# Josh Hedges

Josh Hedges started beHuman, a creative business working with direct-to-consumer brands on performance advertising. Hedges's posts describe its approach as using customer insight and varied creative to learn why ads work, and say the business is expanding into live commerce for UK clients.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/josh-hedges/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-hedges-101691140
- LinkedIn followers: 1,849
- Topics: ecommerce, ecommerce-marketing
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-05

## Summary

Most useful for DTC brands wanting performance creative that learns why ads work and uses varied creative.

- Best for: A DTC brand with an established Meta account rebuilding its performance creative system.
- Not for: Brands wanting paid LinkedIn sponsorship posts or broad shopper awareness outside DTC.
- Check first: Ask for recent post impressions, engagement, audience geography and job function, and live commerce evidence.

### Takeaways

- Treat a winning ad as research: identify its angle, emotion and customer awareness stage.
- Visually distinct creative gives Meta's system more varied inputs to find customers.
- beHuman is expanding into live commerce for UK clients through a limited founding cohort.

## Main ideas

- **A winning ad is only useful if you know why it won**: Josh Hedges argues that most brands scale a successful ad until it stops working and then start over, restarting the learning process. The alternative is to treat each winner as a research document: identify the angle, the emotion it triggered, and the awareness stage it spoke to, then brief new creative against those signals. In a post about Meta account practices, the same priority appears as signal extraction over winner-finding. Creative compounds when teams capture the reasons for success rather than simply repeat individual ads.
- **Creative diversity is what lets Meta's AI find customers**: Josh Hedges says Meta's AI can find buyers only if it receives enough varied inputs. Running one winning format repeatedly teaches the system little, while creative that varies by angle, format, and awareness stage gives it more distinct signals to learn from. The account-practices post makes this concrete with entity ID diversity: whether creatives are visually distinct enough for Meta's system to see them as separate signals. The priority is not more testing for its own sake, but testing across genuinely different strategic territories.
- **Simple is not easy: execution beats the search for a new unlock**: Josh Hedges draws a line between simple and easy. The strategy for growing a DTC brand is simple: understand the customer, build creative that speaks to them, fund what works, read the signals, expand what wins, and repeat. The hard part is doing those steps consistently under pressure, with a team, spend to justify, clients expecting results, and a shifting market. They argue that founders often look for a new format, platform, or agency when the real unlock is consistent execution of what they already know.
- **Strategy before speed: a studio built so production does not skip the thinking**: Josh Hedges describes building a larger studio to remove the trade-off between speed and strategy. The space includes a UGC set designed to look like a customer's home, a high-production set for talking heads, VSLs, and founder content, product photography rigs for fast static turnaround, and a strategy room where every brief is worked out before filming. Fast production is only valuable if the strategic work happens first; without it, a studio is just an expensive camera rental.
- **beHuman's move into live commerce: a deliberate change in direction**: Josh Hedges writes that after seven years, the question was whether beHuman should still exist, because the content, automation, and UGC work the business was doing made money but moved away from the human relationships it was meant to build. The response is an expansion into live commerce, which they describe as one of the few remaining places a brand can be human: a customer can watch a product being used, ask questions, get answers in real time, and buy in the same moment. The post announces a founding cohort for UK clients and cites China's live commerce market and a comparison from Gary Vaynerchuk to the dot-com bubble. Ask for evidence of client results and details of the cohort.

## Work to read

- [Six years of beHuman: reps, why an ad won, and creative diversity](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-hedges-101691140_six-years-ago-i-started-behuman-with-one-activity-7445741905402806273-CnLZ)
- [What the top Meta accounts focus on in 2026](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-hedges-101691140_the-dtc-creative-advice-on-linkedin-is-about-activity-7447191645231624192-ZlgI)
- [BeHuman expands into live commerce for UK clients](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-hedges-101691140_for-the-first-time-in-seven-years-i-had-activity-7510951477713092608-vDyE)
- [BeHuman builds a studio for speed and strategy](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-hedges-101691140_we-built-a-10x-square-ft-studio-to-solve-activity-7445379607081496576-r54H)
- [Simple is not easy: consistent execution over a new formula](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-hedges-101691140_simple-easy-most-people-think-simple-and-activity-7440683654277656576-yBGv)

## Brand relationships

- **beHuman** (owned_business)
- **Meta** (mention)

## Partnerships

Josh Hedges's posts focus on beHuman, the DTC creative business they founded and run, rather than sponsored posts. They describe two ways to engage beHuman: performance creative and studio production for direct-to-consumer brands, and a newer live commerce service being offered to UK clients through a limited founding cohort. The posts publish no scope document, rate card or booking page; the stated first step is to direct-message for details. Agree on deliverables, timelines and pricing directly. No sponsored-post, affiliate or paid-partnership formats appear in the posts. For a potential sponsorship, ask whether beHuman has an official sponsorship policy, media kit or rate card, or examples of sponsored posts.

## Alternatives

- Ujla Shakoor: Choose Ujla Shakoor over Josh Hedges when the campaign decision is the same — rebuilding a DTC performance creative system — but the immediate problem is a Meta account that relies on one winning creative. Two posts describe the failure: scaling budget from $1K to $10K behind a single ad, then seeing CPA climb and ROAS drop, with the blame falling on Meta rather than the account structure. The counter-argument is a pipeline of winners built from different hooks, angles, customer problems, and formats, so the next test is already running when the current winner tires. That is the same buyer task, addressed from the day-to-day account seat rather than the studio side. A brand that wants a testing discipline installed inside its own ad account, with someone hands-on in Meta ads and campaign data, will find this a closer match than a production-led engagement.
- Burhan Arif: Choose Burhan Arif over Josh Hedges for the same campaign decision when the brand needs volume first and the creative routine starts in the design tool. The posts describe a performance creative partner for DTC brands spending $500K+ a month across paid socials, delivering 3,000+ statics and emails every month at a 90% creative approval rate across 20-30 active accounts. The second post explains the method behind that output: after losing money on personal e-commerce stores, the lesson was to stop opening Figma first and instead dig into customer reviews, comments, competitors, objections, and buying triggers, because the best creative ideas sit in the customer's own words. A brand bottlenecked by static and email throughput, where requests arrive as design tasks rather than research tasks, gets a stronger match here than from a smaller strategy-led engagement.
- Amir Faizan Malik: Choose Amir Faizan Malik over Josh Hedges for the same campaign decision when the weak link is conversion below the ad, not the ad itself. The posts cover direct-response copy and conversion work: an audit of 23 DTC landing pages where 19 shared the same mistake of speaking to everyone; a headline rewrite described as moving conversion from 2.1% to 8.4%; and a three-client breakdown covering an email sequence, a landing page rewrite, and ad creative plus copy for a men's lifestyle brand. Each is credited to deep research into the audience's own language. A brand whose traffic arrives but does not convert, and needs landing pages, email sequences, or ad copy written for one specific person with one specific problem, will find this a closer match than a creative-system or studio engagement.

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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/