Hey, readers! This is James Hercher, AdExchanger senior editor, here with our weekly Commerce Media newsletter.
Today, we’re getting into the art side of art and science, with a look at Motion, a creative tech and data visualization startup that sits at the awkward intersection of performance marketing and high-strategy creative.
Motion raised $6 million this week and is riding a wave of creative-focused mar tech, such as Memorable AI raising $2.5 million last October and ad tech vet Omar Tawakol launching Rembrand in February.
But Motion has another wave beneath it, and that’s the powerhouse business channel that is “DTC Twitter,” a bubble of ecommerce brand operators and ad buyers, as Motion Co-Founder and CEO Reza Khadjavi told me Tuesday evening, after news of the round.
Why launch creative tech?
Khadjavi and Motion’s other co-founders previously started or were executives at Shoelace, a DTC-focused social media agency. Shoelace began as SaaS tech, but the market wanted a services and agency company for boutique DTC social advertising.
The Shoelace engineering team, a redundant and expensive part for an agency company, spun out in 2021 and turned into Motion. The jumping off point, according to Khadjavi, was when the SaaS product conjoined the metrics and data the performance or growth marketers are using to the actual creative, like the video or image itself.
Performance marketers try to communicate to creative strategists with pivot tables containing columns of slightly different percentages and cells with labels like “UGC_video_ad_BlackFriday_2,” and it simply doesn’t translate. But when two videos are contrasted, the creative execs understand how production and strategy affect performance outcomes.
For example, say two obscurely labeled cells, each representing one video ad, are being compared for their thumb-stop rate (TSR) – an important metric for brands that reach customers on TikTok and other scrolling video feeds. With standard campaign analytics, that might come in a column labeled TSR containing percent rates within a similar bound. And the information goes unabsorbed.
But show creative strategists two side-by-side videos – one that captures people mid-scroll for a second or two but then loses them, another that doesn’t hook people quickly but has a strong completion rate – and creatives see how the content production impacts ecommerce ad metrics and what to do next with those video elements.
“People have this assumption about the creative team that, ‘Oh, they don’t care about data,’” Khadjavi said. In fact, creative agencies and branding departments are hungry for ways to prove the value of their work.
There are also big media-buying changes that make creative a more important lever for the people buying ads. This includes Apple’s ATT and iOS privacy restrictions, which diminish tracking and user-level targeting, and privacy laws and policies that have propelled Google and Meta to launch their own ad products with tighter control over campaigns.
Performance Max and Advantage+, Google’s and Meta’s respective machine-learning ad systems, give advertisers no choice in targeting creative. In fact, neither reports which videos, images and words were used in the campaign.
But advertisers control the content they create and feed into those machine-learning systems.
The DTC Twitter phenomenon
Motion is built in a community of DTC brands, agencies and tech companies that settled on Twitter as a weird breeding ground, like Atlantic seabirds squashed together on a far-flung rock.
“There’s something special about DTC ecommerce and Twitter,” Khadjavi said. Lots of agency buyers, social consultants and brand operators share their information and strategies very openly. People create deal flow by returning value to the community, he said.
Some of the most prominent CMOs and CEOs on DTC Twitter are early Motion customers, too. HexClad pans, Ridge Wallets, Viori pants and Jones Road Beauty makeup are among the brand logos. Performance agencies like Foxwell Digital, Wpromote and Tinuiti license Motion for their own account services as well.
Aside from banding together to support one another’s businesses, DTC Twitter is an investment source. Before this week’s round, Motion previously was backed by angel investors in the space, including Nik Sharma, who owns a branding agency and invests in DTC ad tech and brands themselves; Adam Turner, CEO of Shopify marketing company Postscript; and Ben Jabbawy, who founded and sold the ecommerce marketing company Privy.
“We’re trying to shine a light on this topic of creative strategy,” Khadjavi said, “and build a bit of a community around that.”
