Are you exhausting your audience or just exhausting your strategy?
Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge) and Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad) dig into the mechanics of reaching net-new audiences on Meta, breaking down which lever moves the needle most: creative diversity, signal engineering, or landing page strategy. They also revisit a Ridge case study showing how optimizing for the wrong purchase event quietly cannibalized an entire product category’s growth.
The conversation shifts to building a DTC marketing function from scratch, what the first senior hire should look like at a $30M consumable brand with deep retail roots, what to pay them, and how to think about the lifecycle marketing role that follows. They close on a standout YouTube incrementality test result where Amazon captured more than half the revenue lift, and what that pattern reveals about upper-funnel channels and where customers actually convert.
Chapters
00:00:00 Audiences & Influencers
00:00:31 AI Note Takers Run Everything
00:03:10 Zach Stuck Is on a Tear
00:07:41 Creative, Signal & Landing Pages
00:12:17 The 40% Problem With Travel Ads
00:23:53 New Languages - Optimization
00:29:57 Top 3 Ways to Reach New People
00:34:32 Beyond Purchase Optimization
00:45:10 When to Trust Holdout Tests
00:46:22 Hiring Your First Senior Marketer
00:52:22 What Skills to Look For & How
00:57:01 Lifecycle Leader vs Email Manager
01:00:28 What to Pay Your First Head of Ecom
01:04:13 YouTube Drove 50% Amazon Sales
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Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026
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Aftersell
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Haus
https://www.haus.io/operators
Prescient AI
https://www.prescientai.com/operators
Richpanel
https://9ops.co/richpanel
