Evan: How's it going, everybody? My name's Evan. I'm the head of partnerships at Motion. And today, it's going to be special. For this section of the course, we're diving into how the role of the creative strategist has evolved and how AI is going to play a big role in the future. We have the perfect person joining us today. Our boss, our leader, Reza Khadjavi, CEO of Motion. He's going to dive into how this role is going to evolve into the future. Why does this role matter right now? And how can the creative strategist prepare for the future?
Reza: Yeah, it's an interesting question, especially when you think about if you go back just a few years, maybe like to 2020, 2021, I don't think anyone even knew what a creative strategist was, right?
Like it was a brand new role. This was the time of iOS 14. At that point, up until that point, let's say around 2020, for pretty much the entirety of the history of digital marketing, probably the thing that was the most important when it came to revenue impact was around audience targeting. So if I'm a yoga brand and I can figure out how to get in front of yoga enthusiasts, that was probably the biggest revenue unlock. And then iOS 14 happens, you know, in some ways it was about privacy. But I think around that time, probably the even bigger shift that happened was that the distribution algorithms just got really good at targeting. Right. So up until that point, if so much time and energy went towards targeting the right person and now all of a sudden the algorithms are just really good at doing that.
It basically opened up this big question of, OK, where's the big revenue impact? And then everyone very immediately understood that creative was where the big revenue unlock was. And it started to give rise to this role of the creative strategist that basically solved a really big pain point between two very different disciplines. So at that point, it's like if creative was going to was going to play a really big role in driving revenue, it needed to solve two very different things. and didn't understand performance data. What's worked in the past, if you take the average media buyer at that time, they had like a million spreadsheets and they were huge data nerds.
And then you had the creative team all the way on the other side that was just making stuff, basically. It was not rooted in actual decisions from the data. And so the creative strategist emerges as the bridge between these two worlds. And these are the individuals who naturally were pretty good at being part analytical, part creative. we all we all know people like that whether they started out on the media buyer side or on the creative side these were the types of people that were like almost unicorns a little bit in the sense that they had a bit of both traits and so they rose up very quickly to fill in this void almost this like frontier role of of creative strategist but to imagine that role without ai at this point is now pretty crazy right so i think any any creative strategist that's paying attention is starting to figure out where does ai fit into this role and i think we'll obviously get a lot into it.
But I think the similarity is that just as in that first era, these were the individuals that had to pull different disciplines together. In some ways, it's just the continuation of that and saying, okay, these almost like polymath type individuals need to figure out, okay, now how do I work AI into the mix as well? But it's certainly going to play a critical role in every job role. And I think creative strategist is no different.
Evan: And as people have risen up through this discipline, I think one of the things that I'm personally curious about are the brands themselves. So if I'm a brand and I hear you talking about the two different types of the brain people and how this is evolving, why should the brand care about this and have these people on their team?
Reza: What we all want is drive revenue for our businesses. And like, that's, that's the ultimate goal. And so the question becomes as a brand, what are my big revenue drivers? And I think, especially if you're selling anything online in e-commerce or anything else you're advertising online that's the the primary way that you're you're driving traffic and customers to your to your storefront and I think obviously people should think about different channels and not just be only relying on paid advertising as a channel but if you're selling anything online paid advertising is going to be like absolute critical channel to get right and so from that standpoint getting paid advertising as a channel is basically a non-negotiable for an online brand.
And then the question becomes, how do I do that? I think one option is in the early days, like you might just go and hire an agency and I think you can still do that today. And I think that's fine. There are a lot of terrific agencies, but there are some things that feel like they need to be core competency. You know, they say that you want to outsource execution, but strategy and direction and a lot of that really does feel like it belongs in-house. And so when you think about getting the paid ads channel right, the biggest component to that is your creative flywheel. At this point, if you're spending anything north of like even $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a month in media spend, the amount of creative that you need to run that kind of a budget is pretty intense.
and yes like you know we're going to see ai make it easier to hit that volume goal and that's really great because i think oftentimes people who are getting started with all of this volume was their first big challenge but then there's still the big question of what are those going to be how do i decide what those 50 ads are going to be to answer that question there's a lot of things that go into finding the right answer that's the question everybody wants to answer and it's a very competitive, dynamic ecosystem because you're up against a ton of really good performance marketers. And so anyways, I think if you're a brand that is selling online, those early days of like, I'm going to open up an online store, run some ads, do some drop shipping and make a ton of money like those days are obviously gone.
And the reason is that the market has matured. There's a lot of there's a lot of people doing that the bar has gone up. And for anybody that is hoping to do well in the years ahead. That's been like the shift that I think most people have recognized is that it's just the bar to do well has gone really high. And that's where having someone like that internally at the company makes a lot of sense. They're like the tip of the spear that drive your paid strategy. You don't have to have the role of creative strategist. I think at a certain organization size, it makes sense to hire that full time. At least someone at the team has to wear the hat of creative strategist could be the media buyer could be the founder could be the head of marketing like actually doesn't really matter who does it but the work does need to be done and it should be done in-house at the brand because then when even when you work with content creators or performance agencies you will set them up to do even better work right because they they would love to work with a brand that has that kind of expertise in house.
So yeah, really critical to have somebody occupying that seat, whether or not they have the full-time title is separate.
Evan: Okay. So brands need this role. And we're talking to a group of people who are going to be upskilling like no tomorrow, especially with AI jumping in. But you mentioned something earlier that I think is so important. The foundations are not changing. So if we can dive a little bit deeper in for our audience into what those foundations are, then we can talk about how AI is playing a role in this process. Kick us off.
Reza: Yeah. So, I mean, in some sense, you can go all the way back. So what's interesting is if you think about what happened in the era before digital marketing, the like David Ogilvy, Mad Men era, is that you would have these advertising slots.
It could be a billboard. It could be a TV spot. But basically, you would hope that your audience is going to hear this and the question is what do you want to say to them that's like the core of the the principle of advertising is around messaging let's say of like what am I going to say to this audience who is my audience and what am I going to say to them I think the first couple of decades of digital marketing kind of flipped that on its head a little bit because that didn't matter as much it was more like if I have a yoga brand if I can get in front of a yoga enthusiast that's going to do so much of the heavy lifting that maybe messaging kind of comes secondary obviously it was important but so much of the time and attention went towards targeting so now that in some ways we're in the modern era where obviously there's there's it's not just a billboard or a tv spot there's like hundreds and thousands of different opportunities to show visuals to customers but because the algorithm is taking care of the distribution in some ways it's very similar in some ways it's like just don't worry too much about how this gets in front of the right person just think about what is it you want to say to them and so in some sense like that's just the fundamental question is around messaging who is my customer what am i selling and what what do i want to say with regards to what i'm selling and that sounds very simple of course but when there's like when you have dozens of competitors who are selling the same thing then you can't all say the same things and you have to differentiate and then within your customer base there's different use cases or there's different value props or different like audience segments that might resonate to your product in a different way the core fundamentals are things like doing really deep research around who my customers are what else is going on in the market i know morella talks a lot about this but like she has her creative strategist consume a ton of organic content just to understand what people in that ecosystem are saying how they think how they speak.
And so in some ways you can think about 90% of the work being around collecting inputs, almost like a chef that wants to create a meal is that you're going and collecting a lot of different ingredients and inputs. And then that's, let's say that's like the science part of it where it's methodical. It's like, I need to understand X, Y, Z about my customer. I need to understand how my competitors are positioning and what our advantages are against them. So it's like a very scientific information gathering process and then there's a lot of creativity of you know even as far as if a team is very tightly organized it's not just about i have this one product and then i now need to go create an ad for it hopefully there's a discussion internally around the things that we're learning in market research are informing our product strategy even right so having a a situation where they would learn things about the market um and our head of content james refers to this idea of the ceo whisperer right where if you learn a ton about the market and you can go back to the company's leadership and say the things that we're learning here can inform our product strategy and product direction so i think that level of integration but just taking that and saying okay we have these things that we've learned and we have these products that we're selling understanding how to connect the dots between those two things and then there's a dimension from there which is just like creativity right everything until that point is pretty scientific you know the the fundamentals of how to be creative are probably a little bit more difficult to pin down but that's why you need individuals who are naturally creative that when they have the right ingredients then it's kind of just about brainstorming that it's like okay we know the points that we need to hit we got that pretty nailed what are the thousand different ways that we can engage with this message and some of it becomes around like humor and getting attention and structuring your creative in a way that follows the the attention span that people have that you need to like hook them with something and then drive them to an offer and i think there are principles there but there's a lot of exploration and brainstorming to do once you have the base set up of these are the things that we want to address and then you do need some room for like actual creativity
Evan: so we've talked about the foundations of the role making sure everyone's set up for success now let's talk about how ai is going to evolve this so let's say i'm a creative strategist how can i incorporate ai into my day-to-day like tomorrow six months from now a year from now what does that start to look like
Reza: yeah so in some ways when you think about the role of the creative strategist if you think about defining success for the role in some ways all that matters is to reliably and predictably produce more winning ads right that's like that's the goal and then there's an element of this that is if we can work more efficiently then that's helpful but it needs to be working more efficiently towards shipping more winning ads right so there's a question of predictability that even in the early days of creative strategy the focus point for everyone was like yes we can just go and produce 100 ads this month but if they're not rooted in something then we're just guessing like how do we get better each time how do we get smarter with with what we're doing that principle still applies also with ai because it's now easier than ever to like come up with new ideas use ai to generate a bunch of ads also and And it can cut quite a bit into the efficiency and allow us to now, OK, I can spend 20 minutes with AI and I have 2,000 ideas and maybe a bunch of ads that are generated.
But are those going to produce more winners, I think becomes the question. And so rooting it back to if we've dialed our process and we're like, OK, forget AI. It doesn't exist. But we have a team. here's our process for the way we do research the way we analyze ads the way we brainstorm the way we prioritize and those are done in a way where as we do them they are taking us closer towards predictably producing more winners winners documenting our learnings coming up with hypotheses that are based on data like all of those types of things that i think there's obviously a ton of content around for that but like those that process needs to be there and then one by one start to think about how can AI help with this?
How can AI help with different parts of this process? But I think you want to have the fundamental process in place and then find ways that AI can make it more efficient. And then we can talk about specific tactics there, but it's very tempting to just open up an AI tool or something and just start riffing. But the right way for it to be in the service of producing more winning ads, it needs to be chipping away and helping us get more efficient at things that we're already doing that we know are helpful towards producing more winners.
Evan: Okay, so I'm so excited to get your point of view on this one. I think there's a lot of folks who are embracing AI as we go into the future, but there's also the camp who's like, wait, is AI going to take my job?
What's going on? So I'm curious what you'd have to say to those folks and your opinion in general on this one.
Reza: Yeah, it's interesting. I think it'll take some jobs, but I think it's more a question of all of our jobs just evolving and changing. if you if you even just think about the job titles that exist today if you were to go back 15 20 years how many of those job titles would even exist then right so i think i think it will take some jobs it'll create some new ones um but i think the biggest change is just going to be in the structure of teams i don't know how long it takes for this to play out what's very likely to happen is that you won't need to hire as many people as you as you had in the past so like a much leaner smaller team can get a lot more done so chances are if you're if you're working at a company you can do a lot to make sure that you're still adding value to that company such that you're not replaced i think what's more likely is that a 20 person company could probably stay 20 people and do the work of 40 or a 40 person company could probably stay 40 and do the do the work of 80 and so i think um if you want to be valuable to your organization it's probably two really core important skill sets one is rising to a higher level of abstraction so if you think about a junior role and this is true of all careers in general it's like if you want if you want to move up in your career how do you rise to higher level of abstraction so you're not just staying at like junior execution roles and so how do you rise up and create more value so that's number one and number two is how do you then scale that without so if you go to a company and you're doing really well and you're creating a lot of value oftentimes what happens is you can create more value by saying now if I grow my team to 10 people or whatever else and now I'm also creating even more value because I've risen to this level of abstraction and then now I've scaled my team so I've created a lot of value so now instead of hiring all of these people what you can do instead is the way to add a ton of value to your organization is you've risen up to this level of abstraction you're able to add strategic high leverage value and you're able to help the leadership of your team get more done with less people so you say that hey instead of hiring two more people i've built an ai agent i've hired a couple of ai agents and i'm doing a bunch of stuff myself and guess what we don't need those five other people that that we thought we might need hopefully what ends up happening is that a lot more companies get created so if you're ever if at all thinking about starting a company it's probably a good time to do that but my guess of what happens is that there's a lot more companies but those companies are smaller hopefully what that means is that there's more opportunities for everyone it's just that the need to have a company become as big as it used to be in terms of headcount is probably not as necessary so i think if you can learn how to help your organization stay lean and scale without necessarily adding headcount, then you'll be very, very valued at that organization.
Evan: So for the folks who are super excited about this, you've spoken about the levels of abstraction. How can they get there? What are things they can do tomorrow to be able to start leveling up?
Reza: Yeah, one of the things like if you look at any organization and the different levels of leadership, having an understanding of the one or two levels above you, what do they care about? What are they thinking about? What are their priorities becomes really important often when we're at an organization we're kind of just thinking about our level and down what is in front of me what do i need to get done but i think the way to solve problems at that at that higher level is to understand what the people who are a few level higher in the organization what is on their plate what do they care about what are they trying to get solved because often what happens for most people is they're just so focused on the execution work that they have and then so much is happening in the organization and that's how you can wake up one day being surprised and be like oh my god what everything is so different now and my job is at stake and so on but I think paying attention to what the company really cares about and what really matters in terms of priorities this month next month this year and trying to figure out ways to contribute to that really is as simple as that That if you as an individual in an organization can contribute to one of the most important problems of the organization, then you will have created value for that organization and they will want to make sure to keep you there.
Because if you know it, then in your day to day work, you can think about how to contribute to that. Often the big issue is that we just don't know, like we're not paying attention to that. And then we can get surprised when priorities shift and we're not adding as much value as we thought we were. We talked about this idea of tinkering and how everything in AI is moving so fast. And that one of the things to do is to make sure that we're spending time at the frontier, trying out different tools, trying out to automate different workflows, and just generally tinkering a lot with AI. And I think that's very important. but one thing that often happens when you start to do that is you get kind of lost a little bit it's like wait i'm now deep in the weeds and i've got these like eight workflows that i'm trying to automate and i'm like learning this and learning that but then there's this question of what am i even trying to automate like what's all this workflow meant to even accomplish and as we get really into into the weeds of of learning this stuff and trying out different things it can be easy to lose sight of what we're even trying to accomplish in the first place so i think it's really important to stay grounded in that so it's almost like get lost a little bit in the tinkering and playing with different workflows and trying to automate different things but if you're not able to answer the question of what is it exactly that I'm trying to accomplish and is that thing useful then just know that you know that's this is just exploration we're just kind of having fun but if we spend weeks and weeks and weeks trying to automate this workflow only at the end to realize is that even the right way to do it was that even useful and so on so I think it's very important to stay grounded in what fundamental thing am I trying to accomplish for the organization and what's the best way that I can do that.
And part of that into this idea that things are moving really fast is that there are lots of people building stuff, lots of companies building things that are going to work a little bit better out of the box. Lots of people building their own AI agents that you can just use and leverage out of the box that'll work. And so sometimes just waiting a little bit for the tech to get better solves a lot of problems too and so keeping that in mind is that is this something that is likely going to get solved by one of the different tools that I'm using if it is something that's going to get solved by somebody else then maybe this is not the right thing for me to go deep into and try to solve so I think part of that awareness to we're now I think starting to get into the phase where a bunch of things with AI are just going to work well out of the box.
And so I think it's always important to know the fundamentals, know how things work, continue to tinker, but you should expect things to kind of work well out of the box. And once they do, then it becomes how do I then use these different things almost as the way that you would use like contractors, right? If you have these different AI agents that start to become effective and useful, then your job becomes how do I leverage different ai agents to get things done for me so there's always something like the core the core premise is there's a bunch of things available that do stuff and how do i put that together to create the outcome that i want and as long as the thing that you're really focused on is what is the outcome that i'm driving towards what's the thing that creates a lot of value then you can scan for whether it's different ai tools or agents or apps or softwares or contractors or team members like what are the different resources that I can put together to accomplish the thing that I want but if we lose sight on the thing that we're trying to accomplish then we get really lost and I think it becomes you can still have a lot of fun like it's interesting to go and do all of that but then you're maybe not creating as much value directly it's valuable because you're learning a skill but if you're able to apply that skill towards something that you're trying to accomplish at the organization, then that's how you know that you're moving forward, but also staying grounded towards the things that really matter for your company.
Evan: Awesome. So this has been super helpful so far. Brings us to the end of the road and final thoughts. Where's all of this going? Any other final things you think a creative strategist should be doing themselves to position themselves well with AI?
Reza: Yeah. One thing is, I mean, just everybody in their own personal life should be using ai a ton right and i think actually getting into the habit of outside of work just starting to get immersed in it as a way of just how you operate i think is really important because then it's not just related to work right like so many people now instead of like don't even use google anymore or like are getting relationship advice from from chat gpt yeah even even just using these tools in our personal life is a really good way to get better at making the most of them in our professional life.
Because if we are the type of individuals that are just using AI in so many different aspects of our day-to-day, then it'll start to come very naturally. So I'd say one of the key areas is just if you find yourself using AI more and more just generally in your life, then that's probably a good indication that you're on the right track. And then if you're doing that, you'll very naturally find things within your work that you'll use it for so for example you might have a meeting with your boss or your peers and you have like a presentation coming up i think most people are even using it today for use cases like this where ahead of that meeting you're just brainstorming with chat gpt your scenario planning and you're saying i have this presentation coming up i'm trying to get across x y and z points and like you know most people have used it in in that capacity and that's really good and the more of that we do then the more just second nature it becomes so imagine for example somebody asks in the modern era if you're a knowledge worker how do you use google it's like what do you mean what kind of question is that it's just it's so so much a part of what i do i think that is the right feeling for ai and it just it just becomes second nature and as it evolves and things get more and more advanced then you'll find very relevant ways that you can use it more in your work but I'd say a very tangible idea is take one part of your work that is pretty repetitive that you seem to be going back to every single week that is kind of a mindless thing for you and it's just it's just repetitive and try to take just that one thing and with the best tools that you can find at the time that you're trying to do this what's the best way that you can automate as much of that thing as possible.
Once you do that, then it becomes pretty addictive. And you're like, oh, now what else can I do? And I think that basically starts the trend of how do I look at everything that I do and find more and more leverage with AI? So solving that one specific use case now gives you the confidence to say, okay, I can start to use AI more and more in my day-to-day and find ways to automate the things that are really repetitive so that I can rise up and do things that are more strategic and more higher value it really is a crazy time to be alive though because over the next several months and years it's getting to the point where all of humanity basically has super intelligence available on tap and it's this this phenomenal capability that we all have access to and what's interesting about it is that everybody has access to it in the exact same way so it's it's just like great equalizer so it's not like some individuals or teams are going to have access to this advanced technology that the rest of us won't everybody has access to the same super intelligence which is kind of mind-blowing and then the question becomes what do you do with it right and i think um that is a real differentiator in a world where everybody has access to the same capability it's a really great opportunity for people to differentiate and create a ton of value by being really really good at creating value using this super intelligence so it's a really chaotic time right now so much is happening so many things are changing really fast but it's also a time of tremendous opportunity it's a really great chance for people to level up increase their skills and create a ton of value for their organizations and so if you've signed up to this course you're definitely on the right path so wishing you all the best on the journey ahead here
Evan: and that's the perfect place to wrap reza thank you so much for the time everyone else you've been the best enjoy the rest of the course we'll see you soon