co-founder of https://teapawt.net/t.co/z8lWLoQIG0 (new way to grow Shopify brands with creators). ecomm agency ceo. i scale brands.
San Diego, CA
Joined January 2009
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Holy smokes. Fantastic event by @runneth this week. Always fun when you get a bunch of real practitioners in a room together.
"The agents will be a gatekeeper of terrible products." @rezakhadjavi at Chief Marketer SF #ChiefMarketerSF
Stoked and curious to try the new Tatari Max (think PMax for TV) tatari.tv/insights/introduci…
Quick thing if you work with content creators: a lot of brands won't even brief them.
It's "hey, you want to make some content for us? Cool, here's the website."
And then the content ends up sucking. There's nothing more difficult than a complete blank slate.
But the opposite doesn't work either. Overwhelm creators with mandates and constraints and you'll just get bad stuff.
You want something in between. What we do is a one-page brief of what we want them to make, just simple bullet points, plus a folder of brand footage they can splice into their video if they want.
Enough direction to get them started, and enough room for them to be creative.
AI is unlocking a level of craft that's tough to accomplish when your team is slammed. We're actually able to be more creative.
Small example: we built a quiz for our website, and after the last question we added a three-second animation that looks like it's calculating your results.
The quiz was already fast. The animation just makes the results feel like they have more value.
It took us five minutes with Claude Code.
Before, there was never time for an idea like that. We had to ship it and move on. Now there's time for those little touches across all our work.
And it's addicting.
Might be a tough BFCM for some brands.
Only 17% of shoppers plan to do most of their holiday shopping on Black Friday, down from 25% last year.
29% are waiting until early to mid-December, up from 19%.
newsroom.bankofamerica.com/c…
I keep seeing posts where somebody brags that they “one-shotted” an entire video ad with AI.
But in the rare case that they post the prompt, it’s the most insanely art-directed, creative-directed prompt I’ve ever seen. One-shotted, after weeks on that prompt.
I’m a big AI dork, but it still seems that taste and talent behind the prompting are still very much the secret sauce to breaking through the noise. Team human ain’t done yet.
2027 will be the year of ads + custom lander, always. Interesting time to brand build when everything can/will be niche messaging and targeting. Feels like death to cable tv all over again. Shit, im old.
Sometimes a client gives us the old line: "you guys are the experts, you do whatever you want."
I'm like, look, man, that's cool, but we want to get you engaged. You should know what's going on. And when you know what's going on, we're able to have better brainstorms with you.
We want your questions, because sometimes the simplest questions are the best ones. They make us think about stuff and wake up.
Training someone new right now, and I feel almost like an old man saying kids won’t know how to do math if they use calculators.
I don’t know if that’s true or not when it comes to AI, but I do wonder about the next generation of professionals being able to get in a room with each other and actually have a productive brainstorm, when everybody is just vibe coding and vibe prompting everything.
But, weirdly, I’m sure that won’t end up mattering.
Anybody else prefer light mode over dark mode?
When I look at light mode I'm like, this is how the designer intended it. That's my theory. Nobody's designing emails dark mode first.
Same reason, the first time my wife and I watch a new TV show, we have to watch the entire opening sequence.
She's like, skip it. I'm like, no, a whole team made this and crafted this. I'm watching it.
In fact, sometimes I make us watch it multiple times.
A reminder if you ever sell out of a product.
Someone I work with keeps checking on a product, and it's still out of stock. I messaged the founder on X. I'm like, hey guys, why don't you have a notify me when available?
We do this for all the brands we work with. One of them builds up so much demand that when the back-in-stock email goes out, it's not uncommon for them to sell out again immediately.
We always do this because it's so effective.
The more we use AI, the greater the need for creativity and breakthrough ideas.
Everybody and their mom can now make a fundamentally sound ad. You can just plug it into ChatGPT or Claude and get a decent ad, honestly.
So the bar is raised, and the platforms very clearly reward novelty, newness and creativity.
It's scary times for agencies, but I actually feel very optimistic about what we do these days.
Around noon, someone on my team had an idea for a quiz for our website. It's based on a deep analysis of over a dozen actual sales processes with real clients and prospects. We built it with Claude, and it was fully live and working the same day.
In the past, this has been a month-and-a-half project for us. So I haven't been able to shut up about it.
The technology is there. This isn't a technology problem, it's a people and a collaboration problem.
2027 will be about rethinking the client-agency relationship to unlock all of these incredible AI tools, so agencies can work seamlessly for their clients.
And the agencies and client partners that figure that out are going to have a serious advantage!
AI is making the value prop for creatives in marketing clearer: be, well, creative.
That's becoming more and more of a differentiator for brands. A challenging one.
But creative alone isn't enough. You have to be fast too.
Amazon set the expectation for free two-day shipping.
AI is setting the expectation for high-quality creative at speed.
Cheap, good, fast. Pick two? AI or no AI, creatives now need good and fast.
A reminder for any early brands getting ready for Black Friday: with almost no exception, the two biggest days of a sale are the first day and the last day.
It changes by brand and by year, but if I had to bet, the last day gets the most sales. People panic and just say, "OK, fine."
Sense of urgency is one of the most freaking powerful things ever. We see tremendous success when we run ads that are just final hours, final hours, final hours.