Add To Cart is brought to you by
Were you forwarded this email? Sign up here to get the next edition.
I spend more time than is mentally healthy on LinkedIn, and most of it is a scroll of people announcing they're "humbled”, “excited” or “sharing a controversial opinion”. It’s rarely the case. Then, there’s Mark Broadhead. Every time he shows up in my feed, I get challenged or excited or just laugh. So I did the obvious thing and asked him to come on the show so we could unpack his Meta creative process for you.
Mark is the head of creative and growth at The Lad Collective, the Queensland bedding brand you've almost certainly been served in social, whether you are a lad or not. Their founders, Ed and Bill, joined me way back on episode 160. This one is about what happened next: roughly 15,000 ads over four years, a launch into the US from Austin, a Robert Irwin shoot at Australia Zoo, and a system of thinking about creative as the competitive moat. We get into account structure, the unicorn hit rate, content pillars, and where AI is starting to change the production maths. If you are struggling for new Meta breakthroughs, this one is for you.
Cheers
Bushy
EPISODE CHEAT SHEET
⏭️ SKIP TO THE GOOD BITS
Stop benchmarking your own category and study disruptive brands outside your space like Liquid Death and Dr Squatch instead. (~13:52)
Run one idea through multiple content pillars so a single piece of copy hits different audiences as visually distinct ads. (~36:23)
Keep a daily P&L as your source of truth and use a tool like Triple Whale to catch ads quietly driving cold demand. (~25:06)
Re-test old organic winners through Instagram trial reels; a video that hit before can reach a brand-new audience again. (~33:39)
Add AI as a production pillar so you can test scenes and concepts you'd never get a shoot budget for. (~47:14)
💬 QUOTE OF THE DAY
If you piss off 80% of Australia, that means 20% love you. And 20% is a pretty big number.
🧠 THE BIG LESSON
You don't find the unicorn until you publish it
Mark has created roughly 15,000 ads for The Lad Collective over four years. Fewer than ten were proper unicorns, the ones that scale and just keep getting the ROI. That sounds like a horrible strike rate until you understand the system behind it. Volume is not the enemy of quality here. It's how you find quality.
Rule 1: Treat every idea as a test, not an outcome
The job isn't to pick the winner upfront; it's to give more ideas a shot at proving themselves. Mark gives almost no feedback and rejects almost nothing, because he's seen the stuff that looks terrible go on to outperform the polished work.
I have no idea what's going to work. As long as it's talking about our product, let's try it because it might work.
Rule 2: Build pillars so one idea becomes ten ads
A single good line, like "Australia's most expensive bedsheets," gets run through street talk, UGC, founder-led, non-verbal and green screen. Same message, visually different executions, each landing with a different pocket of the Andromeda audience.
If you made a very good version of the copy that everyone else is making, it's probably going to do really well still.
Rule 3: Judge winners on your own numbers, not the platform's
With heavy exclusions and delayed attribution, in-platform results lie. The Lad Collective runs a daily P&L as its bible and uses Triple Whale as a backstop to catch ads that are quietly driving dormant demand.
The maths sounds scary but with a clear system and a mindset that they don’t know what will work, the volume is possible. Meta's own creative guidance has long pointed to creative as the single biggest lever on paid social performance, and ad fatigue sets in the moment your whole addressable audience has seen a creative. If you're not finding your winner, the fix often isn't a smarter strategy or a bigger production budget. It's more shots on goal (yes, World Cup reference), because you cannot pick the unicorn before it runs.
✏️ ECOMMERCE ACTION TIPS
Stop benchmarking your own category and study disruptive brands outside your space, like Liquid Death and Dr Squatch, instead. (~13:52)
Run one idea through multiple content pillars so a single piece of copy hits different audiences as visually distinct ads. (~36:23)
Keep a daily P&L as your source of truth and use a tool like Triple Whale to catch ads quietly driving cold demand. (~25:06)
Re-test old organic winners through Instagram trial reels; a video that hit before can reach a brand-new audience again. (~33:39)
Add AI as a production pillar so you can test scenes and concepts you'd never get a shoot budget for. (~47:14)
💾 TECH MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Meta AI. Mark and Ed actively test Meta's native AI generations, including the deliberately rough outputs, because the odd one is funny enough to work as an ad.
Shopify. Where the team reads business results and sales data alongside their own daily P&L.
Higgsfield. An AI video tool built for ad formats. Mark made the FBI skit with it in about 30 minutes, and it's now capable of near movie-quality output.
Kive. An AI creative tool that the wider team has settled on for organising and producing content.
Triple Whale. An attribution and analytics platform Mark checks daily as a backstop to confirm ads are working despite delayed in-platform reporting.
🎧 OTHER EPS YOU MIGHT LIKE
Get Your Sheet Together: The Lad Collective Story | EP160
The Brisbane River megaphone stunt and the four-corner-strap origin story sit behind everything in this week's episode. Go back to where it started, including the NDIS product line with braille sewn in that most people never hear about.
How to Not Win Ad Awards with Michael Beveridge | EP70
This week's guest reckons the worst-looking ads often outperform the polished ones. Beveridge makes the harder version of that case from inside Koala: the only award that matters is revenue, and the fastest creative comes from in-house teams with skin in the game.
How Keira Rumble Transformed Health Challenges into Krumbled Group and Three Thriving Brands | EP452
Owning your own ad account and testing relentlessly is the throughline here too. This founder taught herself Meta, kept experimenting with creatives and avatars, and drove 1600% year-on-year growth.
💬 CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Mark will test almost anything, so let's put that to the ATC Community: what's the worst-looking ad that's quietly become a winner for you, and would you really publish creative you're not confident in? And is anyone else running pillars the way The Lad Collective does, or still cutting new hooks off the same video? Whether you've been deep in Andromeda for months or you're just rethinking your creative process, jump in.
Not a member yet? It's free to join. 600+ ecommerce operators talking shop every week.
