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[00:00:00] Phillip:<\/strong> Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I’m Phillip.<\/p>\n [00:00:04] Brian:<\/strong> I’m Brian.<\/p>\n [00:00:05] Phillip:<\/strong> Today, we are going to run the gamut. Want to cover as much as we possibly can because we have someone who I actually really treasure in our community, mostly because of his candor, mostly because of his dedication to telling the truth, sharing his journey, and also because he’s been a valued member of the Future Commerce community for such a long time. He is the co-founder and president at Popsmith. And today he’s going to tell a little bit about why he thinks ecommerce economics are broken, how he’s building a lean brand in 2026, God help him, and why AI-made ads and customer investors and raising funds and crowdfunding and all those things are helping him to turn the tide of everything else economically that might be a challenge to otherwise building for success in the modern day. Welcome to Future Commerce, Dave Stickland.<\/p>\n [00:01:02] Dave:<\/strong> Oh, thank you, guys. It’s surreal to be here. Yeah. Excited for the conversation.<\/p>\n [00:01:06] Phillip:<\/strong> Brian, I know you don’t have the whole of our time here together, but you two go a long way back at Future Commerce salons. Dave, I don’t think you and I have had much opportunity to break bread together.<\/p>\n [00:01:18] Brian:<\/strong> Soon. Dave’s a great voice at a salon. He has always got something insightful to say and always, you know, if I’m doing, like, one of my icebreakers, it’s always interesting to see what Dave’s gonna say.<\/p>\n [00:01:32] Dave:<\/strong> I always walk out of there with a friend too. Like, every time I go to one of those events, I come away with somebody that I have a relationship with after the event, which doesn’t happen a lot.<\/p>\n [00:01:41] Brian:<\/strong> That’s my goal. That’s my goal. 100%.<\/p>\n [00:01:45] Phillip:<\/strong> Dave, you have this post that, you know, went, I would say, pretty viral in our little neck of the woods, especially amongst the D2C crowd who are, you know, generally are the screen shatters of success in the ecosystem.<\/p>\n [00:02:02] Brian:<\/strong> Funny because, you know, so we’re talking about the… well, I’m gonna pronounce it ecombro. Ecombro. The ecombros. Yeah.<\/p>\n [00:02:12] Phillip:<\/strong> Put the emphasis on the wrong syllable.<\/p>\n [00:02:14] Brian:<\/strong> Dave, you’re like this sort of anti-ecom bro, or you, you know, sort of fashion yourself to be sort of the… an outside voice in a world of ecom bros.<\/p>\n [00:02:26] Dave:<\/strong> Yeah. And it’s a lot… ecom bros and direct response demons, like, you know, as Alex calls them, like, right?<\/p>\n [00:02:33] Phillip:<\/strong> You know? Yeah. Yeah. Alex Greifeld talks about direct response demons all the time. I… we actually… I think this is a really interesting… The topic of conversation in the post was you basically say the math doesn’t math anymore. And I think the setup there was you having had so much experience in building brands, especially brands that have sort of like Amazon at the core, paid media at the core, performance marketing and the like, the before times. And you did this really incredible breakdown of what the contribution margin looked like in the old days versus today and what can be done in order to get your brand to a healthy contribution margin in 2026, or what needs to be done in order to get there. Could you walk us through that? And maybe we can sort of preface that by saying that a lot of people are talking about the kinds of things that might lead you to things like AI-based creative, AI and agentic automation within your business that can drive and give you more autonomy, individual contribution within your business as a leader. So yeah, that… and that’s one of the reasons I reached out to you today. I was like, you need to come share that here with the folks that run these, you know, large enterprises every day. They wanna hear about this.<\/p>\n [00:04:03] Dave:<\/strong> Yeah. You know, I… the post that you’re talking about came out of two things. It came out of… look. I mean, like, there was a period for Popsmith where it almost fell apart, and we had to fire everybody and go back to the garage. So I’ve spent the last year and a half learning how to be a marketer and to be the CMO of our brand. One of the ways to do that is to get your hands dirty all the way down to, you know, how you run the ad account to what creative goes in it. And one of the things that I think is catching traction, you know, that I’m doing is leveraging different AI tools to circumvent traditional ways of spending thousands of dollars on creative. So there’s so many tools out there that are going so fast now that if you have a strong brand play, you’re able to articulate that to the tools. You’re able to provide it all of the context and build the correct scaffolding. There is nothing that you cannot accomplish if your imagination can will it. And as agentic stuff happens, what’s happening is, you know, like, even six months ago, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing. Like, you were losing memory in these chat tools and things are gone. But now with agentic, I can build and build and build and build and it all… it starts to create momentum and there can be a flywheel effect. So, you know, as I see people talk about how founders are wasting their time and money in AI and nothing is coming out of it, like, you know, let’s go look at what Grockbout and Dot are doing for me in the way that they are compounding success and listening in a way that maybe they can go faster and deeper and more interesting and do more than I could do with an agency, you know, five years ago.<\/p>\n [00:06:02] Phillip:<\/strong> Yeah. And, and obviously at, you know, a fraction of the cost.<\/p>\n [00:06:08] Dave:<\/strong> Yes. At, you know, infinite fractions of the cost. Really, all it is is time. And if I’m doing this correctly, there’s nothing that says I can’t hand this off to an employee. Like, when AI came, I realized that everyone that worked for me overseas or not was probably doing the last version of whatever they were doing. Right? Like, so if I had a copywriter, this is the last real copywriting job she’s ever gonna have. So I took it on myself to say, I need you to get good at these tools because this is the only way that you get the next job. I can’t guarantee Popsmith’s around forever. So what is in your future? This is your future. So you either own the software or the software will own what you do. And so being able to build these tools and agents in a way that’s unlike old software, it’s very easy to hand somebody else. Like, once I’ve created a system that I’m comfortable with, it is very easy for someone else to just go in and say, do the thing and get results. So, you know, while I am spending my individual time as a founder doing this now, my goal is to have this done by people that are paid way less than maybe even a creative strategist would be paid for now.<\/p>\n [00:07:25] Brian:<\/strong> It’s funny. You’re spending a lot less money on creative strategy than you have been or would have had to in the past. But you also talk about how selling online is the most expensive it’s ever been.<\/p>\n [00:07:38] Dave:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n [00:07:39] Brian:<\/strong> So explain… just give a quick little background. You don’t have to get into everything since you’ve got an incredible video on the exact details. But, like, why you feel like…<\/p>\n [00:07:49] Phillip:<\/strong> We’ll link it up. Yeah.<\/p>\n [00:07:50] Dave:<\/strong> Need to read it.<\/p>\n [00:07:51] Brian:<\/strong> What… give us the basics about why spending on ecomm is more expensive right now.<\/p>\n [00:07:58] Dave:<\/strong> I think the big picture answer to this, which I didn’t actually directly say in the video, is there’s no more frontier. You know, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, Amazon opened the doors to third-party sellers to sell other things on Amazon. And they made that incredibly lucrative and cheap. Just like when, you know, you had all of the Ubers and the DoorDashes come out and they supplemented the cost of all those things to get adoption. Ecommerce was able to take advantage of that moment to establish itself on a new channel and reap margin. The next thing out was, you know, maybe you weren’t going to a local expo in the United States. There was more frontier to go to Canton Fair. And then after Canton Fair, there was more frontier if you were willing to go out into the weeds in Shanghai or Guangzhou or wherever the factories were and start meeting with people on the ground. Well, that’s all saturated now. Like, the ability through Alibaba to meet the factories directly, the savviness of those businesses that are leveraging… if you were trying to leverage global supply chain, there’s a really good chance that the factory itself is competing with you on Amazon. Like, there’s a million ways that the American ecommerce guy who wants to make product and sell product on the internet has reached a zenith that cannot be sustained with the margins that they had. Meanwhile, the ad platforms have gotten smart… smarter and sharper at maximizing their return on you.<\/p>\n [00:09:40] Dave:<\/strong> Right? So Meta has changed everything. You know? They continue to tweak stuff. They continue to adopt new ways of extracting maximum amount of ad revenue from brands trying to sell, and there’s no one disrupting that. So there hasn’t been a major disruptor in a long time, in addition to global supply chain where we would save money getting more and more expensive. The average amount of a worker at a Chinese factory is doubled. The amount of money that you would have to spend on logistics to get product over the United States has gone crazy. A lot of that has to do with, you know, coming out of COVID. No one really dropped their prices back down. They realized people could pay, and there’s continuing to be supply chain problems. So all of these things congeal into a place where whatever contribution margin I would have had pre-COVID is evaporated. And, you know, everyone else gets paid below the line. Right? Like, so agencies and people that you would hire, all the hiring comes out of that contribution margin. So if you aren’t turning a positive contribution margin, you’re really up a creek as far as how to grow. You know, I got a lot of feedback off that post that just raise your prices. And of course I saw that… obviously, obviously, we’ve raised prices, but, you know, that cannot be the only answer because I can’t raise prices higher than both the economy is shrinking and things are getting more expensive.<\/p>\n [00:11:12] Phillip:<\/strong> What is the popcorn maker retailing for right now on your website?<\/p>\n [00:11:20] Dave:<\/strong> Yeah. The popcorn maker itself retails for $199, and then we have a bundle that’s the most popular that’s $229 where we’re sharing the popcorn. We were really lucky to make that decision. Tal and I had always wanted to have a higher end… Tal, my business partner and I had always wanted to have, like, a higher end product that… because that’s what we like to be. We like to make really nice things that are premium. And so that part of the economy has stayed relatively stable. I’m sure you guys have talked about many times just, you know, the idea that there’s like some crazy small percentage of people that are the ones that are spending all the money online. I’m just trying to sell to those people basically and made a product for that. Like, I have no idea how a skinny margin consumer product, a CPG product, is even surviving in this climate, at all. Much less, you know, profitable after even two or three orders.<\/p>\n [00:12:18] Phillip:<\/strong> I mean, looking at your breakdown, it looks like you’re heading toward a skinny margin consumer product. Right? What are you doing to change that?<\/p>\n [00:12:29] Dave:<\/strong> We definitely are introducing consumable products because we think that there’s an opportunity both for discovery through those consumable products of the popper. People who are really interested in, you know, making popcorn at home can start with something like, you know, our consumable products and then decide they wanna buy a popper. But also, it provides, like, a walled garden for us that keeps the brand really important to the buyer. It’s not just a one-and-done product that you would buy and walk away from. That’s the hope at least, is that then we can pivot that to being popcorn experts in the space. Like, our grand ambition is to be the Orville Redenbacher now. No one’s been talking about this product for a long time. We just needed to establish a product that had the economics to survive ecommerce, which was we had to have massive margins. We had to sell at a price point that could afford to continue to scale and then hope for the best. And even since we launched, you know, like, there are probably things that if I had known today how tight it would be, I would have made different choices then for sure.<\/p>\n [00:13:41] Brian:<\/strong> Would you have just gone straight wholesale retail and just skip the whole ecomm thing altogether?<\/p>\n [00:13:49] Dave:<\/strong> I don’t think so. We still have that door open to us, but we’re ecommerce first and have always been good at this. And I think that this is a brand that lends itself to discovery online. When we came up with this, it was, like, right around COVID. Everyone was cooking at home again. People were making sourdough bread, and this was an opportunity to bring something back that felt real and whole in the home. And so we knew that that would be a story that would work really well and resonate in social media. We developed the box, the product, everything about it to be instantly Instagramable. Like, the goal here is to make DTC work. I have no doubt refill will work. And look. We’re rolling out nationally in Williams Sonoma this year. I don’t think that the volume that we’ll do in Williams Sonoma is going to be anything close to what we can do direct to consumer. That for us is a positioning opportunity to say, this is a product that belongs in Williams Sonoma. We really believe in that partnership with that company and what we can do together. That’s really what we’re hoping for out of that, is continued future, you know, strong brand that exists in a real retail store that’s really careful about what it brings in. That’s why we love that partnership.<\/p>\n [00:15:12] Phillip:<\/strong> I’d love to touch on… while Brian has another few minutes here. Yeah. I’d love to touch on some of the AI creative that you’re doing right now because I think it is helping, you know, you… you said you’ve turned into a marketer. It’s helping you get closer to your customer. You get that immediacy of feedback of what is working in the, you know, in the cultural aspect of how people want to experience the brand. What have you learned there, between, like, what works and what doesn’t work? Playing a cultural strategist, if you will, or a creative strategist. And then what about the AI tools do you think is helping to drive value for the brand? And give us a little bit about what is, you know, what is expensive, what’s cheap. Help us understand that.<\/p>\n [00:16:11] Dave:<\/strong> Yeah. I really love building, and I think AI tools are really excellent places to build. And I think being able to go in and come with an idea and then have built a system that says, these are the kind of ideas I’m going to bring you. This is the expectation of what I want back from you. This is the process in which I want you to go through to vet my idea or to come up with something. If you have built that system, the ability in these AI tools to generate anything is amazing and quick. So I’ve spent the last year or so, you know, following really smart, creative, brand-forward ad makers and brands that I know I’m shoulder to shoulder with for the same market. What are they doing and how do I do that in a way that’s distinctly Popsmith? And being able to discern, okay, this is the idea that I’m taking from, let’s say, HexClad is running an amazing ad. I’m able to say, here’s how I wanna interpret that ad for me. Right? Rather than, I think if you were just taking that ad and saying to an AI tool with no background of what you wanted or what your brand was about and said, make me a copy of this with my product in it, and let’s swap this, you know, and rewrite the script and make it an ad for me. Like, if someone does that, they’re probably gonna come out with something that’s legitimately terrible because the tool that you’re using doesn’t have 3D schematics of your product or understand your brand strategy or understand the thousand people who’ve ordered and what they’re all about and what they like.<\/p>\n [00:18:11] Dave:<\/strong> What I’m getting out of it now is the ability to take an ad concept, get it into my ad account within twenty four hours of making a product. So let’s say I start with a static ad, the static ad starts to get traction, immediately take that static ad, cut it into a ten second video where I animate the static ad. So now it’s running as a video ad as well, not just an iteration, but like just a little difference. Like a good example is we… I just made one where it’s… the poppers are like flashing back and forth like a, you know, stop motion video. And then it’s like, well, that worked okay. What if we have the background filled with popcorn while it does that and it sounds like popcorn? Like, boom. You know, you’re able to get that and then put it into the account. It’s also gonna make organic go so much faster. Like, you know, I think Sarah J. Maas just dropped her new book in her series, and every single person in, you know, in… is talking about her series again, and it’s able to take, like, hey, let’s make something for organic where we’re saying, this is the weekend to make some popcorn and read this book together. And now Popsmith is on the journey with the audience that it wants to be on. So not just advertising side, but the organic relationship and the conversation around the brand is something we can fast respond to versus having to get on the phone with a photographer and say, hey, I need to go get that book. I need you to shoot this on the table. I need you to put some popcorn next to it and then send that over to me. Well, that’s… that’s two weeks. We can just execute on that immediately. And it feels amazing and it feels an amount of control over the direction of the brand that we’ve never had before.<\/p>\n [00:19:52] Brian:<\/strong> Mhmm. Yeah. I think it was Norbert Wiener said that the future revolution isn’t gonna be us sitting around in our hammocks being waited on by robot slaves. It’s actually gonna push the bounds of what our minds can do. So if you can imagine it, you can think it, you can actually accomplish it. And so is this an opportunity for sort of like an explosion of like new ad creative and new ideas and experimentation of finding new ways of getting in front of people and seeing what they want? Seems like the last period was just like little iterations and following after trends and data. It seems like now is the time to be experimenting.<\/p>\n [00:20:42] Dave:<\/strong> I think it’s going to allow brands to be, if they want to be, far more human. What AI will never be is relational. It will never understand what other people want. It’s the same reason I never worry about when a factory starts putting a product on Amazon because I know their branding is gonna be terrible. Because they don’t understand the American consumer. Right? Like, so they’re gonna have a product and it’s gonna be half my price, but they’re not gonna know how to market that thing to the United States consumer. And you see that in the advertisements they run. AI is the same way, only worse. And so if you are focused on your buyer and you are focused on your community and you’re focused on your customer, the things that you were able to do to use this tool to have a relationship with those people, it becomes less about software and middlemen and people who can access different markets for you, and it becomes really about what you can do with this tool to continue to communicate excellently with your audience. That’s what I’m most excited about. There’s literally no limit to the ways now we can have that relationship. Even if I wanna make, like, content about the best way to make popcorn at home, and I film that on my own, I can turn that around without hiring a video editor or without having… and fixing my own lighting and putting amazing, like, cuts in this that make it way more fun than just listening to Dave talk and watch them cook. And that to me is like, that’s gonna get more people excited about the product, and that delivers on my dream concept. I just don’t have those skills. Now the skills are just there if I ask for what I want.<\/p>\n [00:22:32] Phillip:<\/strong> It’s bound to change within the next few days before this even comes out. You know, tools change so quickly. What’s in fashion changes so quickly, but you’ve been sharing your experience in building some of this ad creative with a small group of founders and operators. I’m curious, you know, what does that toolkit look like today? What’s the stack? Is it, you know, as expensive as some people have been saying? I’ve, you know, myself, I’ve been working on trying to up our short form creative, especially around things like our summit. And I found that like things like Higgsfield are just really, really expensive actually. And I’m to believe that at the volume of creative that it takes to run, you know, an effective paid media strategy, that it’s not inexpensive, but it’s also not the same level of what it would be to pay a creative strategist. So I’m just curious what your experience has been and if there are any efficiencies that you found there.<\/p>\n [00:23:34] Dave:<\/strong> Yeah. I’ve kept it pretty cheap, to be honest. Where I have put most of my energy is into ChatGPT Astra, which is both an amazingly thoughtful tool, but also does pretty good image generation out of the box. So, you know, as proof of concept, that’s where I started with my MVP. Also, them rolling out Dot. Dot allows there to be an agentic third party that becomes quality control. Like, I think even, you know, a month ago, you would go into Google Nano Banana or you would use, you know, whatever image generation tool and you would say, make me a dinner party and put some wine and some popcorn on the table. And then it would be, oh, well, can you move the popcorn back to the bottom left hand side of the table? And, like, the next time it would make it, there would be three extra people that each had four hands each. It would have added, like, you know, it’s… and it’s fundamentally broken something else. So it’s just like every time you would make an image in these tools, you would just reach into a bag and, like, maybe take something out that would work. And then, like, hope that eventually it would get it right. With the agent in the middle on chat… with Astra and ChatGPT, it’s going through a bunch of iterations before it brings me anything. So I can actually really control and direct the smallest amount of stuff that it is doing. And so it became a matter of sharing the dimensions of the product. I hired a photographer to take a lot of photos of the product from different angles in relation to other things. So the popper next to a wine bottle, the popper next to a set of books so that the tool could learn how to render the Popsmith correctly.<\/p>\n [00:25:25] Dave:<\/strong> And then being able to separate the rendering of the product from the rendering of the background. That seems to be what has done best for me. Since then, I have added… like, I’m using… I think it’s Topaz or Krea. I’m trying different things to get a much higher resolution image to be able to take that image out or that video out of ChatGPT and run it through a filter to make it really pop and really feel lifelike. And then, like, for, like, creating… I have… I agree with you on Higgsfield, and that hasn’t been the direction that we’ve gone yet where we’re getting super ambitious about creating video. I can see how that would be very expensive. I think for now, we’re just really focused on taking years of really good… like, a lot of this is about having a giant library of creative that you made with different creators online, different personalities, and finding new ways to get as much out of the things you’ve already paid for that a creative or an ad buyer or an agency isn’t gonna do. They’re gonna say, let’s make an ad with this person that we found on Instagram. We’ll pay them $3,000. They’ll make the ad for you. We ran that ad for sixty days. It didn’t work. Let’s find somebody new. And I’ve always been the principal, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What was… we paid $3,000 for that. Like, what was good about that? Right? And now I can bring little bits of it into a video. I can create a mashup. I can find usable things in a bunch of stuff I’ve already paid for. So it’s not just future spend that I’m cutting out of. It’s just like I’m trying to extract value from things I’ve already invested in that are just sitting in a digital asset management folder.<\/p>\n [00:27:12] Phillip:<\/strong> I find this to be… there’s a lot of overlap, right, in the way that we think about the content marketing side of, say, our business insights and research. You know, especially in like back in the agency days. One of the ways that people are always trying to save money in developing insights and research is like, oh, yeah, they just want the insight. Give us the insight. Right? But the way to get that in an inexpensive fashion is to prevent republic… like, they don’t have a license for republication effectively, right? So it’s theirs, they can have it, but they can’t do anything with it other than the knowledge of it. And there’s something really interesting when they realize that they can’t do anything other than have it and they want to republish it, they want to share with PR, they want to, you know, change it or alter it. There’s something that gives additional value in their minds to the ownership or the licensability of it in order to create derivatives and derivative products. And I say all of that to say, I have to wonder what the service economy does by nature of having AI be able to be, for their outputs to be licensed, to be able to be used in AI, like photography, design, creative, even creative strategy to some degree where even these small amounts of work in the future are more highly valued even in their… even if they’re singular pieces because they can be created in such scale and derivatives. You see what I’m saying? Right?<\/p>\n [00:29:07] Dave:<\/strong> Yeah. Yeah. I think you’re right. I think the smarter, more accomplished people in their niches of creative and of software are going to ultimately win because, you know, like, they’re gonna own their own stuff, and they’re going to… and you’re going to want it to elevate away from what already exists. But I also think, you know, like, one of the reasons I created that post is because I have so many friends that are still trying to charge, you know, thousands of dollars a month on… to do things for brands. And my goal was to say, look, guys, where do you think that that thousands of dollars is not coming out of my current month-to-month P&L? Like, you are not… look at how much you would have to scale my business to justify that cost with the contribution margin I have. However, I also look at brands that are saying, oh, well, I don’t need to hire an email marketer anymore because I can just connect, you know, my email service to an AI. Yeah. I can do a report on how all of my flows are doing or how my campaigns are doing, and I can make changes to that with this tool. I don’t need a person to come to a weekly meeting and tell me about it. My question to those brands has been, but who knows Klaviyo in your organization? Who knows how to email market in your organization? Like, you cannot…<\/p>\n [00:30:43] Dave:<\/strong> It is one thing to replicate the tool or to get reporting out of how a software is doing. It’s another thing to be an expert at the software or an expert at what you use the software for. And what ultimately I think we end up paying for is we end up… we’ll end up in a place where we’re bringing in really wise advisers on a periodical basis. Like, once a month, let’s check in with how everything’s going. You won’t be paid to execute within the software anymore. You’ll be paid to oversee the road map or develop the SOPs, and then the brand will be able to execute on it internally because it won’t be reliant on you and your staff or you as an outside person. We can do that with software now. All I need you to do is tell me what needs to happen, and it will happen. You know? And so I think expertise is gonna be way more valuable. And because I won’t be paying… you know, like, there’s people now who will pay $6,000 a month for some agency who has a proprietary software tool, and they’re doing things to help you find new audiences or whatever they’re doing.<\/p>\n [00:31:58] Dave:<\/strong> And then they’re paying an additional 3 or $4,000 to have that audited every six months to make sure that person is doing what they should be doing.<\/p>\n [00:32:08] Dave:<\/strong> You know, now some of that gets eliminated. Either I have the ability to audit you myself against best practices that are out there, and the brand starts to stop treating agencies like wise wizards who have spells they don’t understand. Or if they’re smart enough to do that and they wanna be involved in that way, or the execution gets my ownership and you get to continue to be the wizard. It depends on which one you’re good at. Right?<\/p>\n [00:32:37] Phillip:<\/strong> Yeah. I think back to my agency days and how much of my, you know, what would even the nature of the work be today, in the, you know, post-COVID, post-AI era. So much of my work, I had moved into strategy, but when we were in the engineering side, you know, so much of my work was really just trying to point out all of their critical flaws. I think so much of the critical flaws today, you know, and you see that a lot of, like, free audits around ad accounts or something. Like, we had very similar, around self-hosted infrastructure, open source code, things like that. This is the bad old days. But, you know, it’s really… yeah. I feel like we’re heading back toward that way with a lot of vibe code, and a lot of folks that feel like they can go it on their own, take some, you know, some of those capabilities in house. I’m not sure if that’s for better or for worse, if maybe competition helps to make the ecosystem better. Generally, I think it would drive some prices down, if there’s more competition potentially. Also, I don’t know. There’s… I see a lot of gesturing online generally to the earlier point Brian was making around this sort of like ecom bro. And in fact, there was a thread recently about people who were saying they were rebuilding Motion, in vibe coding it. It took them two days to do it. I thought that was interesting. Reza was in the, you know, chat saying that’s, you know, well, you don’t have all the data we have, which I think is an interesting point too.<\/p>\n [00:34:35] Dave:<\/strong> Yeah. I see people all the time say, look, I don’t need this tool anymore. I’ve got Meta connected to, you know, my… to MCP. I’ve got an MCP connection to Meta, and I’ve got my brand book and what do I need all this for? And the answer is, well, Reza has or any of the… you know, like, Reza has thousands and thousands of ad accounts. Right? Like, so do you wanna train… do you wanna make decisions only based on the limited data of what is working for you today? Or do you want the data that’s out there about what thousands of ad accounts are doing to inform decision making for you? Like, I don’t see how that’s not incredibly valuable. Like, the dataset itself is what you are paying for, not the tool. Right.<\/p>\n [00:35:23] Phillip:<\/strong> Yeah. I think that’s right. Of course, they’re, I think they’re in the middle of a rebrand. Motion.<\/p>\n [00:35:30] Dave:<\/strong> Runneth.<\/p>\n [00:35:30] Phillip:<\/strong> Have you used Runneth?<\/p>\n [00:35:32] Dave:<\/strong> I have. I’ve been using Runneth for a while and it’s been really helpful in, like, even what I did on that reporting, it was… one of the reasons I started that was I’m looking at what my cost of advertising is gonna be at the end of the year and I’m looking at, you know, where we want it to be as far as an MER and being able to say, you know, like, to go into Runneth and do real research about, well, how many ads are these other businesses that I’m supposed to be running neck and neck with? How many ads are they dropping every single month? How often are they turning over their creative? Like, to really understand what it takes and what I need to do to scale. To be able to ask really intimate questions about the strategies and see the other strategies of other businesses has been infinitely helpful. And because it is agentic with what it’s providing me, the… instead of, like, what… you know, when you would plug Meta into Claude Code or you would plug it into Codex, and you would get a seven day look back. Even six months ago, you’re always like, oh, here’s the report. And it’s like, well, it’s an idiot that doesn’t remember that I ran a sale two weeks ago.<\/p>\n [00:36:44] Dave:<\/strong> So when you’re looking month over month, of course, this looks terrible. You would instinctively know the report was garbage, but now it’s remembering. It’s remembering you ran that sale. It’s remembering that year over year, you did Oprah’s Favorite Things in 2024, and you’re never gonna have that level of, like, access to that audience ever again. So stop comparing data. Quit telling me I’m doing terribly because I did so well in 2024. It remembers all of that and just gets smarter. It gets smarter about what it tells you to do as far as which ads to run, which ads not to run. Not to train this into a commercial for those things. You can still do all that in your own tools. You have access to all of that. But that is the difference between, you know, when I hear people say, oh, what’s coming out of AI is garbage, it’s not gonna be usable, it’s just slop. People are bringing slop reports to my meetings and slowing us all down. You’re not doing it right. That’s a skill issue, and you have to… you know, like, that is a skill issue on the brand side. And people are only gonna get smarter and better with the software, so it’s better to bet on it now.<\/p>\n [00:37:53] Phillip:<\/strong> This is probably more of a philosophical issue, and everybody’s context is different. But what is the skill gap? Like, is it just the… there’s a fundamental lack of misunderstanding of what, you know, what the game is today, versus what it used to be?<\/p>\n [00:38:10] Dave:<\/strong> Or I think we’ll… I think there are a lot of founders and brand owners, smaller brand owners who are relishing this opportunity to take power, type something into a box, and get something back that they would usually have to ask multiple people for and would take a week. And I think there is the skill gap, and a good example would be at, like, creating static ads. I’m not a photographer. So the fundamentals of photography or how to tell it to light something, I would really… I took a class with Jamey Gannon, like, six months ago who is… you know, for those of you who don’t know, she’s a really creative, amazing brand person who has been leveraging AI tools since the beginning. And what I saw Jamey do was, yeah, you can build this in AI. Let me show you the thousands of iterations I went through to get to this one thing. Let me show you the lookbook, the, you know, the… all the different resources I gave it as far as the mood board and all of these things that Jamey would build in order to get one set of results that she would post and say, look what I built in this, you know, like, one of… like, in Nano Banana.<\/p>\n [00:39:37] Phillip:<\/strong> Arena, or… yeah.<\/p>\n [00:39:38] Dave:<\/strong> And everyone reads that and goes, I can just get a Nano Banana and make what Jamey did. But the reality is you cannot unless you… so that’s the skill gap. The skill gap is the scaffolding and foundation between what your vision is and the result that you want.<\/p>\n [00:39:57] Dave:<\/strong> And I think that’s where people will get better and better because I think that the people who make the tools or people who are in the middle as far as software will make better ways for you to access chat. Right? Like, the answer is not what some software is doing, which is giving me a window to basically engage Claude, you know, Fable through their own website when I already own Claude Fable. The answer will be, I’m going to develop scaffolding for you. This is, you know, like, what is the shared brain? Like, if you log in to Runneth, what does Runneth know about marketing that it can apply to you versus what do you have to tell Run… like, the… versus on my own Claude where I would have to tell it about how direct response marketing works and go read this article and watch these 19 videos and do all of that. Like, the value of new software will be, I built all that for you. All you have to do is put your vision in this box.<\/p>\n [00:41:05] Phillip:<\/strong> I see. I think the… what I was thinking before was more of the folks who approach AI and maybe have a fixed mentality about the way that it operates because of their association to the chat context of how almost everything is going to exist within the chat window. In reality, there’s so much more that can be had and so much more that you can create, especially, you know, I’ve also worked with Jamey’s content quite a bit and, you know, the Flora and some other sort of workflow type creation tools. There’s a tremendous amount of chaining together of tools and tool sets that are required in order to have that kind of output. And so when I say, like, the game has changed, it is knowledge of an entire ecosystem that’s required, that does sort of exist outside of a singular tool. And to your earlier point too, this is where it looks a lot more like, I would say art, but it is… any prolific art has a tremendous amount of creative waste. And so if you’re going to, you know, create something that has high value for a brand, there’s going to be a lot of productive waste. And that’s what winds up happening with the people who create really, really powerful creative with AI, things that are actually quite convincing or things that are mesmerizing. I would say, Jamey’s done some work with actual brands and has received print features and out of home, doing her work. And it’s, you know, magazine feature quality. And so you don’t get that without a tremendous amount of creative waste, which means it’s proof of human work. It just happens to be with tools that are generative AI. So…<\/p>\n [00:43:18] Dave:<\/strong> Yeah. And a point of view. Right? You have… yeah. Yeah. You have to have a point…<\/p>\n [00:43:23] Phillip:<\/strong> Taste, but, yes, point of view is…<\/p>\n [00:43:25] Dave:<\/strong> Yeah. Yeah. And look, I mean, like, sometimes watching someone like Jamey is, like, listening to a really good musician try to explain to me, like, how they came up with a song idea. And it’s like they’ll play the riff that they started with, and it’s like, how did you get that song out of that one individual riff? And Jamey’s the same way. Jamey will start with, like… as I’ve seen, like, the most off the wall, like, image in her mood board of, like, this is the vibe I’m going for, and it’ll be just a picture of colors swirling and, like, a crystal or something. And it’s like, I’m working on this thing for, you know, a CPG brand or something. It’s like, would have never thought to start with that image. Right? And I think 95% of founders who were trying to pull off this kind of stuff are starting with, here’s an ad that my competitor ran. Let’s just do this with my product in it. And then those are the people going, well, AI doesn’t work because I ran 20 ads out of AI and they were all junk. Yeah. Well… yeah. You know?<\/p>\n [00:44:36] Phillip:<\/strong> Yeah. I… to be fair, I think that’s why a lot of the consumer mindsets feel similarly about AI because they have had those types of experiences. I… this is a secondhand report, but I know someone who had overheard this conversation on the train a few weeks ago, about, you know, these guys discussing that, oh, yeah, AI is terrible at crosswords. And he’s like, oh, no. I’ve used AI to solve a crossword. He’s like, no, no, no. AI can’t make a crossword to save its life. And he’s like, yeah, have you ever tried that before? He’s like, no. And then, you know, my friend was like… he’s like, oh, surely AI can make a killer crossword. Right? And he goes and he tries it. And it’s like, no. They’re all, like, five by fives. They make no sense. They’re, you know, they… none of the clues are any… they’re not clever at all. Right? And so it just doesn’t understand how to make something really truly great, or you don’t understand how to prompt it and give it good input, give it great context, right? All that the consumer knows how to do is say, make me a crossword.<\/p>\n [00:45:55] Phillip:<\/strong> Right. And so they have one experience with it and they’re like, oh, it’s terrible. Right?<\/p>\n [00:45:59] Dave:<\/strong> Yeah. I think I posted a… like, I was just like taking another ad from another company and I was like creating it. And I did a video about that. And the first one, it was just a product in an easy background, change the text, flop it out. No problem. The second one was like recreating a bunch of elements. And I think I put like six hours of my time into that. Now I wasn’t just like grinding for six straight hours, but like lots of back and forth between different projects or whatever, waiting for it to give me a new version. It is a lot of framing and giving feedback, which is why I think good managers make better AI, like, people. Because I think most of what AI is about is being able to communicate effectively about what works, what doesn’t work, what you would like someone to try. Like, here’s an idea that’s maybe out of left field that should inspire you about what you’re doing. Like, I think treating AI like a human and treating AI like an employee is a much better use of your time than treating it like a chatbot that is just delivering, you know, just on command, making a crossword puzzle that… think about all the layers of complexity in a crossword puzzle. Think about the research that has to go into…<\/p>\n [00:47:21] Dave:<\/strong> Come up with questions and clues. Like, this is not an easy task that, you know, it’s pulling something out of the ether to do for you. It’s gonna take work to put that in place. Once you put that in place, though, you can make 50 crosswords and, like, they’re all gonna be fun and great. So it really depends on what your end goal is going to be where you put your energy.<\/p>\n [00:47:44] Phillip:<\/strong> And that too, there’s a lot of tropes in crosswords. There’s a lot of, like, little cultural hat tips. There’s a lot of things that they lean on a lot, especially, like, certain outlets, New York Times crossword. They have a lot of… they love Gaga. They love Tina Turner. Like, they have things that they do a lot that, you know, make them what they do. And if you don’t know that or if it’s not familiar, it’s just gonna feel like it’s not authentic. And if you take that, that example runs true through any medium that someone is deeply familiar with. Right? And I think you’ll get that sort of uncanny valley. It’s like, something’s off here. It doesn’t feel right. I think we can get that with… it can come through an ad creative. It can come through in copy. And I have to wonder too, like, the blending effect of site building is almost like through vibe coding is something I’m also gonna be very concerned about in the future. It doesn’t seem like it’s… Shopify’s new release maybe helps to hedge against that, with the canvas. But I do think that we have to stay ahead of this stuff. And to your point, you said point of view. Yeah. I think it’s people with, you said management. I think it’s people that actually just recognize what is tasteful and what is not. And people that say, it’s good enough… well, we’ll probably fall prey to the best fit average over time. Yeah.<\/p>\n [00:49:20] Dave:<\/strong> I completely agree with that.<\/p>\n [00:49:23] Phillip:<\/strong> And yet all of that said is… do I read this right here in the prep? You’re hiring your first creative strategist?<\/p>\n [00:49:30] Dave:<\/strong> We hired two creative strategists. And what I found was, like, listen. No shade to them. Like, they were really smart people, but I think that that idea of what a creative strategist is is so new. I think a lot of them learned how to do things by watching Motion videos or other free trainings, and they’ve come from, you know, ad buying or they’ve come from copywriting, and they are not coming with creative thoughts and creative ideas. So what they end up providing you is… so far is, like, iterative changes to current ads that you have or, you know, safe ways to spin off of what you get because just like us, they wanna put things in the Runneth or they wanna put things into their chat window and say, let’s play with this ad idea. And what they’re gonna get is what the data tells them. The data is only based on how… what has been successful or not been successful in my particular ad situation. Creative strategists need to think outside the box, and they need to have a point of view. And they need… again, on a point of view, they need to bring that first image that I was saying that Jamey would start with. They need to have inspiration for a way to reach the audience that generates curiosity. And if you don’t have that to start with, like, a brand approaches you, like, let’s do some work together. You should have that before you show up to the first conversation so that you… because that’s the vision that I would be paying for. I’m not looking for someone to do, you know…<\/p>\n [00:51:24] Phillip:<\/strong> Just to manage the, you know, incremental growth of an ad account, you know.<\/p>\n [00:51:29] Dave:<\/strong> To me, that low hanging fruit is now suddenly gonna be gone. That’s gone. That low hanging fruit is gone. The only thing we’re going to pay for is massive changes in incremental revenue from either whether there’s different channels. You’re gonna open up the TAM in some way. Like, we’re going for big hits now. We don’t need to pay for singles. You know? We want triples and home runs when we bring smart people into our accounts. Right?<\/p>\n [00:51:57] Phillip:<\/strong> Well said. Dave, I don’t know why we don’t have you on all the time. This is fantastic, man.<\/p>\n [00:52:04] Dave:<\/strong> Well, anytime you want, man. It’s been a pleasure, and I’m a huge fan. I’m a huge fan of you guys and the community you’ve built, and it’s a pleasure to be part of it.<\/p>\n [00:52:13] Phillip:<\/strong> Thank you. If you’re not following Dave Stickland on X, at least you should be. He puts out incredible, insightful content about his journey in building Popsmith. If you don’t own a Popsmith, highly recommend it. You know, my kids and I, we love it. We make it all the time. We’ve been binging every single Marvel film and Loki and everything else, because we are building up to Avengers Doomsday because my 14 year old is pumped for that, which means we’ve been using our Popsmith a lot.<\/p>\n [00:52:43] Dave:<\/strong> Oh, great. Great. I think this drops during our Better than Black Friday sale. So if you want one today when you’re listening to this, we’re on sale right now. So…<\/p>\n [00:52:51] Phillip:<\/strong> Hey. Alright. I love that. Dave, thank you so much.<\/p>\n [00:52:55] Dave:<\/strong> Thanks. Have… thanks for having me, Phillip. Have a good day.<\/p>\n [00:52:57] Phillip:<\/strong> And thank you all for listening to this episode of Future Commerce. Hey. If this sparks something for you, you can find more episodes of this podcast, futurecommerce.com. Why don’t you like, rate, subscribe, leave us a five star wherever you get your podcasts. We’re at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and we’re on YouTube, and it helps other people to discover what this is all about. You can bring more of Future Commerce into your world with our print. You can get that at our store at futurecommerce.com. We have print journals, zines, and our newest is called Lore. It asks you the bold question, you know, do you write the story of a brand or is it already written for you? And our VISIONS Summit, it’s coming February 10 to the Museum of Modern Art, we don’t want you to miss it. Got Carlos Gutierrez, the former CEO of Kellogg, and he was the Secretary of Commerce of the United States. He is gonna join us with his new book, Sheer Will. And that’s February 10, the Museum of Modern Art. Don’t miss it. Go get your tickets right now, visions.futurecommerce.com. And remember, you shape the future because… oh my gosh. Sarah, you’re gonna kill me. Remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We’ll see you next time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n