The Biggest Creative Trends in 2026 REVEALED With Reza Khadjavi

Hey, real quick, before we dive in, if you've got a brand or marketing tool that marketers need to know about, sponsor the show here at Perpetual Traffic. Perpetual traffic puts you in front of thousands of season marketers, CMOs and agency owners. So head on over to PerpetualTrafic.com to apply to be a sponsor of this show. A great book is a psychological kill shot. You guys got 25,000 registrations for an online training on Creative Trends in 2026 for most advertisers when something's not working, like their accounts are just not taking off. It's usually because of your listening to PerpetualTrafic. Hello, and welcome to the PerpetualTrafic podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11. Alongside my load trotting non virtual background in the hills of Medellin, I believe co-host Lauren E. Petrilo, the founder of Morgus Media. So glad you joined us here today. If you're not watching this, you definitely got to check out Lauren's non virtual backgrounds, one of the best backgrounds I've seen since we've done this show, 750 episodes. And you are in Medellin, right? I am. I am. See, see you in your season. You're, of course, well, today we are very excited. And I believe he's calling in from an area that's maybe a little bit colder than we didn't even ask him to actually see sitting in the virtual green room right now. We've got the CEO and founder of motion. Not the motion app, the app that we use at Tier 11 to guide all of our creative decisions, which is just sort of fortuitous that he's here on the show today. But Lauren doesn't use it. So today is going to be, it's going to be a tough one for our guest because it's going to have to convince you that what they have is something that you should be using because we're already using it. I'm already convinced here. So you're convinced I'm using a different tool. So, you know, you're, you're testing my loyalties here. Well, there are plenty for the perpetual traffic audience at large. But we're not even going to talk about all that today. Obviously, uh, Reza Kajavi is a CEO and co founder of motion here to talk, not just to pitch motion, of course, but to talk about creative trends in 2026. So welcome to perpetual traffic, Reza. Thanks so much. Create to be here. Let's talk about these creative trends. Like you guys put on, I think you had to notify what the Guinness book of world records, uh, at the end of December, it was like December 18th. The time that you would always think like no one's ever going to show up for, like an online webinar. There's no way people checked out like it to December 18th. I think I was already a vacation. Yeah. That was no one was paying attention. Christmas, see your ideas, Christmas, I just absolutely. But you guys got like 24, 25,000 registrations for an online training on creative trends in 2026. So that is outstanding. First off, congratulations. Yeah. But secondly, like we want to know like what you guys are talking about. Yeah. So drop the goods here for the perpetual traffic books. We were blown away by it too. Motion's virtual events have been growing in popularity over the years. Like we, it's been something we've taken really seriously. And every time we have this like one event that really blows it out of the park, we had an event earlier in the year, um, called the creative strategy summit. And that one had 18,000 registrants and we're like, oh my god, this is crazy. And then the creative strategy summit we prepped for so much. And it was like, that was like our big kind of virtual conference of the year. And so we're like, okay, it made sense of that one really went crazy. The creative trends one was kind of like, okay, well, we'll do one to round out the year. And like we had some really amazing speakers, but like, there wasn't as much prep or anything as much as the, the kind of online conference. So we have, so we like, we really got blown away by that one. And, uh, and I think it just kind of shows there's just a lot of change. Happening right now in creative that I think people understand across like AI, they're across like the dimensions of what's going on in organic. And so like there's just, there's just a lot of change right now that I think that people are interested in learning about how the best in the world are kind of navigating the change. So yeah, 26,000 registrants. We had a really great line up of speakers with orange on there. It was great with Jack Afelbee, uh, Dara Denning, a couple other really, really amazing speakers. Um, probably the number one trend and it was like reflected in the, in the speaker lineup that we brought on to, um, is that these speakers were not all just kind of paid social types, right? Like orange and Jack and even Alfred, they're all, uh, very heavy on the organic side. And probably the number one trend unanimous across all the speakers that was the idea that the world of organic and paid are collapsing. And like those are, those are effectively the same thing that was probably like trend number one. Um, and so maybe we can talk about that one a little bit. The other one was about hooks. We talked a lot about hooks. And so, uh, hooks is this really interesting idea, both for organic creators, but also, also paid. Um, everybody intuitively understands, right? That like as people are scrolling past the content, you've got like just a couple of seconds to get their attention before they move on. And so like what goes on in those first few seconds are really, really important. And so the speakers talked a lot about like what goes into an incredible hook and how to think about it. Um, another piece that was really interesting in this one that was from, uh, from Ashley Rodstein who talked about the idea of, um, she had a really cool term for it. She called it the effort signal. So the idea was that like in the era of AI, where it's so easy to produce content, it's almost like signaling the fact that like no real human effort went into this kind of like, you guys know, like the moat, like create the moat around your content, but the effort signal of, oh, you just took the first prompt solution that AI gave you. This is so replicable, replicable, replicable, duplicatable. There was no effort. So, exactly. So like, you know when someone like in the movies would get kidnapped and then they would have them like hold a photo of a newspaper to like prove that they're alive or whatever. So some, something to say that like how can you prove to the viewer of your content that this was not like AI slop. I like know this like, you know, filming stuff that happened in the real world with like real old footage and so on that like really signals that effort was put into the content here as a way of building trust with Ashley founder at stuff about advertising. I'm here for this. If she came up with this amazing, if no way she, I mean, I love that. That's such a piece that like in the world of AI slot for creative, like agnostic of where the creative's being put. I mean, garbage in gets garbage out and the effort signal. Oh my gosh. Okay, this is, I'm done. I'm great. You've gotten your one tip the way you're leaving now, is that okay? Yeah. It came from Ashley. So thank you for bringing this into my ecosystem. Yeah, that was, that was really good. And then the first one around organic and paid colliding, I thought was really interesting. One of the things that's really interesting about in the world of paid, everyone was talking about like Andromeda and Gem and all these like crazy updates and people. What are little things? Raps. Have you ever heard of those two things? I haven't heard of them. Don't know what you're talking about. And, you know, the knee jerk reaction is like, how do we game the system, right? Like, you know, media buyers like growth marketers were like hackers and just like very stay what? Thanks. Of course. And like it turns out the answer is it'll like just make phenomenal content as like a starting point and you'll land roughly in a good spot. Because if you're constantly producing good high quality content for your audience, like you were going to break out of the kind of Andromeda trap of similar content, obviously like just creating new novel content is not enough. But like, that's kind of like the point. I'm Andromeda. It's kind of try to push people towards the idea of even paid folks need to participate in this like content feed as content creators. Yeah. So that's a really big takeaway for paid folks. And you know, when you talk to some of the the best creative strategists on paid and you ask them, like, how do you come up with really phenomenal content these days, the answer that I hear that was reflected in this in this event is like, okay, well, first we'll try to find out who our audience is. Then we'll try to find out like who are the creators that our audience trust and listen to. Then we'll go and try to see like what kind of content this creator is putting out that is doing well and working and landing with this audience. And then I'll take a lot of inspiration from that and try to use that to kind of create my own ad to speak to this audience. And so like the idea of learning about what is going on in your organic feed and specifically what is going on with the creators that your audience already consumes content from and trust gives you a lot of really good signal until like how you can create content for them that would almost like blend into their feed. So it's like you kind of I'm just like earn a place in their feed to feel like kind of like sneak in there a little bit to be like I'm I'm one of the other posts, you know, like I've had a long year to stand out you have to fit in blend in right because otherwise if you stand out as like an ad when you're obviously an ad you're obviously being skipped. So like you had said earlier too like the goal of so much paid creative is to give the illusion that it's organic. So it doesn't look like an ad and someone's like oh, I learned oh my god, I don't want to watch an ad which is like when you think of like the Kardashian era and like the celebrity era when they were telling stuff and you thought it was authentically their recommendation and then how that pivoted and then you had the creator economy and doing all this influence or stuff where I'm saying hey this is what I I recommend to like Jen Alpha they grew up knowing that anything that they see from a creator is an ad. It's all like integrated advertising everything or compensated or compensated. Yeah, there's some it's transactional. It's very rare that you see something that feels authentic. So what you're saying is that these creators are seeking a lot of inspiration by researching and doing discovery which is who is the audience you said who are the people that you're avatar or your ICP trust and then leveraging inspiration from what content that they're already producing that's working and embedding it into your paid or organic advertising strategies in order to stand out by fitting in. And like people have been saying for years that creative is the new targeting and then the question is how do you do that and this approach one of the other benefits of it is that it ends up like putting you in the feeds that you want to be put into. It is like a vehicle for giving meta and the platforms the information that they need to place you correctly in the feeds that you want to show up in. So it has like a really interesting distribution benefit like targeted distribution benefit if you are very thoughtful about okay here are the here are the people that I want to go after here's what their feeds probably look like and how do I create content that matches that feed so that I can so that I can earn my place there. And then the next one was like okay you're doing this but people are still just getting bombarded with content obviously and you only have a couple of seconds like the idea of the hook yeah being such an important part of the ad creative and so I our team also has been very fascinated with the idea of what a hook is and what is a great hook because you know on on the one hand you could say anything to do to to pattern interrupt and get someone to stop the scroll is a hook right in some sense that's true because like you got them to stop visual hook yeah but then it's like hook yes exactly and it's like but then what like if if if the rest of the content is completely irrelevant to that like pattern that can make interrupt mechanism then like yeah what's the point they're just going to scroll past you right on second four instead of second zero it's like a bait and switch kind of situation you're like this was interesting oh ew exactly yeah they hook me in and now I feel dirty exactly yeah yeah the the team at Ridge who obviously make phenomenal ads they have a term for this called the hook ramp right so they're like okay there's the hook and then there's a hook ramp like how do you ramp from the hook to the body of the of the content and then you're very careful about it right exactly it's like um Lauren before we started recording you gave this two really good examples of hooks maybe you can share them again but it's like hooks that basically have like the DNA of your entire ads concept wrapped into it what were they the two you sound like when you get out of bed you sound like a dying whale yeah like the concept of like every time you get out of bed you sound like a dying whale and it's embarrassing and then we had said the visual hook of like two aliens on a podcast talking to each other being like these neanderthal humans I don't understand we solve this like pain relief without surgery two thousand years ago why are humans still accepting it like that's just what neanderthals like that kind of thing it sounded more fun in the pre-recording I'll say that list it's never as good the second time through I was like is she gonna nail this one I don't know we'll think of another one that's okay our our team you know the the thing that's really interesting about those two examples we our team was we spent like a couple of weeks trying to articulate like what is a really great hook and Alicia from our team was one of the best creative strategies I've met came up with the term where it's like I got it I think I know how to describe a really great hook and we're like okay what is it she's like a great hook is a psychological kill shot and like okay that's very good like it's got a strike a nerve so deep that like yes it gets you to stop the scroll but it's like you feel gripped by it okay you you've said something that resonates really deeply to a problem I have or an aspiration that I have and so now I'm intrigued about where you want to go next to like okay I resolved this pain or or whatever it might be and so like that is the essence of a really great hook delivered in a fashion that is like entertaining and like fits within the feed that that that wants to wind up at and like that's not easy to do like those types of like psychological kill shots that land and work and are relevant to your product like they really don't grow on trees right and so that's the reason why people find a lot of benefit in spending time iterating on hooks it's not like you know sometimes the the the naysayers I think people who don't understand creative as well especially in the era of Androma they're like well don't waste your time iterating on the first three seconds because Androma is going to view the ad as the same thing like fair enough but it's like testing great hooks is something really valuable to do to figure out like what are the hooks that and like the good hooks you could probably spend millions of dollars against a really great hook like the amount of ad concepts that you can produce against that are a lot and so I think it's it's like it's almost like the foundation if you find something that works you can produce hundreds and hundreds of ads against against that same theme but you're talking about hooks first creative concepts like you have the the three like the hook rate which is a lot of turn like is a I think Matt actually adopted it naturally natively into their system where it's like what retention do you have for the first three seconds to get people to consume the content but that's like your visual hook and then you have the retention for the hook around which first three seconds divided by impressions is a hook rate right perfect and then but like with the hook where it's like with tension to yeah I was like it was either way it's a former or seen divided by three second views right which is only dependent upon videos right so the hook rate is a native now native meta performance indicator that you can pull inside of your dashboard before you had to do it as a custom calculation but then with the hook ramp you have retention which a lot of YouTube media buyers and YouTube creators they know because retention makes so much of a difference of play but from the paid-out side if you don't have the hook ramp if you don't have that retention you don't get to the call to action which then what was the point so like you're saying I just want to go back to so the the hooks that we have like those psychological kill shots combines a visual interruptive hook pattern or up thumb-stopping magic with the opportunity to allow consumption in a binging matter where you like you freeze everything your attention is solely shifting into what is this experience of an ad that leads you to the call to action but from the iterations you're saying in the past a lot of media buyers would be like oh okay great I'm just gonna keep making different visual hooks I'm gonna like you said earlier pop a balloon I'm gonna look like I'm being pulled by a car and then you find out that I'm not actually connected to it whatever those visual hooks and then the back end of that ad was the same but what you're saying now differently is you can make you can make iterations with the hooks I just because like creative concepts and hooks can you go a little bit deeper of like what that means for making hundreds of iterations well it may be given a maybe given example to or cuz like we have talked about hooks hundreds of times here like divvy diving deeper into it right now because it is such a leading indicator as to whether or not there's gonna be a successful ad at least it's a leading indicator it's not a cell you the indicator however like maybe an example would be super helpful here yeah so terminology is really interesting because people use different terms for different things and I don't know if as an industry we'll get to the same exact terminology we're gonna define it right now as I do it to us hook right straw hook ramp like those are two like can you hook them in yes can you get them to the next step that's sort of the ramp so I love those terms right there anyway so this is just right the the question about like what is the thing what do we call the thing that you can create hundreds ads from right and that thing like the boring way to call it would be like the messaging angle right you say we have this one messaging angle we know this resonates and from this messaging angle we can create hundreds of ad concepts okay fine that tracks the problem is if you say messaging angle to someone who doesn't understand like direct response principles they might come up with a messaging angle that's something like durable pants that technically that's a messaging angle but that's not it like that's not what we're talking about you're you need your messaging angles gotta be your psychological kill shot like that's the thing that's a that's a benefit or not that's not better but that's a feature that's not an angle that's like what the product is in the description however if you're rolling around in like crush stone all day you know there's like some work guy like that might be a really good angle but you know the best way that I've been thinking about it is like durable pants the sentence has got to be has got to pass the direct response test yeah like whatever whatever that is has got to be like this thing can sell like that sentence can sell like a through line for a movie right like you do whatever that through line is where you're flying hey this is movie silence of the lands you thought humans were tasty well so it is handled whatever that and so and so what I've seen on like a bunch of teams like create a pipeline and create road maps when they say okay these are the 10 concepts that we're going to do normally what I've seen is they have the verbatim hook so like the line that's going to get spoken plus the visual format so is this like a podcast ad a founder ad and us versus them before after whatever else so that the pattern I've seen is like people are using the verbatim hook as like the messaging angle of the ad concept so there's something really interchangeable between the idea of a messaging angle and a verbatim hook but you know not to confuse the audience the the general idea is that spoken hook can carry a lot of weight because you it can touch on something really powerful that you can express in many different ways you want to submit examples Ralph like there's some there's one Ridge wallet if you look at like the verbatim hook and sometimes it's verbatim hook sometimes it's written on their at their their their static ads the one that does a lot of work for them is your wallet sucks they do that a lot and something they'll show like a really beaten up old wallet that's like that's that's one example there's a AI company called fixer who do a phenomenal job with their advertising they have this they have this one hook around missing family dinner that I thought was really fascinating so the ad will have someone and what do they sell the dog yeah yeah email like your personal emails like it reads your calendar emails it's like your executive assistant with air yeah basically yeah and so like and so the ad will say something like I stopped missing family dinner or something like that and the idea that I found really fascinating there is like you know you can sell the the features and benefits of this AI will write your emails for you and say okay great but like something really gripping about the idea of missing family dinner that's a lot deeper than just like the the features and benefits of that product and there's a lot that they can do with that type of concept so those are the types of things that I think carry a lot of load and the brainstorming exercise for teams to find their hooks or let's just call them psychological kill shots because it's like yes different and you yeah unique that is like you know for most advertisers when when they're like something's not working like their account is just not taking off it's usually because of a lack of enough psychological kill shots or because they've exploited one and have not found their next one right so to me the formula is find your psychological kill shots then go as visually diverse as possible yes like motions AI tagging system which we can talk about has tagged all the possible visual formats that exist right now and every time there's a new one we tag it and so you want to look for any individual kill shot what are the dozens of different visual formats that I could run this with and then within the visual formats you probably could do iterations I actually think there's something wrong with iterations as long as they are visually distinct so many different differences meta's demand if they are not 25% different you have visual blindness and they're accounted as one on the same totally so like here's an example imagine we have missing family dinner as like our messaging angle and then we have founder ad it's the founder of fixer talking about the problem we can iterate on that quite a bit like in one scene is like in one ad he could be in his car another ad he could be in a boardroom another ad he could be just like you know maybe outside the restaurant looking at his family paying the bill finished what is there and you're like shoot I'm really hungry or like it's him on a podcast we like yeah this is the hardest thing this is what like I'm on a divorced founders podcast and it's like yeah I've missed every meal or so that like you have the verbatim hook of like stop missing family dinners and then you have the visual format of us versus them founder story maybe it's like a cute little AI duck being like oh what the duck or it's the founder telling his own story about like he had this problem and he kept missing like his kids bedtime family dinners and he realized he was spending all this time on email and so like reversing it that way like that would then supplant or like buttress like the original sort of messaging like a key is is you're talking about like a message behind the message like the benefit behind the benefit it's like you know in their case it is you know right faster emails it's like a benefit save more time third benefit really sort of benefit behind that benefit is the fact that you can now spend more time with your family you're not gonna miss family dinners so it's that sort of cataclysm but that's like all in a like a conceptual and then you have all your other creatives that sort of reinforce that concept in a conceptual manner. Yep yep so you know those are all really interesting like direct response principles and the thing that is fascinating about this work is that like then you have to park these and then go and actually consume content and understand like what really good content looks like and like put yourself in the mind of your consumer like there are a bunch of people very hot it's probably the first person who set this to me but I've seen many people other do it as well where they'll try to create like a dedicated Instagram feed. Michael I'm gonna see yeah we do YouTube channels where it's like we followed all we like you make your avatar and then Uncley you had to build a YouTube channel as if you were that avatar and then you start to see the thumbnails and so he he was behind he was a paid media director of Alex Ramose he was behind Jimmy's or Mr. Beast nonprofit stuff like that was he said make your own channels and consume as if you were the consumer totally yeah and like good you do that and then you know stay true to the direct response principles that we've been talking about and like that formula should work you know I think that the the only missing piece other than those two is like is the product that you're selling does it have product market fit how big is the tan like and you know one of the things that I did very bullish about is that for creative strategists to do their job sometimes at especially at this point a lot of it is going to be around like managing up to the leadership and be like okay what are we actually selling how big is the market for this thing is it realistic for us to go and spend you know many hundreds of thousands of dollars against this thing because it is the market even big enough and like it is important I think for creatives and this is why the job is getting very hard is that you have to triangulate like really good organic consumption really good direct response principles and then like also good like business acumen to think about things like market size because and does this product actually have like real product market fit with this audience that you want to sell to and if not like everything else can be so hard like if there isn't actually real large tan for the product that you're selling it's going to put a really big strain on everything else and it's valuable to identify where the problem exists but you know you have a company like grooms for example one of the reasons obviously they do a terrific job with their creative and their and their paid but like can you imagine the market size for what they're selling right like just the massive massive market I don't know what grooms is no no okay let me show you grooms is like a supplement brand come in is that kind of thing yeah exactly it's like a daily nutrition brand that packs like on their product packaging it says super foods green gummies right so like the idea of get your vitamins through this like delicious gummy right what's the market size for them it's like messy right delicious every inner child that has a full-time job yeah yeah I'm like an inner child that has a full time job yeah I actually think that stuff is not talked about enough when people go study like ad library of grooms and then like how do I do this for me it's it's a useful exercise but the question is like are you also selling into a market that big or is your market size different and if it if it is smaller like you have to be a bit more realistic with how much spend you can deploy but I think that is a really important job of a creative strategist who is tasked with like hey I just need you to scale this budget at the and keep these performance targets okay that's the job right and part of that is building really good creative but another part is having like a market analysis hat on and being like how is this product doing in the market that we are advertising to and I actually think like my take for the creative trends 2026 is like from the role of the creative also before we recorded learn we were talking about the how the creative is getting automated with AI and so on like how can creative people level up and add more value I think one of them is this like feeding back insights that they're learning through advertising back to like help guide business strategy and say like here's what we're learning from the market here's what that actually means for the decisions that we might want to make on the business side because the feedback loop between what we're learning in the market and what we do on the business side I think needs to get really rapid and there's something really pure about a signal that you get from advertising that you actually don't get anywhere else we were talking with a brand I won't name them because there's obviously internal politics around this stuff but like you have the brand team right and then the director said D to see yeah the D to see team and oftentimes the brand team is very out of touch with like the customer and what the customer wants and why the customer even buys from this brand so they'll come up with these like vague fluffy turns around brand identity brand is to yourself the time where it's like well very clothing brands Chanel is like one of the most famous cases where like their brand is been out of touch with what the end consumer wants and then in the last five years brand got a re-haul with their director consumer and now you have the highest resale value from any luxury brand I know that's probably what Ralph knows the most about he looks like an avid Chanel purse collector I have multiple ones in the other room but you know who's counting I can't even keep track of all yeah so like you know to me it's like the team that I was talking about like they've crafted some of the most phenomenal hooks in the market but those hooks are not in the conversation when it comes to like what is our brand and how do we talk to our customers like really at the largest scale whereas I actually think the right way is if you take the most powerful hooks the ones that are working across the largest audience like that should actually be the biggest input into your brand identity and like the signal that you get from like what is actually resonating with customers what are they hearing from us it's causing them to move I'm not saying you take like you you you sound like a whale and nick the brand identity I'm just telling you die whale like that's not it but if it's like what's being told about and then all of a sudden like there's a trending sound that sounds like oh okay nevermind it's recorded in the video I'm not gonna do that but if that ends up becoming it can we come at these those and then like what is the bigger picture that that falls into and having that connected but you're talking about like creatives need to know what's working and there's that feedback loop so really happens if anyone's watching madmen you can see like Peggy is just like living on her own space and they're like I keep coming up with ideas is it working it's working pay me more so it's like people don't want to tell the creatives what's working because they don't want the credits charged more but if the crates don't know what's working they're gonna make ideas that can flop tremendously and so that information though that feedback loop I believe is where you're getting into that motion will solve in that vein I think it's important for us to sort of bring it like land the plane here to a certain degree is like all right these are all important but how do you actually read the tea leaves how do you really understand all this is great I mean we could talk for hours on hooks like what is a great hook what is not a great hook and I've seen plenty of hooks that aren't look like great hooks but then they don't have that ramp and then they don't convert so how do you read all of that to understand like what's going to be best what you should iterate on and then that's sort of the next solution that's what we use motion for I mean speaking the way that now this has changed somewhat with Andromeda it used to be more conversion based now it's really because that would always say all right let's reiterate like three years ago let's say if we're doing like top of final level one ads and then we're doing retargeting ads like all the retargeting ads are the ones that are getting all the purchases but or the ad to cart like abandoned cart ads we don't necessarily want to redo all that so the shift has really changed fundamentally from what is converting what's getting that last click purchase versus what's engaging people at top of funnel and that's I think where motion really comes in not to give you guys a pitch here but that's where we use it because what used to be the case and how you would measure a good creative has drastically changed with metta and gel yeah yeah and you know maybe I can share screen as well as show you those things on motion but like when you think about the formula the formula tends to be find your psychological kill shot call it whatever you want messaging angle hook concept whatever else once you have that messaging angle that's working then the idea is like how do I test as many different visual formats as possible I think that the trap that people fall into is like they'll find something that that's working and they'll keep doubling down on it and there's something about that that makes sense that you should be doing that but not on every dimension that I think people fall into these like small iteration traps and so I want to show something that I think is a really helpful way to really helpful way to think about it and so motions AI tags which are really really effective and we've spent we were talking about this earlier as well like you can build a feature around AI tags in like 30 minutes but whether they're good or not is a separate question what's the effort signal right you know actually the effort signal is compute as actually a good one we have spent many many many hundreds of thousands of dollars on compute and continue to do so to make these AI tags really good and so actually in AI like tokens consumed and money spent on compute is probably a good effort signal on the quality being really good because we use like the best models and we run them multiple times to make sure that like we catch the duplicates and they're like aligned and we test them against like our entire data set to make sure that like the way that we're coming up with these naming conventions become really representative and that you can rely on them so that it's not like one day it's tagged this another day it's tagged that like it needs to have constipation yeah it has to be consistent because otherwise like we're looking at stuff and like we can't actually learn anything if the tagging is not consistent over time yeah and at the moment that requires like pretty significant spend on compute which we could do it a large scale and our benefit and our customers can benefit individually because we don't charge on a usage based for this like we spend all the like let's say like it's interesting because software never used to be this way but like we're almost spending this like capex that we're spending and then everybody else kind of benefits from yeah for sure um well that's what makes that's what makes the platform really good so if you're not watching this you've just been listening so far you've been walking the dog you've been the gym whatever it happens to be uh we're going to do a screen share here inside motion just to kind of give you guys an idea of this even if it's this isn't the solution for you it's it should be good food for thought for you to how to sort of you know laser focus in on the best creatives that should be iterated on but also there's some traps that go alongside that so head on over to perpetual traffic dot com forward slash YouTube uh subscribe if you're not already a subscriber on that channel so take it away yeah yeah so that what I want to show you here is you're looking at the card view of a regular motion report and I have three AI tags loaded up here I'm not going to spend time on the messaging angle one because I'm just going to say like let's say we have a messaging angle let's say we know it works and now the work is like okay take that and how do you actually run with it in a way that's and drama to friendly in a way that doesn't get you into this light small iteration trap let's assume that all of these creatives have the same like roughly speaking messaging angle and like these ones were all about the 2026 uh creative trends of event that we did and these three are very informative so first one we're looking at here is visual format so visual format is like um how the ad is presented so stuff like green screen comment response expert explainer us versus them this is the first line of diversity that you're going to want to see because if it's if all you're doing is green screen the chances that you're going to fall into like similarity trap is high but you know if you got green screen on one and you've got listicle on another one an expert explainer on another one like you know that you're being like horizontally broad when it comes to visual testing yep the other one that I really love is intended audience something that when we first launched our AI tags we're like wait no there's a bug here because every single motion ad was tagged with the creative strategist as the intended audience and we're like this got to be wrong because we're not just talking to creative strategists we're talking to like marketing professionals and media buyers and so on but we we we went and rewatched the ads are like oh no we think we're talking to media buyers but we're actually talking to creative strategists and every single one of these videos interesting so the so the AI got it right even though we would have tagged that as like okay this is the creatives because I want to talk to a media buyer here but like sure the AI does a really good job checking your bias and once we saw that we're like okay we want to make ads that are diverse on the intended audience side so that we start to see it get picked up as different tags and then we started to see okay this one is creative strategist but like this one is performance marketers and so it's almost like doing your creative testing and then going and seeing like what the AI picked up and so that's a very interesting distinction where people are like oh AI tags is interesting because it'll automate my naming conventions but it's actually more than that because I might sit down and have my own human bias when I'm labeling something and I'm a rush and so on like who's to say that I have the same level of consistency and honesty when I'm tagging something but if the AI is doing it then like it has that kind of honesty and consistency which I feel cool. But also let's talk about teams at scale like there's teams that have more than one creative strategist there's teams that have multiple media buyers it's not just about consistency as the individual is consistency across platform and if that person leaves and all that tribal knowledge of what I identify as a tag is not a tag I'm like this is future proofing if like there's a lot of assumptions that like Gen Zers have no will see to their companies and your luck is you to say have them for more than two years. God forbid all of a sudden you lose all that tracking or it's miss a misguided for a new hire it's not sustained a long term. Totally and so like you know people like how do I know if I have creative diversity well if you open a motion report like this sorted for your last 30 days and then see are you getting the same visual formats and the same intended audiences and the same hooked tactics across the board if so you're just iterating across these. So if you be thirsty shades of gray because for those that can't see it like each different like green screen as a green tag performance mass performance marketers are yellow marketing professionals orange like I'm looking at a Creole box of colors like this is quite diverse in terms of visually telling me that there's an abundance of options and if you're looking at all 50 shades of gray then yeah and also keep in mind that this is either a media buyer or a creative strategist or a creative production member that's looking at this and the time is of the essence and they just want to be able to see at a quick glance like all right where is that ad resonating we'd I wish I see peas it hitting on what hook is working yeah this is crazy the sooner the one that wants to know like how our ads doing which ads are working which as I like because they're not going into meta ads manager they're looking at a dashboard or using something with super metrics tied into looker studio but that's just showing performance on a performance only side it's not giving direction of what else do we need to create is saying what was done this is showing ideally options of where you can create iterate more of well and check this out so like if you go to the filter and you filter by AI tags and we go by visual format now it actually shows me this actually this is a filter but it shows me a lot of really interesting information so it shows me that in this report I'm very heavily focused on green screen and when I see these ones are all of the various opportunities that I could be doing here that I'm not right so for if I'm sorted by a specific messaging angle I'm like okay we're doing a lot of green screen but let me just scroll through here and be like this is our road map basically right you're like take this messaging ale and like pick from this list and go run with it and then what you can do inside of motion let me just go and share another tab is that in our inspo feed because the visual tagging is consistent across the board then you can take the ideas for like posted or comment response or whatever else that you want to see and you can like filter for them here right so we could say comment response and then you can just look for inspo on comment response because we've tagged our entire inspo library with the same taxonomy and so if you find an opportunity in that list that you want to go and test then you can go jump over to the inspo feed and search for only the visual formats of that type and then you can like pick a few send them as an example to your designer and go and execute so like at that level of altitude of like having a messaging angle that you know that works and testing relatively broadly on the visual format side should put you in a good place from an andromeda standpoint because there are so many visual formats that people can and should be testing that they haven't yet and so having like a rigorous list usually very quickly it's like oh yeah actually we could be very diverse what we've been talking about like we're not even anywhere close to exploiting visually the different ways that we can say this message that we know works yeah you think that you're diverse when in fact this will tell you whether or not you are or whether you aren't as well as all the other options that you have there to just continue on that diverse animation which is so key yeah it's allowing someone else to say what a lot of people listening are like I've been telling my quietness for a while now it's like well seeing is believing and what I take away from that is that that trends are born and being able to see in the discovery of all other options it's like we use the Facebook ads library a lot and I love it and you can see in TikTok you can see what other people are running ads for and you can see iterations like I'm using Ryan Dice one of our like good friends you go into the Facebook ads library for Ryan Dice you can see all the ads that he's actively running and the iterations is insane like he has so many versions of his ex tweet and that's the one that he's just done so many copies of you know that that one's leading the most responsive week what I've had my team whether it's organic or paid look into that look inside Facebook ads library to understand what are our competitors doing what are other ads that are out there but what you're showing is a combination on the creative visual side versus the performance side or just in general inspiration because there's no performance base off of it that's a tool I can see whether you're on the paid team organic yeah well I'm sure you this too so like the the fact that we have consistent tagging across the visual formats also exist at the individual brand level so if I go to our inspo and I search for let's say he'll I can very quickly see the different visual formats that are testing and then I can click if I want to see okay it seems like they're doing a lot of feature benefit point out let me filter for that and just see all of their feature benefit point out or it sounds like they've done a little bit of testimonial what does that look like right and like because the language is consistent across your ad account and across the ad library that hopefully gives the teams shared language when they're doing their creative road mapping to say okay take a messaging angle and then combine it with a visual format and like that is basically the language internally around coming up with a new kid ad concept because just that alone I feel like team struggle quite a bit like it's fascinating what happens when you have shared language how fast you can move but when people are like okay let's come up with five ads how do we describe these ads and everyone just kind of struggling to but you know one's using different nomenclature for the same thing or different things yeah totally but at least at the visual format like we tried to take a crack at a kind of industry standard across like post it ad and comment response like we're trying to we're catching all of the new ones too so that one I feel like is the biggest gains that people can get is aligned taxonomy around how we talk about visual format because very quickly you realize like wait there's actually many more of these than I could test right now and there's no reason for us to be pigeonholed into UGC testimonial product demo like those people know when they're about familiar with and I'm like oh this work but in the age of indroman and the demand of options what you know work testimony you're talking about early like people get in this trap of iterations and iterations and iterations so then but you don't actually test and see can we find a different psychological kill shot that can really expand into new markets so if we go back to like evaluating the time and you're making something your only hyper focus on this one demographic or this one option you could be leaving out the opportunity to penetrate new markets that could have better cost efficiencies I mean I quite honestly I was a little bit reluctant to have you guys on here today because I mean this is sort of a cheat code that we've been using for rights so now the world knows about it it wasn't just the brilliance of our creative strategists but there is a reason behind it because of universal taxonomy it's about all the things that we've talked about here today if people want to take sort of that next step engaging with you all I hear you've got another free training that's coming up we do yeah we have a very very exciting boot camp it's a six or I think eight week live program with some really fascinating instructors we tried to take people were like actual practitioners at great companies and try to yank them from their day job a little bit to run full-on creative strategy boot camp to teach people how to do really great work the really cool thing about it is that it's a hundred percent free one of the cool things about being a software business that don't think like that's free a six to eight week training with the leaders and doers of not the people that are on stages that are repeating what their teams are doing with the actual doers no I don't believe you that it's free you know the the interesting thing is like the economics of a software business is that we make money off selling our software right so we actually don't have to make money on selling the course it's a very like simple business model if we can get like thousands and thousands of people to come through the course then a bunch of them will obviously end up becoming motion questions on that case and that is our put crap yeah and like that's kind of been like motions go to market strategy since the beginning is like create really great content talk about creative strategy in them ultimately like motion as a product becomes an obvious choice there Ralph we're canceling this episode right now I don't want anyone else to go to this craer stratus book out my people be there we might just throw this one in the dust bin maybe not always like I don't know just I don't want to be giving away too much working people sign up for that anyway in case we do air this episode yeah so so we we we uh we have the landing page coming up if it if it's not ready and it's not in the show notes keep an eye on motions social media page or visit our website it'll be out any day now but we're going to do so much advertising for that you won't miss it uh look out for motion bootcamp like it'll start on March 17th so you'll have plenty of time to sign up but we're starting registrations at the end of January and um I think there will be limited spots don't sign up you can sign up we're already signed up he's taken I'm sure I'm here I head over to it's motion app.com correct me if I'm wrong it's right probably say retargeted is my guess so you probably see it but we will leave links in the show notes over at perpetualtraffic.com for anyone who just wants to cut the line and sign up with you guys lay discounts you can offer listeners here yes we do we have uh discount code of traffic 10 which will give you 10% off your first three months of motions so just mention that as you're as you're signing up and uh yeah our our team does a lot trying to like onboard people onto motion because oftentimes we see that when people want to be successful with the product there's a lot of work that happens outside of the product around like how does our team work what's our weekly process like so we run a lot of workshops with people who um are starting to become motion customers evaluating the product so I highly recommend grabbing time with our team because we've we've had people like go through motions like sales process and just learn a ton about how good creative strategy works and so how they recommend grabbing some time with our team even if motions product is not for you I bet that our sales process will give you a lot of valuable insights around um at least the motion POV and how we do things and if we're not a good fit for you today maybe maybe tomorrow because we're always shipping really exciting new things and we have a lot of really exciting AI things coming out this year as well so uh hopefully hopefully we can create enough value to earn your business all right well uh that's traffic 10 make sure you do that we'll leave links in the shanads over at perpetualtraffic.com make sure that you do watch this as well so you can actually see us going through the interface inside the motion app and you know I mean this is we just redid um I just actually met with our finance department this morning I'm like what software is can we cut out in 2026 uh in yours made the cut it did not end up in the cutting room floor so that's how important the software has been for us Lauren sounds like maybe she's now gonna be a customer as well but anyway I'm not pitching anything here I'm more careful uh we've already given away to your maths no one should sign up for it it's not oh and she'd sign up for motion nobody don't register whatever I wish like I would be like okay maybe it's in your roadmap or something like that because we do use an alternative tool is that if there was a connection of putting up creatives there for approvals and having that all dialed in as a pre-live because it looks like this is showing you inspiration before you build and then um information after you've gone live with the launch so I just like if there ends up being that pace whatever we have guaranteed my best. I can't disagree there because we use another one for that specific you know sort of uh creative and approval process for clients so yeah I want this to be the high level it's creative I love it as it is like the sole software for agencies to use for like CRM ESP building documents I want this to be the sole software for creatives so make that happen and I guarantee you have my business for life I love it I'll talk to our team all right oh yeah I'm sure Lauren will be the first one to know not that uh anyway thank you so much for coming on uh this week's show really really appreciated how can people connect with you personally yeah I'm on I'm on Twitter or ex as they call it Reza Kajavi um and uh linkedin as well but our team and following our blog and signing up to our newsletter are we we have a content team of about I think six or seven people now and the amount of stuff that they put out around creative strategy education is like mind blowing uh James who leads our content team um loves this stuff and uh we've we've almost like built a media company within motion to like educate this specific problem space starting more interesting than me is following our our content and signing up for all of our events because there's like really really really valuable stuff in there awesome stuff well very very cool I will leave all the links in the show notes over perpetual traffic dot com and of course wherever you listen to podcasts wherever that happens to be please leave us a rating and review gets us out to a wider audience and teach people how to do this stuff the right way through metrics that matter and growth that scales motion being a huge part of that so thanks for coming on Reza thanks army on behalf of my amazing Mediine-based co-host Laureni Petrilo dog till next show see ya you've been listening to perpetual traffic