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.
Key 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.
Check first: Confirm rates, deliverables, contact route, scope, lead time, and current availability.
Main ideas
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 what the customer is worth over time, not on the first order
Olly Hudson is a DTC growth agency founder whose posts cover paid media, creative strategy and ecommerce growth.
They describe founding Soar With Us, launching For You and sharing agency and growth discussions through D2C Diaries.
Their posts offer practical explanations of how brands can avoid relying on first-order returns alone, reach new audiences with varied creative and plan for peak trading.
Hudson connects growth advice to operating problems.
In one post, they argue that more ads do not help if they repeat the same idea, and that brands need creative diversity without abandoning brand consistency.
They explain why bidding may need to reflect predicted customer lifetime value rather than first-order ROAS, and why affiliate programmes depend on suitable partners, sensible commission rates and ongoing support.
Their Black Friday advice adds an important qualification: bottom-funnel media can make sense when other channels are already creating demand.
The posts also cover agency hiring and service expansion, extending beyond media tactics.
The clearest reason to follow is this mix of specific growth frameworks and candid accounts of how an agency is developing.
Hudson reports the performance figures and business claims in the posts.
Olly Hudson's ideas run through one argument: DTC growth problems are usually diagnosed in the wrong place.
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They argue that brands chase more ads when the real constraint is distinct creative ideas, over-invest in buyers they already have when peak arrives, and judge media on the first order when the profit sits in the customer's lifetime value. Alongside that is an operating view: agency results come from hiring, training and repeatable systems rather than individual heroics.
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.
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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.
Speaking at Performance Marketing Minds in Berlin, hosted by Sam Brand and the team at Brand Partners, Olly Hudson said the agency was fully booked until December. They attributed that not to a secret advantage, but to how few people do this work well.
The tension is worth reading closely: the same agency's Q3 update reports over 48,000 unique ad concepts produced for clients, a volume claim. Their test — whether extra assets are genuinely different or reskins of one brief — separates the two statements.
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.
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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.
Citing audits and a D2C Diaries episode, Olly Hudson says the average brand wastes around 70% of its Black Friday budget on customers who were already going to buy.
They argue that most brands pour nearly that share of November spend into most-aware creative.
The post was published 53 days out from Black Friday with a client checklist attached.
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.
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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.
The post attributes this reasoning to guest Omer Kaplan, speaking on D2C Diaries.
Kaplan's two readiness checks before scaling that way are a minimum 70% gross margin on landed COGS and 2.5x LTV to CAC at entry.
Olly Hudson presents these as Kaplan's numbers, not their own tested benchmarks.
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.
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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.
The post promotes UpPromote's benchmark tool, which matches a Shopify store to one of 39 niches and returns commission benchmarks, partner profiles and activation steps.
It cites Comfrt as a brand that scaled almost entirely in the US through its affiliate programme, with effects that carried into paid and organic.
The specific figures cannot be checked against the benchmark data, which the post does not publish.
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.
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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.
The Q3 update reports 22% MRR growth, record-low churn, new senior hires, a post-click offer whose first build cut CAC by over 30%, a first TikTok live for a beauty client, 20+ growth audits, six event talks and 15 podcasts.
Olly Hudson quotes Bill Campbell's line that it is the people, then adds that as a business grows, the founder's job becomes helping others become more effective.
The Growth Compass is described as a diagnostic built from £170m+ in spend across 250+ brands, now offered as a self-serve framework.
This is the quickest starting point for understanding who Olly Hudson is and how the agency grew: it connects a personal timeline to the scale and services they now describe.
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Olly Hudson traces a path from leaving school at 16 to running a business with over 100 employees: dropshipping at 19, founding Soar With Us at 21, opening a Leeds office at 23, launching For You at 24, moving to London at 26, merging with Hambi Media at 27 and opening a London HQ at 28.
At 29, they describe the agency as the UK's number one independent Meta agency, an official UK TikTok partner, working with 9-figure DTC brands and £600m+ in managed ad spend.
The post also introduces The Growth Compass, a diagnostic built from £170m+ in spend across 250+ brands and now offered as a self-serve framework.
For brands planning a campaign
Use this as a first-pass due diligence item: it establishes the agency's claimed scale, channel partnerships and proprietary planning tool. Ask whether the Growth Compass would be run on your account and how its output would shape media and creative decisions.
This post gives Hudson's clearest current argument about what DTC brands are getting wrong.
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It is useful for judging whether the agency's creative-strategy offer fits a scaling brand.
After speaking at Performance Marketing Minds in Berlin, Hudson argues 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 post identifies four problems: the creative strategist role is hard to fill and has no established career path; brands chase asset volume without enough signal diversity; performance and brand are still treated as a choice rather than a combined operating problem; and platforms such as Andromeda reward diversity at a pace many teams cannot match.
They say the agency is fully booked until December and credit the room organised by Sam Brand and Brand Partners.
For brands planning a campaign
For a creative strategy partnership, test whether the provider can supply genuinely different concepts and senior strategy, not just more ads. Ask for examples where distinct briefs or angles produced new audience signal, and how the team would staff and prioritise creative diversity across a scaling account.
This is a concrete seasonal framework from Hudson's own account, showing how the agency thinks about peak trading rather than relying on general growth claims.
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Hudson warns that brands will struggle in the coming Black Friday period if they keep over-investing in one persona, format or bottom-funnel message.
The post points to audits showing frequency climbing, reach falling and CPMs rising, and says the average brand wastes 70% of its Black Friday budget on customers who were already going to buy.
They argue that most brands pour nearly 70% of November spend into most-aware, bottom-funnel creative, rinsing the same shrinking audience and overpaying for new customers, especially as auction competition rises.
The recommendation is to keep enough budget on unaware and problem-aware assets unless other demand generation, such as large influencer spend or strong organic, is already doing that job.
For brands planning a campaign
Use this as a peak-season diagnostic. Ask how the agency allocates prospecting versus retargeting before, during and after Black Friday, and whether it would run a checklist like the one Hudson references from D2C Diaries.
This post explains a core media-buying idea in plain terms: when first-order profit is a write-off, bids have to be based on what the customer is worth over time.
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Hudson argues that winning a sale can still lose money.
Unless average order value sits above roughly $500 to $1,000, the first purchase is basically a write-off, so brands need to predict lifetime value before the sale.
The post cites Omer Kaplan on D2C Diaries saying that brands pulling ahead are often those predicting repeat purchase rate and months on subscription, then bidding into that number rather than first-order ROAS.
Hudson highlights two checks Kaplan uses before a brand scales that way: a minimum 70% gross margin on landed COGS, and 2.5x LTV to CAC at entry.
The summary line is that targeting is now creative, but bidding strategy is the LTV model.
For brands planning a campaign
For a scaling ecommerce client, ask how the agency models LTV and CAC, and whether the client's margin structure supports the bid strategy. The answer should show whether the partnership can move beyond day-one ROAS.
This is the strongest single post for seeing the agency's operating model in practice: it lists output, services, hires and client work together rather than making a broad promise.
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Hudson reports that Q3 grew MRR 22% with record-low churn, putting the group on track for 50%+ growth again that year.
The post lists a post-click offer that reduced CAC by over 30% on its first build and scaled from £3k to £10k per day within 30 days; a first TikTok live for a beauty client and plans for studios in Q4; over 48,000 unique ad concepts across health, wellness, beauty, tech, personal care, fashion and fragrance; 20+ growth audits; two Growth Leaders breakfasts; six event talks; and 15 podcasts recorded, with a waitlist into December.
It also names new hires and credits Kelsey Rickards for the TikTok live, while framing people as the foundation of agency success.
For brands planning a campaign
This item shows the agency's operating breadth: creative volume, post-click support, social commerce and client education. Ask for category-relevant examples, especially of post-click work, and whether that service would sit alongside media buying or replace part of it.
This post shows a side of growth work beyond paid media: building partner and affiliate programmes that keep selling after the initial sign-up.
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Hudson says most brands trying to build a partner programme get stuck on three things: what to pay, who is worth recruiting and how to keep partners selling once they have said yes.
On rates, they argue that nearly everyone is guessing and copying a competitor with a different margin structure; too low a rate means nobody promotes the brand, while too high a rate funds sales that would have happened anyway.
On recruitment, the post says a supplement brand needs different partners from a fashion brand, and that founders often chase the largest following regardless of audience fit.
On retention, the post describes affiliates who sign up, receive a link, hear nothing else and drift off within a month.
Hudson points to UpPromote's benchmark tool for commission rates across 39 niches and cites Comfrt as a brand that scaled almost entirely in the US through its affiliate programme.
For brands planning a campaign
If a brief includes affiliate, partner or influencer strategy, this post offers a practical checklist for rate setting, partner fit and activation. Ask how the agency would benchmark rates against the client's margin structure and what retention plan would keep partners active beyond the first link.
This post explains who the agency hires and how it says it trains them—relevant to brands deciding whether to trust the agency with a large ad account.
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Hudson describes a network of over 100 growth minds, 250+ brands, £500m+ in tracked client revenue and £200m per year in live ad spend managed at the time of the post.
They say the agency builds on young, hungry individuals and recruits Market Leaders to run Meta and TikTok ad accounts for ecommerce brands.
Hudson presents this as part of an integrated system, with learnings compounding across large spend, tens of thousands of ads and a large UK creative strategy team.
For brands planning a campaign
Use this to assess staffing and account teams. Ask who will run the account day to day, what supervision and training support them, and how learnings from other accounts are transferred without treating the client as a training ground.
Olly Hudson argues that many DTC brands lose money by guessing affiliate commission rates, recruiting partners by audience size rather than buyer fit, and failing to keep affiliates active after signup.
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The post promotes UpPromote’s benchmark tool, which matches a Shopify store to one of 39 niches and gives commission benchmarks, partner profiles, and activation steps. Comfrt is cited as a brand that scaled in the US through affiliate partners and saw halo effects in paid and organic channels.
Benchmark commission rates by Shopify niche, define partner profiles, and use setup steps to keep signed partners active.
The post promotes UpPromote; ask for the underlying benchmark data and client-level results.
For brands planning a campaign
For a scaling ecommerce client, ask how partner rates are set against margin and niche, how partners are selected for actual buyer overlap, and what retention plan keeps affiliates selling after the first link. Treat the UpPromote and Comfrt examples as one agency’s promotional case, not as universal benchmarks.
At a Berlin performance marketing event, Olly Hudson describes a widening gap between high demand for creative and low supply of people who can do it well.
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More assets alone do not help if they repeat the same campaign goal.
They contrast volume with strategy and say brands getting it right run creative diversity and brand consistency in the same account instead of flip-flopping between performance and brand.
Andromeda is said to reward diversity faster than many internal teams can match.
Run creative diversity and brand consistency together rather than treating performance and brand as alternating quarterly choices.
The assessment comes from a conference talk and does not include audited client account data.
For brands planning a campaign
For a creative strategy partnership, test whether the agency can produce genuinely different signals, not just 200 versions of one concept. Ask how they resource creative strategy, balance brand consistency with performance testing, and demonstrate distinct briefs inside one account.
Olly Hudson warns that many brands overspend on bottom-funnel, most-aware creative during Black Friday, leaving themselves with a shrinking audience and rising CPMs.
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The post cites an audit finding that the average brand wastes 70% of its Black Friday budget on customers who would have bought anyway. The recommendation is to keep enough top-of-funnel unaware and problem-aware assets running before, during, and after peak, unless other channels are already generating demand.
Use top-of-funnel creative to fill the funnel before and during peak, and reserve heavy bottom-funnel spend for brands with demand generation elsewhere.
Ask for the sample size and methodology behind the 70% waste figure, which is based on agency audits and a D2C Diaries episode.
For brands planning a campaign
For a scaling ecommerce client heading into peak, build an audience before November rather than discovering in December that there is nobody left to convert. Ask for a funnel-balance plan that separates demand creation from demand capture and explains how budget shifts when frequency rises and reach falls.
Olly Hudson argues that the first purchase is often a write-off unless average order value is above roughly $500 to $1,000.
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They relay Omer Kaplan’s view that brands pulling ahead predict repeat purchase rate, subscription months, and LTV before the sale, then bid to that number instead of first-order ROAS.
Two readiness checks are given: at least 70% gross margin on landed COGS and 2.5x LTV to CAC at entry.
The recurring line is that targeting is creative now, but bidding strategy is the LTV model.
Set bidding strategy from predicted LTV, repeat purchase rate, and subscription duration rather than first-order profit.
Ask how the thresholds from Omer Kaplan’s D2C Diaries interview have been validated beyond the post.
For brands planning a campaign
When assessing paid media for a scaling ecommerce client, ask whether the agency models LTV before acquisition and whether the client clears the margin and LTV:CAC thresholds. If not, more spend may simply lose money faster.
Olly Hudson’s Q3 agency update reports 22% MRR growth, record-low churn, new senior hires, a post-click offer that reduced CAC by over 30% on its first build, a first TikTok live for a beauty client, over 48,000 unique ad concepts, 20+ growth audits, events, podcasts, and BFCM workshops.
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The post repeatedly returns to people as the foundation of agency success and says the group is preparing studios and a 2027 strategy.
Invest in people, service operations, and post-click implementation alongside media buying.
Figures in Soar Group’s posts are self-reported and not independently verified.
For brands planning a campaign
For a scaling ecommerce client, use this as evidence of service breadth across creative, post-click, and social commerce. Ask for named team members, current capacity, examples of post-click work, and substantiation for the reported figures.
Founder history, scale claims and proprietary diagnostics
Olly Hudson’s founder story runs from leaving school at 16 to founding Soar With Us at 21, opening a Leeds office, launching a TikTok agency, merging with Hambi Media, opening a London HQ and building a team of 100+ managing £600M+ in ad spend.
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The post positions the agency as the UK’s #1 Independent Meta Agency and an official UK TikTok Partner. It also introduces The Growth Compass, a diagnostic built from £170M+ in spend across 250+ brands and now offered as a self-serve framework.
Run a proprietary diagnostic on new brands and offer a self-serve version of the framework.
Ask for evidence supporting the ranking, partner status and spend figures; the posts report these claims but do not independently verify them.
For brands planning a campaign
Use the founder history and diagnostic framework to assess whether the agency has the scale and repeatable intake process a scaling ecommerce client needs. Ask how The Growth Compass is scored, how it changes campaign plans, and which parts are self-serve versus agency-led.
In a recruiting post, Olly Hudson describes an agency built around young, hungry people who join the Growth team, run Meta and TikTok ad accounts for large ecommerce brands, and work within an integrated system built from hundreds of millions in spend and tens of thousands of ads.
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The post lists 100+ growth people, 250+ brands, £500M+ in tracked client revenue and £200M per year in live ad spend managed at the time.
Recruit early-career growth operators and train them within a shared system spanning many brands and accounts.
Ask for account-level results; the performance figures in the recruiting post are self-reported and do not show them.
For brands planning a campaign
For a scaling ecommerce client, ask how much of the account is run by early-career buyers versus senior strategists, what training and oversight they receive, and whether the integrated system produces decisions the client can inspect. The recruiting claims also signal capacity growth; check the current team structure before committing.
Olly Hudson’s clearest business relationships are with ventures they run: Soar With Us, later referred to as Soar Group, and the TikTok agency For You.
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Their saved posts promote UpPromote with a tracked link and cite Comfrt as an affiliate example. Hambi Media, Brand Partners and D2C Diaries appear in connection with a merger, a speaking event and a show; ask about any commercial terms.
Soar Group
Owned business
Olly Hudson says they founded Soar With Us with Joe Marston and opened offices in Leeds and London.
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They describe the group — now posting as Soar Group — as the UK's largest independent Meta agency, with 100+ staff and £600M+ in managed ad spend. A separate recruiting post puts agency reach at 250+ brands and £200M a year in live ad spend, without naming the business.
Olly Hudson points to Comfrt, a US apparel brand, as an example they use when people doubt affiliate programmes move the needle, saying it scaled almost entirely on its affiliate programme.
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They do not state a working relationship with the brand.
D2C Diaries recurs as the show where Olly Hudson shares their commentary: episodes cover Black Friday spend and LTV-based bidding with guests such as Omer Kaplan, and Hudson says their Black Friday workshop material is coming to the show.
Olly Hudson's posts are easiest to explore by following a growth problem from diagnosis to operating detail: why creative volume fails without distinct ideas, how peak-season budgets go wrong, why bids should reflect customer value over time, and how an agency builds repeatable systems around people.
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Start with the Berlin talk on creative supply, then move to the Black Friday funnel warning, the lifetime-value bidding post, and the affiliate programme post for assessment logic. Their founder history and Q3 update show how the same thinking is organised inside an agency.
Both write about creative strategy for paid social and argue that more assets alone won't solve performance problems.
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Levi Steede's post on creative diversity argues that different personas, motivations, awareness levels, and promises create incremental reach, while Olly Hudson's Berlin talk says more creative without more signal diversity just accelerates the same problem.
Levi Steede focuses on quality and training in creative strategy, including whether AI-assisted strategists are overpaid and how to develop a designer into a real strategist. Olly Hudson's material sits more often at agency and account level: creative supply, media buying, peak budgets, and how a growth team is trained and resourced.
Both treat creator and affiliate programmes as performance systems rather than one-off influencer buys.
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Riley Cronin describes recruiting creators into a brand-owned community, compensating them through product, commissions, and ad revenue share, and using organic performance data to decide which ads to scale. Olly Hudson's affiliate post focuses on rates, partner fit, and keeping partners active after signup.
Riley Cronin goes deeper on building the creator community itself, including live shopping and a repeatable six-step recruitment and content pipeline. Olly Hudson's posts cover a broader paid media and agency picture, with affiliate economics as one part of creative strategy, alongside peak planning and LTV-based bidding.
Both see creator retention and ongoing partner relationships as leading indicators of ecommerce growth.
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Barney Brown's TikTok Shop analysis argues that creator retention predicts sales better than impressions, likes, or follower count, and sets out onboarding, incentives, education, check-ins, and product access as the retention system. Olly Hudson makes a related point: affiliates drift away when they get a link and no follow-up.
Barney Brown's evidence and examples focus on TikTok Shop and creator retention for fashion and beauty campaigns. Olly Hudson ranges across Meta and TikTok media buying, creative strategy, Black Friday planning, LTV bidding, and agency operations.
Olly Hudson's posts and follower count answer one question well, but leave buyer-facing questions open.
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The LinkedIn account had 37,402 followers on 7 October 2026, and the writing targets a professional ecommerce audience: agency operators, in-house performance marketers, and DTC founders working on paid media, creative strategy, and partner programs.
The seven posts, published between 15 September and 6 October 2026, cover Black Friday budget planning, affiliate commission benchmarks, creative-strategy hiring, and agency recruitment.
The content therefore appeals to people who commission or run growth work rather than general consumers.
The posts do not establish followers' location, age, gender, or job seniority, and no audience survey results are published.
Their following appears relevant by topic, but its role and geographic composition are unquantified—a key distinction if a DTC client needs senior decision-makers in a specific market rather than reach among marketers generally.
Before treating the follower count as a measure of buyer reach, request platform demographics (geography, age, gender), recent performance figures for posts on topics close to the campaign, with comparable depth and format, and any audience survey on job role or seniority.
LinkedIn followers
37,402
LinkedIn profile record for Olly Hudson · 2026-10-07
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.
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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.
Managed paid-media and creative service
Buyer requirement
The agency runs Meta and TikTok ad accounts for ecommerce brands using a shared system built across hundreds of client accounts, described as 250+ brands and £600M+ in managed ad spend.
Plan for a queue: posts from late September and early October 2026 say the team is fully booked until December and running a forward waitlist.
Onboarding follows the agency's timetable, not the brand's, so raise any hard campaign start date early.
Creative strategy and volume production
Buyer requirement
Creative strategy is treated as a distinct, hard-to-fill skill, and the agency positions itself as one of the UK's largest creative strategy teams.
A quarterly update reports over 48,000 unique ad concepts produced for clients across health, wellness, beauty, tech, personal care, fashion, and fragrance.
Another post argues that extra assets only help when they differ in signal, rather than being versions of the same concept.
Buyers should bring a campaign need that supports genuine variation and not treat raw asset count as the deliverable.
Post-click offer and landing page build
Buyer requirement
A separate post-click offer covers offer design and landing page implementation.
The first build reportedly cut CAC by more than 30%, and the service scaled from £3,000 to £10,000 per day of spend within 30 days.
The offer is introduced with a direct message as the contact route, rather than a published package; agree scope, pricing, and timing before committing spend.
Sponsored placement in their own content
Buyer requirement
Hudson's posts include content built around other companies: one features an affiliate marketing platform's commission benchmark tool with a tracked sign-up link, and others promote episodes of the D2C Diaries podcast.
These read as placements within their own commentary, rather than a standalone sponsorship product.
Ask for rates, audience guarantees, disclosure policy, and booking process before budgeting.
Co-marketing through events and podcast appearances
Buyer requirement
The agency uses its own channels as a partnership surface: it reports hosting growth-leader breakfasts, speaking at six events, recording 15 podcasts, and publishing BFCM workshops.
It also co-produces the D2C Diaries podcast with guests such as Omer Kaplan.
Brands looking for joint content or event collaboration should bring a substantive angle or guest rather than simply buy airtime, and confirm availability well ahead of peak trading periods.
The strongest fit is a scaling ecommerce brand with repeat-purchase economics and enough margin to bid beyond the first order.
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Olly Hudson’s posts describe the agency’s work running Meta and TikTok accounts for 250+ brands and producing creative at volume, including a quarterly figure of over 48,000 unique ad concepts across health, wellness, beauty, tech, personal care, fashion and fragrance.
Their operating logic suits a brand with a defensible margin: they relay a readiness test of at least 70% gross margin on landed COGS and 2.5x LTV to CAC at entry, and argue that unless average order value sits above roughly $500 to $1,000, the first purchase is effectively a write-off.
A brand that clears those thresholds can put the creative-strategy argument to work.
They say the bottleneck in DTC is the supply of people who can build genuinely different creative signals, not raw asset count, and warn that 200 ads repeating one brief do not add diversity.
This evidence supports a scaling client with a subscription or high repeat rate, a real need for creative volume and a peak-season calendar.
Practical conditions matter as much as topic fit.
Posts from late September and early October 2026 say the team is fully booked until December and running a forward waitlist, so a brand with a hard start date should raise the conversation early.
Their strongest public frameworks — Black Friday funnel balance, lifetime-value bidding and post-click offer work reported at a 30%+ CAC reduction on its first build — are described at a level a client can interrogate in conversation, not as published packages.
Confirm fit through a scoping call and ask what a specific client would receive.
A secondary fit is a brand that wants partner or affiliate programme help alongside paid media.
Hudson writes about rate setting, partner selection by buyer overlap rather than follower size, and retention after signup, and points to an affiliate platform’s benchmark tool and a brand case.
This is a recurring theme in their content and works best when the brand also wants media buying or creative from the same team.
When to choose a specialist
Two campaign needs should be rejected based on what the posts say.
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The first is a brand chasing first-order profit on thin margins.
If average order value is low, margin is under the thresholds they relay, and there is little repeat purchase or subscription behaviour, the approach their content argues for is likely to lose money fastest: predicting lifetime value before the sale and paying more than day-one ROAS justifies.
Their framing is clear: brands without that margin structure should fix it before scaling, not scale anyway.
The second is a campaign built around a priced sponsored placement with audience guarantees.
The posts contain no rate card, deliverable list, disclosure policy, booking route or audience demographics beyond a follower count of 37,402 recorded on 7 October 2026.
Where other companies appear, as in the post featuring an affiliate platform’s benchmark tool with a tracked link, the format reads as placement inside their own commentary rather than a standalone sponsorship product.
A buyer who needs fixed fees, guaranteed reach or verified audience composition in a specific market cannot build a budget from these posts.
Reject a sponsored placement on those terms and reframe the brief as a paid-media or creative engagement, or choose a different provider.
A third weak case is a brand with a firm start date inside the next few weeks.
Late-September and early-October posts describe a waitlist running into December, making a short-notice campaign a timing mismatch regardless of topic fit.
A worked campaign example
Brief: a supplement brand selling a subscription product with roughly 75% gross margin and a first-order AOV near $120, planning an eight-week pre-peak build and wanting both paid media and creative strategy from one partner.
Angle: buy the audience before buying the conversion. Focus the conversation on the brand’s funnel split rather than its ROAS target.
Step one — diagnostic intake.
Ask whether the Growth Compass, the diagnostic they describe as built from £170m+ in spend across 250+ brands and offered as a self-serve framework, would be run against this account and how its score would change the plan.
This tests whether the intake is real or a lead magnet.
Step two — margin and LTV check.
Confirm the 70% gross margin on landed COGS and 2.5x LTV to CAC thresholds against the client’s actual numbers, and agree what repeat-purchase rate and months on subscription the bidding model will assume.
The campaign angle depends on this: with subscription LTV modelled before acquisition, the brand can justify paying more per new customer than a competitor bidding to first-order profit.
Step three — creative diversity, not creative volume.
Set the brief so the eight-week output contains distinct signal territories — an unaware hook set, a problem-aware set and a proof set — rather than more versions of one concept.
Ask for examples where separate briefs produced different audience signal inside one account; their argument is that duplicate assets do not help.
Step four — funnel balance into peak.
Keep unaware and problem-aware assets running through the whole period, and shift weight to most-aware creative only to the extent the brand has demand generation elsewhere.
Their peak-season warning is that the average brand wastes around 70% of its Black Friday budget on people who would have bought anyway.
Step five — post-click. Pair the media plan with an offer and landing page build under the post-click service they describe.
Step six — partner layer. If the brand has an affiliate or creator programme, apply the rate/recruitment/retention checklist from the partner-programme post as a second channel feeding the same funnel.
Next step: a scoping call that opens with current capacity and the December waitlist, then the diagnostic and threshold numbers, then a written brief for the creative signal sets. Ask whether the team will share account-level examples and name the staff responsible for meeting the thresholds; the public posts offer arguments and self-reported figures, not audited client results.
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?
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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.
The tradeoff is that this evidence shows teaching and diagnosis, not managed execution.
Steede explains how to distinguish fake creative diversity from real signal and how to develop a strategist.
They also argue that many self-styled creative strategists charge €4–6k a month for prompt-and-paste work.
Before hiring an embedded strategist, ask who will do the work, what the scope covers and whether it extends beyond scriptwriting; if you need a partner to take over Meta and TikTok buying and deliver creative at volume, ask for managed-spend figures and quarterly concept output.
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.
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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.
The plan takes months to build.
The posts say affiliate revenue covers the programme by month four, so the brand must fund recruitment, product seeding and weekly content review before payback, while ensuring people can coach creators consistently.
The posts detail community mechanics but offer little on paid-media operations, including account-level bidding, budget structure or buying across Meta and TikTok.
If you want one partner accountable for both creative strategy and buying, ask directly whether that scope is included.
The posts also describe a live-shopping studio that lost money every month for its first 12 months before turning—a clear measure of the patience this model requires.
Choose Barney Brown, of Social Hit, when the partnership decision is really about TikTok Shop growth and creator retention.
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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.
The posts focus on TikTok Shop and creator-programme retention.
They offer less on the broader creative-strategy questions a scaling DTC client may bring to this decision: distinct signals across awareness levels, lifetime-value bidding on Meta and peak-season funnel balance.
For a TikTok-first growth plan, the retention numbers and five-part system are more actionable.
If you want one partner across Meta and TikTok creative strategy, ask directly about that scope.
The posts also include hiring notices for senior leadership roles and open 2026 campaign slots, so check team capacity and who would run the account.
This page is built from seven public LinkedIn posts attributed to Olly Hudson, captured in a snapshot observed on 7 October 2026.
All seven were reviewed in full text.
They cover affiliate and partner programme economics, creative strategy, Black Friday planning, lifetime-value bidding, hiring, a founder career timeline and an agency quarterly update. the research no publication dates for the posts, and no transcripts, video, or pages outside LinkedIn, so the timing signals in the material are internal to the posts themselves — one was written 53 days before Black Friday and another reports quarterly results.
Figures such as follower counts, revenue, managed ad spend and client outcomes are Olly Hudson's own statements in the posts and are not independently verified here.
Comparative references come from the posts of three other creators in the DTC and creator-marketing space, used in the similar-creator and alternatives sections.
Open gaps that could change how this page is read: no sponsorship rate card, deliverable list or booking terms; no audience demographics by geography, age or seniority; no client-level performance data behind the self-reported numbers; and no evidence in this the research about earlier or signature work beyond the businesses named, so whether Olly Hudson has other notable work is unresolved.
One saved post ends with a signature that does not match the name on the account; that inconsistency remains unresolved in the material.
