Ian Lenny

The failure mode they describe is spending on ads that make little profit, chasing small hacks instead of building a plan, and leaving money on the table by not reinvesting in ads that work. Their proposed fix is offer-led media buying: treat the offer as the organizing unit and let an ad’s profitability determine where the budget goes.

The four-part framework Ian Lenny lays out: find the offers that make the most money; identify the people, ads, and creatives that work best for those offers; build a feedback loop based on how much money the ads make; and move budget away from offers that only look good at first.

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They look for nine main creative types and how often each is tested.

• If many types are missing or few new influencers are being tested, they say the account is leaving money on the table.
• That’s why they frame the real problem as production capacity rather than individual ad quality: brands need enough output and variety to run a serious testing program.

Ian Lenny argues that DTC brands need not just better creative but a distributed creative department, and lists what it includes: remote studio product shoots, DTC-focused video and image editors, UGC creators with edited content, licensed influencer content, content calendars, and systemized workflows.

• They claim today’s providers outperform 95% of in-house teams and agencies.
• Ask for evidence behind that claim.

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Sorting by spend volume matters because the campaigns, targeting, and creative strategies that matter are the ones getting money.

• Checking account structure reveals whether testing is isolated from proven campaigns.
• The question most advertisers skip is who they should not advertise to.
• Ian Lenny argues that true cold-traffic campaigns should exclude remarketing audiences; otherwise, platforms default toward people who have already seen the ads.
• Without that discipline, they say, it becomes impossible to track costs across different awareness levels—so incrementality depends on exclusion hygiene, not just targeting.

The 30-minute sequence: use Leadsie to request account access in one click; sort by spend volume; check whether testing budgets are isolated from proven campaigns; review exclusions and optimizations; then assess creative testing and whitelisting.

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For brands under $5M, the emphasis is deliberate restraint: work one channel, one offer, and one bundle, and study the best existing customers before expanding.

• For brands at $100M and above, growth has multiple drivers, with four levers—CPA, AOV, LTV, and margin—each with its own factors.
• They frame consistent testing across all four as the long-term winning approach.
• The advice shifts from focus at one end of the market to a broader measurement system at the other.

For small brands: focus on one channel where the audience converts best, one low-friction trial offer, one low blended COGS bundle that maximizes margin and average order value, and a deep dive into buyers with $60–$120 LTV to scale what attracts them. For large brands: drive CPA through offer strength, audience targeting, creative quality, and landing pages; AOV through bundling and checkout upsells; LTV through subscriptions, lifecycle marketing, and retention; and margin through blended COGS, discounting, and affiliate and whitelisting payouts.

The five-step audit and the offer-led framework both focus on diagnosis and profitability. Posts for small brands and $100M brands show Ian Lenny widening the frame from a simple focus playbook to a four-lever system as the account and budget grow.

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The post turns a broad audit promise into a concrete sequence.

Ian Lenny lays out a 30-minute audit in five steps.

• First, use Leadsie to request account access in one click.
• Second, sort the account by spend volume: focus on the campaigns, targeting, and creative strategies actually getting money.
• Third, check whether the account isolates testing budgets from proven campaigns.
• Fourth, ask who the account should not advertise to, and use exclusions to keep cold-traffic campaigns from drifting into remarketing audiences.
• Fifth, review creative testing and whitelisting.
• Ian says to look for nine main creative types and check whether new influencers are being tested.
• If many types are missing, the account is leaving money on the table.

For brands planning a campaign

Use this as a scoping tool for a paid ads and creative strategy engagement: start with a spend-volume review, check whether the account separates tests from proven campaigns, and assess creative variety before proposing new production.

It explains Ian Lenny's preferred operating model, not just creative tactics.

Ian Lenny argues that DTC brands need a distributed creative department more than they need better creative.

• To run enough tests, brands have three choices: build an in-house team, hire an agency, or build a distributed creative department.
• Most large CPG brands default to the first two, but that works only with strong hiring and a rare agency.
• The distributed model is scalable, redundant, and modular.
• Its cost advantage comes from flexibility: multiple service packages, different vendors, and varied delivery timelines let overhead move with demand and cash flow.
• The stack includes remote studio product shoots, DTC-focused video and image editors, UGC creators with edited content, licensed influencer content, content calendars, and systemized workflows.
• Ian claims today's providers outperform 95% of in-house teams and agencies.

For brands planning a campaign

For a creative strategy proposal, position the work as a modular vendor stack that can flex with demand, rather than a fixed agency retainer or a full in-house build. The key decision for the brand is how much coordination it can manage across multiple providers.

Start here to understand Ian Lenny's central argument: offers, not just creative volume, determine whether ad spend makes money.

Ian Lenny says DTC founders struggle to profit from ad spend because they lack a clear strategy for finding which ads and offers make the most money.

• In the pattern they describe, brands keep testing new creatives to acquire low-value customers, spending on ads that generate little profit, chasing small hacks instead of building a plan, and missing chances to reinvest in ads that work.
• The proposed system is offer-led media buying, built on four steps: find the offers that make the most money; find the people, ads, and creatives that work best for those offers; create a feedback loop based on how much money the ads make; and move ad money away from offers that only look good at first.

For brands planning a campaign

Use offer-level profitability as the organizing metric for an engagement. Connect creative testing to an offer feedback loop, and shift budget toward offers that make money rather than whichever ad looks strongest at first.

Ian Lenny reduces a complex problem to four measurable areas and shows what sits beneath each one.

Ian Lenny says real DTC growth is rare and breaks down how more than 50 brands with $100M or more achieve it through four levers: CPA, AOV, LTV, and margin.

• Each lever depends on several factors.
• CPA is driven by offer strength, audience targeting, creative quality, and landing page optimization.
• AOV is driven by bundling and high-value offers, plus checkout upsells and cross-sells.
• LTV is driven by subscription adoption, lifecycle marketing effectiveness, and product experience and retention.
• Margin is driven by blended COGS across offers, discounting strategy, and affiliate and whitelisting payouts.
• Ian's point is that a simple system to measure and improve these four areas puts a brand ahead of most competitors, and consistent testing across them wins long term.

For brands planning a campaign

Use the four levers as a diagnostic frame for a paid ads and creative strategy engagement. Tie creative decisions to offer strength, landing pages, retention, and margin so the brand does not treat ads as an isolated acquisition cost.

Ian Lenny gives a short, staged playbook instead of a long list of channels and tactics.

Ian Lenny advises DTC brands under $5M to keep it simple: one channel, one trial offer, one low blended COGS bundle, and a deep dive into the best customers.

• The logic is to focus where the audience converts best, use a low-friction trial offer, maximize margin and average order value with a low-COGS bundle, then study buyers with $60 to $120 LTV and scale what attracts them.
• Ian says simplicity wins at this stage.

For brands planning a campaign

For smaller brands, focus the engagement on customer analysis rather than channel expansion. A useful first deliverable would be a best-customer profile and a plan to scale the offer, bundle, and channel combination that already attracts those buyers.

Spend concentration is the fastest way to find the account’s real campaign, targeting, and creative strategies.

Sort by spend first, then check whether testing is isolated from proven campaigns. Ian Lenny argues that if new audiences or creative cannot be isolated, the account structure needs to change.

For brands planning a campaign

An agency can start with a diagnostic audit of the account before recommending new spend. This is useful when a brand suspects its tests are poorly structured or spend is going to strategies that no longer drive results.

Examples: Source 1

True cold-traffic campaigns should exclude remarketing audiences; otherwise, platforms may default to showing ads to people who have already seen them. Without that discipline, they say, it becomes impossible to track costs across different awareness levels.

For brands planning a campaign

A paid-ads engagement can include a review of exclusions and incrementality, particularly for brands that want to measure cold-traffic performance separately from retargeting. This is a concrete area to test in the first 30 days.

Examples: Source 1

Their four-part framework is to find the most profitable offers, identify the people and creative that work for those offers, create a feedback loop based on profit, and move budget away from offers that only look good at first.

The framework connects media buying to offer economics rather than creative volume: identify profitable offers, match audiences and creative to them, then let profit determine where the budget goes.

For brands planning a campaign

This is a strong hook for an agency selling profitability-focused media buying. A brand can evaluate whether Ian Lenny’s proposed plan starts with offer and margin analysis rather than relying on more creative testing alone.

Examples: Source 1

They look for nine main creative types and check how many are being tested, and how often. If many types are missing or few new influencers are being tested, they say the account is leaving money on the table.

For brands planning a campaign

A creative-strategy engagement can use this as a checklist: map the creative types already in rotation, compare them with the nine types Ian Lenny describes, and propose a whitelisting or influencer-testing track where coverage is thin.

Examples: Source 1

They compare in-house teams, agencies, and a distributed stack, arguing that the stack is more scalable, redundant, modular, and easier to flex with demand and cash flow. It includes remote studio product shoots, DTC-focused video and image editors, UGC creators with edited content, licensed influencer content, content calendars, and systemized workflows.

For brands planning a campaign

This topic matters for a creative-strategy engagement because it shows how Ian Lenny thinks about production operations, not just ad buying. A brand can assess whether it wants help assembling and managing a modular vendor and creator stack rather than hiring a single agency or building an in-house team.

Examples: Source 1

Each has multiple drivers, such as offer strength, audience targeting, creative quality, and landing pages for CPA; bundling and checkout upsells for AOV; subscriptions and lifecycle marketing for LTV; and blended COGS, discounting, and affiliate payouts for margin.

Use the four levers as a measurement and improvement system: run consistent tests against each and treat growth as multifactorial rather than a single creative or channel fix.

For brands planning a campaign

An agency can use this as a diagnostic frame with larger DTC brands, mapping proposed work to specific levers and explaining which tests would move CPA, AOV, LTV, or margin. It is most relevant when the brand has enough data to measure those inputs.

Examples: Source 1

This advice is stage-specific: Ian Lenny frames simplicity as an early-stage advantage, while the $100M-brand post shows a more complex, multi-lever system for larger companies.

For brands planning a campaign

For smaller brands, an engagement can start with a narrow test rather than a broad channel plan. A brand can evaluate whether Ian Lenny’s recommendation respects budget constraints and focuses first on one channel, one offer, and the highest-value customer segment.

Examples: Source 1

The post recommends it as part of the audit but does not disclose a sponsorship, affiliate payment, or client relationship. Ask whether any commercial relationship exists.

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Both treat rising acquisition costs as a symptom of account structure rather than a platform problem, and both prescribe similar remedies: weekly creative testing cycles, margin and CAC checks before increasing budgets, offers that suit first-time buyers, and audience signals and exclusions to keep targeting sharp as spend rises. Their posts even share a format: a numbered diagnosis of where money leaks, followed by a short list of structural fixes.

Josh Gregory writes as an agency team using “we” and runs free Google Ads audits as the entry point, emphasizing how Google and Meta overlap and waste clicks when planned in isolation.

• Ian Lenny stays in the first person and makes the audit itself the product, using a fixed 30-minute sequence and a named access tool.
• They spend more space on creative production—editing vendors, UGC, licensed influencer content—than on cross-channel coordination.

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Both recommend the same habit: keep asking what is being tested next, across different hooks, angles, customer problems, and formats, until testing becomes a pipeline rather than a search for a single winner. Both write for DTC ecommerce brands running Meta ads and use short LinkedIn posts to teach the point.

Ujla Shakoor writes from personal practice and reflection, including a post about pausing work after five years to reconsider direction, and focuses on the creative pipeline inside an account.

• Ian Lenny takes a more systems-level approach: account structure, exclusions, offer economics, and a modular vendor stack for producing creative at volume.
• They also explicitly distinguish advice for sub-$5M brands from advice for $100M brands, a distinction Ujla Shakoor's posts do not attempt.

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Their post on bundles and upsells argues that brands spend thousands on ads while never testing offers that would raise average order value.

• That is the same logic as Ian Lenny's offer-led media buying and the AOV and margin levers in the four-lever breakdown.
• Both present their work as a fixed process the client has to follow rather than a quick fix.

Roman Tariq runs a capped practice of five brands at a time and makes capacity the selling point, closing posts with DM invitations and open slots—a direct-response approach to winning work.

• Ian Lenny does not market a client limit in these posts; the offer is a set of diagnostic and production methods, ranging from a simple four-step plan for sub-$5M brands to CPA, AOV, LTV, and margin measurement at $100M scale.
• Roman Tariq also writes more explicitly about trust and repeat buyers as the easiest revenue, while Ian Lenny stays closer to account and creative mechanics.

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The two posts describe what happens once spend passes roughly £25,000 to £30,000 a month on Meta or Google: ROAS declines, acquisition costs climb, and results swing, while the usual reactions—changing bids, testing random creatives, or duplicating campaigns—do not fix it.

• The named causes are funnel gaps for cold audiences, Meta and Google running in isolation with overlapping clicks, and no LTV or offer strategy behind the spend.
• Recommended fixes include weekly creative testing cycles, margin and CAC checks before budgets rise, offers that work for first-time buyers, funnel progression mapped from awareness to purchase, campaign structure that controls where budget goes, audience signals and exclusions that keep targeting sharp, and search terms and product feeds aligned with intent.
• Josh Gregory also offers free Google Ads audits to eCommerce brands wanting a second pair of eyes, which suits a discovery phase paid for in time rather than fees.

The tradeoff is less depth on how campaigns get made and ads produced.

• These posts do not offer a step-by-step account audit, a checklist for verifying creative types in rotation, or a build-versus-buy production model covering remote studio shoots, editors, UGC creators, and licensed influencer content.
• Brands whose constraint is who produces the work and how fast—not where the budget flows—will get less here.
• The engagement also leans toward a Google Ads review, so a brand running only Meta fits Ian Lenny's account-audit and offer-led framing more closely.
• Ask for client results, case studies, pricing, and service terms before engaging.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The post on this problem treats a single winner as the biggest risk in the account, describing the path from $1K to $3K to $5K to $10K of spend behind one hook, one angle, and one message, followed by rising CPA, falling ROAS, and slowing sales.

• The method is to keep asking what is being tested next across different hooks, angles, customer problems, and formats, so the account is never starting from zero when the current winner dies.
• The second post documents three years of hands-on DTC and Meta Ads work across creatives, campaigns, scaling, and data, making the creative-pipeline argument credible for a brand hiring for that single job.

The tradeoff is scope.

• These posts do not cover offer economics, margin or COGS, account structure, exclusions, retention, or a production vendor model.
• A brand that needs the full engagement described in the campaign fit section should ask how those pieces would be handled.
• One of the two posts is a career reflection on taking a pause rather than an operational method, leaving less teaching material to build a paid scope from.
• Ask for client outcomes, performance numbers, pricing, and service terms before engaging.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The post on bundles and upselling argues that most brands think they need more traffic when the cheaper option is a better offer to an audience that already trusts them: give the existing audience the right bundle, and a customer ready to spend $100 can be pushed to $150 without extra ad spend.

• That is the same buyer task—a paid ads and creative strategy engagement—answered from the average-order-value and offer side rather than the creative-volume side.
• Roman Tariq also states a deliberate limit of five brands at a time, says the work is aimed at eCommerce brands struggling to scale or already running ads without results, asks for clients who have patience and will follow a process, and was opening two slots in the month of that post.
• A brand that wants a small, directly involved operator and a first test it can run this week on bundling or upsells fits this material.

The tradeoff is availability and breadth.

• The five-brand cap and the two-slot opening are features of the working model, but they also make scheduling uncertain and a long multi-quarter commitment harder to plan around a single operator's capacity.
• The posts offer less on account structure, exclusions, creative-type audits, margin work, and vendor production stacks.
• The contact route runs through direct messages and slot-scarcity framing rather than published service terms, so ask about deliverables, pricing, client outcomes, and availability before engaging.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2