Ecom Growth Insider · Podcast episode

Sebastian Williams: One Ad Breaks the Plateau, Not Ten

With Sebastian Williams · Published 2026-01-21 · 53 minutes · Hosted by Andrej Tumachowitsch

Sebastian Williams: One Ad Breaks the Plateau, Not Ten

Sebastian Williams started at an agency as a brand new media buyer and was put straight onto accounts spending half a million to a million a month. He describes being underwater, and credits it with how fast he learned. He now works with two or three brands at a time, all of which have doubled revenue year over year.

His objection to the agency model is not that agencies are bad. It is that the model rewards taking the next client, which stretches the team, which puts a junior buyer on an account that needs efficiency now. He has watched brands cycle through five to ten agencies before they either find one of the good ones or give up.

A disclosure Andrej makes on the recording: the two of them have been close friends for years. The reason this is worth your time anyway is the staircase, which is the most useful frame in the episode for why your account is stuck.

What you will take away

• A plateau breaks on one ad, not on ten good ones. His picture of ecommerce growth is a staircase, and each step up is almost always a single outsized piece of content rather than ten winners contributing evenly. Which means a testing programme that produces lots of solid bottom-of-funnel ads can keep you exactly where you are.
• That ad is usually not direct response. The ones that move an account a level tend to be value or education, watchable enough that somebody finishes it, carrying a viewer most of the way through the funnel on their own. His advice for a small brand is to keep running the direct response that pays today while putting a fixed share of tests at finding the big one.
• Get out of the platform. New against returning revenue in Shopify, new customer acquisition cost, whether you are overpaying for returning revenue you would have got anyway. For many brands Meta is seventy to eighty percent of the budget, so a buyer who does not understand the back end is the person most able to burn the cash.
• Half the spend is often doing nothing. He says he still walks into accounts where you can cut spend by half and hold company revenue, then grow again by putting it all behind new customers. Andrej's version: a thirty percent budget cut with flat revenue. The patterns behind it are over-retargeting, branded search and long attribution windows, all of which look better in platform.
• The research is a survey and every review you can find. When he decided to stop saying we need more creative without defining it, what it turned into was a post-purchase survey with direct questions, plus scraping reviews and objections from Amazon, the site and the ad comments. Then building ads around what people actually said.
• Five or six ads a month beat a hundred, once. An olive oil brand with no creative department and a real care for what appears in their feed. They picked one bottle and told the story of where it comes from and how it is made, made five or six ads a month, and after two or three months found the winner that took the account from twenty thousand a month to eighty.
• Test it organically first. A point he took from Gary Vee on stage and has since run himself: post it organically, see whether it earns its own traction, and move the winners into the ad account. It is a harder gut check than any format rule, and it means the business is not built entirely on rented ground.
• Three business metrics, three account metrics. Outside: new customer ROAS, daily contribution margin, three-month LTV. Inside: spend, the bottom-of-funnel result, and click-through rate. He argues spend is the underrated one, because where the platform is putting budget tells you what will actually scale, which is why the ad with a small spend and a flattering return usually will not.

Full transcript

Lightly edited from the episode captions for readability. The episode is the record - where they differ, the audio wins. The source is the published video's own automatic captions, which carry no speaker labels and no timings, so this runs as continuous prose rather than a speaker-by-speaker transcript.

Welcome back to Ecom Growth Insider, the show where we go behind the scenes with top D2C founders, operators, and marketers and unpack what's actually working to scale e-commerce brands today. And today's guest is Sebastian Williams, one of the sharpest metadia buyers and e-commerce growth experts I know. We have been very close friends for years, and I've seen firsthand how he skills the hell out of e-commerce brands. And that's without burning cash or hiding behind flashy return ad spend screenshots. He used to manage six and seven figure ad spends at top agencies working with brands like Dr.

Squatch, Snow, or Thrive Cosmetics, but now he partners directly with a handful of D2C brands, helping them scale profitably, sustainably, and with way more clarity. This episode is a master class on creative strategy, financial modeling, and what's actually moving the needle in 2026 for founders, operators, and media buyers alike. If you run ads, work with an agency, or just want to grow smarter, you'll want to hear every single second of this. Sebastian, how are you doing? Doing fantastic.

How are you? Yeah, doing great. Excited to finally have you on. I have I wanted to do that for quite a while but we never got the chance to do this. Um so yeah.

Do you want to give people a quick story like how you went from media buying to operating in fast growing brands yourself and Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um one excited to be here like it's it's you know have having been on a few different podcasts at this point. Uh you know obviously I'm sure you're going to at some point how close we are how long we've talked for.

excited to be a part uh and you know get to share a little bit of what I've learned. Uh for me uh yeah over the last 2 years it's been a little bit of journey but yeah I basically started off running Facebook ads uh for a sports memorabilia company went to agency side for a little bit after that um spent about two years with different agencies growing media buying departments for you know seven to eight figure DTOC brands uh and then after that ended up going on my own and working onetoone with these brands just trying to implement what I learned from working with you know larger brands. I would say when I worked at my first agency, those are like nine figure, like 8 to nine figure and those are much larger. And so being able to like plug what I learned there into, you know, these smaller brands who maybe just want to be able to crack eight figures. Uh that was there was very helpful been able to like scale revenue much faster for those brands, right?

So every I've only working with two to three right now and those two to three have all doubled the revenue year-over-year. Uh just being able to plug in a lot of things I learned from my previous experience. Nice. And I think for you, at least for me, it's quite unique that you pretty early went like worked with huge or pretty big brands um and pretty big budgets because for me like when I just started the journey like the first few clients were spending like 10 to 20 bucks per day on meta ads and then it slowly like some of them I scaled up, some of them like found like bigger clients and then it went to $50 to $100 per day and then slowly it went up and up and I think for knew it went way faster than that, right? Yeah.

Yeah. No, I mean for me uh when I first started at the agency the you know I had that first job experience. I was there for about 10 months and really wanted to up my like uplevel myself and really get around a bunch of people running ads on a deep level. So I went over to the agency side and uh joining a larger agency as basically like a brand new media buyer. uh day one just kind of tossed in the weeds of you know these massive spenders like people are spending 500k to a million dollars a month on meta ads and I've got to like try to weed through and figure out the strategy and work with the team and it was a lot it was a lot I felt uh underwater for sure but I think that like for me that was a huge key to me being able to grow in the space um and to make so much traction so fast was definitely bars like diving in the deep end.

Yeah. How was it to to manage those huge budgets? Um, and like being responsible for that because I still remember how terrified I was launching like the first ads with like $10 to $20 per day budgets because it was not my money. Um, it was like other people's money and I was just terrified of them losing on that and then them being pissed that like I spent the money I didn't get any results. Yeah.

No, it's scary. But uh but I think that like that fear kind of drives you to like learn more, right? So like I'm at that point I'm waking up at 6:00 a.m. and I'm working till like 8 or 900 p.m. and I'm just like messaging my managers at all times of the day.

Um just on them sideways about like hey what about this? What about this? Pulling every metric that I can and like you know kind of figuring out what's important, what's not. And uh you know like I said I think that it comes down to like it's very scary but that like drove me to learn so much faster. Um but you know there's just like a sense of responsibility that comes with it of like you are managing other people's money.

Uh and with these bigger brands there's a lot of different people a lot of different eyeballs on it. You've got to go and you got to meet with um higher tier people within those companies and talk about and explain your reasons behind what you're doing on the on the meta side or what you're allocating spend towards. And uh yeah, I mean it definitely checks you, I'll say, and makes you uh makes you learn faster. Yeah. Yeah, it does.

And then what made you switch from like working in those in those huge agencies to going the the solo route? Yeah. Um I think um I just for me I'm not a huge agency person. uh in in the traditional model that I've worked at personally so far. I think that there's a lot of times where scale it comes before profit comes before the client and those things, you know, didn't rub me the right way.

Uh and just wasn't what resonated with me. And no disrespect to anybody like I've worked with in the past or anything like that. Uh just wasn't for me. And I would get really good results for these brands. And then it would be okay, how do we take this brand from spending, you know, that might have taken it from 10K a month in spend to 100K a month in spend.

It's going to be how do we get them to 300 and 400K a month in spend even if it's not profitable for them, even if they're not that type of brand that's pushing who's ready for that. Um, and we would often, you know, see clients start to struggle because of that. And so for me, I really wanted to put profitability first uh and make sure that with the clients that I work with, like they were able to grow in a steady rate uh and were constantly communicating. And it's more like one to one, right? Like if I work at an agency, I'm going to get stretched between like I'd say seven to 10 accounts.

Uh and I can't really give a lot of personalized advice. And on my own, I'm able to choose my own workload and give a much more deep like connection to these brands. And for me as well, be be able to be educated across things outside of meta. Um, and really get into talking about the supply chain, talking about how everything I do on the platform as we're scaling the business, how that affects everything else. Uh, and to really become more of like a CMO helping them on the entire business rather than just worrying about something in ad manager, something in meta.

Yeah. Yeah. So basically going more the the holistic route uh route um and also more like as a growth operator of the brand and not only like platform specific and getting like good good in platform metrics. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. I mean I still I love talking to junior med media buyers cuz like for me one of the best ways that I learned was talking to people who just had been media buying for a while and I still do that quite a bit. Um, and when I talk to junior media buyers now, it's like one of the biggest things I say is always get out of the platform, right? Go check your Shopify metrics and look at your new and returning revenue. Look at your new customer acquisition cost versus, you know, your returning and things like that.

Make sure you're not overinvesting and non-incremental returning revenue, things like that. Um, that really change your mindset and how you're looking at meta. And honestly, how what you're doing again is impacting the business. Because for a lot of these businesses, meta is 78 to 80% of your overall budget uh and driving a significant portion of your revenue. Uh and so if the future of the business is dependent on what the media buyer is doing, but the media buyer doesn't understand the back end, then there's like an inherent massive disconnect in what's going on with your business.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, that's also how we are approaching approaching that and approach scaling scaling businesses. Um I used to work like very heavily inside the platforms like inside meta inside Google um and optimize everything for that but over the past I think one or two years slowly shifting more and more away from that on the one side obviously because the platforms are just optimizing more and more and there's like less manual work to do like inside the platforms but then on the other side also because like I've realized how much more important everything else is Um yeah and that you can't rely on just the in platform metrics to to make decisions. Yeah 100%. Yeah.

And you managed that uh uh you you said that the the traditional agency model for you is is broken or it's not really working. Like what do you think is the biggest problem problem with that? Uh I think it's just the way the model works. Maybe maybe this is an inherent model problem, but from what I've seen uh every single time what ends up happening is it kind of starts with like uh very true like desire to help brands and you maybe are really good at media buying yourself or you bring on some good media buyers and you bring on a couple brands, you start to do really good work, you start to get really good results, that attracts more clients and then the agency has trouble turning down that extra work, right? It's like, okay, I'll I guess I'll scale, right?

like I I'll I'll take on this more work and then you start to either stretch yourself or your team thin and then that continues to go outwards and then the uh quality of the results starts to decrease. Uh things start to change slower. You're not as fast to move on newer updates uh and and like updating your SOPs and changing how you're looking at things. Um, and again, I think the biggest thing is like stretching your team too thin and assigning junior buyers and strategists to situations that they probably shouldn't be in, right? Like being at an agency and seeing somebody uh come off the street pretty pretty green to get trained up to be a strategist uh and then getting thrown on an account spending whatever 300k plus a month.

Uh, you know, that is that's pretty tough considering the fact that like that brand needs efficiency right now. they can't be paying for your buyer at an agency to be learning how to do this stuff. Um, so I think that the inherent value for most brands tends to be broken. There's like 10% of less or than of agencies that I've seen that do it really really well. And those like the upper bound of agencies I would say beats freelance and beats contract beats uh like you know in-house a bunch of different situations but those are like outsiz cases.

Those are those are few and far between. They're harder to find and I've seen most brands end up shuffling between five to 10 agencies before they either decide this isn't for me or they actually find one that works for them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think in theory it's the same with like with like freelancers, contractors that like the the top 10% are amazing to work with and they get amazing results and with the with the rest it's is very difficult.

But I guess there you still have like more more control like more training that you can provide uh more um they get more insights into the brand like what is really moving the needle, what is important, what are the goals um and that basically offsets that that difference um and helps you like even have a slightly worse in-house person still get better results than a slightly better agency. Um at least that's what I think. Yeah, one of the bigger problems that I end up seeing, and I'm sure you've seen this a lot, is like you get into an account where the owner doesn't know that they have a problem, right? Like they think that their media buying is really good. They think that their agency is doing a great job.

Um, and maybe they just have really good product market fit, but not a great agency. And I've seen that happen plenty of times. Or even the agency is being either intentionally or unintentionally deceptive, right? Like doing more remarketing on Meta because it looks better in platform. I've seen both cases where like they're doing that intentionally and where they're also doing it unintentionally.

Have no idea because they don't know better. I don't know which case is worse, but neither are good for the business. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I see that a lot.

Like I'm I'm doing a lot of like ad account audits and yeah, I would say every second or third um audit that I do has some kind of those issues like either like too too much retargeting and remarketing to existing customers. Um on Google a bunch of like branded traffic that makes the results just look better. Um yeah, and a lot of those things. Um also like way too long like attribution windows and like whatever you can do to make the inplatform results look better. Uh but for the business long term it's it's not better.

Yeah. Yeah. 100%. I mean I still go into plenty of accounts where you know you go in and you're able to chop half the ad spend and keep the exact same company revenue and uh all of a sudden now you can scale back up uh through new customers and and all of a sudden the the business is growing much faster again. Uh and that's honestly like one of the one of the best things you can do going into a new account.

It's just like okay let's just shift everything over to new customers for most brands. Uh and then you can grow pretty quickly. Yeah, exactly. We had exactly that happen with um with a client a few months ago um that we basically went into in there and we just reduced the budget by 30%. And yeah, the revenue was exactly the same and they were like yeah they couldn't believe it.

Um because they realized how much money they were spending over the past few years um because they had the setup for a very very long time. Um yeah. Yeah. Adriel story. Yeah.

And I mean you've you've worked with a lot of like huge brands like Thrive Cosmetics, Dr. Squatch, and those as you mentioned that are spending a lot of a lot of money. Um like what would you say do those brands do do right and what were like your biggest learnings from from working with them? Uh yeah, those those ones are so interesting because they get so they get so deep. there's like tears to the people doing their Facebook account um that we would be working with from the agency side.

But I think one of the biggest things is like their investment and this is even three like 3 four years ago now, but like their investment in creative, right? Like I I know it's it's beating a dead horse at this point. it was more unique and interesting to say how important it was to invest in your creative back then. But uh but truly like the the process behind identifying everybody who would buy your product and all the objections and uh going through all your your reviews meticulously um and coming up with all the different angles, right? And giving a ton of different reasons to purchase and hit these different people at different stages of awareness.

Um I think that just yeah the granularity uh of those brands and identifying their customers was one of the more impressive things to me and and and really emphasize like you know how important it is to hit creative I want to say not just creative volume but like the value prop of your creative like something that actually resonates with your audience. I say this a lot today is like it's it shifted a little bit more um from when I was back at the agency uh you know the agency I was working at was Rick House and it's a creative agency uh and those creative agencies I think have struggled a bit more in recent years because a creative has moved more towards uh I would say feed optimized like you want to be an advertiser who fits directly in your consumer's feed in a way that's not sticking out like a sore thumb doesn't come off like an It comes off as authentic. It comes off as like value or education that like your users want to watch. Um, and I think again this is something that like those larger brands that have more money to be throwing at meta ads, they're learning much faster than these smaller brands. And so I'm seeing a lot of smaller brands now.

Uh smaller I would say in terms of like if you're spending like less than 30 to 40,000 a month on Meta. Uh you're probably doing a lot of like bottom offunnel direct response advertising still and confused as to why you can't get the same results as those larger advertisers who uh have things that you know they're running as ads that you would never know never know are an ad. Like I'm constantly pulling examples from other brands that are working with sponsored influencers uh that just like you watch it and you're like, "Wow, this is just a regular piece of Instagram content and they're just like, you know, I think I actually showed this you this example the other day where there was an influencer cooking and he used a bottle of olive oil from this well-known olive oil company and you would not know it's an ad because it's just a regular piece of content for him, but he calls it out in the middle of it and like that's great for the brand. I'm sure it does great numbers." Um, and it's just those small things that like again those big brands that are spending so much and testing so much are able to learn much faster. And do you think the same approach makes sense for like small brands?

Uh because historically I was always a fan of like if you're a really small brand, you should focus more on like direct response, bottom of the funnel to just get the first conversions, get the first purchases and then at a certain level you can transition more into education, value, brand awareness, like all of those things that will get you better results long term. But I'm slowly starting to to shift and I think that right now like how how everything is evolving even for smaller brands they should go more into into that direction. Um what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean I think there's always going to be the use case of like lowhanging fruit and going for that low hanging fruit when you're in your initial testing phase. If you're sub 10k a month like I'm sure you can hammer uh direct response ads like just only direct response u without like a banger piece of content.

But the way I always like to describe it with e-commerce is like it's like a staircase, right? Like it's going up and to the right, but like you have these like plateaus. Um, and when when you're like when you're looking at that in your business and you need to crack that next level, uh, it's always it always ends up being like at least when you're talking about Facebook ads and taking that to the next level, it becomes one outsized piece of content. It's not like a bunch of different winners like we made 10 ads and all of them contributed to us being able to spend 100k a month. it vast majority of the time is like one ad that is like a universal winner that takes your account to this massive next level.

Um, and those ads are typically not direct response bottom of funnel. It's like some kind of value or education ad that like is very watchable, very entertaining uh and really moves people almost through the entire funnel on its own. And so if you want to find those winners, you can't really focus on just like bottom of funnel direct uh direct response. And so, yeah, I think that it makes sense for a for a small brand to still lean into those uh bottom funnel concepts, but overall, you should always be putting a percentage of your tests and iterations into trying to crack that big winner. Um, because of course, you need revenue now, but if you want to actually scale, you're going to have to find an outsized piece of content.

And how do you find that? because I I'm sure a lot of founders and and brands are tired of like creating like hundreds of pieces of content and none of them really like move the needle and like their their media buyer the agency just tells them like yeah you need more we need more creative you need to create more and no matter like how much they create the the results don't really improve. Yeah. Yeah. That's I I mean of course and that I think is one of those things that like sounds like a broken record for every media buyer and and and I had noticed that pattern of myself and so I made a conservative concerted effort to make sure that I was quantifying that like what does that mean when I say I need more creative what does that look like like what are we actually trying to get um and what that looks like is like deep customer obsession like meticulous research so for me it's implementing a post-purchase survey and asking like very direct direct questions.

I'm scraping all the customer reviews from Amazon, from the c from from Facebook ads, from our website. Like, you're scraping all those reviews. You're scraping all the objections. Uh, and then you're really trying to create these ads that are tailored around like, well, what are people what are people like having issues with when they're first finding out about our product? Uh, and start addressing that in different ways.

A lot of the time it's like story based content. Um, that's very educational. I think that might be overdone at this point, but that is t what typically you'll see win in an account. Um, but to synthesize that in the best way, it's really being thoughtful about what you're doing. Um, and for me, like with one of my brands, that was what we did.

Like we h we basically instead of trying to produce 100 creatives, this brand was spending about 20k a month. Instead of trying to produce 100 creatives every month, we just didn't have the creative department for that. And they also like are much more brand ccentric, I'll say. So, they don't want to just pump out a bunch of lowquality creative. They really care about what people are seeing on their feed.

Um, we talked pretty deeply about what we wanted to do. Uh, we decided to highlight one specific product. So, this brand sells olive oil. Uh, and we wanted to highlight one of our bottles and what went into making it, where it comes from, how it sourced, everything done transparently in a story format. And we made like five or six ads in a month.

Like every single month, that was it. We didn't blow it out of the water with volume of creative. And then after like 2 or 3 months of just doing that, we found one big winner and scaled the ad account from 20K a month to 80K a month. And that did numbers for their business. It was massive.

They doubled revenue year-over-year. They sold out of the product. It was great. And that all came down to thinking about what we're doing instead of just chasing volume. Yeah, that makes sense.

And when it comes to like implementing that like you do the research first and then you want to implement that that piece of um create that piece of content like what's your view on like which style it should be like whether it's I don't know UGC style where you like talk about about the the angle whether it's like founder le content whether it's influencer le whether it's story based yeah I don't have a particular preference for it I think that founder has done well for a long time, but again, it's one of those things that's kind of getting overplayed now because it's been done by so many different people. I think that doing something that feels authentic to your brand is the most important thing that you're making this like watchable content. Um when I was at uh I believe it was DTOC roundt in November uh in San Diego uh Gary Vee was on stage and I thought it was a really interesting selection for him to be up there just given like this is a group of like raw performance marketers and and you're bringing on you know Gary Vee obviously has an agency in the space but feels a little different right more brand side and one of the things he talked about was the importance of starting your paid strategy with organic like everything that you make for paid he said should be tested first unorganically. You post it on organic, see if it does well and then you move it into your ad account. Um and this is something that like uh Fresh Chili Co is doing and they're a pretty big DDC brand.

They're top 1% of Shopify brands. Uh they are just making organic content and then they're moving that into their ad account. Right? So these these like some of the top brands out there that you're seeing and this is something I do in my own experience is like if I'm suffering for content, I'll just take our top organic content and run it right into our ad account. I think that's the biggest gut check that you can have instead of saying like I want a specific format.

I want a founder story. I want a UGC style. Like that's great. You can see what's working from other brands, but the biggest thing is like is this something that when you post it organically, it just does well. It does well and resonates with your audience and gains its own traction.

Um because again with that olive oil brand, that's how we're doing it and that's what we continue to do. just had two or three different posts in the last two months uh all blow up organically on their own. Uh and that really is the key to growing your business overall. At the end of the day, you also don't want your entire business to be centered around meta ad dollars, right? You're very reliant on an ecosystem that could very quickly change.

Uh I know there's meta outages even right now. So, you know, that stuff impacts your your bottom line. So you want to uh you know insulate yourself from that a little bit uh and try to grow organically and yeah I also view that as the best way to inform your paid ad strategy. Yeah. Yeah definitely.

And I also always see like a very very strong correlation between when something performs well organically and something then performs well on on paid ads. Um, and one of the fastest scale scale ups that we had with a client was one where we came into the business and they had a bunch of viral organic content and they've been producing like organic content for many many months and had a few videos that had a few million views. Um, and they were running zero ads at all. Um, and we were able to I think 17x the revenue in like two months um of working together until like the the operations completely broke down and everything like we had to stop everything. Um, but it it was basically we we just took the organic content um that performed well that went viral before and then ran it as ads for some of them maybe made some small tweaks um but that was like the core of the strategy.

Um, yeah, and we basically scaled up the ad spend from zero to spending 5K per day over the first two months of of working together. Um, yeah, so that that definitely works. Yeah. Um, love to see that. You said before that for you like an ad shouldn't feel like an ad.

Um, how do you guide your clients into that direction? Um because at the same like a lot of brands still want to make sure that everything is on brand and everything fits like the um the brand yeah the the brand guidelines that they have but then if you want to make something that is not that doesn't look like an ad it often times conflicts with those with those guidelines. Yeah. I think one of the bigger problems you run into with that is like if you say I don't want this to look like an ad. might get something that doesn't have a call to action or doesn't uh not that you know you don't always need a call to action but at the end of the day if you don't have something that compels the user to actually click on the video and go and purchase your product uh then it's not going to matter.

I know that one of the better examples I got given early in my career was you know uh creative strategist at the first agency I was at basically said like I can change the hook to a computer on fire and people will stop on it and maybe click but they're not going to purchase the product that's about soap, right? like that's not going to that's not going to help. Um, and so yeah, it does it does matter what you're putting in that ad and you do want to make it compelling. Um, and yeah, I think one of the more important things there just like kind of what I alluded to earlier about like being able to tell a story with it and being able to like, you know, make it very relatable. Uh yeah, I I I think that the more the more objection handling you can do within your ads and like tying it back to the product and making it like, hey, this is how this solves your outcome, like this is your dream outcome.

You're selling quote unquote selling the vacation, uh instead of like everything that goes into it, um the the more you'll you'll get to that successful ad, the more you'll get closer to like being able to take that next step. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And I mean the thing that you that you just mentioned with the hook um we also see that a lot that there are like certain hooks or certain creative that you can create that will just um work for like a huge audience and like a lot of people will watch it just because it's interesting for for everyone and it's like just a piece of content that yeah everyone would watch. Um, and like if you check the the view rate on the ads and the engagement, it might look look great, but then if you don't if you don't like reach the right people and if you don't target like the the right audience, then in the end, you're still just wasting wasting money and you're getting a lot of reach, a lot of awareness, but it's not from the right audience.

Um, so in the end it's about finding the um um yeah, basically being able to combine like a hook that appeals to a lot of people but from the right audience and that you're still targeting as many as possible of the right people and not just everyone. Yeah, that that that intentionality I know that started to take hold more last year and the year before where Meta's algorithm moved so significantly towards broad targeting that you know you start opening an ad with exactly with the demographic you're going for. So if you're a beauty brand uh and you say like you know this is the perfect mascara for uh moms in their 50s, whatever it's going to be, right? So those that that ad will just start hammering that demographic and like those call outs that are much more tailored to whatever you're shooting after ended up becoming a lot more popular. Um and that's still like you know the most important thing right now is like being very intentional about how you're who you're speaking to and how you're speaking to them to be honest.

Um, I know there's a there's a gum brand that I just uh went and bought a product from, I think like two or three months ago that was specifically talking about like uh chewing gum that is healthy for your teeth. And this was like, you know, for me like I had been recently like looking into different ways to take care of my oral health better. And then I got to serve these ads that like felt very tailored to the thing that I care about, right? very organic like uh gum that like you know was healthier for me to chew on. Uh and so it basically is like doing a good job of like that that ad specifically did a good job of like reaching out to a healthconscious consumer and talking to me in a way of like this will improve your oral health and I know that that's something you care about.

And so, you know, obviously that goes into the whole uh privacy stuff with meta and how good they are at targeting. But regardless, um that stuff matters in terms of like when your audience is actually going to serve your ad. How tailored to them to them does it feel? And again, does it feel watchable? Does it feel like something that like I'm actually interested in?

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I also tell all of our our clients always all the brands that that create content for ads to be very intentional and very clear about like who exactly that content is for. Um and basically as as you mentioned before like if a brand has three different avatars, three different like buyer personas that they want to target.

Um it should be very very obvious who that specific ad, that specific piece of content is made for. Um, and ideally someone who like wasn't there while produ while the content was was getting produced should be able to to know like who that content is for. Um, yeah. And basically sometimes if they just share content I basically just ask like yeah who's that for? Like who did you who are you targeting with that?

And often times the brands just don't know that. It's just yeah for for everyone for our clients whatever. Um Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I think uh there was uh I don't know if you ever read this, but there was an old Sam Alman blog. Uh this might have been like the mid like 2010s where he he said uh more people would be better off thinking about what they do before they do it. Uh and I think that that that like if you spent like 10 times more time thinking about the action and then doing the action, uh you will have a better outcome. In the case of making ads, I think that that is the big area people miss is like being really intentional about what we're about to create before we just say, "We need 50 more ads." And you just crank out like, "Okay, you know, we sell fans. Let's like just talk about all the reasons you need a fan." Uh, and maybe you don't hit even the objections and the main points of friction that your customers are feeling and why they're coming to you in the first place.

So yeah, I think that that I think that that's a huge thing in the space is like just again being way more intentional about what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the the majority of the time when you create new content, new ads should go into the prep, into the research, into like knowing exactly what you want to do. Um because I think the majority of the um the creators, brands, they they spend maybe 10% of the time in the in the prep and then 50% of the time creating the content and then 40% of the time editing it and in the in the post-production, but it should be probably like 80 to 90% in the prep and then 10 to 20% in the producing and and editing the content.

Right. Right. you started also leaning more into like finance forecasting and ops over the the past few months. Why? Uh just you you realize that if you as the media buyer aren't I think this alludes to what I said earlier.

If you're not as a media buyer paying attention to the finance and the ops and like what you're actually contributing to the bottom line of the business, you're at risk to just burn a lot of cash. Like you of all people who's burning the money, who's spending the money, uh you really need to be well in tune with the back end. Uh I think this is something that CTC, Commentary Collective, does really really well. Uh and they talk about it all the time. They have plenty of great content on this on YouTube.

Um, but honestly like the person pulling the levers and spending the most money in your business needs to know the back end. They need to know everything that goes into uh your P&L at least on again on the meta side. Um, yeah. So for me, it really comes from a place of like making sure that we're getting the best possible results from like an actual business growth perspective and not just like trying to self flatter myself on, you know, I have a great return on ad spend on Meta or I have a great cost per purchase on Meta because there's plenty of times where taking a lower return on ad spend is better for your business, right? If I am profitable at a 2x and I'm sitting here flexing to my client I got a 4x uh and you know there's like so much room for us to grow like awesome that might look good for me but what might be best for the business is to take that 2x grow faster and then retain those customers.

So you know it it comes from like trying to marry a very holistic viewpoint and become more of like a growth partner to these businesses again rather than being like self flattering. Yeah. And and what do you think most founders get wrong when it comes to like looking at their numbers? Uh revenue over profit. I think that that I I I feel like most people will probably give that answer.

I think that's the most accurate answer. I think that um a lot of founders are trying to get as much revenue as fast as they can because they have this dream of an acquisition and say for 2021 like 2020 2021 that just doesn't happen as much in e-commerce. there's not as like there people aren't coming to save you, right? Like there's not a lot of money that's going to come save you. You should probably be worrying at this level about being profitable.

Um, and I think that a lot of companies get really tied up in just trying to generate as much revenue as possible to be as flashy as possible. Uh, and they think, well, we'll cash flow at a at a later date. And eventually what you see happen is that maybe you don't have the retention that you expect. You hit a shipping mishap. uh there's going to be something that falls through and if you already aren't profitable and you don't have that backs stop to land on uh it it becomes a big issue and so uh I would say like you know revenue over profit uh and growth over uh honestly staying in the game like I think Sean Frank had a really good tweet about this he said like the longer you stay in the game you're going to catch one of the good cycles like you know every 10 years there's a couple good cycles in it uh and so the longer you can stay in the game the stay in the game the more likely you are to have success and that that is the uh you know number of years in the game is the outcome you should optimize for.

Um and I think that not enough founders try to do that. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean yeah the longer you're in business the the more luck surface area you have and the higher the chances that you'll get lucky because you're just in the business for for a long time. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean a mistake at 1 million is a lot different than a mistake at 100 million. Very very different in terms of how that impacts the success and health uh and longevity of your business being able to survive. Uh and the reality is that you're going to make a lot more of that su those mistakes earlier in your time running the brand. And so if your goal is just to scale as hard and as fast as possible, those mistakes are going to be much bigger as a result. And so again, it's just a much riskier proposition that uh can take a really good business that grows really fast um out of the equation just as fast.

Yeah. And how do you balance the um the approach with like focusing more on profit rather than revenue with with also like convincing the client that like if a 2x return ad spend is still profitable pushing the 2x uh return ad spend rather than the 4x return ad spend because the client could say like yeah 4x we're more profitable and I would rather be more profitable right now. So how do you find the the balance there? Yeah. Um contribution margin for sure.

like you just talk to the client, you explain what that is and and how that breaks down for them, right? And I think that's one of the harder concepts to grasp is like, you know, you want to take the most profit, but you can actually generate more profit at a lower return on ad spend a lot of the time. Uh, and that can be a difficult concept to grasp and a risky concept to grasp especially if you don't fully trust your media buyer to be honest. Um, so I think that that comes down to education a lot of the time, at least in my experience. Um, and yeah, talking about like how much do we want to take in terms of profit per new customer from a dollar amount perspective.

Uh, what does the contribution margin look like on that? Uh, and then being very intentional and very aligned uh, as you take those next steps. But I think, um, yeah, I think I think that there's just education and honestly trust like both sides really need to be very trusting in that partnership. Uh, and I think that a lot of agencies to like business partners just lack that inherent trust. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. And how would you say how do you balance creative strategy and like the long-term like longer term brand um aspect of the business with like that financial modeling and short-term short-term results? Um I I would say like to divert that is like just making sure that you are growing the business, right? like and and and from the perspective of like if you're looking at the ad account and you're looking at like new versus existing and how you're spending your dollars. Um it's important to be efficient and make sure that you're generating profit and a good return on ad spend, whatever that looks like for your business, of course upfront, but you also need to have the thousand-y view of like we need to also be paying for new customers to view our ads, too.

We need to be watching our rolling reach. we need to be like getting net new people into our funnel or else we're going to hit a wall. And I think that's another thing that like brands miss big time. Like I would say like 80% of brands do not understand that concept of like okay instead of just focusing on our bottom of funnel results and like we're getting a good uh me we're getting good row like th those things are very important but like are you also getting more people in your funnel uh and growing and putting yourself in a position to succeed in four to six months like what about the buyers when you're in mid July and you're advertising you have to be cognizant that a lot of those buyers at least the higher AO ob you get a lot of those buyers ers are going to push the can down the kick the can down the road, maybe join during a Prime Day sale, maybe they'll join during Christmas time, during Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Um, and how are you investing in getting those people in the business?

Uh, and so, yeah, again, watching like cost per new visitor, your rolling reach metrics, things like that. Um, to make sure that you have again a holistic business view. Are you putting yourself in a position to grow over the long run? Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

when when you consider taking on a new brand um and and working with them, like what are some red flags that you watch out for? Oh man, that's a great question. Um I think the first thing is what you said earlier of the conversation around profitability. And so I've sometimes you'll meet with these founders and they'll say, "I really want to run at a 4x return on ad spend." And you'll look at the business and say, "Actually, it makes a lot more sense for you to run at like a 1.5." Um, if if that's feasible, right? If you're a returning customer business and because I've had this exact conversation, it's like, you can run at a 1x.

That would be amazing for you. You could do way more business at this and you would be profitable. And here's your cash back period. like here's how much that will take to to get all that money back and to grow. And they look at it and they're like, "No, no, I would much rather you be able to spend like it's cool if you can spend $100,000 at, you know, whatever a 2x rorowaz, but can you spend $100,000 at a 4x?" You know, it's like that that uh unrealistic outcome of like what's actually achievable and not understanding uh that there's a lot of market dynamics at play.

Um, right. There's a lot of other people trying to do the same exact thing and acquire the same exact customer as you. Um, so yeah, I think that not not having realistic expectations. Um, and honestly not understanding your numbers deep enough are two like massive red flags for me with founders. Yeah.

Yeah, that's tough. Um, I mean it happens over and over again that I hop on an audit or something or on a on a sales call and just from like looking at the business for like half an hour, I know more about the numbers than the the person I'm talking to and that's usually not not a good sign. Yeah. Yeah. 100%.

And and you know I it's it's tough because it's very busy. There's a lot of things going on in the founder and like on the agency side there's definitely people who take advantage of that the other way around and maybe don't understand the numbers at all and the founder knows them better and the founder is just like oh you guys are you have no idea what you're doing. I think it's important for both sides to come to the table uh with good points and and knowing knowing and understanding what you're talking about and being able to have that highle conversation uh if you want to have success and be able to bring the business to the next level. But like that, yeah, that's that's that's a huge red flag. Like you can't you can't get anywhere with that.

Uh because the the results are always going to be misaligned on both sides. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Now that you're um not working in an agency anymore, like how do you handle client relationships?

And has that changed from from the time when you were in an agency? Mhm. Yeah, it definitely has. I I for me uh for me the clients are way more trusting. Like we we hop on calls once a week.

It's very casual. It's like we talk about all the numbers. I ask them what like what's their main concern. Uh and we're kind of running through the entire business. And then I'm giving them like here's everything that I'm working on and here's my priority not just now but for the next like two three months.

uh and we're just like very much growth partners rather than when it was agency it was a little bit more buttoned up of course like I'm representing a business but also like you go in there and you roll in you say here's the performance here's the performance the last two weeks here the performance the last month of ads here are the ads that we're going to make in the future and that's that and you just kind of move on. Um this situation is much more like okay from a business perspective what's the most important thing for us to leverage uh our time on and spend our time on to grow over the next 3 to 6 months and hit our whatever our annual goal and I found that honestly to be the biggest like driver for success of every business I've been working with right now is like um the the value curve right like like where are we investing our time uh and making sure that whatever we're whatever we're putting our time and effort into is the most like you know high leverage uh high outcome situation that we possibly can uh which is maybe something I wouldn't have been able to have a pulse on care about or have any impact on uh when I was in the agency side. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. If you could only look at three metrics um to when you're growing an e-commerce brand um what would be what would those be?

It's a great question. That's a great one. Um, okay. Uh, I will give you I'm going to give you uh new customer return on ad spend uh slash new customer calculation sheet with the same metric but uh yeah a blended new customer metric there. Uh I'm going to take contribution margin daily contribution margin.

Um, and then, uh, man, I'm deciding between AOV, LTV, but one of those two. Probably LTV, I guess. Um, three month. Give me three three-month LTV. Um, and yeah, I'll take those three metrics.

Nice. That's a good choice. And what about only three metrics in an Meta AD account and not not anything outside the ad account? Yeah, three metrics in a meta ad account. Uh um spend uh yeah spend I'm going to take uh one of the bottom of funnel results depending on the business return on ad spend or cost per purchase.

Uh and then I mean obviously like a clickthrough rate would probably be one of my main ones. Like you want to know how much you're clicking getting clicks on there. And then yeah I mean those are the three things I look at the most. I think it matters like um are you getting people to click and then are you achieving your bottom final result and then like spend's like an underrated one. I know that sounds wild to say, but like when you're looking at creative testing and things like and things like that or what's scaling in your account, where meta is push pushing the most budget really matters.

like that that is like that like I I think that there's this mis misconception when you're looking at an ad account and I can speak from this from my own experience where maybe we're in a scaling campaign and we're on a brand call and a creative strategist will say oh we have $1,000 in spend on this ad at a uh 2x rorowaz which is good but look at this ad that has $100 in spend and has a 5x return on ad spend like that's even better and then the com the company goes why aren't we scaling that ad? And then the answer is because it won't scale because like, you know, nine times out of 10, Meta is making the right decision. If you break that out into its own campaign, whatever, spend on that ad, it's not going to scale. Um, and so that's why I say that like spend is my number one metric that I would be looking at in the ad account. Nice.

Yeah, that makes sense. Are you also looking at CPMs? Yeah, of course. Uh, I don't think it's like I I think that people blow it out of proportion like if you have really bad performance like a my because my CPMs are so expensive. Uh, and it's like I don't know.

I've seen I've seen situations where the CPMs are, you know, they'll they'll triple uh because we're targeting a different audience that maybe is higher value and much more targeted, but all of our bottom of funnel metrics like do much better. And at the end of the day, like if you are achieving a cost per purchase at an like at a sustainable level, it that's all that matters. I don't really I don't care how you get there. I don't care if you have a lower conversion rate and higher clickthrough rate or vice versa or if your CPMs are drastically high or drastically low. It doesn't really matter how you get there.

Um it just matters that you do. Yeah. Now, as the last question, what are your 2026 predictions for ecom advertising? Um, it's a unique time. It's a unique.

I think that we're in a unique era where it is so easy to stand up a store like using these new AI softwares and just kind of vibe code a store in a day and get a product shipped out there and generate all these fake reviews. And um I think there's uh an inherent lack of trust on the consumer side right now. Uh and I do expect like AI ads, AI UGC to take off until there's some kind of regulation on it. Um, and so I think that you're going to see a huge uptick in these like the success of these AI UGC's this year, which isn't a hot take, but I do think as a result, you will also see a huge number of like a much more success on brands that are running like super authentic campaigns like in the warehouse content, uh, like low res UGC, like somebody who like barely knows what they're doing or just like clearly isn't like a regular creator uh that seem like like that just gives more authenticity like you will see outsized results on both of those, right? I think that anything in the middle is going to struggle the most.

Uh but super authentic or super well done UGC that like you could just keep pumping out uh a ton of content is probably going to be the two biggest winners I think in this year at least from a creative perspective. Yeah. So how would you say can brands combat that? Is it primarily due to like creating that very very authentic content? How long will it how long do you think will take until AI will then also create really authentic content?

Uh I don't think it's going to be anytime uh I not to say anytime soon because I think it is soon like I think that it is getting really good at making that authentic content. The one the one factor here I do want to say this now actually Meta will probably be assigning some kind of uh label to these AI ads at some point. This is it's a net negative for Meta for people to not trust the platform and not trust the content on the platform. It is not I I do think that Meta is going to be doing what they can to push back against this not for the good of the consumer to be clear but for the good of their own business. Uh and so that's why I do think that that will change.

Um, but how can brands combat that? It depends on it depends on your objective to be honest. Like if you don't have a problem making AIUGC and you're like, "Hey, like you know, as long as the regulations aren't being enforced, I know that there is regulations around it right now. But as long as it's not being enforced, uh, I'm going to go and do that. Cool.

Do your thing. If you get caught, that's on you." Uh, but yes, absolutely. I do I am encouraging my brands to lean into much more authentic uh stories and uh connections with our customers. Um honestly like reaching out to our customers especially our most loyal customers like just going out there seeing who spent the most money with our brand reaching out to them giving them some free product and being like hey we would love if you would participate in an ad for us um that you know there's no pressure but like we would love to have you do that because you're one of our best customers. Um, and so yeah, just more authentic uh more more authentic content, trying to create uh I would say a moat with your customers, like building a community with your customers.

I think like snarky tea um does a really good job of this where they have like a great Facebook community and people love being a part of it. It's like a big sisterhood within it. Um, and I think that that's really important for brands these days is to like be really true to your customers when you get them in the door because I think that there's a lot of brands that are just trying to take advantage of their customers and just trying to scale uh without that level of like care for what they're putting out there. Yeah, that was awesome. Really appreciate you hopping on.

I I always love talking to you. Um I I learned a lot. It's always really valuable and yeah, I just really enjoy it. Yeah. No, I I love it.

I I appreciate you having me on. It's fantastic conversation and uh yeah, appreciate it. Where can people find you if they want to either talk to you or work with you? Yeah. Uh Sebastian Williams on LinkedIn.

Um feel free to reach out. Uh I don't, you know, post a lot or anything like that, but I do answer my DMs. Always happy to talk. And uh yeah, that's it. Awesome.

Sounds great. I appreciate you. Cool. Appreciate you.