?
Can two minutes of footage actually produce 50 unique ads?
Is this the year under-hyped AI products of 2025 actually work?
This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It’s a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to northbeam.io/incrementality, they’re offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
To learn more about Rezza and Motion you can follow him on https://x.com/rezakhadjavi, https://x.com/motionapp_ or head to https://motionapp.com/
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
Learn More about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com
Full Transcript
(00:01) But the act of concepting is basically to try to find the like higher level themes that are worth pursuing that are worth creating five or six or 10 briefs around. And so it it really is around like what themes are working, what themes are not working and how do I explore ideas at a concept level so that I can basically go and create like a few versions of that concept.
(00:21) And so that was like by far by far the most the most common use case. But there's one paradigm shift that they make is that if you can get an agent to go and do 5 minutes of work for you, great. Then try to do 10, then try to do 15. Keep trying to push that until you have an agent doing work for you for a longer period of time.
(00:41) Hooks are so much deeper than this like tacky pattern interrupt that you might do in the first 3 seconds. It's almost like the hook is like the DNA for the whole thing. And if the team gets good at hooks, they've got it all figured out. Like everything basically becomes downstream of being really good at hooks.
(00:56) Maybe it's not like this month, next month, maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but I think we're getting to the point where that's the only job left is being an allocator of AI tokens. And if you are not doing that job, I don't I don't think there is a job. And now, let's take a listen to the Scalability School podcast. Welcome to another episode of the Scalability School podcast. Everyone's favorite podcast.
(01:21) Thanks to all the tens of listeners we have. Super stoked to have you. We're very popular. I've heard we're the number one podcast in marketing in Poland, Google told me recently. So, thank you to all the polls out there that are listening to this bad boy and implementing it as quickly as possible. Today, legend of the industry, legend to me, who's also a great friend and uh I tried to email you recently and it came up with your shoelace email and I think if you have Rez's shoelace email that that's like a sign that you're like a true friend. and you've known him for that long. And I was thinking and I looked
(01:53) back and the first time I emailed you, do you want to take a get date on the year, a guess on the year, Resza? Must have been like 2017 or something like that. 2016. 2017. First time you and I traded emails. 2011. No way. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah. 2011.
(02:15) And uh which which is insane and also shows that we're old. Um so there you go. Uh so we're glad to have Res on today. We're talking about AI um and creative. There's tons to get into here. Um super stoked to to talk about. Everybody's always excited on the podcast, of course. Um and we're Brad has a story. He has Brad actually has something he'd like to admit to you, Reza.
(02:39) This is a this is a con the confessions part of the podcast. Um but this is by the way, this is not a sponsored episode by Motion or anything. We just really like love Oreza and you guys are doing a ton of crazy stuff and I think been listening and hearing you talk about this a lot in terms of AI and creative teams, what it means um you know what AI where we're headed and how people can really like make sure they're thinking about this the right way in their organization. And so that's really what we're going to cover today.
(03:04) I know it sounds very general but I promise tactic stuff is following from this. But first Brad's this is Brad's confession. That was beautiful. You should sing. You need to sing more often. Well, it's funny that you started with your your story because when I do when I type in Res's email, I also get the shoelace and uh I originally started paying for motion in 2021 and I was the idiot that after 3 months was like I just don't know how we're going to use this.
(03:28) Like I I can't I just like ads manager or stop we stopped using it. And uh yeah, like long story short, it's we use creative analytics every single day all day and everything that we do. It's just like embarrassing that it took me like what that was that was 2021 we first started using motion after a couple months we went off and the last two years I literally like can't it's like we just were perpetually involved in these dashboards and um so I'm embarrassed um which leads me to an like I guess like a starting point with the question um am I alone or was there something that changed
(04:03) cuz like I think we're going to we're going to go through this journey of we'll eventually get to AI in this conversation But before AI, there was just like getting people to open up creative analytics. And so, um, was there a was there a change that like started to get people to care about creative analytics that you you saw? I feel like we've seen multiple like like um something around Andromeda last year.
(04:26) I know this wasn't necessarily a thing that tipped you over the edge, but like for whatever reason towards the end of last year, everyone just started talking about Andromeda. I think a lot of it was a little bit exaggerated like doom and gloom stuff to for like YouTube videos and whatnot. But like I think that that had a really big impact on people taking um the concepts that I think we've been talking about for a very long time seriously which are basically like the the classic motion POV is kind of crazy that like all this stuff has changed and so much has happened in the last few years but like the POV is still exactly as it was when we
(05:00) were first chatting about like why we're building motion which was that there was a gap between the people that are like thinking about revenue and data and numbers and the people that are like producing the creative. So we noticed that those two disciplines were so far apart and I think towards uh when we started working on motion 2020 2021 we saw a really big shift from basically like audience targeting being a really big part of media buying to like all of a sudden kind of felt like a bit overnight the revenue lever started to just basically be creative and the algorithm
(05:34) was going to handle targeting and figure out who to put it in front of. Um, and so our view at the time, and I think it just becomes more and more true every year, is that those two disciplines really do need to merge into one.
(05:49) Like the people thinking about driving revenue and analyzing data, they really got to get their creative caps on. And then the people that are producing creative, if they want to level up, if they don't just want to be like order takers that are just kind of producing stuff, then eventually even like preai, we always had the the view that if you're a creative person that just produces what other people tell you to produce, you're uh you're not creating a ton of value.
(06:16) Like as soon as you can articulate to someone, hey, go and make me this, executing that work is actually not that useful or valuable really. And so as a creative person, it's like how do you rise up to a higher level of abstraction, create more value, and the best way to do that is to like get your data caps on and like think about revenue and the impact of your work, which was like a really empowering story to creative people.
(06:34) And I I think we saw people come from both sides of it. Um but in particular creative people are like you know I actually think they they will win in in whatever is about to happen because to have like taste and judgment and like kind of an eye for good creative is a lot more difficult to teach than it is to be like hey by the way look at what happens with revenue and data and so on.
(06:57) Like that is easier to wrap your head around. And so our view is like could we build products to really help bridge the gap between those two worlds? And it just feels like every year since we started the message of that idea reaches like a wider and wider and wider appeal. The the stat that recently just like starting to blow my mind.
(07:20) You guys know we've been creating like content and do a ton around like virtual events since the early days of motion. I think Andrew, you were on the first virtual event we did. I think it was you, Nick Sharma, and one other person. And I don't remember who it was, but like the first like marketing idea we had for motion was like, "Hey, there's a lot going on. Like we got to do like long form stuff.
(07:38) Like let's get a bunch of smart people together for an hour and do like a live event for an hour." People are still talking about it, you know. That's why I wasn't invited. He said, "Smart people." Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's why you weren't there. That's smart people. Yeah.
(07:53) We we did a creative trends event at the end of last year and it got 26,000 registrants. Just insane. Like I think that the the that's kind of been our marker for like how wide appeal these ideas are is like how many people show up to our events. Um so something's going on. And I think I think the the the idea that this um uh collapsing of roles I think is not just true in our industry but like it seems like in many many industries where we're entering an era where if people the the individuals who can juggle what seem to be like opposing skill sets and bring them into one are just so valuable so extremely valuable.
(08:35) And now like with the help of AI like you can really extend the things that you're maybe not uh naturally as good at to basically be these more like polymath multi-skll set individuals and I think we're going to see a lot more of that. Um and uh just a fun just a fun time to be doing anything honestly. I think it's just such an exciting time to be living through.
(08:57) I mean, so okay, so you have, so right now, let's take about like um let's say I have a brand. Let's say it's an eight figureure brand and we sell water bottles or whatever. We go through and have hired maybe a couple creative strategists. We have uh people that are creative strategists. We have a designer and we have a couple designers and we have a video editor.
(09:17) This seems to be like a typical setup now. Okay. And like maybe creative director if you're lucky, right? Or you're thinking about this, you know, in a bigger picture. What do you think is advice that you would give to organizations that have this model and like how is this going to evolve even in the next six months? Um because so much of I mean already it's gone from like briefing to you know like people were putting together briefs which obviously is still happening to a degree and then it's like you go out and create it and I think there's still some of that that you're
(09:47) going out and you know you're creating the UGC or you're getting UGC back and all this but it seems like a lot of what these people are doing now is they're like project managing to a degree with a creative idea and looking at performance as well. So they have to have paid social performance.
(10:03) like I'm doing a search right I'm doing three searches now for creative strategist and I sent candidates to each of these people and every one of them wrote me back and was like what's their paid social experience and I was like yes let me tell you about that like I sorry I didn't mention that and they all want that they I want to have that because that's what where they're headed so where how does this team evolve like how do people build the right way in my in your opinion yeah it's an it's an interesting question it's also I think a a question of timelines I think there's so much that
(10:29) can be said about where we're headed with AI and it's hard to say like how much of it is going to be applicable next week, next month, next quarter, this year. Like I think that's probably the the piece to like whenever you hear any AI advice. It's trying to figure out like you know is this something that like we're is going to be years in the making or like what do I actually do tomorrow or next week? I think the more useful tactical tomorrow, next week, next month type of ideas is probably less around reimagining the way org charts work, right? Right. I think I think I think
(11:02) that will happen. I think we're going to have to reimagine org charts, but I don't think that is like the most important thing to do right now as like a business leader is to start reimagining org charts. The way that I think about it, and I've been trying to like start to instill this in our team, is that I think everyone's job at this point, I do think this is like this should be a next week thing.
(11:25) It's going to sound like a later this year thing, but I I I do believe this should be like a right now problem is that every individual, no matter what job role they have, I think the right way to think about our jobs right now is as allocators of AI tokens and what I mean and the reason that's an interesting framing is that step one there is a question of like what is my AI token consumption right now? Like I'm I'm not being paid by the AI labs to say this.
(11:52) And by the way, you can use like a lot of tokens on some of these like subscription plans, right? It doesn't necessarily translate to burning lots of money. But the first question is like, am I doing stuff that translate into like AI token consumption? And that's the first place to start. If me or other people on the team are still not like deploying AI tokens for some body of work, that's wrong.
(12:14) Like I I think I think we should be doing something that involves like using up AI tokens. Then the next question is like is my return on AI token positive? Like am I doing useful work? Am I doing valuable work? Am I like am I creating more value with these AI tokens that I'm spending versus whatever they're costing me? Which I I think it's very hard to do poorly on that trade.
(12:40) Like I I think if you're if if you're deploying AI tokens to do any any kind of work that you find is interesting, chances are it's going to be really valuable. But I I think that is a good way to start thinking about things in this exact moment. The the problem the reason why people don't do it as much as they should be doing right now is that in order to get value out of AI, it takes some investment, takes some time investment. Got to learn a bit of vibe coding.
(13:01) You probably need to like do things you've not tried before. Like it the the barrier to entry isn't like that's probably the hardest thing. Like my my sense is that we have extremely capable AI models that have not been diffused into the economy, but it is but they are real and like you see it in in the coding industry and the way that it's like completely transformed that industry right now.
(13:28) Like that's it's not a it's not a theory for that industry like coding is forever changed. It is not the same job as it was even like 12 weeks ago and I think that is going to be true for every other other industry as well. So anyways, long long answer to the question of like I don't think people should be like shuffling around their org charts right now, but every individual in whatever role they are in should ask the question of like if I was forced to spend $1,000 or $2,000 in some kind of AI credit consumption over the next few weeks, what might I do with that? Even if you don't want to give your employees free reign to go and burn
(14:00) a few thousand, which I I think is money well spent, but even if not, like at least get them to like run that as a hypothetical, like if you had to spend $2,000 in AI credits, like what would you do? And I think the answer to that question is basically the answer to what people should be doing right now.
(14:21) It's like force yourself to think about enlarge blocks of AI tokens and then think about what's the most meaningful work you can do with that. We can talk about certain examples. I can give you one that I did the other day that was quite expensive in terms of like token processing but was I found it very useful. Yeah, I would love to hear the example. Okay, one one quick one quick sidebar. Sure.
(14:38) I've been trying this entire like last couple of weeks just like force everybody to like go into cloud co-work and just like whenever you're about to do something, go there first. And like I know that sounds like you're not outsourcing all of your thinking and decision-m to this, but it's like you're using it as a sparring partner to like help you get closer to the right decision. And I just like I just keep getting random HTML visualizations from the team.
(14:57) It's like, okay, like this makes me this helps me understand this better. Um, and it helps me like think of the process to even get through this in the first place. Um, so I've been seeing that show up a little bit more frequently with our team just trying to like push that and it's been it's been fun to see. But, um, tell me how you burned a bunch of money. Okay.
(15:16) So, so our AI agent, uh, which by the way, I think this is the year of last year was the year of overhyped products because AI wasn't really there. Uh, and this year is the year of like underhyped products that really work. We h we we we have launched an AI agent called Runith. We've not really talked about it.
(15:35) If you log into motion, you will see it. Our goal is to actually not make a splash about it, but we just kind of release the agent into our little universe. And uh and we kind of want to take the opposite approach of really big splashy launches.
(15:50) But the thing is completely taken off when we see our usage metrics on Runith. It's just like a vertical line in terms of the amount of usage that people are are doing on the agent. And I can't remember the time period I looked at. It may have been in the last like few weeks. People have exchanged a total of 40,000 messages with Runith.
(16:07) Just to give you a scale of like how far this thing has gotten. And I was like, "Okay, there's no way I'm gonna read 40,000 messages, but like what if I could understand what the hell's going on here? Like, what are people asking? What do they want? And like, what what are some themes and trends?" And I'm like, "I could probably get AI to go and read every single one of those conversations and come back to me.
(16:28) " But obviously, you don't go and just like dump 40,000 messages into like chat GPT or whatever, like blow up the context from those. So, I like vibecoded some stuff with cloud code. We came up with a plan together of of how it was going to go and like do it one by one.
(16:43) By the way, I did this like several weeks ago and I just had one agent do it. So, it took like a few hours and I felt like an idiot now for doing that last time cuz now what you could do is like create a swarm of agents, right? So, I just told Claude, can you spin up like 40 agents and then you just divide the work and then they just like attacked it and they were done in like 20 minutes.
(17:04) that was I I can't remember what it cost but it wasn't cheap because I was using expensive model like I really did want to understand what's going on there but like that is an example of the scale of work that is possible to do right now but it's a different paradigm than I think chat GPT has like screwed things up for us a little bit where we are used to sitting there and talking with AI back and forth as like like a chat partner which I I I actually think like that is a great place to start and it creates a ton of
(17:32) you um but Sequoia, if we can link to the I'll send you guys the the the link and we could share it in the show notes, but Sequoia released this article where they basically claimed that we have achieved AGI for like practically speaking we have achieved it and the the the the framing that they were describing was around this idea of long horizon agents.
(17:54) So like how do you set up a work environment for an agent to go and do work for like an hour or two or three? And I I think that is the paradigm shift that when we start thinking about the world that way, it starts to be like okay this is really powerful like the the kind of work outputs that I can get done from AI starts to be really interesting as opposed to like going back and forth and talking about you know what's the history of this or that you know. All right, friends.
(18:19) This episode is brought to you by Northbeam, the marketing attribution solution we love over here at the pod. And you know, Zach, good news. North Beam is launching Northbeam incrementality. Have you guys used this? We have. We've gotten a little bit of access to it and so far so good. Max is stoked. Who's my CMO? He's digging it. Yeah.
(18:40) I mean, out of the gate, we're we're super happy. Yeah. I mean, I North Beam Incrementality gives you easy automated self-service incrementality tests uh right there in the platform. Um, and it gives you sort of like actionable data. It allows you to operationalize a lot of these. I think that's a big difference between North Beam's incrementality tool and what we have other places in the market.
(19:02) It can, you know, run basically it runs end to end with lift testing with your MTA and your MM. So, you can scale what works and cut what doesn't, which, you know, I know for for you guys at your companies are is huge, right? Yeah. I mean, the fact that we use North Beam as our our north star for all of the dollars that we spend to have this functionality built in right into the MTA is just like not only a timesaver, but it's just makes the workflow much easier. So, big fans. Yeah.
(19:27) And it's something that you trust, which I think is huge. So, they're giving right now really good deals, pretty cool uh 50% off offer to listeners of the Scalability School podcast. You just go to northbeam.com/incinccrementality and you get to be the first on the list. So tell them what we sent you. 50% off all tests for a year for those who join now. So check it out.
(19:52) Lots of awesome features that you have and uh look forward to hearing how it goes for you. I mean give us the tea res. What were some of the things that you know were being what were like thematic things that people were talking about it with? Yeah. Well, what was cool is like it it it gave me some insights about things that what people were trying to do that that that it couldn't work and so people were trying to do a lot of image generation, video generation that we don't support yet, but we will soon.
(20:13) But probably the biggest one is around concepting. So I think there there is this um when we think about the creative strategist job, we've had this view for a long time that downstream of concepting is basically producing briefs that other people are going to execute.
(20:29) But the act of concepting is basically to try to find the like higher level themes that are worth pursuing that are worth creating five or six or 10 briefs around. And so it it really is around like what themes are working, what themes are not working and how do I explore ideas at a concept level so that I can basically go and create like a few versions of that concept. And so that was like by far by far the most the most common use case.
(20:54) But it's super interesting because we're starting to see the agent like part of the our view on this was that on a long enough time horizon the agent is going to disrupt our core business because you might spend a lot of time inside motion poking around looking at reports trying to gather insights but now you can just like tell run to do it and it'll go and like gather stuff.
(21:13) So like it it did a lot of one of the things that we've done in preparation for this moment is that when you connect your ad account to motion when I say like underhyped products like this is kind of what I mean.
(21:30) We're not loud enough about this but I our view is that like we have such a big community and once people start to experience the value like it'll just spread organically it's not worth us like shouting from the rooftop. So we're spending a lot of time trying to get our customers to adopt this stuff. But basically, when you connect your ad account to motion, what we immediately start doing is like watching every single one of your videos and we're summarizing them.
(21:47) So, you know how people are like have figured out that you can upload your video to Gemini and you say, "Hey, Gemini, like watch this video." And like as soon as you connect your ad account to motion, like we we are off to the races doing that for you, processing every video, summarizing every video, most importantly like categorizing every video based on AI tags that we know really matter.
(22:05) Not like was there a dog in this image in in this ad or not, but like what were the hook tactics used here? What messaging angles are found here? What visual formats? Like the the key elements that we know creative strategists use to test. And so all of this rich data is like ready and cleaned and just like perfectly LLM friendly.
(22:27) And so when you type into motions agent some kind of question like we've already prepared all of that so it can fly, right? Like I think when a lot of people are taking this use case and trying to vibe code their own agent which I think is an excellent idea by the way everybody should do it because then when they come to what we have they'll appreciate it more.
(22:46) I actually think there's like an appreciation gap that you really get like when we talk to users that have vibe coded their own systems like oh my god this is crazy but when we talk to people that haven't done that yet like oh this sounds fun. When all of that is clean and ready to go, then the agent can really really fly. Um, so that was another really big use case is people asking it questions like, "Hey, what's working? What's not working?" And like giving it more and more challenging questions and like it delivers and and and does a good job.
(23:11) And so like what I was trying to figure out was that um where are the places it gets stuck or where are the places where like based on the conversation patterns it seems to be going well or it seems to not be going well and the parts where it didn't go well uh what what can we learn from that and like it there's just so so many interesting use cases I think around processing large a very large body of data that we we couldn't possibly do right now but that it would give us so much more clean
(23:41) information to make better quality decisions. So, lot lot of interesting stuff that uh that I think this year people are going to be pretty blown away how different it was to last year where last year is like everyone was kind of made to feel dumb. All these really like splashy videos and like expensive courses and whatnot.
(24:03) But I think this is the year where like people are going to experience the like wow stuff is real. It works. I can't believe it. Yeah. So, let me ask you this. So basically you have this pattern of um you know right now people are really looking for iterations and or um rather sorry personas and new new angles to go after and everything that's like a huge part of what you know you're trying to do as meta advertiser.
(24:26) There's this shift and it sort of like started when you like launch ads then you're using motion to look at creative analytics. you're like, "Oh, that makes sense." And now it's like the next phase of it, which is like, yes, you're looking at creative analytics, but it's also then unlocking the analytics now is not just numbers, but it's also the concepts.
(24:42) And so that's unlocking these new ideas and new concepts and new groups of people you can get in front of. We know with creative diversity that style is important as well. So is the next phase of this you think like we'll be able to to go and not only unlock new angles and you know that type of idea but look at what's trending on certain social platforms and be able to weave that in and then it's pulling in that along with what people are responding to on your ads and it's saying hey by the way you should run this ad and I think that's what Meta is trying to do but they're like ter not going to do that very well um themselves but is that where
(25:12) we're going in your opinion um on this you know in terms of like what the next phase of it is? Well, yeah. And to add like one more thing before that, it's like you said we have this the um Sequoia like they're saying you should think about how to do two to three hours worth. It's like okay I I pull up Replet and I'm saying do this and I think I have this super long plan.
(25:30) I'm going to hop in the sauna and I'll be back in 20 minutes. And I look and it's like it ran for five. I'm like [ __ ] Okay. I like I don't even know how to get there. So I'm curious like as a part of that like do is the way that we do work right now in DTOC land specifically it's like is there even things that AI can do in two to three like is there even enough to be done for to think in that way right now or are they talking about um you know like bigger bigger projects and we're just we're just small fish so I don't know if you can somehow wrap that in yeah so on the style piece I
(26:00) I think they're kind of related um is that so one one of our AI tags is called visual format that's the tag that we've kind of thought about as this like this kind of spans across brands because like a podcast ad is a podcast ad or like you know a before and after or us versus them like these are the basically the formats that people are using.
(26:24) So we do categorize those for all of your ads and we also have a very like our inspo product is one that we've been working on quite a bit for the last six months and it's now very very good partly because we're tagging all of inspo as well. So, like not just we're not just tagging all of your own creatives, we're tagging the entire ad library.
(26:42) We've taken a bit more of a curated approach where like there are lots of ads that are not interesting on the inspo library. So, we've tried to like rank the the brands that we think do a good job, but we're also watching all of those videos and categorizing them based on visual formats. So, we have a pretty good pulse on what brands are shipping, what visual formats are new or trending, and most importantly, like what are the visual formats that you have not tried yet, right? Because if we can categorize all the visual formats that other people are doing, then we can just immediately give you the delta of of what your competitors are doing that you're not. It
(27:09) seems, we'll see if things change over time, but it seems like right now the formula is basically something like figure out what messaging angles work, the kinds of messaging angles that if they work, you could probably spend millions of dollars against that messaging angle, and then try to find as many visually diverse ways of expressing that messaging angle until either the messaging angle runs dry or you've run out of like visual ways to express that. and then just repeat and repeat
(27:37) and repeat where you basically go from like big messaging anchor one to the next and really floor it in terms of the amount of like visual diversity of ways that you can express that. Um and and so like in some sense there's like a simplicity in that in that formula that like even that you know it's so interesting that as an industry we are one foot into like the depths of AI and then another foot into like wait what's the right way to do marketing like you know a lot of brands are are
(28:07) trying to get their bearings about this like these just like 101 marketing principles that I actually think the more algorithm based the targeting becomes the more the principles of marketing are just like kind of what has always worked. As part of that, I think because of, you know, the question you asked Brad about the like are is there even like multiple hours of work.
(28:27) I think it's helpful to think about that as like a mental model, but we have a lot of like 5, 10, 15 minute chunks of work that we can get through before we get to like deploying AI that not just runs for 2 three hours.
(28:45) Like it should just be running 24/7, you know, like there actually is no reason why we don't get to a point soon where AI is just kind of working around the clock. But I think the idea of thinking about multi-hour work is a good breaking of our chat GBT paradigm where we cuz like I had a big conversation with a lot of our engineering team and product team as we were designing the new version of the agent that has completely taken off.
(29:05) There was a trade-off between how fast it could be, right? People are like, you know, people are going to get annoyed if it has if you have to wait like a minute. They're so used to chat GBT. Like, we're going to get killed if they type in a question like, please analyze my last 300 days worth of ads and we don't give in an answer in like 10 seconds. People are going to get pissed.
(29:26) And I was like, "No, people people probably wouldn't mind waiting 1 2 3 4 minutes if it was clear that like hours of work just got done that would have taken you hours like in that like 2 3 minute query." And so I think that actually is like I really pushed our team to think about like it's actually the complete opposite.
(29:43) It's not how fast can we get our agent to respond to you, it's how long can we get it to work and be productive. So like the question of latency is like literally the opposite. like I don't want it to respond in in 30 seconds. I want it to go and do 10 hours worth of work for you and for users to be happy with that 10 hours of work.
(30:06) So, it's it's more of like um I I I think anybody in knowledge work if there's one paradigm shift that they make is that if you can get an agent to go and do work five minutes of work for you, great. Then try to do 10, then try to do 15 and keep trying to push that until you have an agent doing work for you for a longer period of time. I think it's it's useful to do all this vibe coding stuff, but I will say not just us, but like everybody who's been building software for the last year now has like models that really work.
(30:34) And so I think like software products are just going to get so magical this year. And so like for people who don't feel like going through the learning curve of figuring out cloud code in your terminal, like basically it's all coming to you in real time really fast.
(30:48) And I think I think people are going to be able to skip the the learning curve part of it. But I I I think it's useful to experiment and play and try things out. But yeah, software products are going to get magically good this year. Can we can we dangle some some use cases? This doesn't need to become a motion pitch. I have some like I have a specific example I can share to like kick this off of like if you logged in if you're connected to motion right now as an example.
(31:12) And you could you could before before motion had the whatever version I have access to of the agent um in the the chat window like before that was that was in there you know it's like you could you could use to your point you could use Gemini um to analyze things one by one and then you could try to drop it into cloud or chat and you could try to like stitch all these things together. So it's like it's not you need motion to do this.
(31:29) I'm just saying it makes a little bit easier to do it. Um maybe maybe more than a little bit but I think giving people some maybe specific examples like where they can find extra value today. So I'll share one.
(31:42) I'm basically telling our entire team is like we should do this for every single client today because it's super easy to do and I already wrote the prompt for it. My my example. So like we we have clients that um I think there's a lot of teams that probably feel like hey we're we're kind of limited on assets and maybe we don't want to tiptoe into videogen AI creators. We think that's a leak. What whatever their opinion is about creating it.
(32:00) So like we have to do with what we have. I think people get stuck thinking if I'm going to iterate like I can't I've got a video. I've only have I only have a two-minute video. I can't do that much with this. And I think like that's terrible thinking because you can do two minutes is an insane amount of footage for like what you can do with that. So I I can share this prompt.
(32:15) Maybe we could save it somewhere for people to to copy and paste and drop it into motion, but it's like take your top spending video of the last 30 days and just go ask it to iterate. But you can be more specific about how to iterate. So it's like take this video using only the footage that's in here, only the voiceover that's in here, anything that's in the video, and then come up with a couple of different things.
(32:31) One, how do I how do I change the visual hook in a bunch of different ways to make it packaged up like it's a new video? Two, how do I rewrite the narrative of this? Like, is there something later on in the video that is more compelling as a hook that you can pull up to the front, but it changes kind of the narrative and the framing of this? Three, ditch the voiceover entirely.
(32:50) Just make it an organic looking video. It goes from 2 minutes to being 15-second clips and it just pops up the different features on the screen. Uh, and there's like a million like there's there's so many other ways that you can do this. I've done this several times.
(33:01) At some point last year, I put together a case study of us doing this very manually and we took an ad that's like the first time we launched it, spent 16 grand. And by the end of the the 60 iterations, literal 60 60 iterations we made, this ad spent a million dollars over the course of 9 months. And it's like I'm I'm not saying tiny iterations to death.
(33:20) Like don't just change the the text overlay, but if like you run this motion will give you those examples. This is the Andrew Foxwell guarantee on it on my behalf. It's like if you if you don't find something that like gives you additional ad spend or becomes a new winner, I would be shocked because you can get if you have two minutes of footage, you could you could probably make 50 unique looking ads with that.
(33:37) Throw in an AI voiceover that again tells a different story on top of that and you're extending it even further. So, um, what are how I guess like I'm curious how you feel about that. And then two is like what what other specific examples are you seeing people run? Yeah, that's that's really cool that I I've seen a similar example where basically like repurposing content and footage is a really interesting idea.
(33:56) Um I saw another use case where someone was doing that but on a larger scale. Like it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be one video, right? like you can tell it. I I saw one that was like go do that but for the last 100 top spenders that we've had and then try to like mix and match and take only the stuff that you've seen from these like 100 scalers cuz we know we have the footage and so on and how do you kind of Frankenstein together a new set of ads that are from like all of these different um past footages. And so like the thing that's really interesting is you
(34:29) can take any example and just multiply the scale on it and say like okay if you could do it for one you could do it for 100. And the thing that is super interesting I mentioned like underhyped idea like the the the agent that you have and everyone is using and the one that is like basically gone vertical.
(34:49) We've been referring to it as like the legacy agent at this point just like that's how fast things are moving in in AI and like there was a new paradigm that I think you guys saw this like open claw cloudbot multbod whatever we're calling it these days like that the reason that thing took off there's a really interesting principle in that that I think you will see applied to basically the idea of AI agents from now till the rest of time is that AI a and it's it's the reason why cloud code is really powerful on your desktop it's the reason why cloud But co-work is really powerful.
(35:17) It has access to your desktop. Basically, it turns out that if you if you give these powerful models access to a computer, they can do unbelievable things. Like give them access to a computer and give them some time and they will do unbelievable things. The open claw is an example in the most extreme sense because like they could do crazy things. They could like they can get you hacked.
(35:38) Like it's it's a very like be careful with that one. It's fascinating, but be careful. But the the the new version of the agent that we're releasing is basically has its own computer in the cloud, its own virtual machine. Like for every single company that's a motion customer, we are giving their agent its own dedicated virtual machine dedicated to that brand and only that brand just so that it's like safe and sandboxed.
(36:02) And so that means that any com any command that you type into the agent, it has like an entire computer at its disposal to go and do that for you. And the thing that when you watch these agents, how they work, when you give them like a file system in the computer, the thing that starts getting crazy is that they start writing files for themselves.
(36:21) So like write himself a to-do list, come up with a plan, write like reference documents, and it basically is the solution to the context window problem, right? You know that if you just throw a ton at AI, it's going to get confused. So then you're like, "Well, I want you to process a lot of information, but if I just throw all that information at you, like you're going to get confused and hallucinate.
(36:42) " But when it has its own file system and you watch it, it'll like leave itself notes and give itself like reference points and jump back and forth between files and it's kind of the solution to the context window problem. And so like when hopefully we'll I I don't know why the team didn't give you early access.
(36:56) We'll we'll make sure you're you have early access to try it out, but it's just like a different scale of example. So when you think about what can this thing do like you you can basically say if you think about for example like a weekly cycle right like how would a team work how many assets do you need to produce this week and almost like working backwards from a weekly body of work that starts to get really interesting because okay how am I getting to decide like the concepts that I want to pursue well probably I need to do a crap ton of research in my own data probably in the inspo library which by the way the
(37:28) agent has access to the entire inspo library annex social coming soon. Um, so it's it's getting to the point where if you can come up with an SOP that somebody on your team was going to go and execute that this week as part of the process to produce like I don't know 20 30 40 ads that week. You would be surprised how many of those steps is possible to just like get AI to do it.
(37:51) might be, you know, go and look all of our top performers and all of our bottom performers and try to find the themes and trends from each, right? Like that's that's a very common use case we've seen people do for years. Go look at all of our ads, see the top performers, see the bottom performers, watch them, and try to come up with themes and trends. Like, okay, that's gone.
(38:10) You can you can b and you know, when I say that's gone, it's like there is some back and forth to get the agent to do that work to your level of satisfaction. And so I think that basically starts to become what work feels like for us.
(38:28) How do I give the agent a long task and go back and forth on like the structure of that task until I'm happy with the output? I'm not saying that like every time you do that like one shot it's going to be excellent. But you can iterate on that and let it go work for 10 minutes and then see what that and iterate on it again. And some of those like what you're finding is you have a prompt that works and now you can kind of reuse it or iterate.
(38:48) It's I think I think we're going to be experimenting with different approaches to like research, let's say. Like you know how right now we probably do a lot of work that acts as like the inputs to our decisions, but we have limited time and we're probably just kind of winging it a little bit. Like what happens if you could do 10 times 100 times the amount of research work before you make any decision, right? like that that's the kind of example that I think AI could create the most amount of leverage is and it's so funny we really believed this last year that's why we never got into asset generation
(39:23) because we're like that's the least valuable part of the process the most valuable part in the process is like back office creative it's like all of the things that go into the inputs of producing creative and that's the stuff that's very timeconuming anyway so like how can you scale the amount of it's kind of the example I gave of with the help of AI you can go and like understand 50,000 messages ages, you know, and like use that as an input to make better product decisions.
(39:46) Like that is helpful as opposed to like, hey AI, go build me three more features. It's like, okay, it could probably do something, but it's like, no, hey AI, like go and help me sift through all this craziness to help me come up with my next decisions that I'm going to create, which by the way, I'll probably get your help on too.
(40:05) But, you know, I think what it also starts to expose too is, and this is why I was saying like as an industry, we're like moving forward on multiple fronts. probably the most important front is still just like creative strategy best practices. Like often the reason why people don't know how best to deploy an AI agent is because they still need to like master what good creative strategy means.
(40:26) And the more you get good at that, the more obvious it becomes. Um, which by the way, plug for Motion's first ever virtual boot camp that we're launching in uh in I think we're already started to promote it and uh doors open in March. This is going to be a really cool program mostly centered on just like fundamentals, best practices, just trying to become an excellent creative strategist.
(40:48) The more people spend time becoming an elite creative strategist, the more obvious it becomes like how AI can help you because uh a lot of it is about like gathering inputs to make really high quality decisions and AI is very good at helping you gather inputs. Um, so I think I think it's going to be a fun year as people try to master two fronts, being an elite creative strategist and getting really good at AI.
(41:10) Yeah, I uh I actually created some created a little content about the uh boot camp and uh some of my content around it. I'm singing for the ad, just FYI in case you want to ask your team about that. I don't know if you saw that. Uh but it's uh going pretty viral right now.
(41:25) I would like to transition us to um a new segment of the show that I've never even told Brad about called after hours, which is what we would talk about if we had hit stop because it's always really interesting what happens when you like aren't recording and what we get into. And I want to ask a question. So, welcome to the after hours segment of this podcast.
(41:45) Right now it sounds like you know your opinion is people need to be focusing on longer agentic shifts in terms of like they need to be you know giving more hours more tokens and that's like the metric of getting into it deeper you see across a lot of creative teams like what are what are the things that people need to be doing right now that there's not like that are they're missing on or they're stuck on or that you see all the time that just drives you crazy that you're like look like you got to get better like this is something that's happening. So, one one of the things that we've
(42:14) been talking about internally quite a bit is just how important hooks are. And I think that's not a new idea. I think like everybody who's doing anything in direct response, creative strategy, there is this obsession around hooks. But one of our views recently has been that hooks are so much deeper than this like tacky pattern interrupt that you might do in the first 3 seconds.
(42:36) It's almost like the hook is like the DNA for the whole thing. And if the team gets good at hooks, they've got it all figured out. Like everything basically becomes downstream of being really good at hooks. And so I think it's it's so interesting seeing like a wide range of teams that are elite at creative strategy. And I actually think like that's been a minority of people.
(42:59) We we live in this like bubble of exceptional DTOC marketers, which has been like I I just feel so fortunate that we've been amongst this like group of elite advertisers. But like you stick your head out and you talk to like the everyday brand like wait what's a hook? Like what do you mean? Like what's going on? Like and so I think there's a lot of people who are just kind of learning direct response principles for the first time.
(43:25) And I think um if that piece of the equation is not in a good place, then everything else is going to suffer and struggle. So like as people come up with like concepts and ideas, but they're not kind of thinking about them in direct response hooks, then like then things are really going to suffer. And like this is probably a bigger conversation, but one of the things that I've started to notice even with the elite direct response teams who have completely mastered hooks.
(43:44) I find it mind-boggling that there's still this brand team that hasn't understood what's going on here yet and is disconnected by it. And I have a theory on this that I feel like the the brand team is in for a bit of an awakening because you go back like seven, eight, ten years, the people that were doing direct response, they were like destroying the brand, right? They were doing like crazy things, like tacky things, like things that were just like really easy. All right.
(44:12) Well, you know, like but partly it was because the lever was audience targeting. It's like, listen, I I just need to get in front of the right person. As soon as I do that, like we're printing money. And so it was just like things that were not necessarily rooted in, let's say, creative taste, right? Like it was it was not very creative.
(44:32) But now you actually look at direct response is a very is a very creative sport at this point. And the people that are really good at creative at direct response are actually producing incredible content that in many ways is indistinguishable from what's going on in organic.
(44:48) And the reason I make that point is to say that it used to be that the brand team was basically like they understood the customer. They didn't they understood the the narrative that connected the brand with the customer. Whereas it seems to me like now the direct response creative strategists they are the brand like they are the ones that are actually building these like connections with customers through ads through social and the brand team is actually the one that is more disconnected at this point.
(45:14) Not to create a feud amongst teams, but like I've seen it quite a bit at this point. Like if if you have a team that's like starting to think about TV or starting to think about by the way, totally agree. Billboards, it's like you obviously should take the best performing hooks from paid social and obviously that should be the basis for whatever billboard campaign you want to do, right? But it's like not really.
(45:31) that's like there's still this disconnect where people are uh and so I I I think our community of creative strategists are going straight to the top basically that uh the more p the more power they get the more influence they get the more revenue that the the companies make and the lines between what is direct response and what is just like good marketing at this point is like those lines are gone and uh and so my my hot take is our community needs to go straight to the top and basically
(46:01) get more power and influence at companies because they know it's working, you know, and like the the Yeah. And it's being tested like millions of times a day, you know what I mean? I I I I actually I agree with you and I literally had this conversation like the other day with somebody about that exact topic about I can't believe that the number of brands I see that are big brand big DTOC brands that they know all the data on the creative and what drives like revenue for them and then they still put out my example is connected TV this like connected TV thing that looks nothing
(46:34) like it and takes none of the elements and I'm like I don't understand like this things over here is making you jillion dollars and none of that shit's over here and this other thing looks super polished and they, you know, work with some connected TV company and whatever and it's like doesn't make sense.
(46:50) You brought up a new segment which was after hours and then you went into beefs and I just I just love how that flowed together. It was great. Um, let's get into beefs for sure. That's that's a be one one last point on that. I think Dar Denny started talking about this and I think I think she's we were like completely on the same page with her is that the creative strategist job is not necessarily to just like make more ads. It's to grow the business.
(47:10) And I think in in tech there is this idea that the product manager is basically like the mini C CEO, right? And the CEO of their product area or whatever. And I think the creative strategist is basically the mini CMO. And the skill that I think they need to learn and like organizations need to learn is like last few years was around bridging the gap between the creative and the data.
(47:32) And now it's like an altitude gap where it's like how do you bridge the gap between what's going on on paid social and social in general to basically the business. And the more rapid the feedback loop between higher altitude business decisions and what is going on in direct response I think that's the flywheel that will enable companies to grow really fast.
(47:51) And so I think to all the creative strategists who've been like learning and leveling up, the next year or two I think is leveling up to be like you should butt your head into what's going on at like the leadership level because the the amount of value that you can create to get them on board with the ideas around direct response like really could move the entire company.
(48:13) So like get the leadership, get the CEO, get the board involved in ads and like thinking about that because it is the most powerful signal for go to market for any consumer company is like taking the things that are working here and applying the entire go to market strategy around it and not being like oh there's this ads channel like no no no this is like the whole thing basically like the this is the feedback loop that should drive. Yeah.
(48:35) Not to like divulge into a whole separate topic, but like a lot of brand is viewed through this like layer of consistency across messaging and how things show up. But social feeds are everybody has a personalized progressively more personalized feed to them. And so like if you if you want a level of consistency, consistency doesn't necessarily mean that all of a sudden you're saying dramatically different things and your values are changing.
(49:04) is just like you're you're making them show up to that specific person in the way that they care about it. Um, and I feel like that's a that's a pretty big adapt like that's what performance mark because we don't care like okay I'm be a little dramatic for a second like we don't care we just wanted to make money.
(49:16) So it's like we were on that extreme and now like that's starting to be true. Um and on the brand team you know they're thinking well we needed to be consistent. It's like there's there's a way to be consistent without being dilutive, but also speaking to the person on the other end because like if there's trillions of pieces of content out on the internet and people are spam scrolling their feed every single day, it's like what's getting them to stop and pay attention is the thing that is more unique to them, which is why Meta is spending billions of dollars on GPUs or whatever the hell that I
(49:40) don't understand. So anyways, that just it made me think of that. If the consistency originates from what's going on in direct response and we use that as like consistency across everywhere else, I think that achieves brand goals of consistency while making revenue for the business. And actually like because direct response is is such a powerful beast at this point, you can't you can't fight it anymore because then you're going to be inconsistent.
(50:09) And like if you if you don't fight direct response and let it consume the brand and make sure that you're doing it in a way that's like authentic to the brand, like I think those are the brands that will do well both in terms of like near-term revenue and long-term brand is you got to work the hooks right into your brand identity.
(50:28) You know, it can't just be like our brand identity is X and then we're going to go try all these like unrelated hooks on paid social. That's not going to work. Like the hooks are the brand basically. like the hooks need to be consistent to the brand and it's not going to be the brand that's going to set the hooks. I think it's like kind of the other way around.
(50:41) So that there is a merger that needs to happen that um I think uh I think is going to be really interesting in our community is very well set up. So I think this is the year for our community to be like a lot more ambitious with the amount of value that they create in companies and not think about ads as a channel but like the the work that we're doing in paid as basically like the microcosm of the entire business's go to market strategy. Yeah. Yeah.
(51:07) There's there's there's many other things that I'd love to dig into. So we'll have to save that for a followup or uh you know a separate time especially as it pertains to uh what hopefully I get some early access to. But this is my this is my after hours questions. Like in the short term it's like this is awesome. Dopamine is perpetually popping off cuz you're just unlocking new things day after day.
(51:28) But like do you ever get like sad like [ __ ] what's going to be left for us? Like do are you there yet? Do you have that? Do you fall into that at all or you kind of like we got time? I don't go there for myself. Partly because I think that uh if you are a person who has like really high agency and really curious and like loves tinkering and playing around with stuff like we are in the moment where like that person is going to have a blast and like person like we've grown motion we're like 75 people now and like we have lots of different teams and so on but like I'm still like deep in the weeds
(52:01) of like playing around with AI and doing cool stuff like if uh if we didn't have motion and I wasn't running this company I would be having a blast just individually playing around with all this stuff. Um, and I I think there's a real superpower to the the people who are doing that. It is concerning.
(52:27) I will say it is concerning if you are not leaning in that direction because um increasingly that is going to be the way to create value which like I I I really do think about um we are allocators of AI tokens. I kind of love that job right. So like from my standpoint, I'm like that is exciting. And so I'm fired up. But I think uh where I get concerned and nervous if if you know there are some people who are like I don't know what that means.
(52:53) I don't want that job. Like I have a different job. I' like gotten used to a different job. And I I I think maybe it's not like this month, next month, maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but I think we're getting to the point where that's the only job left is being an allocator of AI tokens. And if you are not doing that job, I don't I don't think there is a job that is not that. Um interesting.
(53:14) So let's get allocated giving us not just food for thought, but a meal a meal for thought. An entire buffet for thought uh with this episode. Uh Resza, very much appreciate your time and um thank you for joining us on the Scalability School podcast. Thanks guys. Always a pleasure. This episode is brought to you by the Foxwell Founders membership that Andrew and his wife Gracie run.
(53:46) It has been absolutely pivotal for not just the Homestead team, but the Easy Street Brands team. We've had I don't even know how many members are currently in there that are a part of our ecosystem. But when it comes to anything from learning ads to understanding what's going on to building an agency to knowing retention, it's been absolutely useful for our team when they get stuck or they need help to just go there and resource all the other experts.
(54:04) So definitely would recommend it for anybody that's looking to, you know, take it a step deeper, try to get a little bit more knowledge on on growth marketing and all the world DTOC is. I think one of the most incredible things about it is you can just like open up the Slack group every single day.
(54:21) You can pin your favorite channels for the topics you care most about and like every day there's going to be somebody who just like because they want to contribute something valuable to the group. You can go learn something every single day and it's going to be extremely useful. There's there's some ballers in there that you just get like the benefit of learning from that like for the for the cost like you couldn't pay them that for their time but through the membership like you get access to some some incredible people and tons of resources. The Yeah.
(54:42) I mean I think the biggest resource to me too is like the events that you know Foxwell Founders does. They've been able to do some even in Wisconsin, even in the the boring state of Wisconsin, which is pretty awesome. Getting people together in person and able to have really just like honest conversations of what's going on, what's working for them now, you know, where where they're at in their business and knowing that there's going to be, like Brad said, some real killers in the space in this in this membership that can that can help and are willing to take the time and help. So, that's been
(55:08) a huge part of why a lot of our team have really enjoyed it as well. And the applications are now open if you're looking to join. So, founders. Yeah, foxfounders.com. Go check it out. Go apply. Do you want to say on this? Yeah, please go check us out on YouTube. Rack up those views for us. We'd love to see it. And then subscribe. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube as well.
(55:31) And I relentlessly refresh the YouTube comments because it dictates my mental health for the day. So, please say something nice about all of us. Thank you everyone. Thank you for listening. Honestly,
