Call Us Disruptors

Targeting is automated. Bidding is automated. So the biggest lever you have left is the one most brands treat as an afterthought: the creative.

This week David and Jess sit down with Tommy Changaris, a Marketing Science Partner at Meta, who spends his days measuring what actually moves ad performance. His answer is blunt: creative is the new targeting. In the Advantage+ era, you don't tell the algorithm who to find, you put the targeting into the creative itself and let the system find the people.

What that actually means for brands, agencies, and the people making the videos:

• Real creative diversity is not 50 versions of the same ad with a different font or CTA. It's varying the structural stuff: hook, motivator, format, pacing, casting.
• Keep your audiences broad. Narrow targeting just starves the algorithm and speeds up fatigue.
• Creative fatigue is real and it's a lagging indicator. Refresh concepts every 2 to 4 weeks, and build the next batch before the current winner dies.
• Stop shooting one ad on one day. Shoot a system: multiple concepts, pull stills for static ads, keep the raw footage so you can iterate fast.
• Test meaningful variables (the motivator), not the red button versus the blue button.

Plus the receipts: a supplement brand's three-doctor test, the beach blanket that taught us diversification, and Tommy coining a phrase David is absolutely going to steal, the "creative operating system."

Chapters
0:00 Creative is the new targeting
0:17 Intro, and our guest Tommy from Meta
1:05 The biggest lever you have is creative
1:43 Why 50 tiny variations aren't "diversity"
3:13 The Advantage+ era: AI does the targeting now
8:16 Why broad beats narrow (the women's clothes trap)
11:49 Put the targeting into the creative (the beach blanket)
13:29 What it means for the shoot: cast multiple heroes
15:17 Budgets aren't shrinking, you just need more variation
20:42 Creative fatigue and how to stay ahead of it
26:50 Keep the footage, build a system not a one-off
31:03 How to test creative the right way
37:21 Receipt: three doctor concepts for a supplement brand
40:03 It's one system, not three problems
41:02 Rapid fire round
48:13 Tommy's one takeaway

Call Us Disruptors is the podcast from Savvy Studios, hosted by David and Jess Siciliano.

Chat with us on LinkedIn, and if there's something you want us to cover, drop it in the comments.

Most creative briefs are lying to you. Not on purpose. They're just built to describe what you want made (the logo, the colors, the deliverables, the due date) instead of what the video is actually supposed to do.

In this one, David and Jess break down why that gap quietly kills good work, and the 5 questions they run every brief through before anyone opens Premiere or a camera case. It's the same framework behind a HELOC ad that pulled a 4.8x return on ad spend, and a furniture campaign that drove half the sales of its featured collection.

Also: a prostate commercial told from the dog's point of view, the client who was a total brick wall, and a special guest named Charlie.

The Savvy Framework, the 5 things we look for in every brief:

The takeaway: stop asking "what should we make" and start asking "what are we trying to do." If you know exactly who you're trying to reach, everything else gets easier. Skip it, and the creative team ends up solving the wrong problem beautifully.

Chapters

Call Us Disruptors is the podcast from Savvy Studios, hosted by David and Jess Siciliano.

Chat with us on LinkedIn, and if there's something you want us to cover, drop it in the comments.

Most companies don't have a creative problem. They have a source of truth problem.

That's what Mike Rizzo told us, and he'd know.

In this episode, we sit down with Mike Rizzo, founder and CEO of MarketingOps.com and the force behind MOps-Apalooza, to talk about what's actually broken in the way most companies approach go-to-market. We get into why disconnected data leads to disconnected creative, what it really means to align sales and marketing before a single concept is written, and why the message you put into the market matters more than any one ad.

We look at how modern marketing operations have evolved from managing a few email tools into something closer to organizational therapy, and why setting aside ego might be the single most underrated move a team can make.

If you're a marketer, brand leader, creative agency, or anyone trying to make campaigns that actually perform, this episode reframes what you should be asking before any creative work begins.

Key takeaways:

• Creative is made better when it's backed by data.
• Most companies already have enough customer data; the real problem is that it's disconnected.
• Aligning on a shared definition of success before concepting is what separates good creative from great results.

Jump into the conversation:

(00:00) Introduction

(01:54) What marketing ops is and why it exists

(04:11) What a healthy marketing foundation actually looks like

(06:58) Why sales and marketing alignment keeps breaking

(12:05) How naming conventions and UTMs drive cleaner data

(25:16) Building a single source of truth before any campaign

(26:27) Who are we talking to and about what

(33:08) Rapid fire: personas, data, and expensive assets

(35:26) The one thing to take away from this conversation

Resources:

Connect with Mike Rizzo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikedrizzo/

Connect with David Siciliano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sicilianod/ 

Connect with Jess Siciliano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sicilianoje/ 

Learn more about Savvy Studios: https://www.savvystudios.com/

Welcome to the first episode of Call Us Disruptors.

For years, we've been told that video should be “cheap, fast, or good: just pick two.” 

We think that's nonsense.

In this launch episode, we share how we went from careers in the performing arts to building a video production company focused on business outcomes first. Along the way, we break down what's wrong with the traditional agency model, why so many expensive videos fail to perform, and how measurement, AI, and modern marketing have completely changed what brands should expect from video.

We examine the reasons the traditional playbook has become obsolete and define the necessary shift toward content systems designed for experimentation and iteration, moving away from high-cost agency productions.

If you're a marketer, agency leader, brand operator, or anyone responsible for making video actually drive results, this episode lays the foundation for everything to come on Call Us Disruptors.

Key takeaways:

• Great video should be measured by whether it did the job it was supposed to do.
• Modern brands need content they can test, iterate on, and use across channels.
• The best production partners start with business goals before the camera ever comes out.

Jump into the conversation:

(00:00) Why the traditional video production model is broken

(06:30) How we built Savvy as a strategy-first video company

(09:50) The agency story that exposed broken marketing decisions

(13:39) Why one-off video production doesn’t work anymore

(18:00) How measurement changed everything

(27:15) What future guests and topics will explore 

Resources:

Learn more about Savvy Studios: https://www.savvystudios.com/ 

Connect with David Siciliano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sicilianod/ 

Connect with Jess Siciliano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sicilianoje/ 

Video is the most powerful tool in your marketing stack, and most of it is being wasted. Not because the footage is bad, but because no one is thinking about the business outcome it needs to achieve. Everyone’s still stuck in the "fast, good, cheap: pick two" triangle. We say f*** the triangle. 

We're David and Jess Siciliano, co-founders of Savvy Studios. We started in the traditional agency world and left it behind because, guess what? The model is broken. 

Whether you're an agency or a brand, each episode you'll walk away knowing exactly what to ask for, what to push back on, and how to make video work harder for you.

We believe you can create great ads and brand videos with any budget. People just don’t know how to make it work. After listening, you will.