Moment
$40M+ creator DTC brand · 2019–2022
Growth Creative Lead
In one line
I built Moment’s paid creative from scratch. By the end we were testing 100+ ads a month on a weekly cycle, with creative and data sitting side by side.
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 $40M+ creator brand built on real trust: 600k YouTube subscribers, 1M Instagram followers and relationships with some of the best photographers and filmmakers online. When I joined, more than 90% of revenue came from organic social, and there was no paid program at all. The audience and the content were already there. We just needed a way to turn them into sales.
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. That gave the data something real to work with from the start.
- RanA weekly iteration cycle: test, read the numbers, scale the winners, kill what didn't work. Having the studio in-house is what made that pace possible.
- IntegratedWith the analysts every week, so creative decisions were based on data from that same week.
Strategy
Start clean, test on purpose and let the data tell you what the audience already knows about itself.
On in-house vs. agency
Our biggest advantage was speed. With creative and data in the same building, a weekly testing cadence actually works. With an outside agency, that same feedback loop usually takes a month.
On what actually worked
Educational content won, which makes sense looking back. Moment’s whole organic following was built on helping people get better at what they love. People didn’t want to be sold to, they wanted to learn something. The ads that worked felt like the YouTube channel. That was our hunch from week one, and the data backed it up.
100+
Ads tested every month on a weekly iteration cycle.
Weekly
From data to new creative. With the studio in-house, what we learned on Monday was in an ad by Friday.
Education
The winning format: ads that felt like the YouTube channel. Consistent with the brand's organic success.
We built paid creative from nothing at a brand with one of the most trusted audiences in the creator economy. That loop (brief, test, read, iterate) is the same one I’ve used on every performance project since.