Why Creative Is Still the Biggest Lever in Performance Marketing with Reza Khadjavi, CEO of Motion | Ep. 425

27:16And like never because like AI is only as great as like the feedback, the like the brief, the like what you give it. um so if you don't know how to give good feedback to someone and say like this is what you're missing and you're just saying like random stuff like it's not going to do any better for you so i would say like that like also like if you learn how to if you know how to code like that's like like it's funny like the soft skills are like what's rising to the top of what like what ai is like people it's like the coaching the feedback the people skills if you're good at that you probably could be good at and the system ones is really interesting too because i like even me like i'm constantly like seeing like which like what i'm doing is like like which right which writes the best headline like like in testing between like all of the ai like i don't like say like i'm like claude's only thing could do this so we're like what i'm just like giving example i'm like claude like if a new model launches i want to like test it and see like is that model better and this model and this, and that's like, would you have to do now where like, you can't just be like eyeball, but it's good to have like a tool like motion.

28:27Who's probably testing all those tools in the backend and then like giving it to you where it's like on a silver planet, like, Hey, I'm running all these tools in the background and here's, we know which one's the best because we're doing it ourselves. So yes.

28:42Reza Khadjavi:Yeah. And, and there's so, so I mentioned like last year, we spent a lot of time investing on like our data infrastructure. this year has been a lot of time invested in our agent infrastructure um we've not done a big launch around this even though it's like live we have an agent called runneth and um it's been live for a little bit uh 500 of our customers are using it and every week we are rolling it out to another like one or 200 of our customers by the way if you're watching this and you're a motion customer and you don't have access to run it yet just ping us and we'll enable access for you we're trying to do it in batches.

29:19Reza Khadjavi:One of the investments that we made there is around the time, I don't know if your audience all saw what happened with OpenClaw around the end of last year, but there was something really magical about the idea of giving an agent a full computer. So that's when the Mac Mini craze happened. A bunch of people went and bought a Mac Mini and put an OpenClaw in it and start giving a lot of access. We were pretty convinced as soon as we saw that, that that seems like the right pattern for ai but but not only that it would be like a personal use machine but it's like it's one ai with its own computer that is basically like a teammate at your company uh and there was going to be a lot of challenges and basically setting that up because like who's going to go build buy a mac mini and like how does that become like interchangeable with the team so So we set out to go and solve that problem and say, what if we had the same concept of open claw?

30:18Reza Khadjavi:Everyone gets their own virtual machine. It comes like multiplayer out of the box so your entire team can interact with it. And it kind of shares this like company brain so that as each person right now is like working with their own AI and probably has their own little system and people are duplicating efforts. Talked about this early on. Like how does like multiplayer AI work? Because if you're a paid social team, like it's rarely just one person, right? Like there's a bunch of people in the loop that need to like coordinate work with each other. And our theory is that like AI needs to be at the center of that.

30:52Reza Khadjavi:It's not like a tool that each individual user is using. It's more like AI is at the center of the company now. And we're all kind of working together with AI to do our work. and and the way to implement that takes an insane amount of like infrastructure thought to think about like you know people have like shared cloud subscriptions but that's not quite doing it right um and so runneth is built on this premise that literally for every single one of our customers like motion as like a sas company is no business going into this like type of business but like all the rules get rewritten with AI, I think.

31:31Reza Khadjavi:We are now like basically like a virtual machine vendor because every single one of our customers has their own dedicated virtual machine that is like provisioned just for them and has Runeth running inside of that just for them. And that like extreme approach has made it so that it could be, it really can be like the center of the AI operating system for those brands. and um and so that's like all of the investments that any ai-pilled person even like when we talk to like the most extreme ai-pilled person that like they often have their own little cloud code set up and it's not necessarily transferred into the rest of the team and so what i was trying to say was that like we've solved all the problems that even the most cloud-pilled people have not fully solved for their orgs.

32:25Reza Khadjavi:And we're able to deliver that so that we can give like level the playing field of like AI investment for the best marketer so that they can just focus on being the best creative strategist. And our view is actually like, we want to make a lot of this AI stuff easier for people to do so that we can place the edge where it actually belongs is who's the best creative strategist? Who is the best marketer that is able to like use the same cut to use the tennis racket analogy? Uh, everyone has the best tennis racket. That's not, that's not the edge anymore. How do you use it? And like, I think that that's where we're actually seeing that, uh, when we talk to our customers and we're onboarding them into run it, even though everyone gets the same technology, it's the better creative strategist that's able to like get more value out of it because they already have like a really, a lot of really good insights on where they want to go.

33:22Reza Khadjavi:And the people who are lagging behind, what they need to do is actually go to our bootcamp. They need to go learn creative strategy. They need to get better at like the principles of really good marketing. And like, that is actually more of the bottleneck then how can I find the latest prompt to use inside of Claude, which I think feels today that the marketers are like, I need to obsess over that. We're trying to change that equation and say, no, no, no, just like learn what it means to be an elite creative strategist. And like that is where the edge belongs. If your boss has ever said who approved this copy because they signed off on it a month ago, you might need some ops help.

34:01If your campaigns get delayed because no one can find the brief, the assets or the approvals, you definitely do. Wrike kills the disconnects. It's a smart work management platform that automates the chaos for the whole team in one place. With visual collaboration, resource planning, and the insights to make everything better and quicker every time. Go to ryke.com slash TMM to see how teams at Lyft, Ogilvy, NVIDIA use it. That's W-R-I-K-E dot com slash TMM. Yeah, I've always said since I've been in marketing ops that like fundamentals first, then tools. Like it's always like if you don't have like that fundamentals of what great like marketing is where like it's understanding psychology, understanding marketing, like understanding people, understanding writing, understanding like like those those those skills are like never going to change if you don't if you understand like the human.

35:09and then when you lay it upon tools but like a lot of people go the opposite and say like i need a tool to do this for me instead of like like who's the best human that can use the tool to like the the 10x like the the and it's the same with everything it's like people like try to like manipulate platform they try to they go to platform before strategy like they go to like It's always like they try to get the quickest way, and the quickest way is always like leveling up expertise is always the quickest way to win. It's never like being the best. Being the best at Claude now will give you leverage for a little bit.

35:53It's just like what we just said. It's like you can be the best with that tennis racket for the longest period of time until someone either gets a better tennis racket or finds a better tennis racket, or they learn how to do something with the forehand or backhand or the surface that they're playing with or mentally better than anybody else, and then they win. Because really, a lot of it is like the companies that are winning are 1 % to 4 % better at the end. And it's not the biggest difference, but that 1 % to 4%, the best in the world in any sport, is always like one to 3 % better than, and the other people are really close, but that edge of one to 3 % is always like the person.

36:45It's not the coach, the tool, it's always the person.

36:49Reza Khadjavi:Yeah, it's like, you know, software engineering is a good example of like probably the first role that has gotten really, really disrupted by AI. And I think it's a good example of what's to come in other industries where in software engineering, yes, like the floor has been raised. Now like VibeCoders can like build cool products and ship. But if you see the value that the individuals who didn't know how to program before and what they're able to do now, yeah, that's like pretty valuable. But look at the people who are like elite engineers who have adopted this stuff and like really good at AI.

37:27Reza Khadjavi:like they're probably now like a thousand X more valuable than, than they were before. And so this idea of like mastering the craft is at the end of the day where you're going to get the most leverage, especially if the tools accelerate quickly. I think, you know, right now it is probably a good idea for everyone to be like immersed in trying to understand like Claude and other AI tools and like tinkering and playing with stuff. Like it is a, it is a good idea to spend a lot of time there, but it's kind of like also important to ground ourselves in, in this idea that like that is not where the edge is actually going to be in the edge.

38:08Reza Khadjavi:Like don't kind of lose the principles and you know, the best marketers don't even need to be told that cause like they already know it. It's more for the folks who are so excited about all this AI stuff and think that they can basically like defy the fundamentals of good marketing. and like maybe for a little bit until you know the good marketers also catch up to you on on the tool side yeah i mean we what you said we've seen it through history too it's like when people got access to a computer like the edge was the computer right versus like doing things manually when people got access to the internet like the edge was like the internet and then people that became a level kind of a level playing field and now it's like the edge is ai but like it's always the people who knew how to operate the business, like, like operate a business or understood the fundamentals of marketing or under actually like, that's why I like, Oh wait, I'm hounding brand so much like now, because like brand is something like is taste and performance together.

39:10And I hate when people say brand is just like, not that it is like brand is performance marketing to me. Um, so like, it's the people who are like invest, like motions, doing it through like education, media that's like an investment in brand you want to be seen as like not like helping creative strategists win um but you also have a good tool that could do it too but that's brand and i think people who making that invested alongside with things is like when always gonna win um it's the people who try to like edge people edge people with like hacks or little things that are going to like end at the end of the day are not going to win out.

39:52That's just, you can win for a little bit with tax, um, like, or like money grab with tax for a little, little bit.

40:00Reza Khadjavi:Which is the other kind of point of, I think what happens with creative strategists 2.0 is that the, the really great ones actually influenced the business quite a bit. So it's not like they just sit there and the business says like, okay, we have this product and this value prop go sell it, I think what we'll start to see is a really good and tight feedback loop between what we're learning on the go-to-market side with creative strategists. If founders are not obsessed about what is happening in their ads, I think actually those founders might be in trouble in the years ahead because there's so much signal about what the market is saying to you about the products that you're building and the things that they care about, like what richer signal is there for a founder trying to like think about their product strategy and company strategy than understanding like what the market is responding to from a creative standpoint, right?

40:57Reza Khadjavi:That feedback loop to me is the opportunity for like creative strategist 2.0 is to not just like take marching orders from the company and just go and try to sell their products, but it's more like build a feedback loop from what we're learning in our marketing back to like, hey, actually, I know we're prioritizing this, that, and the other as a business, but like, do you realize that the market is really responding to this, this, and this? Like, maybe we should use that as a signal to actually influence company direction, which honestly, I think is like what some of the best founders are good at doing.

41:36Reza Khadjavi:And so I think the, the, the lines between like, what does it mean to run the company and what does it mean to do marketing are also going to blur quite a bit. And you mentioned like the, the sixties and seventies, I think there was a lot of that where it wasn't just about like, how do we take this product and go and sell it? It is also trying to like inform back to the company and like, Hey, this segment is really fired up about what we're doing. Like maybe we should go all in as a company, like focusing on this segment or this product line or this category. And the people who are good at that to your point are like just like really good big picture thinkers who ultimately will win out against the people who are just trying to like experiment next tactic and like that might have short-term results but it's not who wins in the end yeah that's why like i'm so bullish on like social media people too because they're just like such in the ear of like what's working like to make something work in like an algorithm like you have to understand like what people want because people are the algorithm and the platform has one people to stay on that platform so like you have to understand what your audience wants and you could find based on what the comments and stuff you could find audience and like if you're not finding like like you said like creative strategies emerged because you saw that people were like focusing on that and maybe like it was a a dual role like for in some companies you saw people were focusing because you were like paying attention to like that pain point and that's the same with ads like you you might think like your audience is like this and then like an ad's like like all these other people are coming through the ad because of this and they're coming because this pain point is like telling them like this is a pain i'm having and if you keep building for over here you're like going the whole opposite direction of the company needs to go um that's the thing it's like when you think about like what good marketing is it actually has a really strong opinion about what we're selling.

43:39Reza Khadjavi:Is there a market for this thing? Like, like some of the best marketers would show up at a company and be like, there's no market here. Like, there's no point. Like actually the best thing to do is to try to pivot the company until you find a real market for what you're selling. Or some really amazing marketers would be like, we found a good niche, a good pocket of customers that really resonated with this, but we've now hit a plateau. And the plateau is not because we need to like find the next ad iteration. It's because like we've exhausted the TAM of people that would resonate with this. And so if we want to scale our ads, we need to find more TAM.

44:18Reza Khadjavi:Like, and maybe we don't have a product to sell to more TAM. Maybe this is it. And so then you go back and say, well, the thing that we need to do to like really scale our ads is we need to come up with a new product because like we need something that's more accessible to like a wider audience. and stuff like that and so and usually usually it starts too with like what you said like like usually the first problem is that you haven't scaled creative enough to like to a point where you're hitting people and not fatiguing the audience with the same ad and and then when you get to like like that level where you're fatiguing every like like nobody else is buying because like there's it's not fatigue it's just like nobody like the creative has got at a level where there's not enough fish and then like cat keeps going up then you're like okay um there's a segment we haven't been focused on because we see it and they can't buy our product because that doesn't matter um like that's why we used to when i used to run in sass we used to have like an acp which is like acceptable customer profile and we used to like feed them into like this ACP and see like oh like let's test them on our product with a small bit of people and then like let's see like if we can build around those people and if we can't we will go but like it was like an ACP was like this acceptable customer profile where like they could be kind of successful at what we do but like we need to build better features to make them really successful so it's like you have to keep looking for that next team or that next like or like what you said, like there might not be your TAM.

45:58Like it might not be your TAM. So, but creative will tell you that.

46:03Reza Khadjavi:Yes. And this is the like, the multi-dimensional skillset thing that we were talking about that like, and I think AI accelerates this in every discipline. It's the people that are able to like, look from high altitude, go wide and then also go very deep that will drive the biggest impact is to have the largest possible perspective on what you're doing, what the company is doing, and having a really good problem-solving skill set as opposed to being tunnel vision and being like, I just need to create one more ad next week that's going to do well, right? And when you think about that big picture, the amount of leverage that AI can give you keeping tabs on all of these different questions and problems and signals, that becomes like AI done well so that you can kind of look at all these signals and then do like where I think humans will earn their keeps is basically doing the final synthesizing of that information and like locking in a decision of like this direction or that direction.

47:13Reza Khadjavi:Because pre-AI, there's only so many signals that we could look at, right? And I think that's probably one of the biggest changes is that people have like a mental model change is that what used to be impossible in terms of like keeping tabs on multiple things at once to use that as signal for decision-making becomes very trivial today. Like keeping tabs on all your competitors, all your past winning concepts, like all of the different things, all the reviews that people are saying, all the comments that people are leaving in your ads, like just so many different things that you can keep a pulse on at the same time as like level one and then level two is like, okay, how are we going to, what kind of business logic are we going to make on top of these like signals that we're, that we're looking at?

48:00Reza Khadjavi:And all of that is like, is things that we can experiment with and try and, uh, and, and come up with new ideas. And, you know, the best people are going to be very opinionated about how they want that to work. And the level one people are just going to like, let AI basically do all of that for them. And I actually think like, it'll do an okay job. But as soon as AI is able to do that for everyone, then that edge is gone. And like the real edge becomes like, okay, we all have access to the same super intelligence with a computer. How am I going to use it? How are you going to use it and like goes back to the principles of really good marketing which in some ways is like just really good decision making right uh given a set of information like what what decisions are you going to make and what i've always loved about marketing is that uh basically people talk about two things that are really important in the age of ai is like agency the idea that like if i decide to do something i'm just going to do it and i can like humans have like one of the things that's really special about us like we can have the agency to decide to do one thing or another thing and taste like those two things become really powerful in the age of ai and marketing has both of those things like in an extreme amount you can decide to go in so many different directions if you want and the best marketers have a lot of really good taste so like it's a good it's a good career to be in uh yeah because really marketing like the best marketing is like like you said like looking at all the memory but like taking two like obsolete points of data and connecting them together to come up with like a new idea because if you really believe in now with ai you're going to believe that like there's no original ideas out there anymore because ai is going to like level the the like and the original ideas are original idea in the age of ai is taking two obsolete points of like information and making something new out of those two obsolete.

50:07And that takes taste to find and consumption and like knowledge should take those obsolete points, connect them together and say like, this will be something great. That's like also creating a great company, right? It's like you take two obsolete, like a couple, it could be two or three, but obsolete points that like, okay, I see this and I see this and I like connect this together. there. It's going to make a new idea, which would make a new great company. And then it's, it continues down the line, like with new features and stuff like that. Um, but totally. Lastly, what is a marketing hill you would die on?

50:45Reza Khadjavi:Marketing hill I would die on. Hmm. I think people care about attribution too much. It's a great deal. I mean, that is the, I feel like attribution was, the intention was great of attribution because it like gave marketers like a better seat at the table. But like when people use it as like a GPS to get somewhere, that's where it screws people up. I'll also say one of the reasons we've experienced this quite a bit, the reason people love attribution is they love predictability. They want to be able to put on a spreadsheet, input, output. I do this. I get that. That's the reason why attribution is so exciting.

51:32Reza Khadjavi:I think what happens is as people get more spreadsheet predictable on this goes in, this comes out, I think you get it. But I think your cacks go up. The more predictable something is, probably the more expensive it's going to be, the more predictable it is. and I think we've experienced this at Motion over our many years is that I don't think we have the most like spreadsheet predictable go-to-market machine, but it is one of the most efficient go-to-market engines of any SaaS company and our peers that have gotten to the revenue levels that we've got at. And I think there's a bit of a trade-off between predictability or like explosive efficiency that I think if you're willing to trade off, obviously I'm not saying like not looking at data signals is not a good idea, but being obsessed about them, I think can be a problem that kind of puts you into a corner.

52:35Reza Khadjavi:Whereas we've kind of had this view that like if we believe really strongly that doing this is going to make a lot of noise and usually that leads to a lot of revenue for us and we're not able to like perfectly attribute it, that's fine. And the result of it, like we get somebody who comes on a sales call with us, most often what they say, we ask them like, how'd you get here? And their answer is something like, I don't know, everywhere. I've been to your events, people talk about you, this, that, and the other thing. And like the attribution source is like all of it, everything. Whereas if we're just so obsessed about like, we're going to sponsor this newsletter and then we're going to see a sign up.

53:20Reza Khadjavi:And then like, we have those things, obviously they're there, but I think the bigger picture, if like the most senior leaders of the company are too obsessed about it, they pigeonhole the company into, um, yeah. I think the problem is that like marketing got so like, like nobody got fired by deciding on IBM said like logic wins out. And the problem is that like the way the market, this is my, like one of my theories, like the way the marketing role is structured is like it doesn't incentivize risk. So like there's a salary and like if you do the logical thing or the illogical thing, there's the same outcome is there.

54:03But like with an investment banker, like they're incentivized on risk. Like if they pick a better stock that gets a hundred X growth or 10 X grows, like they get incentive, they get more money. But the marketing role is not incentivized to make the illogical choice. Like it's incentivized to make like the choice that keeps them in the role. Like, cause they don't want to get fired. Like, but if someone was told me, like, like said, like, if you revenues goes up like 10 X, like you're, you can get a 10 X bigger, like, like 10 X on this bonus or something like that the marketer will take bigger risks to get that 10x versus like i make 300k i don't want to get fired i'm going to pick the logical choice and logical choice tells me the the spreadsheet tells me this i'm going to pick this and that's the outcome like but there are marketers who do know that like they want to keep their job for a long time and you need risk to win but like most marketers don't want to get fired um and the firing comes from like make taking a risk the risk bombs they spent a lot of money like and there's no revenue to come out the other side and they they lose like so um like that's my theory it's like marketing is they're not incentivized risk that much um so good one um that's where people can find you motion all that good stuff I know you're everywhere, but like, where could they, um,

55:32Reza Khadjavi:Yeah. Yeah. If you go to our website, motionapp.com and like drop your email somewhere, you'll get, you'll get emails for all the events we do. We just wrapped up our, um, bootcamp and we'll be doing another one of those soon. Uh, we have the creative strategy summit coming up at the end of June. So look out for invites on that. That'll be a really good one. Um, but yeah, probably the best way to keep up with motion is to like, find yourself on our newsletter to get emails when we're doing our next event. And we probably do like one really big one per quarter. And, uh, we are, as we get more into AI, we are getting even more serious about like educating and training the best creative strategists and marketers.

56:14Reza Khadjavi:So like, um, Oh, maybe one more thing, actually, and it's useful for us and useful for all of your listeners is that in one of our events, there was, um, one of our speakers said this idea that in the age of AI, you want to show your audience like proof of real work, proof of like, wait, no, actually that was hard. That was not, that was not possible to pull off like AI slop. And one of the things that we're really trying to do in the heart of our own marketing for our ecosystem is like, when you look at some of the stuff we do, like when people joined the bootcamp, they were like, I thought this was going to be like a sales pitch.

56:50Reza Khadjavi:And you guys were just like collecting emails and you were going to like, you know, talk about a bunch of things and then like promote motion. But like, it was heavy duty. Like we ran that thing as if it was like a truly an info product that we were trying to like really sell incredible education through it. And so we take that stuff really seriously as our marketing investment where people like it just, it is not possible to do that quality of education without like real time investment. which I think is going to be more and more important as people can just put out AI slops. So obviously for SaaS companies, it's one thing for consumer companies is something else.

57:31Reza Khadjavi:But I think, I think buyers are going to crave that almost like show me proof that you're not just like AI slopping me. Obviously it's fine to use AI, but like show me proof that there's some like meaningful work that real humans are doing behind the scenes here. I think, I think both in like consumer and business people are going to care about that. Yeah. And I mean, it comes from like, like, like psychology, like, like the, the Dyson theory of like, this took 483 tries to get me to like the best product. Like it's that theory of like, it took a lot of reiteration and work to land up here. Like it, it were, it's like psychology, like humans want to see like the work behind things to like justify price and justify like like that's why like Ikea's model is like so good like why people love it because like they like love like that they put together the furniture because it took them they're like and I put together this furniture it was cheap but I put together this furniture and like this is my piece of furniture that I built like so it's like people love that work aspect of it and it's like a mental thing makes it more real yeah well thank you so much for joining i really appreciate it yeah no worries thanks so much thanks so much for listening keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world if you haven't ready make sure to subscribe and follow the marketing millennials podcast on apple podcasts Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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