Motion (Creative Analytics)

Stop. Doing. This. 👋 We're hiring at Motion! One of our talent philosophies here? Move fast and bet on people. Just ask Libby Moyer, our head of talent. Motion is a 75 person remote team backed by $65M+ in funding with a valuation that's nearly 3x'd in under two years. A big part of that growth trajectory? It came from giving people autonomy to recraft their roles. As people have gotten more comfortable with AI, the lines between roles have started to blur in a really good way. Four recent examples for y'all 1) Our Head of Customer Success is now a full time Product Manager 2) One of our Customer Success Managers stepped into a PM role too 3) Our Senior Platform Expert is working a ton with our PLG team. 4) One of our AEs is vibe coding on our PLG team and building things alongside our product and engineering team. None of these were forced changes btw! These people grew into new spaces because they were curious, flexible, and genuinely wanted to help the company and Motion was willing to move fast enough to let it happen. That's the part I think a lot of companies struggle with. It's not just about having people who are willing to evolve. It's about being an organization that isn't so rigid that it misses the moment when someone is ready for something new. So if you're looking for a new adventure, give us a shout! We're hiring for a number of roles across customer success, sales, engineering with executive IC roles open for design and product as well. Full details on our careers page! Hope to hear from you soon - Libby

Need more ad inspo? Save these 5 hooks by The Social Savannah👇 Savannah recently joined our creative strategy summit and shared her top 15 highest performing UGC hooks from June. Don't know Savannah yet? She's the founder of The Social Savannah, an ad creative agency shipping over 200 ads a week for clients like Fabletics, Bumble, Athletic Greens, and more. If you missed her session, here are 5 of her 15 winning hooks. You can watch the full VOD with all 15 on our YT page btw. Now, let's get into Savannah's hooks 1) The running yapper Yapper ads are the format of the moment with a simple repeatable style. Someone talking to camera, minimal B roll, minimal editing, more like a friend's recommendation than an ad. Savannah's twist to make these scale even better is about changing the setting. One of her best performers in this style was using a creator who delivers the pitch mid action "3 reasons why I think everyone should start running" mid run, then lands on the shoes that got her there. The setting IS the hook for this style. 2) Self skits with his curiosity hook "POV: The girl that found out about ___" This style has been working for a long time now. One creator plays both characters in the script, talking to themselves about discovering the product. If you're leaning into humor, you can lean into props and have a male character play both male and female with a wig. 3) Spin the bottle nudge Picture an overhead shot, a bottle on the floor surrounded by options for the day: cook, read, run, watercolor. The creator spins it then nudges it on purpose so it lands on the product, grabs it, starts her day. 4) "As I've gotten older, I've realized..." This is Savannah's top performing storytime opener right now. Note from Savannah: anything filmed in a car is over indexing for her right now. Her theory is it reads as a genuine chat, so she starts in the car and still cuts in b roll of the product at home to keep it moving. 5) Quick outfit changes A clap transition into a new outfit, or swiping through looks, then into the testimonial. The transition does the attention work so the testimonial doesn't have to be as strong here if your visual hook is compelling. Psst, want more from Savannah? Go to our YT page now and queue up her replay to watch with your lunch today! It's only a 22 min watch and has a ton more depth and tactics you can swipe for your brand. The VOD is called "15+ Proven UGC Ad Hooks That Are Working Right Now | Savannah Sanchez" https://lnkd.in/eiKa4MtE

It's all about trust 🤝 That's how DoorDash beat Adidas in share of voice. (When Adidas spent $95 MILLION on their World Cup spot) Meet Zaria Parvez. Zaria turned Duolingo's unhinged owl into the most famous brand account on the internet. Today she leads social at DoorDash. We just had Zaria join our Motion Creative Strategy Summit for a session on why paid and social have to work together. (Full VOD is on our YT page now btw) TLDW for you: Paid and organic love to silo into "my team, your team" But content hits consumers at what Zaria calls muzzle velocity. If you're heavy on either side, you get stuck in the algo. So, what does that look like in practice? Three plays DoorDash ran: 1) The UFC hot bag Everything anchors to one brand anchor: "DoorDash is the 24/7 life assistant" DoorDash had a paid UFC deal with banners around the ring but they saw an opportunity with Hasbulla walking out at fight night. So they had him come out with a DoorDash branded hot bag. Then they built a "reunion" with the Rizzler via sports interviewer Caleb Pressley, plus clip farmers to spread it. The formula is simple but repeatable here: one paid placement hit every corner of how DoorDash measures success: Share of Voice = owned + influencer + UGC. 2) The Knicks broom promo they shipped in 24 hours When the Knicks swept, DoorDash gave out free brooms in app. This was pretty cost inefficient but paid and promo greenlit it for the brand vibes. They got billboards up across NYC in the first two days. How they were able to ship this so quick - Zaria pre negotiated 3 to 4 "reactive windows" per quarter with leadership, scoped in advance with paid and promos. That way, when the right moments hit, permission already exists and they're ready to ship. - One Slack channel with her three allies: accounting, legal, and strategy & ops. Her advice: make friends with your support pillars! Her level one accountant approves creator payments fast which helps them keep creators happy and move quickly. Think pre built permission plus pre built allies. 3) The Tim vs T Pain play Tim Payne, a New Zealand fan favorite, was going viral mid tournament. So DoorDash tweeted like they'd confused Tim Payne with T Pain. They signed T Pain to a talent deal so he played along, acting confused. The media picked it up then they did a reveal video drop, and put paid behind it. Some marketers didn't love it. But you know what matters? Consumers loved it. It won on business metrics AND beat Adidas in the moment. Here's the pattern across all three - One brand anchor - One paid asset (a placement, a promo budget, a talent deal) - Organic amplification across owned, influencer, and UGC at once Friendly reminder from Zaria "Not everything is going to be a smash hit. Sometimes you just got to flop to fly". So keep going until you fly ✌️ 

Ahh, my eyes! 👀 P.S. We're hiring engineers at Motion! Our eng team is 17 strong right now and have some really exciting technical challenges ahead of us We have an AI workspace (VM) called Runneth, an AI brain for marketing teams. It's a cloud based persistent, self organizing knowledge base that ingests your ad data, creative playbooks, and performance learnings, then organizes them automatically. We also became an official Claude connector with our Motion MCP which allows Claude to watch your video ads at scale, something no other integration on the market does today. You're a strong fit if you align with these qualities: 1) A strong sense of ownership: you make decisions and move quickly to fix things quickly when they go wrong. 2) A pragmatic mindset. You can ship the simple thing when speed matters, while flagging that which needs to evolve later. 3) Comfortable in a fast moving startup where requirements come with ambiguity and the “right” way isn't handed to you. 4) You enjoy being a strong individual contributor and a supportive teammate. Engineering is a team sport here. The people building Motion are deeply embedded in where AI and our industry is heading, and obsessed with closing the gap between what's possible and what's actually shipping in product. Our tech stack is primarily TypeScript, React, GraphQL, Nodejs, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Azure but we care more about strong engineering fundamentals than exact stack match fyi. Sound interesting? These are our open eng roles today: - Senior Software Engineer (Infrastructure) - Senior Software Engineer (Backend) - Executive IC, Engineering Check out our careers page for full details.

Stop scaling your highest ROAS ad first. Zach Stuck: Look at this metric 👇 Zach is the founder of Homestead, an agency that's audited 500+ DTC brands over nine years. He also runs his own brands: Hollow, the sock company he built to eight figures, and Mars Men, a men's wellness and supplement brand that scaled to a $100 million revenue run rate in under 18 months. Yes, you read that right. That's 9 figure run rate in less than two years. We had Zach join our Motion Creative Strategy Summit with Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch to break down the framework he's used multiple times now to scale new brands. 1) Spend velocity beats ROAS as your early signal Zach's internal rule: if an ad spends $2,000+ within 4 to 5 days, something special is happening. Meta is injecting budget because the data coming back is strong. "Who cares if that new ad that scaled has a 0.5 ROAS and the rest of your ads have a 1.5? If it's doing the right job, which is feeding the rest of the ad account and driving net new visitors" He judges the business holistically (new customer ROAS, MER, profitability) and structures everything as CBO campaigns with a min spend per ad set, one concept per ad set, broken out by pillar. Mars Men runs ~40 active campaigns this way. 2) Spider web every pain your product touches Before making one ad, Zach opens a Figma file and maps every problem the product could plausibly solve. He calls these pillars. Take Mars Men. It sells testosterone support, so everyone assumes the angles are muscle but low testosterone also shows up as stubborn weight gain, high cortisol, and the 3pm crash that has guys slamming caffeine all day. Each of those became its own pillar with its own ads. Then he tests each pillar with statics before touching video. One "concept" = one pillar with ~5 completely different static variants in one ad set, at $300/day for 2 to 3 days. You're hunting for headlines and visual cues with promise, then going deeper on winners with AI video or a $100 creator. The pillar that built Hallow to eight figures was not the one he expected. That's why you test them all. 3) Listicles plus congruency, then duplicate winners to a quiz Zach calls listicles "the goat" of landing pages. His rule is ad to lander congruency: a cortisol ad lands on a cortisol listicle, never a message shift. His single SKU build: a shoppable listicle on top, product page below. Across hundreds of Homestead audits, listicles beat sending traffic straight to the PDP almost every time, even with average copy. And when a creative wins? He skips the iteration and duplicates it to a quiz funnel as his second scaling lever. TLDR from Zach: "The best ads still today are compelling and they feel real. If you can do that with low budget, you can do that with a ton of budget" -- P.S. You can watch the full session on our Motion YT page now, the full video on demand is now live for you

Open English has 3.5+ million students now How Runneth AI scales their ad strategy. Meet Nina, the Director of Performance Marketing and Paid Social at Open English. She wanted to find a better way to go from idea to briefing faster, but things got bogged down with meetings, conflicting ideas of what would work, and multi hour meetings with growth and brand. Until... She deployed Runneth to help. Quick context if you're new to Runneth by Motion (Creative Analytics). Think of Runneth like a shared AI brain for your marketing team. Every insight, meeting, brand doc, and tool in your stack feeds into it. The real superpower behind it all? It knows all your ad data. Runneth not only watches and analyzes all your ads but also your competitors, and what's working winning in your segment. Think of like 24/7 eyes on every winning ad that knows your data inside and out. That's why one evening Nina was able to sit down with Runneth in Slack and DM it her problems in plain language. In a few conversations, she was able to create a pipeline system that now runs the entire creative operation in Slack. Nina was able to replace her weekly meeting with rapid voting on creative ideas right in Slack and a smooth signal to brief production process. What started as a paid team workflow has spread across their entire org now from all things copy, brand, email, and organic pulling Runneth into how they work. Here's what Nina has built so far with Runneth: 1) A signal to brief pipeline that runs in Slack, from creative idea to fully written brief 2) Marketing wide AI adoption across paid, brand, email, and organic 3) Brand team reports Runneth writes and delivers on a set cadence Her next project is to load more first party data, meeting context, and marketing wide processes into the brain, so Runneth stops being a paid media tool with brand access and starts being the operating system for the whole marketing org. Thanks for sharing your story with us Nina! Full details at Runneth dot com

How should you measure a hook? 👀 Thumbstop rate? Well, Thumbstop is easy to measure, easy to interpret, and slowly it has become the default signal for whether an ad worked. And that's a problem... We have been using hook performance as a proxy for ad performance and quietly forgetting they are not the same thing. Hooks matter. Of course they do. But somewhere along the way we stopped asking whether the rest of the ad was doing any work, because everything after the first three seconds is harder to attribute and easier to deprioritize. Volume pressure is making it worse now btw. The biggest accounts in DTC are running thousands of ads at once. Loop Earplugs, Gymshark, and Huel sit at 4,056 active ads between them for context. THAT is the output of a system that treats creative like inventory. Most teams are nowhere near that scale, but the pressure to produce more, test faster, and ship continuously shows up everywhere. When you are drowning in briefs, you optimize for the metric you can see. The hook moves first, so the hook gets all the attention. The result is "hookslop" (should we TM that btw?) Ads that earn the stop and lose the watch. Duh duhh duhhhhh. Platforms are onto you for this. Meta's organic feed ranking explicitly weights time spent viewing. TT treats completion rate as its top signal. X is mechanically penalizing accounts that repost others' content to game reach. The era of being rewarded for stopping the scroll is ending. The era of being rewarded for holding attention has started, and the platforms have made it clear they want users sticking around and coming back tomorrow. So, what's changing? This is why daily posting as a growth strategy is fading. A few high quality posts a week now beat daily filler. The same logic applies to ads. The platforms want you scrolling, and they want the content keeping you there to be worth the time. Enter... Hold Rate. Hold rate is the metric that tells you whether your ad earned the watch, not just the stop. Most creative strategists are not paying enough attention to it, but it is what the platforms are measuring and it is what separates an ad that performs from an ad with a good hook. Howard Gossage wrote it 65 years ago. "Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad" Hold rate is the quantified version of what he already knew. You can stop someone mid scroll the same way a loud noise stops a conversation, but if there is nothing worth staying for, they are gone. TLDR Add hold rate to your creative scorecard. Brief for what happens after the hook, not just the hook itself. Make sure the rest of the ad earns the attention your hook bought. Hooks tell you the first frame worked. Hold rate tells you the ad did.

How Katie at Cozy Earth ships 75+ ads / week (using Motion's new Runneth AI) As Growth Creative Manager, every one of the 75 ads her team ships each week ran through Katie for review which was eating up a good chunk of her time. Until she trained Runneth to think like her. What's Runneth you ask? It's our new shared AI brain for your marketing team. The only AI that watches all your ads and is trained on the $14 billion in media spend analyzed every year through Motion. Think of it like 24/7 eyes on all of your ads plus the best new ads coming out every day. On top of that, it parses every insight, every meeting, every brand doc, and every context signal from your stack feeds into it. It becomes your always on creative strategist. (That knows your ad data inside and out). Katie taught Runneth her QA standards. The brand voice checks. The product line context (ex: bedding vs loungewear vs bath vs pajamas each have different rules). The visual quality bar re: what ads pass and what ads get sent back. Now Runneth runs the first pass on every video ad directly in Slack. If it flags something, the team fixes it before it hits Katie. If it clears the ad, the ad moves. Katie went on vacation last month and told her team: "If Runneth says the ad is good to go, the ad's good to go." The week ran without her. What Katie has built with Runneth so far: - Brand context across product line - QA right in Slack - Video QA routine 👋 P.S. Curious how it could work for your team? We're giving away $1,000 in free Runneth credits to the next 100 marketers who sign up. You can check out the full details here: Runneth dot com

Save this $1.4M Yapper ad prompt by Harry Delmege: https://lnkd.in/eKr89Y5G Meet Harry! Harry is co-founder of Roly Poly Digital and an absolute ad genius when it comes to all things Yapper ads, aka talking head UGC ads. We had Harry on to break down the full anatonomy of what makes this style work so well. For Yapper ads, there are three types of people who can sell anything: 1) The Expert (doctor, "billionaire's assistant" character) 2) The Friend (Oprah archetype) 3) The Convert One tends to outperform them all though. Can you guess which? 👀 It's the Convert. Here's why. Because they have had a real experience that turned them from a skeptic into a believer. That's the energy that carries the ad. It also forces a real before and after story, and storytelling hacks the brain. So how can you make winning Yappers? Make sure you the save the gdoc prompt above. But the key is to fully script your ads. Do NOT send creators bullet points. Harry's take: you are the copywriter, that is your zone of genius, do not outsource it. What you give creators is permission to add small mistakes on purpose. One of his creators intentionally fumbles picking up the free gift on camera because "if I do it perfectly, it looks like I'm selling something" So, how should the ad shape up? Curious to know what it looks like in practice? You can watch the full masterclass VOD from Harry on our Motion YouTube page now here: https://lnkd.in/e26gFnGn Make sure you give Harry a follow btw!

Have you heard of "Moment Anchoring"? 1/3 DTC ads are using it now. For context, our team analyzed 3,254 ads launched recently by 15 top DTC brands and found that nearly 1 in 3 use some form of moment anchoring. We haven't looked at the broader trend numbers yet but that should give you a proxy indication of how popular the format is becoming. So what is it? Moment Anchoring is all about tying your brand to simple, everyday moments to make your customers think of your product in those moments. It's been a primetime strategy for decades in the CPG space and we're starting to see the same playbook pop up in DTC ads now. Example for you: Got Milk was one of the most iconic advertising campaigns of all time. In the late 90s and early 2000s, all manner of celebrities rocked a milk moustache for this campaign. So many celebs were featured including Taylor Swift, Shaq, and even Kermit the Frog. These ads were instantly recognisable. But... What many marketers don’t know is that they actually borrowed the tagline from an earlier ad campaign. One that was arguably more effective. Let's take a step back first. In the early 90s, milk sales in California were steadily declining every year so The California Milk Processor Board recruited ad agency Goodby to reverse the trend. GS&P settled on a simple idea: People only really think about milk when... They run out of it. So they launched with an ad depicting a guy who loses out on a $10,000 radio call in prize because his mouth is full of peanut butter. After this campaign, milk sales in California rose by 2% in 1994. Not a meteoric rise. But they reversed their previous 4% losses. Now fast forward another two years... Got Milk became a national, celebrity driven campaign. It was highly recognizable, but never drove the same sales lift as the original campaign. How come? What made the original so effective? Encoding specificity. The reason the ads centered on a lack of milk in everyday situations outperformed the celebrity driven national campaign is simple: encoding specificity. Encoding specificity means a retrieval cue’s effectiveness depends on whether it matches the way the target was originally encoded. AKA... You remember things better if they match the context you learned them in. Encoding specificity can be stronger than general association. Most of us would associate jam strongly with peanut butter sandwiches. The original ad planted a specific connection instead. TLDR on how to use Moment Anchoring: - Anchor your product to specific moments - Turn those moments into cues for your brand - Become the brand they think of in those moments -- P.S. Enjoyed this read? This was a snippet of our latest edition from Thumbstop, our weekly Motion newsletter on the art and science of creative strategy. The full newsletter has modern ad examples, breakdowns, and lots more inspiration for you. Join 47,000+ marketers who read Thumbstop