Moment
In one line
Built paid creative from scratch at one of the best creator brands in DTC. 100+ ads tested monthly on a weekly iteration cycle, with a direct line between creative and data.
Context
Moment had the best organic content pipeline I'd ever seen, and no paid advertising to show for it. I was brought in to build it.
Moment is a $50M creator brand built on genuine trust: 600k YouTube subscribers, 1M Instagram followers, and personal relationships with some of the best photographers and filmmakers on the internet. When I joined, over 90% of revenue came from organic social alone. No paid program existed. The audience was there. The content was world-class. The infrastructure to convert it wasn't.
What I Built
A paid creative system built on the same analytical rigor that made Moment's organic content work.
- DesignedA creative framework built on Moment's internal standard: Problem, Hypothesis, Execution, Follow-up. Every asset had intention, a brief, and a follow-up on what worked.
- Launched10 distinct creative themes to test from day one: Problem/Solution, Before/After, Offer, Personality-driven, Education, and more. Gave the data something real to work with.
- RanA weekly iteration cycle: test, read the numbers, scale the winners, kill what didn't work. The in-house studio made this possible. No external dependencies, no lag.
- IntegratedDirectly with analysts on a weekly cadence. Creative decisions informed by data the same week it came in, not the same quarter.
Strategy
Start from a clean state. Test systematically. Let the data tell you what the audience already knows about itself.
On in-house vs. agency
The biggest structural advantage wasn't the talent; it was the speed. When creative and data are in the same building with a direct line between them, a weekly testing cadence is actually possible. Agencies can't do that. The feedback loop that closes in a week at an in-house studio takes a month with an external partner.
On what actually worked
Educational content won. Not surprising in hindsight. Moment's entire organic success was built on helping people get better at what they love. The audience didn't want to be sold to. They wanted to learn something. The ads that worked felt like the YouTube channel. That was the hypothesis from week one. The data confirmed it.
100+
Ads tested monthly on a weekly iteration cycle. Scale built on systematic testing, not intuition.
Weekly
Data-to-creative turnaround. In-house studio meant no external lag between what we learned and what we shipped.
Education
The winning format: ads that felt like the YouTube channel. Consistent with the brand's organic success.
Built paid creative infrastructure from nothing at a brand with one of the most trusted audiences in the creator economy. The system that came out of it (brief, test, read, iterate) is the same one I've applied at every performance engagement since.