Featuring insights from The Ecommerce Alley, Ethercycle, and Smart Marketer’s own Attila Kerekes
3 Key Takeaways
- Creative diversity is the new targeting. Andromeda wants concept-level variety—different stories, formats, and faces—not minor tweaks.
- There’s no single scaling formula. Every ad account behaves differently. The best operators test, track, and adapt instead of chasing universal rules.
- AI assists great marketers—it doesn’t replace them. Use it to research and ideate, but your strategy and storytelling still win the sale.
When hundreds of founders, media buyers, and marketing leaders packed into the Denver Art Museum for Smart Marketer Live 2025, one theme emerged again and again: the landscape has changed, but the fundamentals still hold. To bring you the full picture, we pulled insights from The Ecommerce Alley’s Josh Coffy and Dylan Counts, on-site interviews from Kurt Elster of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, and a fan-favorite presentation from Smart Marketer Agency’s own Attila Kerekes, whose session became a masterclass in scaling with confidence (and data).
Short version? Meta’s Andromeda update quietly rewrote the playbook. AI is a powerful assistant—but only if you already know how to drive. And according to Attila, every account is its own “box of chocolates”: there’s no single setup, only what works for you.
Creative Runs the Show (and Andromeda Is the Director)
Josh and Dylan confirmed what every media buyer in the room had suspected—targeting on Meta has shifted entirely into the creative. Andromeda’s retrieval system rewards variety, velocity, and volume. It’s not looking for five versions of the same ad; it’s looking for distinct concepts: founder stories, UGC, product demos, testimonials, and problem–solution angles that speak to different avatars.
Kurt Elster’s hallway chat with Beav Brodie from Tactical Baby Gear echoed the same sentiment. “The buzz in the room,” Kurt said, “was that optimization is now happening inside the creative, not the ad set.” Beav agreed: “You need 30 types of content for one product. Maybe one will take off—but that’s what the system wants now.”
The takeaway was clear: creative diversity is no longer optional—it’s the algorithm’s targeting system. The teams producing concept-level variety, not small copy tweaks, are the ones winning reach and profitability.
Founder-Led Creative, Operator-Led Numbers
Another consistent theme from the stage was the divide—and harmony—between creative vision and operational rigor. Founders, several speakers argued, are still the fastest path to resonance. But the operators—the data-driven number-crunchers—keep the whole machine profitable.
Josh noted that many eight-figure brands are happy running ads that break even on Day 1 because they’ve modeled out Day-30 and Day-60 payback. “The pros aren’t guessing,” he said. “They know their contribution by day, by SKU, by channel.” Kurt heard the same from experienced operators: younger brands might rely 80% on Meta and 20% on Google Shopping, while larger teams still anchor 50–70% of their spend on Meta because that’s where the scale—and learnings—live.
The throughline was confidence through clarity. As one operator put it, “Break-even is fine if your payback math is solid.” When you understand your contribution timeline, you’re not chasing ROAS—you’re building a predictable engine.
AI Is Your Assistant, Not Your Author
AI was everywhere in conversation, but not in the way most people expect. Alex Cooper from AdCrate shared a workflow that cut through the noise: use AI for research, brief creation, and concept generation—but not for the final ad. “AI makes good marketers faster,” Kurt summarized, “but it doesn’t make bad marketers good.”
The consensus among panelists was that AI should sit upstream in the process—helping brainstorm angles, structure ideas, and even build visual metaphors like “pain point glows” or comparison graphics—but humans still handle the final message, tone, and testing. As one speaker joked, “You can let AI help with the recipe, but don’t let it run the kitchen.”
TikTok Shop: Can Work, If It’s Your Whole Job
Josh called it early: “TikTok Shop is a grind.” His team shared stories of brands seeing success, but only when they treated it like a full-time channel—managing affiliates, organic content, commerce ops, and paid ads as an integrated system. Kurt’s podcast interviews confirmed that pattern. Some brands were thriving, but many called it a rollercoaster of spikes and crashes, dependent on creators whose loyalty often ends with the next viral trend.
It’s not that TikTok Shop doesn’t work—it’s that it requires a structure most small teams can’t yet support. As one attendee put it, “It’s a second business inside your business.”
Scaling Smarter: Attila’s “Box of Chocolates” Approach
Then came Attila Kerekes, Smart Marketer Agency’s senior media buyer, who stole the show with his “Forrest Gump” analogy: “Life is like a box of chocolates—you never know what you’re gonna get.”
Attila argued that the same applies to ad accounts: every one behaves differently, and there’s no universal playbook for success. “Your account isn’t someone else’s,” he said. “Stop copying blueprints. Gather your own data. If it works, do more of it.”
His talk challenged several industry “rules” and replaced them with pragmatic experimentation. Audience testing campaigns, often dismissed as outdated, are a cornerstone in his playbook for maintaining creative longevity. One such campaign has run profitably for over two years and generated more than 17,000 purchases. The trick, he explained, isn’t chasing new audiences—it’s letting solid creatives reach fresh pockets of buyers without burning out.
He also broke down creative isolation, the idea of scaling a single winning ad within its own dedicated campaign. “Why wouldn’t you give Meta every dollar you can on the creative that’s working best?” he asked. One of his isolated creatives has spent more than $1 million while maintaining consistent performance—a direct challenge to the myth of creative fatigue.
And when a creative really hits, Attila doesn’t hesitate to “go nuts.” In one case, he scaled spend from $5,000 to $35,000 a day in less than two weeks, holding a 2.5x ROAS the entire time. His takeaway? “Don’t overthink it. If it’s working, pour gas on it until it stops.”
He wrapped with the advice that drew laughter and nods across the room: “If someone tells you, ‘Don’t do that,’ try it. Get your own data. And if it works—duplicate it.”
YouTube, Media Mix, and the Rise of AI Search
Kurt also highlighted Brett Curry from OMG Commerce, who broke down YouTube’s resurgence as a conversion channel. The key, Brett said, is not to overcomplicate it: take the familiar Meta storytelling structure (hook ? founder ? proof ? CTA), pair it with better production values, and run spots between 45 seconds and 2½ minutes.
Beyond ads, the Smart Marketer team shared how AI-powered search is reshaping organic traffic. Structured, well-organized blog posts are already surfacing more frequently in AI summaries on Google and ChatGPT. The winning format? Posts that open with three clear takeaways, include embedded media, and use schema markup—because “AI likes sources it can cite.”
Operator Insights: Quality, Context, and Cash Flow
Across all sessions, operators kept returning to the same principles. Creative quantity matters, but quality matters more—ten deeply researched concepts will outperform a thousand rushed ones. Changing who’s on camera can unlock entirely new audiences; Meta’s reps even suggested rotating through different faces and personas to refresh delivery pockets.
Nick Shackelford (Brez) reminded attendees that every dollar you save on SaaS tools is a dollar you can reallocate to learning inside Meta. And Brett Curry added a timeless reminder: “You can be profitable and still choke on cash flow.” For brands scaling fast, cash management is strategy—not bookkeeping.
Scaling With Confidence
Attila’s final message became a fitting close for the entire event: “When you find what works, don’t hesitate—duplicate it.” It wasn’t just about ad structure; it was about mindset. Data beats dogma. Every campaign, every creative, every account is its own experiment. The best marketers aren’t guessing what should work; they’re observing what does.
“Find your chocolate,” he said, smiling. “Taste it. If you like it—enjoy it.”
The Energy That Built It All
From Josh’s observations to Kurt’s candid interviews, the common thread at Smart Marketer Live was generosity. Every conversation, from hallway chats to Q&A sessions, carried the same spirit: share what’s working, learn from what’s not, and collaborate instead of compete.
As one attendee put it, “It felt like a family of entrepreneurs who just want to see each other win.”
Because at the end of the day, that’s what Smart Marketer Live is all about—people who test, teach, and grow together.
Final takeaway: Creative portfolios, simple structures, and disciplined scaling still win—but the best marketers, like Attila, prove that the real advantage isn’t the system. It’s the willingness to experiment until it’s yours.
Big thanks to Josh Coffy & The Ecommerce Alley for their candid debrief, and to Kurt Elster (Ethercycle / Unofficial Shopify Podcast) for the on-site interviews. Multiple perspectives, same conclusion:
Creative portfolios + simple structures + measured payback = durable scale.
