Conor Macdonald, partner at Ridge, describes how their team uses the startup Icon to repurpose thousands of hours of existing video footage into new targeted ads.
“Icon's been cool in that because it is basically an AI video editor. We can say, Hey, we want a concept to appeal to 40 year old men in flyover states, and it will put together A concept and kind of piece together and stitch together the content to do that.”
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More from Conor Macdonald
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Meta contact called current climate for DTC brands a "bloodbath"
“The second point that I have is from our contact at Meta who described the current climate for DTC brands, at least the growth oriented ones as a quote unquote bloodbath.”
Conor MacdonaldMar 24, 2025▶ 2:59Conor Macdonald on "Why Meta Ads Are Failing" and "How AI is Saving E-Commerce".
PredictionNot checkable as stated
LLMs won't be a 10X ad platform for discovery-driven DTC brands
“Probably I wouldn't say a 10 X ad platform. I think the important distinction is like there are certain brands and industries that benefit from like these high intent channels, right? You are looking for a mattress or you are looking for insurance. They're the…”
Conor MacdonaldMar 24, 2025▶ 8:36Conor Macdonald on "Why Meta Ads Are Failing" and "How AI is Saving E-Commerce".
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Data shows digital ad platforms are performing worse while costs increase
“Clearly what all the data is telling us is that not only are things getting more expensive, ad platforms are performing worse.”
Conor MacdonaldMar 24, 2025▶ 2:14Conor Macdonald on "Why Meta Ads Are Failing" and "How AI is Saving E-Commerce".
Insight
Meta's ad algorithm now skews toward warmer audiences over incremental reach
“They began kind of weighting outcomes differently. It's become more middle and bottom of funnel to say you know, it's sort of serving to warmer and warmer audiences and us as marketers or, you know, Growth people, like we want to be driving incremental results…”
Conor MacdonaldMar 24, 2025▶ 4:00Conor Macdonald on "Why Meta Ads Are Failing" and "How AI is Saving E-Commerce".
AssertionNot publicly verifiable
DTC consumer sentiment recently dropped to its lowest level since October
“And on the 18th or just a couple of days ago, consumer sentiment about the economy dropped to the lowest level since October 14th of last year to paint the picture of how are people feeling about spending dollars today?”
Conor MacdonaldMar 24, 2025▶ 2:49Conor Macdonald on "Why Meta Ads Are Failing" and "How AI is Saving E-Commerce".
Disclosure
Ridge completes creative concepting 5x to 10x faster using Claude
“The further upstream parts of the creative process, the concepting, the briefing is, we're probably doing five, 10 times faster, and probably more, with more novelty than we were otherwise, just because it's easier to ideate with something like, we use Claude …”
Conor MacdonaldMar 24, 2025▶ 10:26Conor Macdonald on "Why Meta Ads Are Failing" and "How AI is Saving E-Commerce".
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