Someone pinch me 🥹 Tell me how I just had my UGC journey and 10-year business story featured in freaking @Entrepreneur?! This is for sure one of those ‘Mama I made it’ moments that I’ll always cherish. Special thank you to Amanda Breen and @jlthoms for bringing this piece to life, and for giving the UGC community a spotlight. 💓 I’ve said it before, I’ll say it till I’m blue in the face: this is a win for the UGC community at large. A rising tide lifts ALL boats! 🛶✨📈

Nearly 20,000 people have learned through our free and paid resources since 2022. And something I've realized is that I know where a lot of their journeys started, but I don't necessarily know where they ended up. 🥹 If you ever took one of our courses, attended a live session, used our resources, or were part of the community, I genuinely want to know: Where are you now? What are you doing? What did learning UGC lead to? I want to hear ALL of it. ❤️

In performance creative, the rules change way too often. The moment you take yourself too far out of the game, you start losing access to the nuance of what’s actually happening in real time!

I use acronyms and marketing jargon ALL the time, but I make it a point to explain what the heck they mean instead of assuming everyone knows WTF I'm talking about. And it's because I VIVIDLY remember learning marketing terminology years ago and feeling unbelievably self-conscious about getting “caught” not knowing something. And without a formal education or degree to point to, I genuinely felt like a fraud when, in reality, I was just experiencing something way too common in performance creative. 😅 And yes, this was before AI chatbots could explain something in two seconds or video courses were readily available. Some of us had to figure things out ourselves or work up the courage to raise our hands and ask for help. 😒 So consider this your reminder that you don't need to know the terminology for something to be exceptionally good at it. Sometimes you develop the skill before you even learn what it's called. And not knowing the language of an industry doesn't mean you don't belong in it. Don't confuse unfamiliarity with terminology for a lack of intelligence, ability, or potential. 🫶

Being a great mentor doesn’t automatically make you a better creator, strategist, editor or service provider. In the same way that being great at any of those things doesn’t automatically make you a great mentor.

Knowing how to create content people watch vs. creative that drives measurable business outcomes are two VERY different beasts. Organic social and paid ads are NOT the same. Is the gray area thinner than EVER BEFORE? Absolutely. But the two can (and SHOULD) inform each other. Because when you're only looking at one side, your strategy becomes a reflection of the echo chamber you've built in your own little corner of the internet, rather than the bigger picture of what actually resonates with consumers AND drives results.

Scaling creative production is one thing, but what about scaling GOOD creative decisions? 👀 Think about it, producing more assets is relatively straightforward compared to building a process where every new concept, test, and iteration contributes to a better understanding of your audience and what actually drives performance. And yes, that probably means investing MORE effort into pre-production, being more intentional about what you're testing, and dedicating time to post-mortems instead of immediately jumping into the next batch of deliverables. But here's where it gets interesting… that investment compounds. And that's ONLY if you're not just focused on improving the creative you're producing today, but actively taking everything you've learned and applying it to your next batch of creative, so that every round of testing informs the next instead of starting from scratch. Zoom out for a sec and look at the bigger picture here, because I promise it's worth it: The real opportunity isn't just scaling how much creative your team can produce, it's scaling how much smarter your team gets with every round of production. 😉

Just because you're testing MORE ads doesn't mean you're learning more about what works. 👀 You could produce 50 new ads, launch every single one, and STILL walk away without meaningful insights if you weren't intentional about what you were testing in the first place. Be honest: How much are you actually learning if every variation changes the same superficial elements without exploring different strategic angles, objections, messaging, or audience motivations? The value of creative testing isn't just in identifying winners, that's table stakes, especially with platforms like @motionapp_ making it easier than ever to see what's performing. 😉 The SAUCE is in understanding WHY something won (or lost) and using those insights to make better decisions about what gets produced next. Because otherwise, you're just keeping the production machine running without necessarily getting any smarter about your creative strategy. 😅

Organic social and paid ads are NOT the same. Hear me out before you come for me in the comments, please! 🤣 Is the gray area thinner than EVER BEFORE? Absolutely. But knowing how to create content people watch or engage with vs. creative designed to drive measurable business outcomes? Two VERY different beasts, guys. Pleaseee don't get it twisted! A creator's following or ability to make visually pleasing videos for their own audience doesn't automatically mean they understand consumer psychology, objections, messaging, or how to create content for a specific product, audience, and commercial objective. Because I'm here to break it to you: there's a difference between hiring someone for the audience they've cultivated and hiring someone for their ability to produce effective creative. Sometimes you need influence and distribution. Sometimes you need performance creative you can test, iterate, and scale. And sometimes you need BOTH! But if you're anything like me, when I'm investing in creator-led performance creative, I'm looking for creators who understand the WHY behind what they're producing, not just how to make it look good and perform on their own little slice of the internet. And when brands (or creators) confuse the two, they're potentially wasting budget, time, energy and opportunities to actually learn from their creative investments. So before hiring your next creator, ask yourself: Am I paying for their audience, their creative expertise, or both? That's exactly what we're focused on at @ContentJet: connecting creator-native execution with performance creative strategy instead of treating them as interchangeable. Because the goal isn't just creating content people want to watch... although that would be a nice little ego boost, wouldn't it? 💀 The goal is creating content that gives your brand a better opportunity to turn those viewers into customers. 📈

What happens when creative teams are stretched too thin and pressured to produce MORE creative? Let me paint you a picture (proceeds to grab sticks for paintbrushes and mud for paint), because this is NOT going to be a pretty one. 😂 Strategy is often the first thing that gets oversimplified to compensate for maxed-out bandwidth, and that's where things start falling apart, because when the underlying strategy is weak, increasing production volume just means producing MORE creative that probably wasn't worth testing in the first place. 😅 So consider this your reminder that the goal isn't just to produce more creative, fam! It's to get better at producing creative that ACTUALLY makes sense from a testing perspective. Because when your creative decisions make sense strategically, they have a much better chance of making money. 😉

I've seen this way too many time to not say something... “being on social media” does not count as staying close to the work as a creative marketer… your FYP is literally YOUR algorithm, not everyone else’s, and even trends aren’t universally relevant across demos. 🫣 Seeing something everywhere on your feed is not the same as seeing what’s actually holding spend, scaling, fatiguing or converting across multiple accounts and verticals. That’s the difference between spotting a trend and spotting a performance pattern. 😤 And please don’t tell me we’re blindly doing trends for ads because… we already know how people feel about that. 😭

@ Most marketers: Using acronyms and industry jargon without explaining what they mean isn't the flex you think it is. And if I'm being honest, it’s giving troll-under-the-bridge gatekeeper vibes. 🧌😂 Knowing the terminology doesn't make you smarter than someone who doesn't... so let's normalize making knowledge accessible instead of making people feel stupid for asking what something means. 🫶

Organic social and paid ads are NOT the same. Is the gray area thinner than ever? Absolutely. But knowing how to create content people watch vs. creative that drives measurable business outcomes? Those are two VERY different beasts, guys. Pleaseee don't get it twisted. 😂 A larger following might get you noticed, but it won't automatically get you booked. Want repeat clients and consistent work? Learn how to deliver a meaningful return on their investment (what they paid YOU but also the money they're backing your ad with). 📈

Someone asked me a REALLY good question the other day: “When creative volume goes up, where does quality break first?” My answer? 👀 I think when teams are stretched thin and pressured to produce more creative, strategy is often the first thing that gets oversimplified to compensate for maxed-out bandwidth, and that's usually where things start to fall apart. Because suddenly, you're producing more ads, but you're not necessarily testing in a way that generates meaningful learnings to inform what you do next as a strategist, which means you could be spending more time and money producing creative without actually getting any better at understanding what works and WHY. And if the underlying strategy isn't strong to begin with, increasing production volume just means you're producing more creative that probably wasn't worth testing in the first place. 😅 This is why I don't believe creative quality and creative volume are mutually exclusive, and I'd actually argue that the real bottleneck is often the process supporting both, because the goal shouldn't be to produce fewer ads to protect quality, it should be to build systems that allow teams to produce MORE without sacrificing the strategic thinking that makes those ads worth producing. And while scaling creative production is one thing, scaling good creative decisions is an entirely different challenge, because it requires more intentional pre-production, probably a little more effort on the post-mortem, and a process that actually connects what you're learning from one round of creative to what you're producing in the next. But that's also where the investment starts to compound, because you're not just improving the creative you're producing today, you're developing a deeper understanding of your audience, your messaging, and the strategic bets worth making next, which makes every subsequent round of creative that much more intentional. So consider this your reminder that the goal isn't just to produce more creative, fam! It's to get better at producing creative that ACTUALLY makes sense from a testing perspective. Because when your creative decisions make sense strategically, they have a much better chance of making money. 😉

If I’m hiring someone to create, I care about how good they are at creating. If I’m hiring someone to strategize, I care about how good they are at strategy. If they also teach or mentor, great, but that doesn’t automatically make them the stronger hire.

UGC for performance creative (AKA paid ads) was NEVER about hiring the creator with the best social media presence or the most aesthetically pleasing videos... and it STILL isn't. It's one thing to build a social presence around how you want to be perceived, but it's another to have the case studies and performance data to prove you understand what makes an ad convert, regardless of vertical, target audience, etc. These are two VERY different skill sets... don't get it twisted!

And if there's ONE thing I hope people walk away understanding, it's that creative isn't just an output. It's a learning system. Because volume without a feedback loop is just production. And production alone doesn't make you a better marketer. 👀 Excited to represent ContentJet alongside our CCO Christian Zilio and Global Head of Business Development Walid Agour today! P.S. NYC FRIENDS! 🗽I'm in town all week and would LOVE to connect with more founders, marketers, creators, and people building cool things in the space. 🥂 We're also co-hosting a mixer with TikTok and Funnel Fox on Thursday, October 22, so if you'd like to join us, you can request to join here: lnkd.in/g_T2BQgb ☕ Oct 19–22: Looking to scale your performance creative? We're making time to meet with founders, brand leaders, and growth marketers while we're in NYC. Shoot me a DM! My schedule is filling up, but I'm always happy to make time for a good conversation. 🫶

Something I've believed for YEARS: the value of education shouldn't be measured by how much information you can fit into a course... or how much it costs. It should be measured by how much of that information someone can actually APPLY. More lessons ≠ more learning. More resources ≠ better outcomes. And more courses definitely don't guarantee more career opportunities... which is why we're trying to build UGC Pro's next chapter around that distinction. Less information for the sake of information and focusing our energy on more tools that help people actually DO the work. Stay tuned for UGC PRO 2.0... the app! 👀

One thing I wish more people understood about starting over in your 40s, 50s, or 60s is that you're not actually starting from zero. You're bringing decades of life experience, communication skills, emotional intelligence, and professional knowledge into a NEW discipline. And guess what? That's an ADVANTAGE! One of our UGC Pro students started learning UGC at 58 after losing her job. At 61, @missterriholley is working as both a creator and creative strategist... thriving and living her best life! So no, you're not behind—you just haven't discovered where your existing skills belong yet. 🥹

You don't need to know the terminology for something to be exceptionally good at it. Sometimes you develop the skill before you even learn what it's called OR realize how valuable it actually is. And sometimes you're already doing the job before the industry has even come up with a title for it. 😂 That was me with direct response video editing, UGC, and creative strategy back in 2014, 2015, and 2016. The industry looked NOTHING like it does today (duh), and half the things I was doing intuitively were things I wouldn't learn the actual terminology for until years later... 2018, to be exact. I was just following my curiosity, teaching myself new skills, experimenting, and figuring out what worked and WHY. Never in a million years would I have guessed that the skills I was teaching myself over a decade ago would end up paying off tenfold. Sometimes you're building expertise long before you realize how valuable it's going to become. So let this be your sign to keep pushing, learning, and growing. Think of those little moments of curiosity and experimentation as seeds you're planting and watering, even when you have no idea what they'll eventually grow into. You never know which ones will change your life. 🥹

You can forget 90% of what someone taught you and still remember the one thing that completely changed how you saw your future. A LOT of strangers on the internet that found UGC PRO didn't just need information, they needed someone who could help them see a path forward that they didn't know existed. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can teach someone isn't a skill, it's showing them what's possible. 🥹