# Joanna Wallace

Joanna Wallace works in paid media for direct-to-consumer ecommerce, with a focus on creative strategy, video editing, and creator and affiliate partnerships. She also describes doing recruiting work.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/joanna-wallace/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannalynnwallace
- LinkedIn followers: 4,585
- Topics: ecommerce, paid-ads, recruiting, creative-testing, paid-media, affiliate-marketing
- Based on 19 dated posts, latest 2026-09-16

## Summary

Joanna Wallace is most useful for paid media, creative strategy, creator testing, and DTC ecommerce measurement advice.

- Best for: DTC ecommerce brands running paid social that want better creator partnerships and new customers.
- Not for: Consumer packaged goods brands seeking consumer reach, scripted creator videos, or blended ROAS targets.
- Check first: Confirm scope, deliverables, pricing, booking terms, and recent sponsored post results.

### Takeaways

- Blended ROAS can look healthy while acquisition weakens; use new-customer CAC and ROAS.
- Use affiliate sales as an early signal before scaling creator partnerships with ad spend.
- Ask creators for organic-style and direct-response versions instead of over-briefing one flattened style.

## Main ideas

- **Blended ROAS hides whether a brand is acquiring new customers**: Wallace argues that the ROAS-versus-CAC debate is a distraction; the useful numbers are new-customer ROAS and new-customer CAC. Returning-customer revenue props up the blended figure, so an account can look healthy while top-of-funnel campaigns fail to bring in new buyers. Acquisition campaigns that worked get cut because their ROAS looked worse than campaigns mostly reselling to existing customers. NC ROAS will always look worse than blended ROAS, Wallace says—and that is the point.
- **Use affiliate performance to test creator partnerships**: Wallace argues that partnership ads often fail because teams choose creators based on gut, follower counts, and rates—not evidence that they can sell. The proposed system: bring creators in as affiliates, track which ones drive sales, then put ad budget behind the proven ones. It follows the media-buying principle of testing an ad before putting it into a scaled campaign. Paying creators on results keeps the cost of testing low.
- **Brief creators loosely and ask for two versions, not one that flattens their style**: Wallace argues that a creator’s instincts can outperform a carefully built brand brief, and that over-briefing flattens the specific way they sell. The practical change: ask new creators for two versions, one in their organic style and one more direct-response. If their instincts perform, Wallace leaves them alone rather than micromanaging. They apply the same logic to affiliates: approach them for their particular way of selling, not to make them like every other talent on the roster.
- **Paid-media editing is a discipline, not a general editing skill**: Wallace argues that experienced editors from TV, documentaries, or other backgrounds still need to learn paid-media editing before working on DTC accounts. They write that strong editors who can learn fast but have no direct-to-consumer experience approach them constantly, and that there is no time to train people in the team’s specific needs. The advice: watch the "10 rules of DTC video editing" episode before applying, then come back once you understand the material. Wallace also recruits US-based paid media video editors with extensive paid media experience, and argues that most founders and strategists do not know what great editing looks like or why it matters.
- **AI has not replaced the junior paid-media coordinator**: Wallace argues that treating AI as a coordinator hurts paid-media teams in four ways. Overworked strategists throw spaghetti at the wall, waste ad spend, and burn out. Skipping coordinators removes the internal pipeline for promoting future senior strategists. Strategist salaries go to admin work, while admin bottlenecks slow creative testing, iteration, and scaling. Burnout costs more than a coordinator’s salary, Wallace says, and promoting someone who already knows the account is cheaper than hiring senior talent from outside. The post pushes back on the claim that AI eliminated entry-level jobs, arguing that companies made that choice themselves.
- **Hiring and pay calibration in creative strategy remain unsolved**: Wallace writes about hiring for creative roles. Candidates who get offers, they argue, are not necessarily the ones with better answers, but those who talk about their work with conviction, excitement, and authority—and make the hiring manager feel the problem is handled. Confidence in an interview is not about being extroverted, Wallace says; it means leading with what you have done instead of burying it. In another post, they note that comparable creative strategist candidates ask for completely different salary ranges because the job title is new and nobody has calibrated what levels mean or what they should pay.
- **An independent consulting practice with a recruiting arm**: Wallace describes leaving a salaried role to build an independent business combining paid-media consulting, creative strategy, and recruiting. Recruiting recurs in the posts, including discussions of creative strategist hiring and pay calibration, alongside paid-media and partnership arguments. The material gives control over the work, a client roster, and a recruiting line alongside consulting equal weight with the services themselves.

## Work to read

- ["ROAS is the biggest lie in your ad account" — measuring new customers instead](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joannalynnwallace_roas-is-the-biggest-lie-in-your-ad-account-activity-7495870642483916801-3xfA)
- [Test creators as affiliates before paying for partnership ads](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joannalynnwallace_9-years-in-paid-i-ve-never-seen-anything-activity-7488237782084104192-2Skk)
- [Over-briefed creators and the value of asking for two versions](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joannalynnwallace_of-course-the-ad-i-hated-the-most-is-the-activity-7506007505165029376-vzHa)
- [What editors moving from TV or documentary into paid media need to learn](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joannalynnwallace_10-rules-of-dtc-video-editing-every-creative-activity-7416470663219003392-d7Iy)
- [Six months after leaving a salaried role to run CreativeRx Consulting](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joannalynnwallace_theres-nothing-more-terrifying-than-starting-activity-7493736112721522688--DNW)
- ["AI is not your coordinator" — the case for keeping junior paid media staff](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joannalynnwallace_ai-is-not-your-coordinator-there-i-said-activity-7363620252577927171-45h6)

## Brand relationships

- **UpPromote** (disclosed_partnership)
- **CreativeRx Consulting** (owned_business)
- **Operators Podcast Growth Summit** (mention)

## Partnerships

The posts show two commercial relationships a brand can plan around: sponsored LinkedIn content for a marketing-software company, and paid-media consulting through Wallace's own business, CreativeRx Consulting. They also recruit paid media video editors for brands, which is staffing support rather than an influencer engagement. Ask Wallace directly to confirm scope, deliverables, pricing, and booking terms. The sponsored placements are disclosed in-post with an #ad tag, setting the baseline for how a paid placement would be labeled.

## Alternatives

- Jim Schroën: Choose Jim Schroën when the need is to produce a high volume of UGC and paid-social ad edits at agency scale, or when AI-search visibility is part of the goal. They post as GoViral, an agency that creates UGC ads for DTC brands every day, and are hiring full-time remote editors to edit short- and long-form paid social, UGC, VSLs and direct-response ads alongside creative strategists. A second post argues that the same creator and affiliate content running as social posts is what AI tools pull from when recommending products, and cites 58% of shoppers now using AI tools to find products. For a DTC brand with a production-throughput gap, or one that wants creator content treated as an AI-visibility asset, this is a closer fit than a measurement-led consultant.
- Nativ Yanko: Choose Nativ Yanko when the brand wants an agency to build and run the ads, particularly in health and wellness, and when the problem is cold-audience conversion. Their posts walk through a UK collagen example end to end: research the ad account, product ingredients, competitor landscape and personas; build the persona from account metrics, reviews, comments and surveys; teach why the problem exists, agree with the buyer's scepticism, then give the mechanism; choose the format last, arriving at a 90-second mini VSL; and track NCPA rather than blended ROAS. A second post shows a set of Claude skills built for the agency's daily work — TOF scripts, hook variations, creative briefs pushed to Notion, a viral-concept translator, static ad copy. This is the closest alternative to the measurement discipline in the campaign fit section, with a full production and AI layer.
- Levi Steede: Choose Levi Steede when the symptom is a spend plateau and the likely cause is that every ad targets the same persona, motivation, awareness level and promise. Their posts draw a hard line between fake creative diversity — new hooks, a different creator, new captions — and true diversity that changes the who, the why, the awareness level and the primary promise, arguing that only the second sends distinct signals and produces incremental reach. A second post questions AI-era creative strategists who prompt-and-paste, and notes the pay inversion between strategists and the designers and editors who can carry an ad from hypothesis to finished work, citing an experiment converting a senior designer into a strategist through a copywriting course. For a brand that has exhausted surface variants and needs to expand its audience pools, this diagnosis is the useful contribution.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/