Scalability School

Question: How should DTC brands plan their Black Friday ad spend and offers?

Direct answer: Plan Black Friday around contribution margin, not a ROAS number. Run the exact offer weeks early so cart, checkout and discount-code problems surface before the big weekend, and set acquisition targets that account for the higher return rate after the promo ends. During the sale, use time-boxed incentives such as a one-hour free gift with purchase instead of a deeper percentage discount, track orders by channel by the hour against target, and put creative effort into founder-led storytelling ads rather than new landing pages. Zach Stuck's best customer cohort ever came from spending $100K before 9 AM on the Saturday after Black Friday, because the 12-month contribution margin on those customers still came out ahead.

Last Black Friday weekend's ad strategy started with a mistake that paid off: Zach Stuck
spent $100K before 9 AM on the Saturday after Black Friday, his team panicked,
and those customers became his best cohort ever on 12-month contribution margin.
Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch and Zach walk through how to plan BFCM spend and
offers: test the offer in October, set ROAS targets that account for returns,
run a one-hour free gift with purchase, pace orders by the hour, and film
founder ads instead of building new landing pages.

We discuss:

- Why your Black Friday ad won't save a weak business-as-usual setup
- Testing your Black Friday offer in October to find what breaks
- Setting ROAS targets that account for post-holiday returns
- Whether discount customers are really worse (and how to measure them)
- The one-hour gift with purchase that tripled hourly sales
- Building an hourly pacing sheet by channel, with Claude
- Why bonuses and gift cards beat a bigger percentage off
- Why a lower AOV can scale better on Meta
- Founder ads, yapper ads and the "source of the week" creative process
- AI character ads and turning blackhat tactics white hat

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https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter

Watch last year's BFCM recap with Zach: https://youtu.be/3POPSecWu_M
Get the newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter
Learn more: https://www.scalabilityschool.com

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It’s a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they’re offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you

This episode of Scalability School is sponsored by Alia, the AI-powered pop-up platform. Head to aliapopups.com, book a demo, and mention AI DTC WTF for an extended 45-day free trial.

Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach
Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no
recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and
real ad accounts.

Chapters

00:00 Black Friday ad strategy: the $100K morning and why the basics win
02:10 Test your Black Friday offer in October
03:58 Set Black Friday ROAS targets that account for returns
05:49 Sale cohorts, BOGO and keeping evergreen ads cranking
08:04 Are discount customers worse? The $100K Saturday cohort
11:13 The one-hour gift with purchase that tripled hourly sales
13:05 How to pace Black Friday by channel and by the hour
20:59 Why a lower AOV can scale better on Meta
23:40 Black Friday creative: founder ads beat new landing pages
34:45 AI character ads and turning blackhat tactics white hat

What BFCM tactics actually work for DTC brands running Meta ads?

Answer: The BFCM tactics that worked best last year were planned around specific hours, not just the weekend: a one-hour free gift with purchase flash sale sent by plain-text email and SMS, which roughly tripled hourly revenue, and a pacing plan built from last year's daily and hourly Shopify revenue and matched to the day of Black Friday rather than the calendar date. On Meta, run BFCM-specific creative alongside evergreen ads, build a dedicated BFCM campaign on min ROAS with a pre-built volume campaign as backup, and give lapsed customers their own one-day-click retention campaign with a ROAS target two to three times higher than acquisition. Then make sure shoppers can actually qualify for your best offer, because a threshold set too high prices them out.

These BFCM tactics come straight from what worked last Black Friday Cyber Monday:
a one-hour free gift with purchase flash sale that roughly tripled hourly revenue,
a pacing plan built by the day and by the hour, and BFCM-specific creative running
alongside evergreen ads. Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch walk through seven tactics
to set up now, including campaign structure, a dedicated retention campaign,
landing pages for new vs returning customers, and why lowering your offer
threshold can help you scale.

We discuss:

- How a one-hour free gift with purchase flash sale works, and when to rerun it
- How to pace Black Friday Cyber Monday revenue by day and by hour
- Why Cyber Monday landing on November 30 changes your December comps
- Whether BFCM-specific ads beat evergreen on Meta (last year, they did)
- Black Friday ad ideas: founder warehouse videos, gift guides, ugly ads, the
  "We're sorry" ad, Christmas tree product shots and comment replies
- BFCM campaign structure: min ROAS, cost caps, 1-day vs 7-day click
- Why you should pre-build backup campaigns before the weekend
- How to set up a Meta retention campaign for lapsed customers
- Landing pages and pop-ups for new vs returning customers
- Why Hollow dropped from buy 3, get 3 free to buy 2, get 2

Subscribe for a new episode every week.

Watch last year's BFCM recap with Zach: https://youtu.be/3POPSecWu_M
Get the newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter
Learn more: https://www.scalabilityschool.com

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach
Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no
recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and
real ad accounts.

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It’s a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they’re offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

Chapters

03:03 The one-hour free gift with purchase flash sale
08:07 How to pace Black Friday Cyber Monday revenue by day and hour
14:11 Do BFCM-specific ads beat evergreen on Meta?
18:20 Black Friday ad ideas: ugly ads, "We're sorry" and Christmas trees
21:24 Black Friday campaign structure: min ROAS, cost caps, click windows
26:37 Backup campaigns and the Black Friday retention campaign
29:46 Black Friday landing pages for new vs returning customers
33:43 Pop-ups and offer consistency before and during Black Friday
35:36 Offer thresholds: why buy 2, get 2 scaled better than buy 3, get 3

Question: What are category entry points, and how do you use them in Meta ads?

Direct answer: Category entry points are the buying situations that make someone think of a category, like standing front row at a concert or lying awake next to a snoring partner, and the more of them a brand is linked to, the larger its share of mind and its share of sales. To use them, map situations across the whole category with the 7 W's rather than relying on your own customer surveys, score each one on size, frequency and brand fit, then launch ads that call out and show the situation. Tyson Drake recommends that situation-led ads carry more than half of ad account spend, ideally 60 to 80 percent, with roughly 80 percent of creative effort going into proven entry points and 20 percent into new ones.

Category entry points are the buying situations that make someone think of your
category, and the more of them your brand owns in a customer's head, the more of
the category's sales you take. Brad Ploch sits down with Tyson Drake, former CMO
of The Oodie and now a fractional CMO for eight and nine figure DTC brands, to
turn the Ehrenberg-Bass research into a tactical playbook for Meta ads. You'll
learn how to find category entry points with the 7 W's, how to prioritize them
by size, frequency and brand fit, and how to launch, tag and scale the creative.

We discuss:

- What a category entry point is, and why nobody wakes up thinking "I need
  testosterone"
- How mental availability works, and why brands thought of in more buying
  situations sell more
- Category entry point examples, from front row at a Metallica show to a
  snoring partner
- The difference between a persona and a category entry point
- Why your own post-purchase surveys bias the research, and where to look
  instead
- The 7 W's framework for mapping buying situations
- How to prioritize entry points with ICE scoring, search data and frequency
- Why situation-led ads should carry more than half of your ad spend
- Statics vs video, and the naming conventions that make entry points
  trackable
- The 80/20 explore vs exploit split, and how Loop grew beyond festivals

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It’s a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they’re offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

Follow Tyson Drake on X: https://x.com/tysondrake
Get the newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter
Learn more: https://www.scalabilityschool.com

Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach
Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no
recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and
real ad accounts.

Chapters

01:25 How Tyson Drake scaled The Oodie and taught himself marketing
08:05 Mental availability: the research behind category entry points
11:23 Category entry point examples: concerts, flights, snoring partners
17:01 Category entry points vs personas: what's the difference?
19:17 How to find category entry points with the 7 W's
28:56 How to prioritize category entry points: ICE, size and frequency
33:47 Why mental market share predicts sales market share
38:36 How to launch entry point ads: statics, video and naming conventions
47:07 Explore vs exploit: how to scale a winning entry point

• (01:25) - How Tyson Drake scaled The Oodie and taught himself marketing

What should DTC brands A/B test to increase revenue per visitor?

Test the variables that change how the offer is perceived before you test reassurance. In Brad Ploch's recent split tests, cutting a $279 product's sale price from $229 to $199 lifted revenue per visitor 44%, adding six problem-focused questions to a quiz doubled it, and swapping the post-purchase offer took upsell revenue per visitor from about $2 to $10. Trust signals went the other way: a bolder warranty line cut conversion 7.5%, full reviews lost 10% of profit per session to an AI summary, and USP blocks at checkout changed nothing.

The ecommerce A/B tests that paid off this season all changed how the offer is framed: the price point, how long a quiz lets shoppers sit in their problem, how plainly a headline states the USP, and where Meta sends the traffic. The "trust signal" best practices most brands assume are safe (a louder warranty, more reviews, reassurance at checkout) lost or did nothing. Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch walk through more than a dozen real split tests from DTC brands, with the numbers behind the winners and the losers.

We discuss:

- Why dropping a $279 product from $229 to $199 lifted revenue per visitor 44% and more than covered the margin hit
- The six extra quiz questions that doubled revenue per visitor, and the switcher review that cost 8%
- Why these "trust" signals ultimately backfired
- How a plain USP headline beat ALL of the clever ones during a collection page headline test on $2M in revenue
- Why USP and review blocks at checkout changed nothing
- One ad, five landing pages, one CBO: how weekly spend doubled & efficiency improved
- The post-purchase offer swap that took upsell revenue per visitor from about $2 to $10
- Longer product pages for premium products, and preorder vs. sold out

Subscribe to never miss an episode.

Get the newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It’s a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they’re offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach
Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no
recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and
real ad accounts.

Chapters

00:00 Ecommerce A/B tests: what won, what lost, and why
02:06 Price testing: why $199 beat $229 by 44% revenue per visitor
07:08 How to build a quiz funnel in Claude, and the button that added 20%
12:04 "Sit in the problem longer": the quiz change that doubled revenue
22:30 Why more trust signals lowered conversion: warranty, reviews, AI summaries
33:53 Clear beats clever: a collection page headline test on $2M in revenue
38:18 Do USP and review blocks at checkout lift conversion?
41:55 One ad, five landing pages: how weekly spend doubled
47:41 How to audit your post-purchase upsell
50:54 Longer product pages for premium products, plus preorder vs. sold out

• (00:00) - Ecommerce A/B tests: what won, what lost, and why

How do you build a DTC offer that raises profit without hurting conversion rate? Simplify the offer so a shopper understands it in seconds, then raise MSRP so you can show a bigger discount at a higher final price. The offers scaling DTC brands run today are buy more save more, a discounted first subscription order, or tiered dollar-off bundles. Brian Ng of Digital Ride raised one brand's MSRP to $74.95 behind a 50% discount and saw conversion rate hold steady while the brand moved from a monthly loss to profit. In this episode, Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch and Zach Stuck talk DTC offer strategy with Brian Ng of Digital Ride, covering how to raise prices without losing conversions, the three offers scaling brands run right now, and how a $10M a month brand manages creative with outside agencies. You'll learn why raising MSRP behind a bigger discount can lift profit at the same conversion rate, how to test a new offer with a single URL parameter, and why more creative volume often makes performance worse.

We discuss:

• What a bad DTC offer looks like, and why confusing offer pages lose the sale
• The three offer structures scaling DTC brands use: buy more save more, subscription-first, and tiered bundles
• How Brian raised MSRP to $74.95 behind a 50% discount and turned a monthly loss into profit
• How to test offers with Convert or Intelligems experiments versus sending ads to a new landing page
• How to forecast ecommerce revenue year over year and why you shouldn't scale before new customer ROAS is there
• Running a $10M a month brand's creative through three agencies with no in-house strategists
• Pricing psychology: why $39.99 beats $35.99, and a $30 price change that lifted profit per session 40%

Get the newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter Learn more: https://www.scalabilityschool.com This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you! To connect with Brian Ng: https://x.com/briannjho To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Scalability School is the podcast for media buyers, agency owners and DTC operators who want to grow without guessing, hosted by Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch and Zach Stuck.

Chapters

00:00 DTC offer strategy: why $39.99 beats $35.99 02:35 How Digital Ride grows DTC brands as a growth partner 05:27 How to forecast ecommerce revenue year over year 08:56 Can creative agencies replace an in-house creative team? 14:26 How much creative a $10M/month brand launches 22:29 The 3 offers scaling DTC brands run right now 23:55 How to test a new offer: Convert experiments vs new landing pages 25:29 How raising MSRP turned a monthly loss into profit 30:25 Pricing psychology: the $30 price change that lifted profit 40%

How do you scale a subscription app with Meta ads?

Start with an offer whose value is obviously outsized for the price, then test the packaging rather than the product. Format Finder moved from a single $97 plan to $29, $59, and $97 tiers, and the single change that moved AOV the most was toggling annual billing on by default. Free trials failed outright because the cost to acquire a trial on Meta never backed out. Target customers with a need rather than a want, since need-driven buyers churn less and complain less, and turn your best users into your ad creators by paying them a percentage of the spend their ads carry. Scaling a subscription app with Meta ads comes down to the offer, the pricing packaging, and where the creative comes from. Brad Ploch and Zach Stuck sit down with Naveed, who went from affiliate marketing to a 45-person performance agency to an ecommerce brand to Format Finder, the app he built in three weeks and now runs at $20,000 to $25,000 a day in Meta ad spend. You'll learn how he builds an offer, the pricing tests that worked and the one that failed, the campaign structure behind the spend, and the creator flywheel that turns his own users into his best-performing ads.

We discuss:

- How to tell whether an offer is worth running before you spend a dollar - Why problem-solution fit matters more than unit economics at the start - The move from a single $97 plan to $29, $59, and $97 tiers, and why the free trial never backed out on Meta - The pricing change that moved AOV the most, and it was not the price - Why customers with a need churn less than customers with a want, and how a realtor funnel tested that theory - Why he runs one CBO split by geo, no ABO testing, and no interest targeting - The creator flywheel: users who hit a million views make his ads and take 5% of the spend those ads carry - What a one-click AI video editor actually costs to run, and how SaaS margins survive per-user API fees - How he runs the ad account, customer service, and product development through AI agents in Telegram and Slack - Why the harness around the model matters more than the model

Subscribe for a new episode every week.

Get the newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter Learn more: https://www.scalabilityschool.com Connect with Naveed https://x.com/navuud To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and real ad accounts.

Chapters

00:00 How to scale a subscription app with Meta ads 00:29 Meet Naveed: Switch Research to Format Finder 02:45 From affiliate marketing to a 45-person performance agency 04:06 Getting banned by Meta and what it exposed 05:45 Why the ecommerce inventory cycle burned him out 08:10 How One Peak turned viral videos into a course business 10:10 Building Format Finder in three weeks with AI 11:50 What the app does, from format quiz to finished cut 13:15 Why the offer is the biggest lever nobody talks about 16:18 How to price a subscription without killing conversion 19:15 The pricing change that moved AOV the most 19:55 Why customers with a need beat customers with a want 22:05 A word from Northbeam 23:20 Why your ad does the targeting, not your audience settings 24:45 Ad account structure: one CBO, no ABO testing 25:31 The creator flywheel: paying users 5% of ad spend 28:35 How the video editor cut churn and unlocked scale 29:35 SaaS margins when every user burns API tokens 32:50 Why the TAM for creator tools is enormous 37:50 Running ads, support, and dev through AI agents 42:00 Where to find Naveed

How much should you pay a DTC agency in 2026? For Meta ads management on its own, the market has settled between $2,500 and $5,000 a month, and paying above $5,000 only makes sense when the brand spends six figures a month or the scope adds creative, forecasting, and CRO. Creative is the one line item worth paying at the top of the market, because a single breakout ad can add $20,000 to $50,000 a month in profitable spend. Percentage-of-spend deals are fair when they carry a hard cap and a CPA or ROAS target attached, and they should never be charged against branded search. DTC agency pricing is all over the map, so Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck break down what you should actually pay in 2026 using a Foxwell Founders survey of 200+ agencies. You'll learn the real retainer ranges for Meta ads management, when percentage of spend is fair and when it is a red flag, what a media buyer should be doing to earn the fee, and what creative, email, SMS, landing pages, and CRO cost right now. We discuss:

• What 200+ agencies reported charging, and why 4 out of 5 quote a flat retainer or a retainer plus a percentage of spend
• Why $2,500 to $5,000 a month has become the market rate for Meta ads management with no creative attached
• When to keep an agency, bring it in-house, or pay up for one exceptional freelancer
• Why percentage of spend only works with a hard cap and a CPA or ROAS target
• At what monthly spend incrementality testing starts to matter
• Why nobody should charge a percentage of spend on branded search
• Why creative is the one agency worth paying the most for
• What to pay content creators directly, with and without whitelisting
• Email and SMS pricing, and the attribution model that gets brands fleeced
• Landing page and CRO pricing per page and per month, plus five fixes that work on almost every store

Get the newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter Full Episode and transcript: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-school-podcast/what-you-should-pay-a-dtc-agency-in-2026Learn more: https://www.scalabilityschool.com

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and real ad accounts. Chapters 00:00 What you should pay a DTC agency in 2026 01:58 What 200+ agencies told us about how they price 02:45 Meta ads management pricing: the floor, the market rate, the ceiling 04:42 Should the fee be flat, or tied to performance? 05:13 Why $3K to $5K became the market rate for ad management 07:36 When to use an agency, go in-house, or hire a freelancer 10:20 Why percentage of spend works when you cap it 11:01 What a media buyer should actually do to earn the fee 16:52 The gap between pressing buttons and real media buying 19:17 At what monthly spend does incrementality actually matter? 22:42 Google Ads agency pricing and the branded search problem 28:45 Creative agency pricing and why it is worth paying the most for 31:45 What to pay content creators directly 35:58 Email and SMS agency pricing without getting fleeced 39:42 Onshore vs offshore teams and what actually changes 43:20 Landing page and CRO pricing, per page and per month 48:15 How fast a landing page should go from idea to live 50:03 Five CRO fixes that work on almost every store

How do you build a performance creative team for a DTC brand? Start with the most experienced hire you can afford, a director-level player-coach for nine-figure brands, a senior agency-trained strategist for smaller ones, and let them build the team top-down, using freelancers to fill gaps while full-time roles get approved. Match output goals to headcount, because ad volume is determined by team size, and vet every candidate with a paid assessment that tests both craft and how they use AI. Building a performance creative team starts with hiring the most experienced brain you can afford, a director-level player-coach, then filling in strategists, editors, designers, and a creator manager around them. In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Joanna Wallace, who founded the creative department at HexClad and served as VP of Creative Strategy at Birddogs, to map out exactly who to hire, in what order, what they cost, and how to test them before you commit millions in ad spend to their strategy.

We discuss:

• Why going cheap on your first creative hire is the most expensive mistake in DTC
• What a creative strategy director actually costs in 2026 (It's not what you think) and why
• Why your ad volume is determined by your team size, full stop
• Why agency experience beats brand-side experience for strategist hires
• How to run paid assessments that expose AI-generated word salad
• The coordinator role: the smartest entry point into creative strategy

Join The Scalability School Newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter

Connect with Joanna Wallace: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannasloamewallace/ Joanna's creative strategist evaluation template: To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com. This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

Scalability School is the podcast for DTC media buyers and e-commerce operators who want to scale profitably — hosted by Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck.

Chapters

• 00:00 How to build a performance creative team for a DTC brand
• 02:02 The #1 hiring mistake: going cheap on your first creative hire
• 03:04 What a creative strategy director costs in 2026
• 05:06 Player-coach: what the director does in the first six months
• 09:10 Why ad volume is determined by team size
• 13:13 The hiring order for seven-figure brands
• 18:18 Why agency experience beats brand-side experience
• 21:21 What nine-figure creative teams do differently
• 25:24 Sharing creative learnings across the whole company
• 31:27 Where to find great creative strategists
• 37:36 How to evaluate candidates with paid assessments
• 41:38 How to break into creative strategy (the coordinator route)
• 47:43 How to keep a creative team from burning out

In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Hannah Houg and Matthew Gattozzi to answer the question every team is quietly avoiding: how do you use AI for creative strategy without losing the judgment that makes ads work? The short answer is that you bring AI a hypothesis instead of asking it for one. You'll learn which four parts of the process to protect from AI entirely, why the briefing stage is where ad quality actually degrades, and how to give your strategists room to think without torching your output.

Hannah has built ads and campaigns for 300+ DTC brands. Matthew's studio has driven $100M+ in client revenue. Both use AI daily. Both have watched it quietly weaken the same muscle they get paid for.

We discuss:

• Why every creative brief in the space suddenly looks the same
• The difference between AI helping your research and AI writing your hypothesis
• Why AI is good at following rules and bad at breaking them, and why that matters for scale
• How Hannah lost the ability to write a script after a few months of AI-first drafting
• What a genuinely good AI input looks like (and why it's built before you open the tool)
• The one-sentence goal every brief needs before anyone writes a word
• Why building 7 personas on a $10k/month budget is a math problem, not a strategy
• What "deep context" actually means, and why most teams don't have it
• Why the efficiency-vs-quality fight is a leadership conversation, not a tools conversation

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This episode is sponsored by Proppel, the hiring agency that has placed more than 75 employees for Foxwell Founders members. Get 10% off your first hire when you mention the Scalability School Podcast: https://www.weareproppel.com/foxwell-founders-proppel

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

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Chapters 00:00 Intro: why AI creative strategy is producing the same ads everywhere

04:08 Why every creative brief suddenly looks the same

07:18 What makes a great ad, and why AI can't break rules

10:22 Is research or briefing where AI actually hurts ad quality?

12:26 Why AI can't come up with the big idea

14:33 The danger of letting AI write your hypothesis

16:39 How AI quietly degrades your copywriting muscle

19:45 How to find an insight before you open AI

25:55 Why hyper-specific creative is winning on Meta right now

29:57 Why your team needs space to think, not more output

30:58 Has any LLM actually cracked ad copywriting?

33:00 Why creator talent match beats a perfect script

37:07 What a good AI input actually looks like

40:10 The one-sentence goal every creative brief needs

44:14 The persona trap that sinks small ad budgets

47:21 What "deep context" actually means

50:24 Why strategists want to slow down while owners push efficiency

53:27 Why this is a leadership problem, not a tools problem

56:32 Break your margins today for performance later

57:32 Bonus: the Michigan method

Brad and Zach go deep on the single biggest scaling lever most media buyers are ignoring: the landing page. The spine of the episode is a mindset shift, meaning you can scale spend without new creative, new offers, or more discounting. You scale with pages.

They open with creative-to-lander congruency: the ad makes a promise and the page has to keep it. Zach shares how MarsMen now runs 33 active landing pages organized by roughly 10 messaging pillars (aging, cortisol, energy, weight loss, GLP-1, TRT vs. natural), and the company has a hard rule that no ad launches without a congruent page behind it. The reason goes beyond conversion rate: Meta's Andromeda algorithm is reading the landing page itself. Page copy is a targeting signal, not just a destination.

Brad backs this with a case study: a client sending all traffic to a PDP ($41K in spend) duplicated the exact same creative to a "5 Reasons Why" page. Same spend level, substantially better ROAS, lower CPMR, and the age breakdown showed 45+ ripping harder than ever. Same ad, new audience, unlocked entirely by the page.

From there they cover the format progression (listicle → advertorial → dynamic hybrid page → quiz), the specific page elements that matter (comparison charts, clear single CTA, social proof, FAQ, shoppable PDP sections injected below listicles), how to structure tests inside the ad account, kill criteria (48 hours at MarsMen's spend level, plus a "graveyard campaign" with cost controls to separate creative problems from page problems), what "winning" actually means (net new spend volume added to the account, not just beating the PDP head-to-head), and reporting (spend velocity as the success metric, heat maps, and session recordings, including one recording session that led to a single button change worth +20% revenue per session).

The episode closes with the getting-started playbook: don't reinvent the template. Go pull the landers from the biggest spenders in Motion or any ad-tracking tool and copy the structure, because they all run nearly the same one. The real bottleneck is copywriting, which is much harder than people think (raw AI output without heavy pre-prompting gets you "shit copy with a bunch of em dashes"), and perfectionism: your landing pages can be uglier than your website, and your ads can be uglier than your landing pages. Use your brand font and colors, but if it's not perfect, get started.

• Did you know Meta's Andromeda algorithm is reading your landing page copy, not just your ad, and using it to decide who sees your ads?
• How one brand took the exact same ad, swaped the PDP for a "5 Reasons Why" page, and matched $41K in spend at a substantially better ROAS while unlocking an entirely new age demo.
• What if you could scale spend without a single new creative, new offer, or deeper discount, using only landing pages?
• Why "my lander beat the PDP" is the wrong definition of a winning landing page test.
• What watching just 20 session recordings revealed that a single button change fixed.
• Why MarsMen refuses to launch any ad that doesn't have a congruent landing page behind it, and how they actively enforce it with 33 live landing pages.
• Why nearly ALL nine-figure brands run the same landing page template, and why this one thing (and not design) is the real reason your pages take forever to ship.

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

Chapters

• 00:00 – Intro
• 02:42 – Creative and lander congruency: the ad makes a promise, the page has to keep it
• 04:20 – Mars's 33 landing pages and the "no ad without a congruent page" rule
• 06:48 – Organizing pages by pillar and how wide to go
• 09:04 – Case study: same creative, $41K PDP vs. 5 Reasons Why page (and the 45+ audience unlock)
• 11:27 – "Andromeda is reading the page, not just the ad"
• 12:52 – What CPMR is and why it's debatable as a metric
• 13:54 – The landing page format progression: listicle → advertorial → dynamic page → quiz
• 16:51 – The elements that actually move the needle on a listicle