Kickoff Inspo

@1stvows is more than a music account. He’s a philosopher-artist. Having spent some poignant years in Los Angeles, I felt this one deeply.

1stvows

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@jb_copeland never fails to deliver the raw goods. He seamlessly blends authentic, emotional content with quiet promotion of his own eclectic closet, which he sells at the link in his bio. Not sure what the revenue is, but the concept is working for me.

jb_copeland

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Deep Dive

A Brave New World

The film and music industries are busy imploding. The art market is coming off a punch-drunk high from two years ago. And marketing spend is down an average of 15%. I see creative professionals across multiple industries being laid off or struggling to find freelance work. If there were ever a bad time to quit your day job, it would seem like 2024 is it. But what if we made 2025 a different story?

What I’m seeing in the content marketing world has me convinced that 2025 will be one of the best years for those with the stomach, the skills, and the confidence to pivot into a new creative career. Let me be clear: it will not be easy. In fact, it may be more difficult than it has been in the last decade. But we are still in a golden window of opportunity—a transitional moment when we can build new skills and adapt to an ecosystem that is rapidly changing. The way that social platforms have disrupted traditional forms of entertainment has wreaked havoc on many careers, including mine, but it’s also pointing to a future where creativity is king, and almost anyone can gain leverage.

Step Right Up, Folks

We now live in an attention economy. With the exception of a few healthcare and old-money establishments like Berkshire-Hathaway, the world’s largest corporations are capturing and selling our attention—or they are building machines that allow other companies to do that. And as we settle into the new status-quo, your ability to harness people’s attention will directly correlate to your leverage in the creative industry.

Previous to this, the business world begrudgingly wrote the checks for commercial artists, and advertising content was often the first thing to go when budgets were down. But now that most people spend most of their entertainment hours on platforms that put forward endless streams of captivating entertainment—companies can’t afford to make commercial art a second thought. Real creativity will be the only way to get through to an audience or customer base. And that’s where we come in.

Case Study

I’m currently the creative director for Murphy Door, an e-commerce business that sells $24M in hidden doors and murphy beds. Our marketing effectiveness was plummeting at the beginning of 2024 because of audience fatigue and an ineffective conversion funnel. These terms might not mean anything to you, and that’s alright. The tl;dr is that things were bad, and in the last 6 months we have turned around an 11% YoY revenue dip into a slow but steady revenue incline. And while it takes a village to make that happen, good creative effort has been essential to our growing success.

My employer spends about $100K per month on Meta advertising. Year over year, our average cost for impressions has gone up 60%, which would normally mean that we’re getting less traffic per ad that we run, fewer customers, and less revenue. But thanks to our creative team we have increased the efficiency of our advertising by about 40-50%. So our overall cost per conversion has actually gone down this year, which is unusual in the best way.

This is primarily because the business was not doing any regular creative testing or adding new creative to their campaigns until I came along. We have gradually developed a workflow that allows our very small team to regularly launch new creative assets in our advertising and rapidly identify what’s working and what’s not. The ad buyers have told us that ours is one of their top-performing accounts because of the quality creative that we’re delivering them, and we are seeing that in the revenue growth over the last six months.

Conclusion

So why do I bring this up? Because it’s a good example of the way that creativity can impact the health of a business and stabilize it against external pressure. It’s to remind us that they need us. In a world where every brand is not only battling its competitors but battling thousands of other content creators—for their customer’s attention—brands are beginning to realize that you can’t just open a Shopify store, slap your logo on a pretty image, and put some marketing budget behind it. Branding today is about entertaining people and providing real value to people before they even hit the website or walk into the store. Businesses need coordinated creative efforts across several platforms, in several types of media in order to find their audience and not only build trust in the brand but create that spark that keeps people engaged. And we know how to do that. Or we can choose to learn.

2025 is going to be a good year, but 2024 isn’t over yet. Stay tuned as we dive deeper on some of these concepts. And please reach out if there are any topics you’d like me to take on. Stay dangerous, friends.