7 Creative Trends Shaping DTC in 2025

Phillip: [00:00:01] Hello, and welcome to Future Commerce podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip.

Brian: [00:01:54] I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:01:55] And today, we have with us James Mulvey. He's a friend of the show, obviously. And if you've been listening for a little bit, you know that we are big fans of Motion, and we're this month, actually, this whole quarter, we've been brought to you by Motion by this Motionapp.com. Motion is putting together a really amazing creative trends report. We've been partnered together for a few weeks now and talking about how that could help you build better creative in your business. And here to talk about today is James Mulvey. James, I want you to tell us a little bit about that and tell us a little bit about yourself. But thanks for partnering with us. Thank you for coming and talking a little bit more about creative. But thank you, I think, specifically, for raising the bar and talking more creatively about how brands can partner more creatively in Meta and having a different conversation in this ecosystem. So thanks. And welcome to the show. It's been too long.

James: [00:02:48] Thank you.

Brian: [00:02:49] Yeah.

James: [00:02:49] Thank you. Yeah. Super excited to chat. And as always, Phillip, you were the inspiration for this report. Very, very sort of in the back. I tasked Costa on our team with researching it, and I said, "Don't give me a prediction sport report. Don't give me high minded stuff. Give me something that's more taste making and all about aesthetics and something that someone can read and then come with new ideas and feel like they've increased their creative vocabulary." So that was something we actually chatted a lot based on your presentation at our creative strategy summit back in the fall.

Phillip: [00:03:27] That's awesome. One of the greatest... {laughter} One of the great...

James: [00:03:31] {laughter} You're a coauthor.

Phillip: [00:03:32] I had an amazing... I love that. Should I get points on the back end maybe? I don't know. Yeah. I got the greatest compliment of my life, James, after that. I had someone DM me on LinkedIn and said, "I loved that session. I got so much out of it. Has anyone ever told you you give youth pastor energy?" And I was like, okay. That's a first.

Brian: [00:03:55] No. It's not. No. It's not. Don't lie.

Phillip: [00:03:58] {laughter}

James: [00:03:59] I think you'd crush it as a youth pastor.

Phillip: [00:04:02] If the culture and commerce thing doesn't work out, I have a separate career. James, catch us up a little bit. What is the job you guys are doing over at Motion? What are you doing over there in your role today?

James: [00:04:15] Yeah. So Motion, as some people might know, is a platform to help meta advertisers really understand their creative, what's working, how to improve it, and to really run a really effective performance creative team. And so lucky for me, as I've always been interested in advertising, I've worked as a copywork writer, worked in agencies, and I get to research and try to find things that help the best of the best get an edge in their advertising, and that's what we try to do in our content. Part of that is us getting out of the way and having events and having these operators speak at it or interviewing a bunch of people like we did for this report and then also just going deep into data, so we analyzed over a hundred million in ad spend for this report. We surveyed 500 DTC advertisers and then just did a bunch of manual review of ads and ingestion of that taste that I was talking about as well as have had 500 comments on the ad survey so that we could actually go through and see what people are talking about and what they're tired of, what they're planning to do more of in 2025, and that's all assembled in this report. So having a blast over at Motion and really found that super exciting intersection of prior experience in advertising and then also getting to write about it and think about advertising all the time.

Brian: [00:05:37] Writing and thinking about advertising is right. This new report that you just put out, your 2025 Creative Trends Report is super interesting. You mentioned the cutting edge or even the bleeding edge, which is actually one of the points   that's in the report. We'll get into that a little bit further. Motion highly, highly focused on what actually is gonna perform. And so I'm really excited to chat about this report. Like, Phillip said, your creative is incredible, and I appreciate the Future commerce nod, the Phillip Jackson nod. The creative on this report, it's like a bunch of really well designed, almost like artwork on cards.

Phillip: [00:06:23] Yeah.

Brian: [00:06:23] And it's just gorgeous. So anyone who's listening absolutely needs to go download this right now as you're listening along to this podcast.

Phillip: [00:06:34] I'll do the thing. I mean, like, you'll hear it twice in this episode at least,   but go to motionapp.com/creative-trends. And even easier, it's probably in the show notes. Go and expand the little tab. Click it, and go check it out. It's  worth it. And email. Drop your email in. Super easy. Click it and get it. I got a lot out of it. It actually took me a couple sits to get through it. There's a lot in here.

Brian: [00:06:58] Yes. Packed.

Phillip: [00:06:59] So I'm hoping we can get a little bit of... It's worth the read. I keep it open in a tab. It's worth going through. James, I told you you got my email in your CRM at least twice because I had to get...

James: [00:07:09] We'll be in touch.

Phillip: [00:07:12] {laughter} Give us a little bit of an overview. Give us a couple of the state of the industry. What are some of the big trends? What are some of the top line that, you know, people can expect to get out of this?

James: [00:07:23] Yeah. Like I said, there are seven trends. And each one covers a different dimension of what is really shaping DTC creative right now. And like I said, I didn't want it to be a predictions report. I wanted to be more of a taste infusion of here's what's working. Here's what you can do. And some of the trends that particularly people have been talking about is, one, the comedy trend, and maybe we can go into that as I know from reading Future Commerce emails, you guys are are pretty funny in your own right and always coming into a sly subject line. So I think this one will resonate with you. But one of the things we found analyzing the hundred million ad spend was that 25% of the highest spending ads, so ads spending over a million dollars, had humor in them. And I think, if you look back to David Algovy, he said humor is the most effective way to make a sale and you should try to make ads that are funny and I think everyone in DTC and advertising knows that you should be funny and make funny things, but still we don't do it. I think if you looked at a lot of people's strategy decks this year, there'd be a lot of "We're gonna do this, we're gonna do that," but probably what's missing is "We are going to make more funny ads in 2025." And so I've made it my personal mission to make more funny ads for Motion. I just hired two amazing creatives. So hopefully in a couple months, you'll start laughing more when you see us on Instagram and seeing our ads, but really, I'm making a big push here to solve the idea that not everything needs to be serious..

Brian: [00:09:13] I love that.

Phillip: [00:09:14] Well, you say that. Brian and I just had a whole argument about this. Brian's like, we need to be funnier. And I was like, "Uh, okay. Well well, when you figure out how to do that, you let me know." I'd love to be funnier on our podcast that's very serious about futurism.

Brian: [00:09:31] So serious.

Phillip: [00:09:31] The future doesn't feel so funny all the time, Brian. It feels really dark sometimes, so I'd love to be funnier.

Brian: [00:09:37] It does. Oh, dark humor is my favorite, so I'm into it.

James: [00:09:40] That's a good point too because I always feel nervous giving... We were nervous writing this trend because I think everyone understands it, but you're probably like, "How do I be funny?" So some of the things I've been recommending is one, every problem is a people problem. So you might not be funny because you don't have the right people in the seats.

Brian: [00:10:02] Yes.

James: [00:10:02] And that's why I solved that by hiring these two people who are very funny, demonstrated funny, make funny ads, have funny ads in their portfolio. So it's like, I can try to solve it myself and try to be funnier, but I think sometimes it is literally a talent problem. I think also you can do it in small ways. I laugh all the time at some of your subject lines and just the way you take a serious subject, but you should always be trying to find a twist or something that's not just the obvious. One of the sort of things that I've been trying to do with my team is my old VP of Marketing, Hank, used to give us mild to wild. So he'd say, give me creative that's mild to wild. So you start with the mild version and then give me also the wild version, like the one we might not execute, but at least stretches yourself. I think also now it should be give me mild to wild and also funny. Try a funny version. You know, I think you'll find that there are people on your team that are funny and can make at least some type of funny ad. And maybe you're not ready to do a full on, like, comedy sketch, but maybe you can make a headline that's a little bit cheeky or just push it in that direction and see where it takes you.

Phillip: [00:11:18] I was shocked to learn, and a proof point here is Liquid Death who often gets praise for their marketing prowess. One of their early hires was the guy behind the nihilist Arby's account on Twitter who went dark on Twitter just after they hired him. I'll read one snippet. This post was from 01/16/2023, which is one of the last posts. "This Martin Luther King Junior Day, force yourselves to once again go through the unchanging dull soul crushing routine that passes for your life while across town, the CIA assassinates your hunger. Have a dream of Arby's." And what Dan Murphy...

James: [00:12:12] Some genius there was like, "We can use this guy."

Phillip: [00:12:14] So, yeah, Dan Murphy was, like, "We were all a fan of this Twitter account. How do we leverage that for our brand's unique voice?" And that actually, for them, they say, "Well, that eliminates CAC for us." Comedy cuts through the noise.

Brian: [00:12:30] Yep.

Phillip: [00:12:30] But anyway yeah.

Brian: [00:12:31] And I think this has been a huge theme for Future Commerce for years. Even back as in 2020, I wrote a a piece called Storytelling is Insufficient where basically said it's not just about telling your brand story. It's not just about, you know, inserting your product into a product placement moment or writing a typical ad. It's about actually being true artists and good writers. And actually comedy requires some of the greatest writing of all because it's often multilayered. I think that's the thing that people struggle with. Humor often requires two narratives, and that's what makes it funny or more than that sometimes. And so that requires people who actually have something interesting to think about or say. It's very contextual often. It's making a a point that's not the point sometimes. And so that's not an easy thing to hire for, and I think people are the key here. If you're hiring someone who's good at traditional marketing and has built skill set around that, they're probably not very good at writing. They're probably not. Or they haven't been employed that way before, and they're gonna have to exercise that muscle again.

Phillip: [00:13:46] It's an art. I mean, this is like an artistic... This particular trend and this particular skill is artistic in nature, and I think that's why this is a creative industry. This particular skill is one that I think requires exercising a specific muscle.

Brian: [00:14:02] Actually, Yancey Strickler said the same thing at the end of his interview with us back at the end of last year.

Phillip: [00:14:08] The Co-Founder of Kickstarter, by the way, for people who don't know who he is.

Brian: [00:14:11] And he basically said the future of branding, of our economy is actually the true creative mind.

James: [00:14:21] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian: [00:14:21] I love this as an emphasis in this trend.

Phillip: [00:14:25] I thought it was gonna be AI, but maybe he's right. Just to say too, these trends that are in The Creative Trends Report, James, aren't in isolation. You sort of have a tactical how to apply them in each of these sections too, which is worth checking out. So you give like a one, two, three, how to put this into action, which I think is super valuable as well.

James: [00:14:51] Yeah. One thing I noticed looking at the funny ads, True Classic obviously comes up a lot. But the best copywriters are based in culture as well. And if you look at True Classic's funniest ads, they're all based on, like, movies. It's like The Notebook is one of their top ones.

Phillip: [00:15:08] {laughter} Yeah.

James: [00:15:09] The Jepsen one, I don't know if that's based on a movie, but it feels, like, very familiar. It feels, like, very office drama. So I think that's another tip is the whole Future Commerce thing where you need to connect better to culture and find those funny moments. And even if you're not that funny, there's tons of stuff out there that people will recognize and might give you a boost, And you can use it a little bit.

Brian: [00:15:35] It's interesting. There's another theme in here that I think is is really powerful, and that is authenticity. Authenticity renaissance, which is interesting because many years ago we had a whole trend that was like...

Phillip: [00:15:52] Yeah. Being inauthentic was the trend.

Brian: [00:15:53] Inauthenticity was the trend. So we're looking at an authenticity renaissance right now, and I think that's something that we've been chatting about as well. One of the things you say in here is, focus on first person content formats. And I actually think this is really powerful. There's another piece that we produced a while back about phenomenological brands. And that's this idea that phenomenology is sort of study of data of experience, lived experience, first person experience. And one of the ideas I think is really important when you think about how to create these first person narratives that really resonate is having first person data so that you can actually figure out what types of those first person stories are gonna resonate with the most people. For example, create an archetype.

James: [00:16:49] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian: [00:16:50] And so I think that's really cool too. I love this as a trend right now. What's really hard is marrying the two. Authenticity and humor can be very difficult to marry.

James: [00:17:05] Right. Right. Especially if you're not funny.

Phillip: [00:17:07] Oh, gosh. Yeah. Explain what the authenticity means in this particular   perspective.

James: [00:17:15] It's more if you think back to maybe this time last year, you started to see AI actors and AI really pick up steam and maybe advertisers are thinking, "Man, these UGC creators and this style of content, they're cooked. Why would you film a real person when you can just have someone holding something?" And I think this trend, because our customers are generally ahead of the curve, they're kind of thinking to the next step. They're like, "If everyone's creating AI ads, I'm gonna zag and I'm gonna do something different. I wanna stand out. I don't wanna blend in." So we did see in our survey that 71% of advertisers plan to increase the use of AI in 2025 in creative production, research, across the board. So there's no skepticism over the potential. And certainly in the last three months, we've seen a release of more models and so on. So definitely, our audience is using it. They're not skeptics. Only 12%, I believe, were skeptical of AI. So that's the minority in the DTC world. But at the same time, a data point that surprised me was that 68% of advertisers plan to increase their use of UGC, which is arguably supposed to be the most authentic. And when I dove deeper into the comments and the qualitative comments from the advertisers in the survey, really what they called out was "We're not going to do the standard UGC anymore, we're not going to do cookie cutter, we're going to invest more in talent, we're going to invest more in casting, we're going to invest more in high energy UGC creators who can really sell it and, you know, people who can deliver stuff in one take," versus you see some of those videos where it's like chopped up like six sentences or whatever. And I think that is really what we were trying to get out with this trend was we feel that DTC advertisers are wise to the game, and they know that they need to pierce attention. And you don't pierce attention by creating stuff that looks like everything else. So what will stand out are the human alpha, which is stuff you can't create. There's a great ad that's referenced in the report by the the brand Poppi. And she has Taylor Swift's song, you know, "All you ever will be was is mean while I've gone until I live my dream." And it's just her posting about her doubters, and she's built this company. And it's like that piece of content only can come from her. That is a one unique piece and her story and something you watch it. There's no, like, reservation that this is contrived or anything. She can tell that story. That's hers. And I think we just stressed in the report that you'll see more of this, more messy ads, more people trying to make sure that you know that it's not AI. Because even now in voiceovers, you know, you hear a voiceover where the person kinda sucks, and you're like, "Oh, that's better because it's not perfect." {laughter}

Phillip: [00:20:09] The POV thing is really interesting to me, only because most of my content consumption outside of the work that we do is sort of film criticism. And there's a film that made the round at Sundance last year, which is now, I think is not receiving a lot of positive reviews of Steven Soderbergh's new film called Presence, which is a horror film that's filmed in first person POV. Spoilers, if people don't like to be spoiled on the premise of a film, it is a horror movie that is told from the point of view of the ghost in the house as opposed to...

James: [00:22:13] That's cool. That's super cool.

Phillip: [00:22:13] Which is but it's POV.

Brian: [00:22:16] Are we talking about The Sixth Sense?

Phillip: [00:22:17] No. No. No. It is literally a first person view.

Brian: [00:22:20] I'm just kidding. I got it. I got it.

Phillip: [00:22:21] Of the ghost, which is great. Which is also I didn't know that a ghost could really frame a shot so well.

James: [00:22:28] What does the ghost do during all the time between the hauntings?

Phillip: [00:22:32] Yeah. The ghost really set that shot up really well for that next scene. It was really great. But I think this idea of putting yourself into this lived experience of other people is such a modern conceit, and it's such a thing that we are used to seeing now, but we never really think about. This idea of I see it now with a lot of Meta Ray Bans content. I'm wearing them right now.

James: [00:23:02] Yeah. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:23:03] Seeing people's hands and seeing them using a product is so natural, and capturing that content has never been so easy. I've never thought of that as a trend, but I've also have never thought about how easily that works on me.

Brian: [00:23:19] It's interesting. That movie was was kind of destroyed. Right? But I think that might have been the the content. Actually, the content doesn't necessarily match the format. I think that there is a format for that kind of content that's super interesting.

Phillip: [00:23:36] Well, Quibi Quibi was also destroyed, and then we have TikTok. So, I mean, like, it's a...

Brian: [00:23:41] Right. Have you seen How To with John Wilson?

Phillip: [00:23:42] There's always a sacrificial lamb. Of course.

Brian: [00:23:44] Have you seen How To? Yeah. Yeah. It's similar vibes. Right? It's right there in his first person.

Phillip: [00:23:51] I don't know if this is advertiser safe. So, you know, James it's like there's there's some stuff. That guy goes to some great lengths, if you know what I'm saying. You've seen that episode with machine that... Okay. Never mind.

Brian: [00:24:05] Haven't got there. Haven't got there yet.

Phillip: [00:24:07] Anyway.

Brian: [00:24:08] But I will say this, that talk about combination of humor, first person, and mix of... I think ads are actually trending towards How To with John Wilson than they aren't anything else.

James: [00:24:20] Right.

Phillip: [00:24:20] I think you're making a really good point. James, you're just witness to a lot of our wild conversations here. I think that a lot of what's happening in popular media informs a lot of what happens in ad creative because it's so easy for that to be the driver of interest. Popular media drives creator motions, and creators are creating brands. And I think there's so much of that that just informs a lot of this content creation now.

James: [00:24:51] Yeah. We can really get lost in Adland and forget that the primary driver of culture are these main mainstream content products versus we kinda think that it's coming organically from TikTok somewhere.

Phillip: [00:25:07] For sure. And those are the sort of archetypes. What else is trending that's it seems to be on the rise that you found in the research?

James: [00:25:16] I think another cool one is the low fi squeeze, and the volume game. So these are two trends that we covered, and they're covering kind of similar ground in terms of one, like you said, POV is very popular, kind of the modern format. And there's DTC advertisers used to differentiate mostly because they were the best at creating paid social ads, whereas the traditional advertisers couldn't keep up. They're cutting up the commercials and putting them in there. And then you have a DTC advertiser really understands social platforms. And we're kind of seeing maybe that advantage fading, whereas, you know, Walmart is creating what would be considered ugly ads. Everyone's creating don't make an ad, make a TikTok. So the game is sort of out. So once the game is known, how do you stand out? And that's what the low fi squeeze trend is all about. And so we kinda go into some aesthetic choices you can make to better differentiate. Some of the ones I liked were ads with low cognitive load. So instead of "Stop the scroll. I got something to tell you," grabbing attention or doing crazy stuff, like the hooks that we've become used to, like Mr Beast style. We had stuff like tutorials that are much more calm and maybe super aesthetically pleasing to watch a lot of, like, "Here's how your laundry works," or something like that. And just low cognitive load. Other ones were where you put the product up and then on the bottom you have something else playing is like a good one. But I think all of it kind of fits into the mind state of customers as they use platforms, especially reels and TikTok where it's often at night, it's often in an escapism mood and you wanna make sure you match that, not yelling a sales pitch or doing magic in your hands to try to get someone to look at you. So we saw even in the comments in the survey, people backlash against maybe those super traditional hooks where you're really trying to stop someone or shock them. And what people saw really worked better than those hooks were more understated, more natural, and just fit into the feed better.

Phillip: [00:27:42] Is that because so lo fi in this context is the minimal editing and minimal post production was a way of standing out in a high production value ecosystem. So it wasn't just make ugly ads. That was, like, the hook. Or that was the thing that became, like, the catchy narrative. It was the actual abstract was stand out in an environment where everything becomes samey samey. So in a world where everything's loud, be quiet. And so there's this idea of escapism. So in a world where everything is frenetic, sell peace and tranquility. Is that sort of what you're saying?

James: [00:28:22] Yeah. Exactly. And maybe accept that just doing a lo fi is not enough, which was maybe before just recording the novelty of that is enough. Barry Hott, one of the experts who sort of championed ugly ads and all that.

Phillip: [00:28:38] Yeah. He just has quotes and all the rest. Yeah.

James: [00:28:42] Exactly. So he has a quote in there that I love, and it's "Go watch what your audience watches and make that." And that varies by audience is Barry's point. What resonates with someone on Facebook in their fifties is much different than what resonates on an Instagram reel for someone in their thirties or whatnot. So you have to actually, you can't just sort of assume your tastes, but he's really good at doing that and making sure that you're matching, like I said, the mind states of the customers.

Brian: [00:31:31] I think this plays really well into the volume game because, like you said, you might have customers in all those segments.

James: [00:31:41] Mhmm.

Brian: [00:31:41] And so ads have to become more specific to the channel that they're in and to the audience that they're serving. And so if for some people, a slow TV sort of style show, like, my kids used to love watching these shows where people would just build ancient homes, like, viking longhouses, and they were just literally the camera would just be on, and they would just be sitting there sawing logs and chopping them.

Phillip: [00:32:07] Your kids and my kids are very different, Brian.

Brian: [00:32:10] That's true. That's true. And so this whole slow tv movement. I've watched before like some, you know, some people in the Eastern European landscape just make a whole meal for an hour. They just sat there cracking eggs and it's like volume is necessary because we're talking about so many subcultures. Phillip's kids in a different subculture than my kids, potentially. There's probably crossover somewhere in a specific channel, though.

Phillip: [00:32:46] Doubtful.

Brian: [00:32:47] Maybe. Doubtful. That's right. {laughter} Music. Music. They both like music.

Phillip: [00:32:53] Oh, that's true. Yeah.

Brian: [00:32:53] Yeah. They like learning music. So I think it's like, how can you actually achieve that? Well, it means you gotta make a lot of stuff. And so maybe lo fi is the way to go because you aren't gonna have the time or the budget to do it otherwise. {laughter}

James: [00:33:09] Yeah. Yeah. In Meta's recent earning report, they talked about Andromeda, which is their new AI enhancement, their processing capabilities, and they're talking about tens of millions of ads narrowed down to thousands of ad choices. And then they select which one's most relevant. And that is sort of like the downstream effect that advertisers feel where they're looking for ones that are just more personalized to the person, maybe sound off, all these sort of situations that a static ad might work better here, a video ad might work better there. This person likes more polished, this person prefers this type of creator. Mirella Crespi, who's one of the experts we interviewed in the report, and she spoke on our event last week, she broke down the volume game into three POVs that I find are super useful, which is creating ads from the brand perspective, from the customer perspective and from the expert perspective, and you can kind of dial up and dial down your different creative approaches there so that you have a really diverse mix of assets that Facebook can then deliver to the most relevant people. The brand stuff, you can do more founder stuff, you can do more of your branded stuff, your product launches, all that stuff that we love to create and marketers love to consume and that we're most happy creating. The customer stuff, you can go crazy and do more of the silly stuff, more of the meme stuff, more of the lo fi stuff, more of the ugly ads. And then the expert stuff, you're bringing in more of the neutral perspective. So could be podcast interviews is one format she cited that works really well for them. She even cited forty five minute sales letters, like video sales letters that are converting. So even going to defy your expectations of what of what you think trusted content can be. But for some purchases, people will watch it.

Phillip: [00:35:06] Wow.

James: [00:35:06] And I love those three POVs, though, because that gives a team a set of pillars you can start attacking.

Brian: [00:35:15] You touched on the education advantage there, I think.

James: [00:35:18] Yeah. Yeah.

Brian: [00:35:18] Which is one of the other trends.

Phillip: [00:35:20] Alright. Can we go back to the forty five minute video sales letter? My very first reaction was to shutter in in horror. And then my second reaction was, actually, last year, I watched a four hour video on the Star Wars hotel. So Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I'll watch long form content if it's interesting.

James: [00:35:39] I think Teenage Engineering could get you.

Brian: [00:35:41] Oh, definitely.

Phillip: [00:35:42] I mean, I've got my whole...

Brian: [00:35:45] His whole background.

Phillip: [00:35:45] I could very well watch hundreds of hours of that sort of content. I watch it anyway. And that is, I think what it comes down to is the audience fitness for and the tailoring of the content for the audience and it being in the right place at the right time too. And I think a lot of folks have in this industry too,   got a little bit skeptical around the ability for some platforms to deliver that at scale with AI.

James: [00:36:23] Right. We've heard the story for ten years.

Phillip: [00:36:26] Right. I think the hope is that that does get better over time. And as platforms rev, If you feed more creative into the platform over time, I think that you'll you know, generally, we start to see more success. And obviously, you hit different plateaus. I think as a friend of the show, Alex Greifield, says is that generally what you realize is those plateaus aren't necessarily the limitations of the platform. It's that your limitations of your understanding of your customer and the limitations of your brand, and the limitations of your ability to deliver creative that speak to new audiences are the things. It's not the platform. It's not the algorithms. It's your maturity, at your scale and your level of your business that tends to hold you back. Maybe those things come through in this trends report as well to help you understand those things as well. James, I think this is fantastic. What else do you have? What are some creative team suggestions and team architecture sort of shifts that folks need to expect in '25?

James: [00:37:32] Yeah. We talked to a guy called Gil Chamovsky who runs basically the creative strategy. He's a creative strategist at Meta, but they have something called the Creative Shop, which is like an internal strategy team that works with some of the best brands on Earth. So he has a really good quote and section in there called the Bleeding Creative Edge. And he shared a little bit about what the top of the top performance creatives teams are doing. And one role that he talked about that I think you both will be interested in was the idea of what they term platform native directors. And they're sort of they coined that term at Meta. And really what it's all about is someone who's tasked with just understanding the vocabulary of social platforms, where ads live, and going so deep into that organic consumption and bringing that back to the paid team. And I think as advertisers, we often forget we're often looking at other advertisers and you're sort of looking at a reflection of a reflection because the true insight came from either a genuine customer or a genuine organic platform trend or something in culture. So if we just look at other advertisers, we're not really going to the source.

Phillip: [00:38:56] That's right.

James: [00:38:57] I think this is what Gil was hinting at with the the native platform experts is that they're absorbing the source code, and then they're bringing that into the creative team. And I think we all try to do this in our spare time. You know, we're all trying to learn as much as we can about Instagram and doom scroll as much as possible to stay relevant, but it'd be awesome to have someone who has the what I consider a little bit of an unfortunate job of doing that all the time. But yeah.

Phillip: [00:39:29] Hold on. You just said something. That was so profound. Hold on. That was really profound. You called it source code, and I've never thought of it that way, which is very, like, Matrix of you.

James: [00:39:41] Yeah. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:39:43] Primary source media.

James: [00:39:46] Mhmm.

Phillip: [00:39:47] Not derivative media, which I think social media can be derivative media.

James: [00:39:51] Totally.

Phillip: [00:39:51] But primary source media and forms of entertainment that are high culture are like source code. I think that that's really profound. I'm gonna have to jam on that. That's really good. There might be a piece in me on that.

James: [00:40:05] I think it comes back to my advertising days too. When you're brainstorming, I learned the worst thing you do is you go to Google and look up what other people have done or go to Ad Age, and you're like, "Why am I not getting ideas?"

Brian: [00:40:19] Yeah.

James: [00:40:19] It's like you need to expand your aperture, and you need to go somewhere where a million marketers haven't gone before.

Phillip: [00:40:28] I've always found that going to to a library or going to an art museum provides so much more inspiration. That sounds so trite and douchey. I'll be honest with you. Like, it really does. I know what that sounds like. I know what it sounds like. But in reality, there's also a serendipity to it. And I've always tried to encourage marketers to to do that and, like, go and get IRL and get analog because you can pick something up that you would never have encountered otherwise and flip through it and actually touch it and find a page that says something to you. I think that's really cool.

James: [00:41:02] I think it's a super uncomfortable muscle, though. It's what you talked about at our strategy summit because it seems like irresponsible when you have a deadline and you're like, "I'm headed to the museum."

Brian: [00:41:15] Uh-huh.

James: [00:41:16] Yeah. I'm not gonna read I'm not gonna look at any customer stuff. I'm just gonna be on a train to the museum.

Phillip: [00:41:21] But what if, James, that was just part of your lifestyle and that was just part of who you were? And every so often that that was just what you did, and that was part of, like I don't know. Maybe that was just I think we'd all be better for it.

James: [00:41:36] I think it's if you have to do it all the time because maybe you don't find the insight for that brief.

Phillip: [00:41:43] Correct.

James: [00:41:43] But instead, three years you find something.

Phillip: [00:41:45] It pays off for sure.

Brian: [00:41:46] Long term thinking.

Phillip: [00:41:47] I know. And it's trite. If you're at thirty six minutes into this thing, then you probably agree with us, but I don't know. It's generally, I think when you're looking at trends to understand where things are going, you're probably understanding too that there is also an expectation that there is a small facet, not the whole facet, but a small facet of being on trend also is part of the job. Because you can't be totally countercultural in everything you do as a marketer.

James: [00:42:22] That's very true.

Phillip: [00:42:22] You can't do it. Right. So I think having situational awareness of what the job requires and looking laterally at what your peers do is also part of it. Super valuable. I think it's really cool.

Brian: [00:42:37] Giving those people that have the ability to have that sort of vision and understand that this isn't just a one time thing that they're doing. It's, like, part of their lifestyle. It's part of who they are. Giving those people actual leadership roles is essential here. I think that's the last thing here is, like, it's easy to go out and be like, "I need to hire somebody like that." It's like, "Maybe you should hire them as your boss." {laughter}

Phillip: [00:43:01] Oh, jeez. I know which part of this podcast is gonna get struck after the edit. No. I love this. James, we'll link it down on the show notes. It's motionapp.com,/creative-trends, and you can go get it. If you do talk to Motion, tell them you got it from Future Commerce. I'm sure that helps.

James: [00:43:24] Absolutely.

Phillip: [00:43:25] And we'll link it up as well. This has been a great partnership. What else do you guys have coming down the pike? What's the future look like for Motion? What do you guys have coming up?

James: [00:43:36] Yeah. Definitely working on a lot. We raised our Series B in September as you know.

Brian: [00:43:45] Congrats.

James: [00:43:46] So we've really built up the team and have been trying to take some really big swings in 2025. 2024 was really building the engine. And so I can't share anything specifically, but I'd say we've gone back to the foundations, and we're looking to really swing big and plant some big seeds in 2025 that I'm gonna be super grateful to my former self in 2026 as we're building some big things.

Phillip: [00:44:16] I love that. Alright.

Brian: [00:44:16] Congrats.

Phillip: [00:44:16] Yeah. We'll keep an ear to ground for it. Thank you so much. Thanks, James, for coming. Thank you, Motion, for partnering with us on this. Motionapp.com/creative-trends, and thank you so much to Motion. Thank you, James. And, remember, Future Commerce, we have our VISIONS summit coming. I would love to see you guys there. VISIONS at MoMA, and this is our fourth year in a row, Brian. It's really really gonna be something else. I'd love to have you guys come and join us. Go to futurecommerce.com/visions. And we have saved the date, June 10 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. We can't wait to see you there. We'll see you in the After Dark. Thanks for listening.

‍