Marketing Operators

“There’s going to be a world where you just tell them your product and your business goals and they do the rest.”
What does Meta’s AI push mean for ecommerce brands trying to win on paid social right now? Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge), Cody Plofker (CEO, Jones Road Beauty), and Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad) recorded this episode live at Meta’s Performance Marketing Summit 2026 where they break down everything Meta announced: AI infrastructure to catalog-powered creative and what brands need to do about it immediately.
The conversation covers Meta’s shift toward catalog-first ad infrastructure and why clean product data is now table stakes, not a nice-to-have. They dig into how the media buyer role is converging with creative strategy, what a 24-hour full-funnel launch looks like in practice, and why the brands building creator ecosystems today are setting up a major moat for catalog creative tomorrow.
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“You don’t have to be first to be the best.”
What does it take to scale a brand from $20M to $140M in just 12 months?  
Luka Kvatchrelishvili (CMO, True Sea Moss) joins hosts Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad) and Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge) to break down how he took a bootstrapped, product-led superfood brand … and scaled it into a nine-figure DTC powerhouse. Luka shares his path from practicing law in Georgia to drop shipping foosball tables to leading a 33-person marketing team.
The conversation digs into how Luka diagnosed and fixed True Sea Moss’ data infrastructure before touching a single ad, and how a surge in creative volume gave way to a more methodical, outcome-driven testing system. He also gets into the halo effect between Meta spend, Amazon, and retail performance; the power of the LTV-to-CAC cohort report; and how True Sea Moss went from Telegram groups and Trello boards to a marketing-led operation scaling toward half a billion.  
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Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026 
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What does a content flywheel look like when it’s firing on all cylinders? 
Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge) and Cody Plofker (CEO, Jones Road Beauty) break down how their teams structure content creation end-to-end: from micro-creators and TikTok Shop affiliates to high-production studio shoots and ambassador programs. Both hosts bring their own playbooks to the table to compare notes in real time. 
They cover the three core buckets of a paid ad account, why scripted UGC is losing ground to raw “yapper content, how to negotiate more deliverables without doubling creator rates, the TikTok Shop affiliate flywheel, and why building an in-house production playbook is one of the highest-leverage investments a brand can make. 
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Haus
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Richpanel
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Are you measuring new reach on Meta the right way or just guessing? 
Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge), Cody Plofker (CEO, Jones Road Beauty), and Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad) dig into the tactics + measurement frameworks driving their paid media strategies right now. 
The conversation spans Meta’s incremental attribution rollout and what the data shows. They cover signal engineering with conditional pixels, the case for non-purchase optimized campaigns on YouTube, and why building a deliberate testing roadmap matters more than chasing every new ad tech feature. Plus, behind the scenes on Jones Road’s biggest creator partnership came together. 
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Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026 
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Richpanel
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Aftersell
https://9ops.co/4i3bb5
Haus
https://www.haus.io/operators
Operators Newsletter
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Drawing on over a decade of experience on the brand, HoldCo, and agency sides of DTC, Andrew Faris (Founder, AJF Growth) joins Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge) and Cody Plofker (CEO, Jones Road Beauty) to discuss what it takes to build and scale an ecommerce brand across every stage of growth. 
The conversation covers what advice from larger operators can get wrong for smaller brands and why AOV may be the most underrated metric in subscription businesses. They explore how to think about the atomic units of an offer, the real trade-offs between in-house and agency media buying, and why the message is the most underrated growth tactic in ecommerce today. 
This episode is brought to you by AppLovin. Get access to the Operators channel expansion playbook, online masterclass, and up to $5k in ad credits here: https://www.9operators.com/paid-growth 
Or, skip the waitlist and launch your Axon by AppLovin ads today with our Operators-exclusive link: https://axon.ai/en/9operators