Focal

If you're running creative ops at a DTC brand, you should take a look at how The Longevity Store® does it 🔥 Tom van der Kolk and the team move fast and push features further than we imagined when building them. They've been among the quickest to fully adopt Focal into their ways of working. The outputs: 4000+ ads in 8 months. Creative volume up 4x. Time spent on copy and translations down 60%. Full case study below. Worth a read if you're running creative across multiple markets. 👇

The Longevity Store is on a mission to become the largest longevity brand in Europe by end of 2026. Their creative operations need to scale with the business without compromising margins, and they need lots of localized ad creative. This led co-founder Tom van der Kolk to look into Focal. After onboarding Focal, the efficiency gains have been considerable:  - They now ship 20-40+ concept variations per two-week sprint, a volume that would have been impossible before. - Copy prep time is down ~50% - Translation cycle time has dropped from around a week to a couple of days - Each concept is also localized across markets.

Last night we filled an entire London pub with Creative Strategists. (j/k, actually just the first two tables in the picture) Another event in the series of no agenda, just getting people in performance creative together for drinks. This was a fun one, thanks for coming out Naomi Peh Haeger Karina Tukanova Becky Ward Charles Timms Faye Nash Dan Wajda Manu Coates Beth Atkinson Clark Layla B. Eira Engedal Jordan P. Josh Nuttall Elise Zareie Soumya Satyajit Alec Bono

Focal isn't just great for managing your own creative assets - it also works extremely well for deconstructing competitors' creative strategies (and you can do it in a few minutes).

We've shipped some major improvements to the Focal Asset Library during the past few weeks, including easy similarity search. Highlights below: - Similarity search: Upload a reference asset or start from one you already have, and Focal surfaces all visually similar assets across your library. Great for spotting duplicates, thematic overlap, and creative that could have issues with similarity in Meta's ad auction. - Connect your ad account and filter assets by performance, e.g. all assets with spend over $1,000 or all currently live assets - Turn your most common searches into saved views for quick access. The views are automatically refreshed as new assets get added to the library

Nobody sets out to build a six-tool creative stack. It happens one decision at a time and every step seems logical when it's made: - Drive or Dropbox for assets is an obvious choice. - Notion, Monday, Jira, Asana, Docs, Sheets, or similar for briefs and tracking makes sense. - Slack for feedback is another obvious selection because "everyone's already there". - A spreadsheet is easy (in theory and in practice at low volumes) for naming conventions. - A separate analytics tool to see what's actually performing? Your performance team already uses it and can just give you a seat. Each addition solved a real problem, but using a stack that is this fragmented creates entirely new problems, especially when you scale (and I'd argue it effectively slows your scaling speed). - The manual download from Drive, and having to rename and re-upload everything to different ad platforms is a few minutes per file, but what happens when you have hundreds or thousands of them? - The review discussion that lives in a Slack thread is fast when it's getting done, but try finding it six months later. - The naming convention that's documented in a spreadsheet looks clean, but it's ignored in practice because it's easier to just upload and move on. At low creative volume, the friction is manageable. At 100, 500 or 1000 new ads per month (perhaps with multiple agency partners added to the mix) the manual work grows faster than headcount can absorb it. Most teams respond by hiring someone to manage the gaps between tools. That works, but it's an expensive fix that can destroy your margins when you could fix your systems instead. This is also why consolidating the stack to a purpose built platform can make a lot of sense. The cost of that single tool might seem high compared to free or existing tools, but if you factor in the opportunity costs and reduced issues, the equation looks drastically different.

As a marketer building a tool for marketers, one of the best feelings you can get is what I call a "Damn, I wish I'd had this thing in my previous role" -moment. At Focal it's weekly, so I think we're on to something. Here's a recent example: Take quality ad copy & localization. Back when I worked in online travel, this was a herculean task. With Focal’s AI enrichment, it can now be a one-person job, even with THOUSANDS of creative assets (video or static). Before, you’d brief a copywriter, wait for drafts, then brief again for localizations, (and pray nothing got lost in translation). For every language and format. Now, with Focal, it's super simple: - You just set up your fields once - Our AI writes ad copy based on what is actually in your creative asset (static or video): themes, scenes, etc. - It then localizes it across as many markets as you need, all in a single view so country teams can review, edit and approve right there in the same view. No extra spreadsheets or drive files needed.

A great use case of Focal’s AI: generating more relevant ad copy based on actual creative contents (static or video) and localizing it across markets. Here’s a quick demo from Giorgio 😎 - Focal’s AI system scans your creative, recognizing themes, contents, hooks and more. - You set instructions, character limits etc. as needed per placement and format. - The system does the rest, providing copy suggestions and translating to other languages as needed.

Many multi-million $ DTC brands (and their agencies) are power users of Focal. The reason they come to us is a lesson for all DTC brands wanting to scale to 7-8 figures and beyond: Your ad creative production needs to scale with your business growth, but without destroying your margins in the process. The typical creative ops stack I see is some combination of the following: - Google Drive or Dropbox for asset storage - Notion or Docs for briefs - Monday/Jira/ClickUp or similar for project management - Slack for approvals - A spreadsheet for naming conventions - A separate analytics tool, report export or dashboard for performance. That's usually ~3-6 tools for one creative workflow. These tools might get you to $1M, but they weren't built with DTC creative operations in mind, and will likely hold you back from reaching $10M. The manual work caused by this kind of fragmented stack compounds: naming conventions slip, winning creatives get lost, managing multiple production partners becomes a huge time sink. Ultimately performance learnings from one sprint no longer make it into the next brief, actively hurting advertising efficiency. Most brands respond by hiring. More coordinators, more agencies, more people to manage the gaps. It can work, but it's also one of the easiest ways to destroy your margins just for the sake of increasing scale. The COST-EFFECTIVE solution is having a single platform that handles all or most of the creative ops workflow: briefing, agency coordination, automated naming enforcement, localizations, creative delivery to Meta and TikTok, and performance data connected to the actual asset. This way learning compounds, context and winning creatives don't get lost, and the business ultimately grows in a more sustainable way.

If you're a Creative Strategist, here are 5 essentials you need to get the best results from your ad creative – and how they should work in an ideal setup: 1. Performance visibility: knowing which creatives are live, testing, and driving results. Ideally connecting performance data to the actual files (not a spreadsheet) 2. Ad inspiration & competitive research: tracking what competitors are running on #Meta and #TikTok and saving references for briefs. 3. Brief writing & production tracking: ideally one place where briefs are written, assigned, and visible to everyone (designers, agencies, media buyers). 4. A searchable asset library: Google Drive is a good start. A system where assets are findable by what's in them, not just by filename is better. 5. Review, approvals & channel delivery: structured submission, frame-by-frame feedback on videos, and assets getting uploaded automatically after approval without a manual download → rename → upload in the middle. Most teams have all five covered. The problem is they're running 5+ separate tools to do it. Every handoff between platforms is a place where context drops, files get named wrong, and time that should go to creative decisions goes to logistics instead. #creativestrategy #creativestrategist