Creative strategy and paid social for outdoor and adventure brands. Ecommerce and lead gen — 200+ brands, $20M+ in managed spend.
Tuff Jug makes fuel jugs for dirt bikes, farm equipment, and more. I shot at their SEMA booth, cut 30+ variations out of the footage, and ran it across four platforms. These are the live posts.
More than 2 million people watched the entire two-minute video start to finish. Not a three-second view — the whole thing.
Most people running paid social aren't active on social themselves. No account, no audience, no reps. They've never watched a hook die in the first two seconds on their own post.
How much more effective could your ad buyer be if they lived and breathed the platforms they're advertising on? Imagine working with someone who's actively posting and trying to go viral for their own projects — every insight and trick they pick up gets shared straight to your account.
I spent six years inside an agency watching the alternative: brief the client, wait weeks for footage, run whatever comes back, learn nothing fast.
Post it with no money behind it first. If it can't hold attention for free, paid won't fix it — it'll just buy reach for something people already scrolled past.
Boost what's already working. Paid amplifies proof, not something people already scrolled past.
A team of forty can afford a strategist, a buyer, a videographer, and an editor, because managing the handoffs between them is somebody's full-time job. At that size, specialization is correct.
Below it you're paying three or four people to run three or four separate plans, and nobody owns whether the thing actually worked. A feedback loop that should take a day takes a month.
You can still outsource pieces. But someone has to hold creation, creative strategy, and media buying at the same time, or the loop never closes. It's why creators often make better paid strategists than career buyers — they've felt what works instead of reading about it in a dashboard.
On a feed where everything else was shot on a phone, production value reads as an ad. The moment someone performs for the camera, the thing worth watching is gone.
Capture, don't create. A trade show booth where customers ask the same question forty times. A founder explaining the one design decision he's still annoyed about. The first thirty seconds after someone actually uses the product. Those moments already exist — most brands just aren't in the room with a camera when they happen, and nobody planned for them.
My job is knowing which moments are worth being there for, being there with a phone, and editing them into something that performs.
Some things do need production. Motion graphics, studio work, a proper brand film. For those I bring in people who do it better than I do and direct it. I just don't pretend it's the same job, or that it's what's going to perform on social.
"I've done three other in-salon shoots and I was very uncomfortable. We brought lighting, and I felt intrusive. This was subtle mics, a phone, no tripod. We didn't make a scene, and we got really authentic content because we were so subtle."
Kara Koo
Butter Shears — shear sharpening membership and online retail.
One-hour shoot, filmed on an iPhone.
An adventure travel company running guided running tours around the world. I rebuilt the account from the creative up rather than the bidding down — new hooks, new formats, tested organically before scaling on paid.
The portable cooler-and-AC brand had gone stagnant on Meta. I led the move onto TikTok with Spark ads and creator UGC. Revenue climbed from $6.08M to $11.32M year over year, with a 93% jump in orders.
A supplement brand already growing on Meta and Google that wanted a new channel. After the IcyBreeze playbook, we ran Spark ads on TikTok — DTC website sales rose 339% and sessions grew 155% year over year, with Instagram and YouTube contributing alongside.
The card-game brand was flat on Meta. First month on TikTok lifted revenue 138%, and it held. The post-purchase survey put TikTok as the top discovery channel by a wide margin.
"Thanks to TikTok, we've grown our revenue 5x over six months, and our followers 30x. We're incredibly excited to keep going."Eric McCoy · Founder, Doomlings
Paid social
Paid social
Creative strategy
Across seven years I ran paid social for 200+ brands with $20M+ in managed spend. I built my agency's TikTok ads program from scratch and trained 20+ buyers on it. As Head of Marketing for Utah Tech Week, I grew the account from 20 to 1,000 followers in two weeks — 150K+ organic views, zero paid spend.