Marketing Operators

Cody Plofker, CEO of Jones Road Beauty and e‑commerce operator versed in paid media and TV; Connor MacDonald, CMO of Ridge and channel-strategy specialist. They debate when to expand beyond a hero channel, why customers acquired should drive sequencing, creative and influencer timing, TikTok Shop/affiliate accounting, creator-first content engines, and surprising wins like low-CPM baseball TV buys.

Ari Murray, Chief Digital Officer at Salt & Stone and former Chief Growth Officer at Sharma Brands, brings growth and creative strategy chops from beauty and body brands. She talks agency vs in-house career moves and when to hire partners. She explains using discovery sets instead of discounts, session growth as a daily obsession, and how to test and scale channels without half-committing.

Cody Plofker, CEO of Jones Road Beauty and DTC growth practitioner, walks through building an incrementality-first marketing approach. Short takes cover running consecutive channel tests, using holdouts and scale-up experiments, and measuring upper-funnel channels like CTV and YouTube. Listens to directional reads and strings test results into next hypotheses for continual optimization.

They unpack Meta’s integration of Manus AI into Ads Manager and what that means for paid growth. The conversation weighs AI-driven automation against traditional media buying and evolving ecommerce roles. They explore how teams build internal AI tooling, CRO workflows, and centralized enablement. Creative work and long-term strategy are debated as AI changes hiring and org structure.

Avi Moskowitz, CEO and co-founder of PrettyDamnQuick, builds checkout tools that stop revenue leakage. Mina Zandbar, Mattel’s VP of Global E‑commerce, leads D2C growth and community drops. They talk checkout as the moment of truth. They cover first-party data, personalized checkout trust signals, logistics-driven profitability, and blending startup agility with corporate scale.

Connor Rolain, Head of Growth at HexClad, a paid-acquisition and launch specialist, and Connor MacDonald, CMO at Ridge, who leads product and creative growth. They debate when to add new products into paid channels. They cover geo lift and holdout tests. They compare colorway tweaks versus new silhouettes. They walk through measurement plans and cross-category attribution.

They lay out the strategic priorities brands are using to drive growth in 2026. Topics include building a bulletproof marketing operations system and Slack hygiene. They debate testing volume versus precision and treating retention as a product. They dig into creator-led social, TikTok Shop mechanics, and scaling organic plus paid YouTube integrations.

Cody Plofker, CEO of Jones Road Beauty — builder of creator-in-residence programs and high-volume content systems. Connor MacDonald, CMO of Ridge — builder of in-house creative strategy and signal engineering. They discuss concept-driven creative, campaign structures that balance testing and scaling, pixel consolidation and signal work, and building creator pipelines to produce steady, testable content.

They debate how organic and paid social should fuse in 2026 and why old influencer tactics are fading. They outline Slack workflows that turn organic hits into paid creative and a creator-in-residence hiring model. They compare product-first high-volume creator content to episodic brand plays and unpack TikTok Shop affiliate flywheels and platform-specific creative strategies.

Dara Denney, performance creative consultant and former media buyer turned strategist, shares fast-moving creative operations and why velocity beats perfection. She discusses in-house creators vs strategists, using AI to speed briefs and research, and how organic signals should inform paid creative. The conversation covers creative diversity, scaling creator teams, automations for ad uploads, and aligning content to audience segments.