We Audited 40+ 8-Figure DTC Ad Accounts in 2026. Here's What's Broken and How to Fix It

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29:03Loukas:One connected view, your whole financial experience in one place. Brands like Asio Beauty and Hello Paris are already scaling with this. So if you're spending serious money on daily expenses and getting absolutely nothing back on it right now, you're going to want to look into this. Back to the episode. Yeah, for sure. Seeing this more and more, and I think we're, yeah, transparently, like we're seeing a lot of brands that we work with now that are starting to use methods like this to create that flywheel at scale. So essentially, you know, it's all about how you can create a creator flywheel and lower your cost per creative and create this kind of compounding effect that can be utilized across multiple different channels.

29:49Loukas:So essentially, it's this idea of being able to seed hundreds of creators through TikTok. You know, you pay them a small fee plus commission to be able to use that creative on other platforms. but then you are able to incentivize them to reach certain milestones that could be in relation to volume, GMV, other things that will then in turn be able to drive this kind of creator armory essentially that could be used across multiple different platforms. So I think I'm going to use the Comfort founder as an example because he, I think, has over half a million affiliates now that work directly with them.

30:34Loukas:And it's super interesting. I was on their ad library the other day and I filtered by highest impression ads. Their top five highest impression ads are affiliate ads that are just calling out affiliates. Not even like ads of them selling their products. That kind of shows you where they're actually driving lightly most of their revenue from. But his whole method, obviously, they're finding creators through different means, right? So they essentially have creator coordinators that work directly with them. They use things like ManyChat for where they've kind of created these chat funnels, where they're able to actually trigger DMs to these creators.

31:17Loukas:And then also, obviously, they're approaching people through TikTok shop as well. and what they are doing is they're creating these kind of communities where they are incentivizing them to post 10 15 times a day for 45 days and they call it like the 45 day challenge and if you reach it you will they'll essentially pay you a bonus off the back of it and then if you reach certain levels of gmv you will get you you earn more commission off the back of that so it kind of creates this whole flywheel where the it compounds at scale because the creators within this group of people are feeding in new ideas they're able to execute them at scale by driving volume and i know that this brand and i know this is an extreme example but they are they are able to create hundreds of thousands of ads every single month at a fraction of the price that you would pay a ugc creator and and you you know you're benefiting off that in multiple different ways the the reach and i guess more top of funnel reach that you would be able to drive through tiktok that then would translate into you know search traffic and and you know feed into meta and that then being able to be utilized as meta creative and i think that idea of being able to lock in a loyalty system that you can drive bonuses through is a way that can gamify it at scale so it's it's it's definitely not one for the faint-hearted because i think operationally it can be very complex but you don't need to do it to the same level that may be comfort hub you could do it on a smaller scale that is more contained yeah you're seeing more i think more

32:58Olly:and more brands deploying this method um i think there's a couple in the uk that have done it really well as well i think overload do quite a bit of this if i'm if i'm correct but i don't know from what i've seen anyway um i think the the key is that gamification and reward scheme and making it really incentive aligned for for these creators because more and more brands are going to do it so like how do you get the better creators to work with your business are you seeing i think i saw shark ninja they've started taking a lot of the top top affiliates for like two events and hosting these big events for them which i think is another evolution of this um but just the sheer volume and variety of content that you see brands generate and the the scale of organic and paid awareness is just crazy yeah i think that's been the one of the main drivers of comfort hitting that sort of

33:53Loukas:just that massive like crazy growth journey in terms of revenue yeah exactly and it's like if you can like guarantee the reward and essentially then it's like you can help them crack the code you can you can help direct drive them towards the reward um so yeah i think super interesting i think the thing that we've obviously spoken about on top of that is is how can you enhance their chances of succeeding through that so we you know being able to like jump have someone that can jump on a call with all of your creators on a weekly basis or being able to feed insights back into the system so then they are heightening their chances of actually you know finding a winner with one of these ads um is is also a good way to um you know to to help kind of build that relationship

34:43Olly:seeing more tech come out like that's allowing brands to bring that level of like transparency and tracking and accountability to meta that you can see on TikTok shop as well. So attribution tools where you can onboard creators and track percentage of spend into your meta account and then obviously incentivize them directly in that way as well. It'll be interesting to see how this continues to develop. And I think it's that, obviously the second point I put here is that TikTok shop into meta, which is like the starting point of this, I think for brands, if you want to do it in a more like simple, way like a version one would be just getting cracking with tiktok shop and using it not only as a revenue generation engine but mainly using it for affiliate creative that you can then pull into meta and scale um and then off the back of that starting to build the more tiered structure that comfort have built out over time yeah exactly

35:48Loukas:cool next we've got creative volume yeah so this idea of we've spoken about this a lot but it's the idea there's there's this kind of constant debate about volume versus intention yeah i think there's you can have volume with intention right and i think

36:08Olly:that's where we're going we're going with here yeah i saw north beam put out a a really interesting post about the sheer volume of ads that they're top one percent of advertisers the top one percent of ad accounts are responsible for 36 percent of all ad creative on meta so top 1.4 percent so the median advertiser is running 23 different ads at a time the medium north bean customer is running 150 ads so like they're they're stating that that that top percentile is just doing so much more volume and therefore it's creating so much more scale i think the apprehension and the the reason that people are pushing back on this is the the i think it's difficult to connect strategy and volume together and with the right intention we've spoken about that a lot um and therefore you can start to see like real diminishing returns as you scale up volume of output but that doesn't mean that it's not the right the right that the right approach it just means the system is complex and the intention needs to be there that behind it yeah exactly

37:09Loukas:And I think the big thing here is gap analysis because that's what's going to identify if you're over-indexing into either a persona, a vehicle type of messaging. You know, these are all of the things that you need to make sure that if you're looking at it like on a heat map, that you are really spreading yourself across all of these areas or otherwise you're going to be too oversaturated. and then as a result diminishing incremental reach. So what I would recommend even doing, and it's very easy now to build a skill on Claude where you can connect Meta's API. I think be careful because you can get banned if you do it wrong.

37:56Loukas:But it's very easy to do that now. If you are clear with your naming conventions, you can directly pull that creative and start looking at things like are we diversifying across all of our personas are we actually tapping into all of the emotional uh zones within the valence heat map um are we actually speaking to people through different vehicles because i think i was speaking to a brand the other day and and they thought that they had real vehicle diversity but then if you actually run that through a tool like we've built it actually identified that it's it saw most of the ads as the same and it didn't actually see them because this the differences were so subtle yeah that it didn't actually differentiate so i think this these are like the different variants that you need to be looking at to ensure that you are diversifying as much as

38:51Olly:possible yeah and i think um i still think the the language and tone and and valence zones is one that almost every brand we encounter is missing at least one of the core quadrants in that process. So I 100 % agree with the gap analysis. And it's just making sure that you've got those two KPIs running across the process, like hit rate or average spend per asset or whatever the measure of quality you want is, whilst you also scale volume. But it is the thing that's coming up the most on calls with brands right now is that they feel like they're in like a creative echo chamber or they're just um struggling to they feel like they're just doing more and not better um so it's a common problem and it's it really does need a detailed and intentional system to connect connect the two together yeah and it's

39:46Loukas:not that's the thing if you're if you lower if you lower spend and you're not driving as much volume it's not as important but it becomes much more important with scale so the sooner that you can kind of build a system that allows you to exercise that the you know the quicker you'll be able to increase spend but like i just want to like go into some of these areas that you need to be thinking about that will help determine whether you are over indexing in one of these areas so firstly thinking about persona coverage how many distinct persona clusters do you have now obviously this differs based on your your volume of spend um but really you should be looking at if if you're spending over 100 care a month you need to be looking at in terms of macro personas at least four to five macros and then obviously more micros off the back of that are all three identity angles uh covered so that's actual self so how am i feeling in the moment i'm sitting in the pain or self which is you know um how how am i feeling about my partner who i could be motivated to buy something for uh or ideal self um you know the the the more sitting in the after state what do i the you know the motivation for actually wanting to feel something what wanting to get to a solution.

41:11Loukas:Now, one thing you'll know about that if you look at these identity angles in your ad account, and if you actually label each creative against, I would say probably 90 % of your creative is an actual self. So that's a big one to look at. And there's some big opportunities there to go into or an ideal. And then looking at spend concentration by persona. If you look into your ad account, you see that actually, yeah, we're covering five, six personas, but 80 % of spend is going into persona one you know that maybe there's not enough coverage of some of these other personas the second one is messaging diversity as we spoke about before so we've spoken about valent zones as i said sarah levenger has a great article on this literally take that article transcribe it put it into claude if you've got a skill that that is connected to your meta api ask it to do a scrape um and actually just try and build a bit of a heat map of how many where your creatives sit in each of these zones, you will find that there are zones that aren't even being targeted yet.

42:14Loukas:Distinct messaging angles as well. So, you know, how many different messaging angles are you covering? Awareness level coverage is another one that we've spoken about because you might have diverse messaging, but it all might be messaging that sits, you know, solution aware down and then also another one that i haven't really spoken about much in this podcast but i did this for club neuro recently and it really uncovered an interesting insight that we were over leveraged um in an emotional driver so when we're looking at emotional drivers we're looking at the through achievement belonging autonomy and empowerment what i realized after doing that gap analysis was that there was zero creative that sat in empowerment uh or sorry that sat in belonging which for like club neuro which is all about belonging and community and you know being a part of something was a real concern and that actually is the biggest potential opportunity in terms of how we could be speaking to those customers so again that really identified an opportunity there for us to diversify and allow us to drive more volume as a result of that and then i think when you get on to like volume and velocity looking at things like how many ads have we launched in the last 30 days is volume sufficient to hit target spend now i don't know if you want to speak to that for a moment i know you we've done a whole episode on like how to

43:39Olly:identify the amount of volume for spend but yeah going to go back to the creative forecasting masterclass i did a couple of weeks ago and there's a there's a detailed notion doc of how to map that out i think the key here is um do the quality before you do the volume so run that process get a measure of hit rate reflect on your data decide whether you need to make the process work harder first or just do more volume but you should be able to build an expectation of how many ads do you need to launch every week two weeks 30 days to hit your spend target for the rest of the year and avoid leaving yourself short by making proactive decisions to resource that two two months before you need to get the the asset volume in place um i think most brands are still making far less ads than they need to be not as many as they should be based on their spend targets and especially as we're getting closer and closer to q4 when spend really ramps up for a lot of a lot of categories that that needs to be top of mind yeah um next one is format

44:46Loukas:and vehicle so like i'll just go through your ad account and like you know even if you do this manually count how many different types of vehicles there are and we would determine a vehicle by vehicle is is a is a way that you deliver a message into in inside each format so if you've got hybrid ugc static as each format you'll have different vehicles that live within that so a vehicle for a UGC would be a whiteboard ad or a raw face to camera testimonial as an example to count how many of those do you have and if there's not enough then again that's an area where we need to be driving more diversity I also think like look if there's like a lot of spend that's being driven through one vehicle specifically I've seen this quite a lot where brands will you know almost do it subconsciously well they're over leverage one vehicle because they see that it's working time and time again and they almost get it in their head oh no this is just the type of ad that works for us but actually it's just because we're not putting enough resource into testing um you know more more diversity i think that's the issue of confirmation bias or like

45:51Olly:going to tunneling down into one type of vehicle we've actually just had a client really push towards this in the last couple of weeks and it can it'll maybe help in the short term but you've keep 20 % of your creative output on on new different things you've never tried before for

46:08Loukas:that reason yeah it's it's always when you that's that's just yeah that's how you see the brands will hit a ceiling it's always because they there's not a willingness to be able to diversify vehicles because they think one as you said confirmation bias but then second to that it's they don't want to break outside of what they feel um sits outside of their brand essentially um another thing that is super interesting to do is looking at how many personas are served by different vehicles so if you've got a list of like your top 10 vehicles that you've tested almost create like a heat map of have we tested those vehicles on all six of our personas and if not that is a really good opportunity or a quick win low hanging through to test those vehicles against different personas or different messaging angles because usually you'll see oh no we've done it over here but there's all of these personas that we have already validated that we've not

47:08Olly:tested those vehicles on yeah 100 % and the final the final one I wanted to touch on before we move on is just like concentration and lifespan so like reviewing your current inventory and how much like risk sits within top ads you want to be avoiding a single ad taking more than 20 percent of spend looking at like what's the replacement rate of churn creative and really treating it as a portfolio i don't think that's how to think of an ad library over time um i think that's something again brands are not reflecting on enough like what's the quality of that that ad library and how is it improving with the work that you're doing on the actual creative output but so we sat on that for a while.

47:50Olly:I just wanted to, do you want to quickly touch on the hit rate case study? Cause I kind of segues off that.

47:58Loukas:Yeah, I think it's just a good example. I won't stay on this for long, but a great example where this happened within one of our ad accounts and we were over leveraged in ideal cell, in actual self messaging and only one zone within the psychological heat maps that we discussed. So we did a bit of an analysis and actually broke down macro personas into deeper micro personas to really understand their motivators and fears. And then we adapted the psychological messaging to ensure that we were covering ourselves across that whole heat map. So just two simple changes there. you know introduction of more micro personas that spoke to the macro personas but in a way that was much more specific to a certain type of person within that and then more a gap analysis from a psychological messaging standpoint to really kind of unlock um you know the gaps that we hadn't yet explored and i think the the third thing that that isn't on these notes but really is important off the back of this if you were going to if you are and i've seen this before where creative strategists will really be super intentional in a creative strategy and actually build these micro personas really understand the person how to speak to them and what their fears are and their desires but then actually when you get to the point of writing a script it just feels very surface level it doesn't it's not obvious that you're speaking to that persona and i think with this this one a great example was like and we spoke about this on the episode with chris was it was so obvious even from a static exactly who that person was down to like their hobbies that it meant that meta had the signals to be able to put it in front of the right consumer and that comes back to that soulmate

49:54Olly:theory that we've spoken about yeah i just think it's a great case study of applying all of the bits we've covered over the last couple of months into transforming an account in a very short period of time um it's like turning that theory into action so it's great to just recap that another point that's like all over twitter and and quite common narrative right now is this like distaste distaste for iterations yeah as after post andromeda and we've touched on this previously but we're still seeing iterations drive like really significant impacts in a number of accounts we did kind of cross business analysis of of our iteration workflow um um and i know the the the key area we're seeing it really work is through like the lens of a

50:40Loukas:format multiplier isn't it yeah yeah i think it's um we talk about this a lot in in with our creative strategy team and it's like if you have found a vehicle or format that has really worked for one persona rather than when you're introducing a new persona reducing your chances of success by essentially changing more variables take the winning vehicle and just apply it to a new persona as a way of validating that and we've we've done that scale for lots of different brands and it works really really well and uh an example we did this with with club neuro and it was like a three reasons why very simple style creative but we saw that it really worked for one persona and obviously like you know the it's a very new ad account so um there were multiple personas that I hadn't yet validated or tested that I wanted to bring into the ad account but I wanted to especially with the amount of budget that we had available to us I wanted to reduce the chances of of you know wasting that budget essentially so I essentially took the exact same framework and vehicle that we we have validated and then applied a different persona and valence messaging to that and by doing that we did it four different times and it worked every single time so it shows it's a good it's a good way of validating a persona and then almost creating this tree off

52:05Olly:the back of it that then you can test against that yeah nice i think we talked about that on the alex episode that brand that just used basically the same concept to scale to like nine figures nearly which is an example of taking something that's worked and really pushing it to the extreme we also were chatting in the office yesterday around taking angles and messaging that's worked from another business and pulling it into your brand like another audience another persona but then using like gemini and claude to adapt a script to

52:34Loukas:your own um products or a proposition yeah what's the process behind that yeah so i think again i i'm i hate and we've spoken a lot about this going to actual direct competitors and just just pulling their scripts because it just becomes an echo chamber yeah um but i'm yeah a big believer of like taking winning scripts either mainly through organic um i think work a lot better um or going to you know brands that aren't direct competitors of yours uh as an opportunity to test more vehicle diversity and taking vehicles and frameworks and applying them to your brand essentially just take putting it into gemini asking it to translate it into a framework um and then from that you can essentially take one of your winning scripts and ask it to apply it to that exact framework with an exact angle valence zone um and uh persona and it will be able to do a really good job at just placing it within the framework that you can then test

53:38Olly:against your brand yeah i like that for um looking at products that solve a similar problem so speaking to a bedding brand recently and push them to go and look at sort of sleep supplements because a lot of the outcomes they were they were selling a um a bedding that really helps with like hot sleeping in summer so it's like the outcome the outcome in the the customer wants the free failed previous solution the emotional reactions will be very similar because they're solving the same problem but the way they'll be packaging that up will be so different that it's quite interesting to take inspiration in that way it's a really good yeah it's a really good example um

54:19Loukas:So I know you've been going deep on landers and post-click. Post-click, yeah.

54:24Olly:Just think this is the next frontier. We're starting to do some work with clients. I think it's super exciting. Something I really enjoy spending time on is post-click and funnels as an area of the marketing ecosystem. So I saw David Herman tweet about it, how taking proven creative winners and scaling them into new landers is helping with incremental reach and that belief that a landing page is part of that creative diversity mix.

54:59It definitely seems to be the case

55:02Olly:and it makes sense because meta crawls not only the creative and the landing page, it's getting more sophisticated. You can see how that can sort of support you. The algorithm is built off the concept of expected action rate. So if you can improve landing page performance, funnel throughput then it'll improve cpm it'll improve bids you'll win more auctions etc and i think when you look at the playbook some of the biggest brands in the space and the fastest growing brands in the space have applied over the last 12 months gruns ima mars of men top of mind i know they're all supplements loop kind patches um so many others uh they always come out the gates not only with creative but with so many customer journeys and it's all through the through the view of like persona or need state um funnel and that alignment through that through that journey and i just think the competency level hopefully if you've been watching this podcast hopefully your competency level has increased in creative over the last 12 months um the last 18 months i think the market is getting better and more sophisticated in that area but i don't think many brands are connecting landing pages at scale because it's another element of complexity i think it's most impactful across problem and unaware stages there's greatest upside um i also think it's where like they can often be the most needed because you can only do so much education in a 40 to 45 second to two and a half minute video but you can use them all the way through comparison pages pdp improvements that align a pdp more with a persona um and i just think this is going to be something that that develops rapidly over the next sort of six to twelve months uh obviously there's a lot of brands agencies that are doing it very well we're starting to roll this out with a couple of a couple of our partners uh claude it's actually amazing how if you it's amazing how far you can get with claude one-shotting now so using claude design creating a github that like codifies your brand guidelines and your visual identity what good looks like historically from like a website blocks perspective and then some reference points for great pages you can pretty much one-shot a lander's you can pretty much one-shot pdps advertorials listicles quiz funnels so it was one shot quiz funnel last night and it was nearly perfect so you assume that's going to get um get even better but it brings into focus the strategy right and the um the the approach to doing it well and it it as with creative it has personas as the foundation so same persona and micro persona should connect all the way through the system you should prioritize based on spend volume by persona and micro persona you can actually do it quite easily by just taking sort of either either using claude or taking top 20 ads and running it through gemini and just being asking it to split spend split by persona against your creative os and then start to build a bit of a strategy off that like aligning some pdps duplicating pdps thinking about i i really like things like five reasons why seven reasons why because they're such formula such a formulaic approach to education it's very digestible as well yeah it's just it's really easy to do like executionally it's not very complex to just break a product out into seven reasons why someone should buy it you just go benefit benefit common objection common objection social proof social proof cta it's like the angle's quite self explanatory um but we're seeing more and more of these different different customer journeys like i think they've always they've been around um brands have been doing them for years but i think we're seeing them done a higher volume um with more of an thought process around the creative that connects to it and a greater level of diversity with things like quiz funnels becoming a really big part of the part of the strategy for quite a few different brands talk talk on quiz

59:24Loukas:funnels because i think there's yeah this is something i'm seeing more and more and um it's super interesting i know we've we there's been times where we tried it in the past and it hasn't quite worked as as it seems to be now for some brands yeah so looking at miles of men rather

59:40Olly:than talking theoretically i'll just walk for an example it's like their landing pages find out what's really suppressing your testosterone take this two minute assessment social proof and then it starts with like how old are you what's the one thing you'd fix about your masculine health first and then it's all of the benefits and you just select a benefit how would you describe your build right now um how how's your strength training trending lately and it's just then it's got like before and afters um so yeah just super super thought out and intentional lots of social proof um throughout the journey lots of common failed solutions benefits and then it feels like he's building like a custom solution to your problem rather than just serving you the same product yeah so i think they're really impactful um as a funnel type but i just don't think brands are doing enough here in terms of testing um and optimizing starting with the pdp and improving that and i think that's a separate workflow to the to the landers above it but when you can connect the dots at scale it's super super powerful yeah such a massive improvement in

1:00:51Loukas:performance and volume it's just again like a build on personas isn't it it's yes it's you know it's like if you just if you're super specific with your persona targeting on meta but then post-click it's like a generic pdp like it's it kind of you know loses the impact um so yeah it

1:01:12Olly:really helps with that full funnel strategy just translating conviction and building continuity and trust so i think um i would encourage everybody watching to do that process of just pulling out those top two personas and thinking how do i start do i need to do a step page is conversion rate telling me that there needs to be a big change in education or can i just reorientate some of the things on my pdp to be more aligned to the to the buyer that's coming through this type of creative yeah um yeah and the final final thing on landers is that whole perceived value and increased average order value and how you're seeing more brands re-engineer their offer to drive higher average order value through improving value perception of the product an example of this being im8's recent move or somewhat recent move to a three-month sub on the front end on the as their main offer you can what did that move from one month just rolling yeah one month roll into three months up front delivered monthly um danny in the podcast episode we did discussed how significant an improvement on the av and ltv that oh well if he didn't touch on LTV because it was too early but transform their average order value um and they've done it through the lens of like engineering the value perception of the product through so many different um monthly gifts uh benefits uh they've obviously released this like 90 day IMA transformation program where you get masterclasses quarterly for those people who are on that quarterly subscription it's all about how although the price is increased it's like increasing the perception of value of the product beyond the the price um so that the pain the customer feels is greater than the the value the price that they're going to have to pay for the for the solution to that pain um again i think offer is a bit of a dirty word in in econ but when you're thinking through the lens of perceived value how do we increase the perceived value of our products within the customers eyes to allow us to charge more to increase our average order value i think we're seeing a lot of brands unlock a lot more volume when doing this well because it allows you to spend more on meta so it increases your allowable cac you can win more auctions you can generate more um just you can just spend more and that often will almost always if you increase aov it'll increase the ltv of those cohorts as well so i think there's a lot of value there maybe maybe a follow-up masterclass we can do around that yeah super interesting i feel like yeah you

1:03:54Loukas:did a great session with the team um brought in some of this and just offer us something we don't

1:04:00Olly:speak about much so i think that would be valuable it's like the it is the ceiling it's like if you're offers if you're not i think with the business you need to forecast how are you going to increase average order value every quarter like what's the what's the strategy that sits on the aov line of the P &L um because you are you are just going to hit a ceiling if you don't manage to do that yeah uh a lot of brand or well L I guess AOV and LTV if you're if you're working on a payback period but yeah I can do a session on that maybe moving forward I think we've chewed through a lot there yeah it's always good to get these little uh shoot the shit episodes in in the diary I think

1:04:42Loukas:we need to do them more because they always go down well but yeah

1:04:47Olly:I think that's everything I think we can end it there yeah well thank you for watching we'll be following up with more solos like Lucas said over the coming months if you haven't already and you've stuck with us to the end please do like and subscribe we've just passed 5k it'd be appreciated and we're going to have loads of bite-sized masterminds coming yeah looking forward to that so yeah thank you for watching

1:05:12you