Blue Sense Podcast
The Blue Sense Podcast explores how 7, 8, and 9-figure eCommerce brands scale profitably through the intersection of finance, creative strategy, and performance media.
Hosted by Scott Wilkinson, Head of Growth at Blue Sense Digital, the podcast features insights from co-founders, strategists, and industry operators on how to master attribution, creative velocity, forecasting, and operational efficiency in a changing marketing landscape.
Expect unfiltered discussions on financial-led marketing, creative testing frameworks, and what separates resilient brands from those getting squeezed by rising costs and shrinking margins.
Subscribe for conversations that cut through the noise and show you how to grow with clarity, control, and creative discipline.
Blue Sense Podcast
BSD Pod Episode 3: Creative Strategy for 2025-26
Scott sits down with Gaby to unpack the creative systems that drive scale. They discuss the biggest testing mistakes brands make, how to set velocity without sacrificing quality, the formats that consistently win across industries, and how to turn a single founder video into a scalable creative engine.
They also dive into Meta’s new diversity and fatigue metrics, planning output via a marketing calendar, what to do when peak season hits, and where AI genuinely fits into modern creative workflows.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:30 Creative as the fuel for growth
00:43 Testing mistakes and audience assumptions
02:18 Creative velocity and fatigue management
05:24 Meta’s diversity and fatigue metrics
07:20 Winning creative formats by vertical
10:01 Founder-generated content that scales
13:22 Auditing complex brands
15:30 The Creative Volume Calculator explained
17:38 Using a marketing calendar to forecast output
19:18 Refreshing winners for BFCM
21:03 AI’s role in creative
26:50 The creative team of 2026
CTA: Book a Creative Audit → bluesensedigital.com.au
Key Takeaways
- Why “creative velocity” is the single most important growth lever
- How to identify and multiply winning assets
- How to prepare your team for the 2026 creative landscape
- Practical frameworks to blend creative intuition with performance data
Okay, we are back for episode two of the new Look Blue Sense podcast with the star of episode one, Gabby, our creative strategist. So we're going to talk obviously much deeper dive then into creative strategy and how that influences the work that we do with our clients. We, we talk a lot certainly when we're auditing brands about how media buying in general is really the growth engine for acquiring new customers and which obviously is the main engine for growing brands. And more and more we're seeing that creative really is the fuel in that engine. Really. Where do you see most brands, I guess going wrong with where they start there as they approach testing in their creative.
Speaker 2:Thanks Scott. Great question. I think that in general a lot of brands, they will start with an assumption of what their audience is and they kind of want to go from there with the messaging and setting really strict brand guidelines. And I think when you are still in that exploratory phase, you really just want to expand as much as you can and start from there. So you really don't know what your market fit is yet at this point, to be honest. So you might think, you know, your fit is a bunch of teenage girls who need a clean deodorant and then you realise like, you know, one year later that oh, they can't afford this deodorant and your whole branding kind of shifts around that, you know, and we've seen that with clients you can get really niched down into what you want your audience to be. And I think that from a creative perspective, you really have to be open to discovering what that really is. And that means trying a lot of new things from the get go. Obviously with our eight figure brands you've probably already got an idea hopefully of what that. I'd really hope so of what that market fit would be. In which case you're just wanting to explore, to expand and scale. I mean that's why brands come to us, it's to scale. So that's, that means trying out new things that also work. Kind of like throwing your spaghetti against the wall and seeing which parts stick. Yeah. So I think to answer your question, biggest mistake is brands that aren't willing to try new things. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And obviously we talk a lot about in our content around this idea of velocity that's obviously so important to creative. Every week we're auditing mid eight figure brands that might be launching literally anywhere from 10 to 15 new assets a month and then we'll see another brand that's launching four or five hundred a week. Yeah, how would you. I feel like velocity is something that can be defined in so many different ways. Like, how would you define that? And really what's most important? Is it just the number? Is it? Or is it more to it?
Speaker 2:Really good question. The annoying answer is that it depends from brand to brand. But if I had to summarise it, I think for most brands, if we took a blanket kind of approach, you would see that coming up with new assets on a weekly or fortnightly basis, it's critical. Those are the brands where. If you want answer on what's the recipe for the brands where I see the most success, it's brands that are coming to us with a good amount of velocity every one to two weeks. But it's not just about volume, it is absolutely about quality as well. And when I use the term quality, I don't want that to get mixed up. You get quality as in like a high quality ass. That's not what I'm meaning here. I'm meaning quality in terms of ads that we see work well within your account. So that could be a low quality asset. It could be, you know, someone literally holding up blurry iPhone footage. And that could be a good ad, even. That's not really high quality content. And it is a blend of both. It will vary based on your brand. So as a performance marketer, you come in and you are able to identify metrics that will highlight or indicate creative fatigue. And if your creative fatigue rate is high, then your volume has to be higher or you need to consider whether your quality is bad. Perhaps. But generally what I like to do is I'll go in, I'll do a creative audit of the brand. You get a general sense of historically. And this is if you've got, you know, a few years of data in the account already, you get an idea of how much they're launching per week or per month already. Then from there you identify what their winning assets are. And generally you're going to find about three to eight forms of video content that do really well and four or five statics that do really well. And then you want to break down that content per week. So if I'm seeing video do really well in your account, I'd say, okay, let's do at least 10 new videos every week. Let's make 80% of those videos literally replicates. So not making it look exactly the same, but following the same formula of those winning video formats we've seen. And then let's do 10 to 15. Just because static is Easier. Even though it's not actually your winning format. It's a lot faster to pump out 15 statics than it is to pump out 15 videos. Do 15 statics? Make 80% of those based off of your winning static formulas and then the rest is just constant exploration of new ideas. And that just requires, you know, going out and finding inspiration online, in magazines, on media, etc.
Speaker 1:So I think excellent definition. There's sort of a couple of pieces to unpack there. I think one is looking at. I think we're all sort of quite excited. There's these new metrics that Met has announced very recently around diversity and fatigue similarity, and we're sort of all quite eager to see what that looks like. Obviously that's a totally new lens that we don't really understand the impact of fully yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What are those key metrics that you'd be looking to in lieu of a specific in platform number at the moment?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think what will be really interesting, and I'm hoping it'll align with what I've been telling my clients, otherwise I'll look really bad, is you're going to be able to get metrics that indicate very clearly what a top winning asset is and a number that identifies whether that asset is starting to display fatigue.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:So it's just going to make what has felt like a guessing game to a lot of clients a lot clearer. We're yet to know how effective those metrics are going to be. You know, as a performance marketer, it keeps me up at night, I'm lying there, I'm like, are they going to say the total opposite of what I'm saying? Am I going to have to fight the metrics now? You know, those are all possibilities as well. But the hope and the expectation is it's just going to make performance marketers better at being able to do their job. Because a lot of performance marketers can either fall into the pattern of getting really into other numbers like your cpc, your customer acquisition costs, and they tend to fall behind on the creative analysis. And this is really going to help scoop up that aspect, I think. So, yeah. Hopefully we're all just going to see better performance marketers and better understanding of your creative performance for a brand at the end of the day. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if were to go back to the other question around these formats that we're seeing useful or prove most useful, I guess, in an account, what are those sort of top, say, three or four ideas in a, say, a video format that you're seeing sort of most consistently working across different brands.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good question. It does vary per industry. So for instance, with our eight figure fashion brands, something as simple as just a video montage where you're kind of getting as many different products in front of the viewer's eyes in as quick a time period as possible does really well. So that doesn't just apply to fashion brands. You can apply that to any brand with a bunch of skus, especially if it's got a visual aspect to it. So if your brand is aesthetic and you can sell it just by looking at it. Absolutely. A winning format for other brands where you need a little bit more of an explanation, a little bit more convincing to buy the product. So let's say you're selling collagen. You know, founder generated content and UGC content do really well there. This is such a big pool of content. Like I, I could literally sit here for hours just talking about different kinds of founder generated content. Ugc, that's why it does well, because you can tailor the story to whatever you need touch on, whatever pain points or audience you want to really highlight. And not only does it do that, but it also builds trust. So it's kind of, it has a dual purpose. So for a founder, for instance, you can hear about their story and why they created a product like a collagen powder because of something that they were suffering with, know, and then you're not just trusting the product and saying, okay, cool, I need collagen. You understand that you need this person's collagen and you trust their story and their personality and start to kind of develop a brand from there. So I think one thing to highlight though is a lot of brands can get trapped into thinking that this content has to be super scripted, super well thought out, has to take hours and you know, they have to set aside a whole day for shooting. That is a complete misconception. I really encourage a lot of my brands and this is honestly where I sometimes see some of the best content is where you're pulling out an iPhone camera and just recording yourself on selfie mode or whatever and just kind of chatting something. Like a good hook is really important. So it's not just, you know, you can't just yap on forever about total nonsense. Please don't do that. But I think that it doesn't have to even necessarily cost you a lot of money. You know, it can really just be that simple. You don't have to overthink it all the time. So yeah, that's, I would definitely Push that for video content.
Speaker 1:And I mean speaking of founder content, that sort of led into naturally one of the questions I was going to ask you today. So we looked at a mid to high seven figure brand selling a consumable product like a household item a couple of months ago. I remember this whereby this brand, this is a brand that's been growing over 100% year on year for three or four years in a row. They'll be cracking eight figures relatively soon.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:And they have literally a single founder generated ad. Yeah. That has held hundreds of thousands of dollars in spend at this point. And, and really they don't have a creative strategy in place simply by nature of they. They haven't needed one to get to the scale they are today. Where do you start if that's the situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, more founder generated content. Give me 10 more. I think it's you want to. If you found a winning format that works for you. There are so many questions that evolve from that. Was it actually found generated content? If it's just one asset, you know, sure. Was it maybe the hook? Was it maybe just a good product? You know, if that's all that they've been running off of and they haven't been doing other testing, you're going to want to take that video, start figuring out how you can turn that into static formats. So taking the hook or the headline or the main message, put that into a static format, see if it does well as a USP ad or a lifestyle image ad. See if it's just that message that is actually effective or is it because it's packaged in founder generated content that it's doing well? Because there's that, you know, added bonus of trust and putting. You're not just buying from a brand, you're buying from a person you know and you're supporting that person. Then once you've done that and you've identified is that the messaging is that the found generated content. Let's say all of the static content fails. You're going to want to take the founder generated content and start to think of different angles, different usps, different audiences and identify a hook that will resonate with them within the first three to five seconds and then create different file generated content off of that. And the best part about it is depending on how they've structured that video, they don't even necessarily have to shoot an entirely new video. They probably just have to shoot a new five seconds of the video. So let's say I'm going to go back to the collagen example, just to be consistent here, let's say you are targeting collagen for moms who are starting to develop fine lines and wrinkles and they want to improve their skin. What's the first five seconds of your ad? If you're a mom and you're tired and exhausted and you feel like you can see the exhaustion on your face, collagen is the way to go. Bam. Go into the same pharma generated video that's been winning, that's been, you know, succeeding for you for years and see how that goes. And see if you start to, you know, garner in an entirely new audience, then take that exact same video and say, do you have sore joints? You know, when you're at the gym and you're lifting, can you feel it in your elbows and your knees and you're waking up in the morning and you feel like you've aged 10 years. Bam. Going to the same finder generated video talking about B collagen. So that is how you kind of take your learning and you grow and expand from there. But it will get to a point with a brand like this, even when as they grow their spin kennel to grow and then diversity is going to become important. You probably won't be able to just rely on father generated content forever, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:Sure. And so you've answered, I think, a couple of questions in there. Can you walk us through? You know, that's a relatively simple brand when it comes to their creative approach currently. Obviously we then see the opposite end of the spectrum of some of these mid to high eight figure brands where they're literally flying around the world all the time shooting new content in these absolutely stunning locations.
Speaker 2:Sounds nice.
Speaker 1:It looks nice.
Speaker 2:I mean, can't complain, I guess.
Speaker 1:I have no idea what this podcast is going to look like when we return to Melbourne and Cape Town and what our. But we'll come to that when we need to walk us through the process for auditing that brand from a creative perspective where it's got a lot more complexity.
Speaker 2:That's a great question. I think a lot of brands like that can get caught up in a bit of a hamster wheel where there isn't really even time to think of creative strategy because you're just so focused on production, whether it's like a new line or a new launch of clothing. You're going from summer to winter, whatever the case may be. And obviously there's that added element of also travelling the world to get it all done, which makes it super stressful. I Think that for those brands you've got a lot of data and what you're going to find is a huge portion of your budget. You know, travelling to new places for your camera crew, for your editing, all of that is probably being wasted because you are just taking shots mindlessly trying to get new content in new places and you're not actually looking at the bigger scope of identifying like okay, it's actually all the close ups where we're seeing the beaded detail, those are the winning ads for us. It doesn't actually even matter what location we're in. And obviously I sound like the bad guy here. I'm not saying stop that entirely, stop travelling the world, stop having fun, do that. It's still good for building your brand. But if you don't know what Your top like five to 10 winning assets are, you're going to go into each one, waste time on photographing the wrong stuff, spending money on those ads as well, just to find out that it's the same five assets that kind of look like the five assets before that ended up doing well for you. So I think you really just need to go in with a clear identification of what those assets are so you can tick off all those boxes, make sure that's 80% of your content and then have fun with the other 20%. You know, and that will really just be based on trends. You know, I could give an example now, but it's not going to be relevant in a week's time. It's going to change. And that's where, you know, having someone that's chronically online can become really helpful in your content team.
Speaker 1:That's where I lean on the younger people that speak. So when we look at that in a bit more detail, we have a piece of content that's worked very well for us at Blue Sense in a variety of formats. That is this creative volume calculator that go down the line of our performance marketing team and they'll tell you they either love or hate this tool. And what we find most effective is it's a very useful starting point for a conversation and brand, getting a brand to understand exactly what their velocity requirements might look like. But that it's that singular data point, it's not taking into account wasted efficiency in an account. It doesn't give you a read on net new concepts versus iterations on existing winning ones. What are the other things? So we have that as a model which we can run at any given point in time. We can come back to that at a point in time. And look at how that efficiency has changed over time because of all of the other work that we're doing. What are the other things that a brand should be thinking about when it comes to forecasting how much creative production or how many new concepts or new ideas they should be putting into an account?
Speaker 2:Yeah, really good idea. And I tend to harp on about this a lot, but your marketing calendar is absolutely fundamental here. For a lot of brands, you're going to have slower months, and in that time, content production can slow down as well. I think it's like a big pitfall of a lot of brands for the slower months, whether you're like a sole owner or, you know, a big eight figure brand, marketing can get really exhausting. And it you kind of get to those months where something like January where you might have a bit of a slowdown, your creative teams can kind of like take a step back and go, oh, okay, like Jan's not a big month for us. We don't have anything planned. And I think that's like a really critical mistake because during that time, if you can use your marketing calendar effectively and they're like, okay, January, things slowed down, you should actually be increasing your volume in that time and trying to explore new audiences and new angles that you wouldn't get to expand on or test in your busier months like Black Friday or Christmas, because that's where you'll find your winning content for the next year so that you can scale up and continue, you know, to kind of build this layered cake, for instance. And I think if you can build out your marketing calendar effectively, it doesn't just apply to slower months, it also applies to your bigger months. But it'll help you to identify what you can be focusing on. So an example of this is I've got one brand. You know, they've been growing over 300% year on year, but they still battle with seasonality. And for the first six months of a year, they're absolutely crushing it. And then August hits, things start to slow down for the rest of the month and it's just dead. And during that time, brands often want to step back and just accept that's the market and seasonality, but that's the time when you should be doubling down on creative, because I know that I need to double down for Black Friday. I'm already preparing all of the creative content then. But if I knew, and I can predict that those other ones are going to be slow, I want to make sure that my creative is top notch. It's got to be its absolute strongest to make sure that I am minimising those terrible months as much as possible. Yeah. So to put it succinctly, just making sure you've got a marketing calendar and making sure that you're adding in any artificial revenue peaks, adapting your creative to promote that, whether it's a promotion or not. Like, I think a lot of people can confuse and say, like, oh, I think you should have a discount during, you know, so much like January. That's not the case. It just means trying to think of any creative angles you can. So maybe January is where you start your new year messaging to, you know, encourage and then inspire assets around that. But it's also where you start to test out this totally new audience you've never tested before and then kind of marry the two concepts as well and then see if it wins from there. I'm kind of rambling a little bit at this point, but I could talk about it forever.
Speaker 1:You've given me another sort of interesting idea. So we're probably going to drop this episode within a few weeks to maybe a month ahead of Black Friday, the actual weekend. Many brands will be well into their sale promotional period during that time. It's obviously way too late to be testing totally new creatives. If you're a founder, a creative operator and a brand, an E comm manager, and you're hearing these ideas for hopefully not the first time around, the importance of creative and volume and diversity, what are you doing with those existing winners to get you through Black Friday in lieu of all of that testing data that you should have been running for the last three or four months?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. Hopefully this doesn't reach anybody's ears too late. But just identifying one, your evergreen top performance, anything that's performed well for you over the past like two to three years and then b identifying any of your Black Friday winners from previous years as well, taking all of that content, just refreshing a little bit. Basic things like adding a banner for some ads. It could literally even just be changing your ad copy to Black Friday messaging, making sure that you at least have all of that live. And then 20% should be testing out new assets. And that will because social media trends from Black Friday last year are different to social media trends from this year. So trying to get in some timely content that feels relevant, that feels, you know, on market with your brand and your audience is really important. And then just kind of blending those two together into your Black Friday strategy for this year and then you'll do the same thing next year and pull out your winners from this 2025 period into 2026.
Speaker 1:Excellent. So we nearly. I think we made it to within like three or four minutes of the end of the previous episode. Before AI was mentioned, I was like, this might be the first piece of content produced in 25 that doesn't mention AI.
Speaker 2:Can we just end the podcast?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I feel like it's a. It's a dirty topic in creative at the moment. Right. Because there are. There's a school of thought that, you know, I think we're seeing technical media buying is increasingly getting just sort of reduced to zero in terms of more and more modern tooling is going to push those skill sets more towards traditional marketing. Sure. And conceptually understanding marketing and so on. Yeah. I think there's a school of thought that people think creative is going to get to that same position. I think when you go and look at some of these modern tools and the actual outputs and the quality, it's not. It's definitely not there yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We don't know if it's going to be there tomorrow or in six weeks from now or six years from now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe at some point. Probably at some point. Where do you see an ability for that to actually be impactful in a workflow today versus what's just wasteful distraction?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, again, I think we could have an entire episode just discussing AI and, you know, we could walk away from this podcast right now. I'll be like, oh, it's changed. Like, okay, cool, guys, we're ready to just move fully. I think that the first thing is it's really important, not just as a creative strategist, but as a brand. You need to stay on top of your AI tools, because right now we're in that battle where they're all fighting for dominance, but eventually certain tools are going to emerge. Or obviously ChatGPT is one for, like, a large language model that's doing really well right now, but there are so many AI creators of tools out there that the list is honestly endless. I can't wait until we find out which one is at the top. But just keeping up to date with them and trends and making sure that you are following other trustworthy voices in the industry to kind of educate yourself on to know, you know, what brands are utilising, I think that's really important. I think that we're not there yet. A lot of the time, as you've already said, you get sold this tool and it's like this changes Everything. And I hate those ads. Every time I see an ad like that and I'm like, oh, great, another AI tool that I need to learn. And then I use it and I come out with like 15 fingers. I'm like, straight face, you know, like, it's definitely. You also have to keep in mind all that hype. And, you know, as marketers, we know the marketing tools that people use to kind of like, get people excited about AI. But I have absolutely no doubt that it will eventually become the main source of creative design and function, particularly for ads, especially when that gets integrated with, you know, your creative learning. I think that using integration tools like you've got your zapiers, your make.com, i think those will become a lot more prevalent to kind of integrate with meta ads, for instance, or your creative dashboards as well, to start eventually putting prompts straight into, you know, your ChatGPT, your image generation models, VO3, like, video content. I'm sure all of that's going to come along and I'm confident that it will. But I think that at the end of the day, it's just going to give creative strategists and performance marketers and brands more time to be creative because it's never going to replace a unique idea. And I think that a lot of the time, the beauty of creative strategy and the beauty of creating unique ads is it comes from a serendipitous moment where you're sitting here and you realise something about your brand and your unique personality and maybe it has something to do with the outfit you're wearing. You know, like, for instance, I was wearing. I was wearing an all brown outfit yesterday and my boots and my pants on, my belt, on my top were all slightly different. And I was like, I could make a joke about creative diversity on this. You know, I was like, if your ads look anything like my outfit did that day, then you've got a problem because your outfit's not diverse enough. You know, what AI model is going to think of that? They're not going to. And that's also becoming. It's already become a trend where people are becoming frustrated with AI because they're feeling like right now they're just being fed a lot of AI slop and it can really disenfranchise users. So I think that making sure that you're using the AI tools maybe to help with your production, you know, like, if you can't afford or flight Italy to do a shoot, you can now work around that with AI. But if Your idea is bad. AI is not going to help you there, buddy. No, that can't save you from a bad situation. So I'm not worried. I think I'm excited because it means I can just sit and think more about fun ideas. And at the end of the day, that's the best part of marketing, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean, I think I had the exact same epiphany when I. When I started with the Blue Sense team back in May and Sebastian said to me, he's like, you know, ChatGPT is going to be doing 20 to 30% of your job. And me, as someone that's a little bit older than a lot of the team and been in our industry for a long time, went, sure, kid. Okay. Yep, I believe you. And he could not have been more correct in that assessment. But it's in the. It frees me up to consolidate all of that information and do all of that sort of manual laborious task for me so that I have more free headspace to think about. What are the things we should be conceptually talking to each of these brands that we're engaging with about? And I really see like creative strategy and creative production sort of working together.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is maybe the most visible version of that where I think there's a lot of opportunity. I mean, with that in mind, what do you think creative teams will look like over the next 12 months? Is it going to change much? Is it going to be tooling changes? Do we need to be thinking about different hires or different processes? And process.
Speaker 2:I think creatives will probably be wearing more caps, so their capacity to create and work will probably evolve. I don't think the general role will change. You know, you'll always still need those fundamental roles, but I think the ability to kind of jump between platforms and maybe do more and produce either a higher output or at a higher efficiency or volume will increase. And I think that's important because every band's going to have to do that. Otherwise you're just going fall behind your competition. I do think that as a creative, you're gonna have to make sure your brain is a little bit more switched on in terms of, I think in more technical roles, you can really start to rely on the tools. You can start to rely on AI for idea generation. And I think now, because the playing fields have kind of been levelled out, anyone, and I say anyone and, you know, inverted commas, anyone can now produce good content. Like the tools are out there. So the competition is going to be in your unique ideas and your unique personality or perspective that you can put on it. So I think in a way that sounds nice, but it means sitting down and really using your brain.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think that's what's going to evolve and it's just going to mean creative people are going to become really important and it's an investment in a person and their mind, which is pretty hard to. It's intangible in a way. So it's hard to define. It's hard for me to explain right now even. But yeah, I think that's probably going to be the biggest change.
Speaker 1:It's very cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is cool.
Speaker 1:I think that's probably great food for thought to. To wrap up this conversation and I'm sure the start of many more in depth conversations on for sure. More in depth specific creative topics that we can get into in future episodes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So yeah, we'll wrap episode two there again if you're a eight or nine figure retail brand and you're looking to speak to incredible people like Gabby and incredible creative insights and auditing reach out. We'll have all the details and some more concepts and thoughts from Gabby in the notes and yeah, we'll see you in the next episode.
Speaker 2:Sounds good. Thanks.