# Olly Hudson

Olly Hudson is a DTC growth agency founder whose work focuses on paid media, creative strategy, and helping ecommerce brands grow.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/olly-hudson/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olly-hudson
- LinkedIn followers: 37,402
- Topics: ecommerce, paid-ads, agency-operations, creative-strategy, paid-social-advertising, peak-season-planning
- Based on 15 dated posts, latest 2026-10-06

## Summary

Most useful for practical paid media, creative strategy, and ecommerce growth frameworks.

- Best for: Scaling ecommerce brands with repeat purchase, strong margin, creative volume needs, and peak season planning.
- Not for: Thin margin brands chasing first-order profit or campaigns wanting priced sponsored placements with audience guarantees.
- Check first: Confirm rates, deliverables, contact route, scope, lead time, and current availability.

### Takeaways

- More ads only help if the ideas behind them are actually different.
- Fill the funnel before peak, or buy the audience back at peak prices.
- Judge a bid on customer lifetime value, not first-order ROAS.

## Main ideas

- **More ads only help if the ideas behind them are actually different**: Olly Hudson's central creative argument is that demand for creative across DTC has never been higher, while the supply of people who can do it well has never been lower. The shortage shows up in four places: the creative strategist role has no established career path and is hard to fill; brands fixate on asset volume while ignoring signal diversity, so 200 ads can be 200 versions of one brief; performance and brand are still treated as a quarterly choice instead of two things run inside the same account; and platforms such as Andromeda reward diversity faster than most internal teams or agencies can produce it. Their conclusion: more creative without more variety just accelerates the same problem.
- **Fill the funnel before peak, or buy the audience back at peak prices**: Olly Hudson warns that brands go into Black Friday over-invested in a single persona, format or bottom-of-funnel message aimed at the most aware buyers. The result: frequency climbs, reach falls and CPMs rise, all compounded by auction competition during peak. The fix is to keep enough spend on unaware and problem-aware assets before, during and after the period, so there is an audience left to convert. Their exception: if big influencer spend or strong organic is already creating demand, Meta can run almost entirely bottom-of-funnel and still work, because someone else is doing the awareness job.
- **Judge a bid on what the customer is worth over time, not on the first order**: Olly Hudson argues that winning a sale can still lose money. Unless average order value sits somewhere above roughly $500 to $1,000, the first purchase is close to a write-off, so the key decision is what the customer will be worth later. Brands pulling ahead, in this account, predict repeat purchase rate and months on subscription, then bid against that number rather than first-order ROAS. Their shorthand: targeting is now creative, but bidding strategy is the LTV model.
- **Affiliate programmes fail on three guesses: the rate, the partners, the follow-up**: Olly Hudson says most brands building a partner programme get stuck on what to pay, who is worth recruiting and how to keep partners selling after they agree. On rates, nearly everyone copies a competitor with a different margin structure, so the number is either too low to motivate anyone or high enough to fund sales that would have happened anyway. On recruitment, a supplement brand needs different partners from a fashion brand, yet founders chase the largest following regardless of whether that audience buys the product. On retention, affiliates sign up, get a link, hear nothing further and drift away within a month. Their summary: the revenue goes to whichever brand sorted its rate out first.
- **Agencies scale on people and repeatable systems, not individual heroics**: Across the founder story and the Q3 update, Olly Hudson returns to people as the foundation of an agency and to systems that make a growing team effective. Early-career hires join a growth team, run Meta and TikTok accounts for large ecommerce brands, and work inside an integrated system built from hundreds of millions in tracked spend. The claim is that compounding learnings across many accounts are what a strong buyer cannot see from a single brand. In parallel, the agency packages its own intake process as a proprietary diagnostic, so new work starts from the same repeatable assessment rather than a fresh opinion.

## Work to read

- [Career timeline and the Growth Compass diagnostic](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olly-hudson_nobody-in-my-family-had-ever-started-a-business-activity-7512058965166448640-eC-i)
- [Why creative strategy talent is the bottleneck](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olly-hudson_flew-to-berlin-last-week-came-back-with-activity-7510603236601430017-m5qD)
- [Black Friday planning: top-of-funnel before conversion](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olly-hudson_black-friday-is-just-53-days-away-this-year-activity-7512870234219855873-7D6N)
- [Bidding to lifetime value, not first-order ROAS](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olly-hudson_you-can-win-the-sale-and-still-lose-money-activity-7510307145305919488-jPTG)
- [Agency operating proof: creative volume, post-click and people](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olly-hudson_q3-was-another-huge-period-for-soar-group-activity-7513138609575882753-TIVa)
- [Affiliate and partner programmes: rate, recruitment, retention](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olly-hudson_ive-helped-scale-dtc-brands-to-600m-in-activity-7505529561766363136-oucZ)
- [Hiring and training paid media talent](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olly-hudson_are-you-already-picking-apart-ads-studying-activity-7511688442502770688-s-IJ)

## Brand relationships

- **Soar Group** (owned_business)
- **For You** (owned_business)
- **UpPromote** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Hambi Media** (mention)
- **Comfrt** (mention)
- **Brand Partners** (mention)
- **D2C Diaries** (mention)

## Partnerships

Olly Hudson's public posts point to two routes for a brand: a managed paid-media and creative service delivered through the agency founded with Joe Marston, and placements inside their own growth content. The service sells execution—running Meta and TikTok accounts, producing creative at volume, and building offers and landing pages—rather than a fixed sponsorship package. Ask for partnership rates, deliverables, and a contact route, and agree scope and lead time directly.

## Alternatives

- Levi Steede: Choose Levi Steede when the creative-strategy decision is really a diagnosis question: is the brand's creative genuinely different, or is it the same persona, pain point, promise and awareness level in a new guise? They set out a four-part test: who the ad is for (persona or job-to-be-done), the core motivation, the awareness level or objection state, and the primary promise. They distinguish real demand differentiation from visual reskins that only change how a platform classifies an ad. It is a sharper lens than a general creative-volume pitch when an account has plateaued as asset count rises. Steede also describes an experiment that turned a senior designer into someone who could enter an account, find an underleveraged angle, write the hypothesis and copy, and design the whole ad. That is relevant for brands looking to build internal strategy capability rather than rent it.
- Riley Cronin: Choose Riley Cronin when the campaign should be built around a brand-owned creator community that produces creative and pre-tests it before media spend, rather than a creative-strategy retainer. The six-step plan is specific: compensate creators on performance (product, affiliate commission and a percentage of any ad launched), recruit 100+ creators a month, brief them on top-selling angles, review and coach their content, run the strongest organic videos as Partnership Ads, then move consistent performers onto retainers. It answers a different version of the buyer's question— which creative should get budget?—by using organic signal first and spend second. It also builds a roster the brand owns, useful for clients seeking a durable affiliate and creator channel alongside paid media.
- Barney Brown: Choose Barney Brown, of Social Hit, when the partnership decision is really about TikTok Shop growth and creator retention. After analysing 100+ TikTok Shop accounts, the posts argue, retention—not impressions, likes or follower count—is the strongest predictor of sales. They cite brands above 80% retention at £150k+ monthly sales, those at 50% retention under £50k, and brands below 20% barely off the ground. The five-component fix is concrete: personalised onboarding, performance-based incentives, education and content guidance, weekly check-ins, and exclusive product access. For a client whose programme churns creators, or whose last-click reporting obscures which creators build sustained purchase intent, this is a more directly usable operating plan than a creative-strategy pitch.

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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/