“We used to try to win every day. Now we’re willing to sacrifice entire months.”
What does it mean to optimize ad spend when there’s no universal answer?
Michael Ting (GM of DTC, JAXXON) joins Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad) and Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge) to challenge one of the most common assumptions in ecommerce email marketing and paid media: that there is a single optimized ad spend. There isn’t. The better question is what you’re trying to achieve and over what time horizon.
Michael walks through how JAXXON uses cost per email signup to make confident budget decisions, spending aggressively into slow seasons and monetizing that list when it matters most. The conversation also covers decision quality frameworks, doubling AB testing velocity, and how daily performance reporting builds operator instinct over time.
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Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026
https://motionapp.com/thumbstop-pulse...
Richpanel
https://9ops.co/richpanel
Aftersell
https://9ops.co/aftersell-mops
Haus
https://www.haus.io/operators
00:00:00 David Protein Ice Cream
00:02:52 Michael Discovers Huel
00:07:59 Michael’s Origin Story
00:15:30 The Nine Figure Gap
00:21:45 No Such Thing as Optimized
00:28:10 Forecasting as a Tool
00:33:05 Cost Per Email North Star
00:40:42 The Chicken Gut Check
00:49:15 Test Velocity Culture
00:58:40 Good Decisions Bad Outcomes
01:04:38 Decision vs Execution
01:09:07 Lower Confidence Move Faster
E171: What’s Working in Ecommerce in 2026 & What Completely Blew Up
