Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you’ve had a great start to your new year, you’ve been focused, getting things organized for the upcoming year or revenue to be generated, and you have taken some time to recover from all the Q4 madness. This is your lull-period before the rest of the year starts (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, summer, etc.), so take your time.

Today’s email is a culmination of thoughts I’ve had as I’ve been working with more founders in an advisory capacity. Since really coming to NYC about 6 years ago, I’ve invested/advised 100+ consumer brands, and all of their learnings, updates, mistakes, successes and flops give me one more data point to understand patterns of what works, and what doesn’t. 

Today’s email is sort of a rant, based on a lot of things I’m seeing lately, and I hope it has some nuggets of low-hanging fruit for you to execute on, and help break past this problem. But, before we get into that...

Vendor of the Week

If you’re planning to add CTV as a real performance channel in 2026, the #1 thing you need to solve isn’t just “creative”... it’s trust.

CTV is growing fast, but the ecosystem is still a mess. This report calls out that 20.8% of CTV impressions were fake content and 65% of fraud in CTV environments is bot fraud.

Vibe.co’s angle is simple: make CTV “performance-grade” by going reseller-free with Certified Supply (direct publisher integrations, authenticated impressions, no recycled inventory or hidden middlemen), and pairing that with verified identity + measurement so outcomes can be validated outside a walled dashboard.

In fact, this report is a full 2026-friendly CTV Performance Playbook. When you get it for free on this link, you’ll get:

  • A practical breakdown of how to avoid the “black box” (verification + supply path basics).
  • A creative checklist built for CTV (3-second hook, “sound-off” design, persistent CTA, etc).
  • A measurement stack that’s actually CFO-friendly (pixel attribution + incrementality testing + MTA/MMM triangulation).

Get the full report for free on this special link!

Limited Supply

This past week on Limited Supply, I sat with John Scheer (1/2 of Herman Scheer, one of the best branding agencies in the country) to talk all things branding, identity, how to build it, etc. 


It’s closely related to a lot of what is in today’s newsletter, so if you have an extra 45 minutes, put this on while you shower, workout, or go for a walk.

Provocative Patterns of Winning Brands

One thing I’ve said repeatedly going into 2026 is that this is the year of unapologetic branding, provocative content, things that really get people to stop their scroll, zoom in, and question what the hell is happening. Consumers are tired of the same “We are for everyone” slop, and with how much things are starting to mush together, with AI-generated slop, people are becoming attracted to things that stand on their own two feet.

This very concept, I believe, is why there have been more creators than ever, earning more income, creating content for brands... either as a content creator, an influencer, or an affiliate marketer. Yes, affiliate.

The growth of affiliate revenue being paid out to content creators, of all different types, if something that is never monitored, talked about, or expanded on. My guess is it’s because it’s everyone’s own individual private data, who they pay, and how much, and how much spend is put into that channel. Also, the biggest players here are typically the marketplaces themselves, not the brands. Amazon Associates, TikTok Shop affiliates, etc. 

The creator side of this equation is where this thought originated. It’s not the old media companies (Business Insider, Refinery29, etc.) who are making the bulk of affiliate dollars today... it’s creators. It’s mommy bloggers with 150k to 450k followers on Instagram, who have such a distinct personality/persona/morals they map to (aka, their BRAND), and they are making $500k to $2M per month in marketplace affiliate commissions. 

Let me rephrase that... full-time content creators, who are successful at building their own personal brands on Instagram or TikTok or Substack, are making 7-figure per month. My immediate realization... people are tired of the same slop. These creators create a brand around what they stand for, their personality, their tone of voice, and through that, they can sell anything. Why? Because they have a personality people can attach to and relate to.

As a new brand, getting to the $10M to $30M revenue range with a one-dimensional brand is possible, but to get past that, and become a brand that will stay for your grandchildren to shop in their lifetime, it needs to have a strong, distinct personality. I think 2026 is the year we are going to see more of it, both because creators are always the ones to lab-rat-test what brands eventually follow and do, AND the platforms will heavily reward it. You start to see it with some brands creating content series’ that have a niche audience, but blow up.

This got me thinking... What are easy ways to apply this when building a brand? 

  • Photoshoots
  • Site design UX/UI
  • General tone of voice across the brand + consistency of messaging points
  • Positioning/angles you present to sell / solve with your product

Photoshoots are unfortunately not given enough attention at brands. Often-times, the founder is the real creative director in the early days, and if they’re not that type of founder, then it gets outsourced, and isn’t usually updated until someone with senior creative DNA comes into the organization, OR they pay an expensive agency to help with building a proper shotlist and doing that whole process. 

Last year, that would’ve been a valid excuse, but today, with the ability to leverage tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini (which is a multi-modal LLM, allowing it to watch/digest videos and derive patterns), you have no excuse to not replicate what an expensive agency would do for you. That is the process of:

  • Identifying shots from other brands to create a mood board
  • Define it with any additional pieces (fruit, hands, etc)
  • With these AI models, you can even create a rough example of the shot you’re going for

50% of a good photoshoot happens in these 3 main steps above. The remaining 50% is finding a good photographer who can execute on the vision. On the other hand, if you are good enough at prompting AI models, you can create and test some of these shots, even feeling very life-like. 

Site content, UX (user journey), and UI (design/feel) is another big place to differentiate and stand out as a brand. 99% of brands/eCommerce stores you’re competing with run with the same basic Shopify themes. Again, with the access to use AI tools now, and for how advanced some tools are (like Jurni or OuterSignal), it’s never become easier to understand who you’re selling to, and create funnels built for them. That’s the UX. How you bring them in, is like how you would welcome them at the doors of your brand’s store on Rodeo Drive. You’re proud of that store, and you want everyone to have the best experience when they come in. The same goes for your DTC site.

The UI is the look & feel of the store. How does it feel as a brand, visual identity, does it resonate with me as a new consumer coming into the store to see if I like what’s here? Some of my favorite examples we’ve built are David Protein, Salud, Parachute, POV Beauty. All feel so different, distinct, not like standard Shopify websites, and the design and development of that design work in harmony together.

The tone of your brand voice and messaging points you constantly push, are also another way to distinguish your brand. Brands used to have taglines they’d brand heavily, or sonic branding (“Call 1-800 Nine Oh One, 1-1 OH TWO! CORKYS!”). But with how fast content is now created and consumed and thrown out, fewer brands use taglines. That said, finding a couple of key phrases that you say, over-and-over again, through the brand, your content creators, your newsletters, your PR campaigns, your founder-led content, in your investor decks, on your packaging, in your TV commercials... it all compounds and adds up. I remember back when Hint used to lean on its tag line, it was always well-recognized and understood, “Drink water, not sugar.” 

Lastly, the positioning and angles you go after and how you demonstrate to solve problems for your customer set, is another easy way to allow yourself to be provocative, in a way where you know you’re still on the side of your customer. For example, if you’re a cookware brand that has a toxin-free surface, your consistency of messaging against toxic cookware can break you through the feed of wellness slop. 

The beauty of this last point, is you can test AS MANY angles as you want, all with individual funnels (from creative, to landing pages, to offers/bundles), and not worry about attaching your brand to something before its proven. It’s the brilliance of short feedback loops and leveraging performance marketing for brand building. 

If you do nothing else, just test 1 opinionated/provocative funnel before the end of Q1. You might unlock the carpool lane to customer acquisition.

That's all for this week

Thank you for reading through today’s newsletter. This topic hits home as I’m working with a few brands to understand how we’re going to scale this year, but also investing and helping those founders build something special. 

My original topic for today was going to be how so many brands haven’t checked up on their retention marketing funnels and flows, and they’re likely sitting on what could be an additional 20-30% of revenue, if touched-up and done well. I’m going to get a couple of retention experts to work with me and build something tactical, vs just telling you to check it. More on that next week or the week after.

It’s Sunday night, so I hope you get a good amount of rest. It’s cold here in New York, and I know across much of the country, so stay warm, stay hydrated, do some push-ups if you can’t make it to the gym, and have an amazing upcoming week!