Bridging the gap between the art and science of marketing

A successful founder must first recognize the opportunity in front of them and then stay focused on harvesting the opportunity through the processes of building products, teams, companies, and markets. This is especially true when the opportunity isn’t about making things faster, or smaller, or easier to use, but instead is predicated on helping people better work together to complete essential, highly complex tasks.

How do you remain focused on solving hard people-oriented problems in a noisy world featuring ephemerally shiny options? By bridging the seemingly intractable gap separating the art and science of marketing.

Motion is the leading provider of software enabling creative strategists to dramatically improve how businesses deliver content to the right customers in the right channel at the right time. It’s a rapidly expanding opportunity that became clear only because of Reza Khadjavi’s unique path.

Q: Tell us a bit about your early life.

I grew up in downtown Montreal. My dad was a law professor at McGill, a premier Canadian university. We lived near the McGill campus. My dad loves academia and, I think, wanted that life for me. I have an older brother, a year and a half older than me. He and I were very, very close growing up. We were always up to something, and in retrospect, that something always was entrepreneurial. For example, if my parents bought a bulk of soda from Costco, we’d pack a bunch of it in a bucket of ice and sell it to the kids in the playground.

As I got older, I just couldn’t shake that entrepreneurial bug; I always knew that I wanted to start a business. I dropped out of university at 20 and started my first company with my brother, a laundry delivery business, Nettoyeurs Express, which means “express cleaners” in French. It was “Uber for laundry,” but this was in 2008, before there was an Uber. The idea was that we’d come to your house and pick up your laundry and dry cleaning and then deliver it back to you. Later, a bunch of funded companies went after this problem, but none of them actually ended up working out, which is interesting.

I ended up cobbling together a useful software system for our business. That’s how I fell in love with software, both as a creative craft and as a business model. I mean, it just seemed too good to be true. Here we were running this very low-margin convenience-laundry business that involved high programmed costs, like 60% to the dry-cleaning partner, renting the van, buying gas, and paying drivers. It was also very hard to expand. Replicating it in a new city required the sunk costs of building out a new network of dry cleaner partners, acquiring new customers, hiring new drivers — you get the idea. Expansion just wasn’t practical. But franchise the approach through software? You could grow the business through the efforts of other entrepreneurs at no marginal cost to us. Software lets you sell to anybody in the world without limitations.

After a couple of years in Nettoyeurs Express, I decided I wanted to spend the rest of my career in software. My brother and I sold the company to the dry-cleaning partner that was doing all the cleaning, and I got my first and only real job at Hubba, an early-stage startup. So, I moved to Toronto to join Hubba as a software engineer. Hubba was trying to build a wholesale/retail brand marketplace. I worked there for about a year and got the entrepreneurial bug again. I left Hubba with two colleagues to start something new.

Q: Before we get to your second venture, what lessons did you take away from Nettoyeurs Express that shaped you today?

I think one important lesson I gleaned was “learn by tinkering.” To build the Nettoyeurs Express infrastructure, I didn’t spend a lot of time reading about graphic design or studying software engineering theory or watching programming tutorial videos. I just started designing and printing out posters, which I really liked. From there, it was a small jump to laying out HTML elements for our website. Then, I started trying to add forms to our site. Once I got that working, I wanted to add self-service function, like rescheduling orders. We’d come up with something very specific we wanted in our business, and I’d figure out how to build, implement, test, and maintain it. I think that actually is one of the best ways to learn programming. Very targeted, very practical, rapid feedback learning.

Q: “Learn by tinkering.” That certainly sounds like a founder motto. So, you guys decided to do something new. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah, sure. I think the most important dynamic about what came next for me is that I found the people I wanted to start something with before I found the problem that I wanted to solve. There were three of us. We would gather nights and weekends and spitball ideas in the B2B software space, but we just weren’t making progress. But we enjoyed being with each other. We knew our talents and personalities blended together in a special way. At some point, we just realized that the idea was the team, you might say. We quit our jobs and gave ourselves a summer to seed a new B2B software business, one that solved a key business problem and made money through software licensing.

The second thing we did was to expand our sources of inspiration. We were coming up with good business ideas, but not the great business idea that we all could commit to. So, we went to Yelp and started cold emailing a variety of small business owners and just asking them if they would talk to us and tell us about their problems.

Q: Market research by Yelp. Interesting.

Yeah, it was. Talking to the potential customers that you want to build for, you want to serve, is just exciting. We’d get them on a call and ask: “Hey, we’re thinking about an idea in this area. Can we ask you some questions?” And that led to this one idea that we ended up pursuing. We saw that e-commerce was starting to get very popular. Shopify was, and continues to be, Canada’s tech darling. At the time, though, Shopify was very, very early. I think they had around 50,000 merchants on their platform; today, that number is in the several millions. Also, at about that time, Facebook’s platform was facilitating the emergence of direct-to-advertise model, effectively giving advertisers the option to cut out ad-buying agencies. Those two forces met — and amplified — each other. Shopify became a fulfillment channel for Facebook’s marketing channel. That combination really made it possible for small ecommerce merchants to scale to reach the world.

But Facebook advertising wasn’t simple. Merchants needed to install a bunch of code snippets from Facebook onto their web store. They also needed to sync their product catalog from Shopify over to Facebook. It was a heavy IT load for a small merchant. Most didn’t have the expertise and, therefore, most couldn’t do it quickly or well. They needed tools that embedded that expertise and streamlined the process. That’s where we stepped in; we built a lot of the tooling for integrating Shopify and Facebook. We built an app called Shoelace. It automated setting up Facebook advertising for Shopify store owners. At the exact right moment, we solved a very simple problem that every single Shopify merchant had, and the app really took off.

But, like I said, it wasn’t a deep problem we were solving. Our solution didn’t lock-in business. We knew that, eventually, Shopify and Facebook would build their own native integrations with one another and displace Shoelace. And that’s what happened. From 2018 to 2020, our business was in pretty bad shape. So, we took steps to salvage value from Shoelace and started looking for our next software adventure.

We didn’t have to go far. Our experience at Shoelace led to something we called “customer journey advertising.” Basically, we developed this segmented approach to advertising that allowed advertisers to serve up adverts based on factors like “how many times visiting the store” and “days since visiting the store.” Customers were very excited about it, and we were too.

The challenge was that we were bucking the evolution of digital advertising. Algorithms were getting really good at audience targeting, but customer journey advertising presumed that the best approach to audience targeting was segmenting them. Pretty quickly, we determined that the best practice was just to let the algorithms figure out what was the right message for the right person at the right moment.

Q: Automation is hitting marketing, too, but often automation in one area highlights problems in another. What did your study of the opportunity find?

Exactly. This was around 2020. When we spoke with professional performance marketers about issues and needs, they told us they were spending less time on audience targeting and more time on creative; they were letting the algorithms figure out who to target where and when and spending more time on what their business should say in those moments. The revenue driver moved from targeting to creative, with a specific focus on creative asset management.

The marketing profession suddenly has two streams of focus: data and creative. Marketers were gathering all this data, including volumes of data from analog sources like in-store and billboard interactions, and feeding all this data into models like “ideal customer profiles.” Done right, businesses use these models across a product’s entire lifecycle, from concept through design and go-to market and full engagement. It’s powerful stuff. But it remains sub-optimal unless the right content is being served. Increasingly refined data must be married to increasingly specific content to keep a marketing engine efficient and effective.

And that process leads to the fundamental tension in marketing: The data stream is advancing rapidly, generating all these spreadsheets and analytics highlighting the “who, when, and where,” but you put a web analytics tool or a spreadsheet in front of creative folks, the people responsible for “what,” and you get a dead stare. The creative folks are like, “A spreadsheet? I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” It’s a serious mismatch, especially given that hundreds and hundreds of creative assets can be required and all of that involves hefty costs.

That’s the breakdown in the marketing workflow that Motion is targeting. Around 2021, we built a minimum viable product (MVP) that combines marketing data and creative in one place in a form that creative people can use and that treats creative assets as first-class citizens, equal to data. Motion provides the tools for creative people to understand how their creations are performing and then subsequently take actions in concert with analytics and revenue professionals to improve marketing performance.

Motion really does bridge this divide between the data and the growth people and the creative people. The MVP really worked. People loved it. And we hit the sweet spot at the exact right moment. Dara Denney is one of the most popular influencers in the whole performance space. She’s been creating content around performance marketing for many, many years. If you go back to her YouTube channel, you’ll see that anything prior to 2020, she was talking about lots of different tactics and strategies around audience targeting. And then suddenly around 2021, she shifts and focuses almost entirely on how best to marry creative and performance marketing. That’s Motion in the background, handling all the magic.

Q: You know, my background is marketing, and I’ve seen the dichotomy you’re talking about firsthand. You’ve spoken about how marketing functions might evolve. Can you share a story about a personal journey a marketer took because of Motion?

Absolutely. In our conversations with creatives, we found a new role forming, the “creative strategist.” The creative strategist is using data and analytics to set creative direction, like an analytics or growth person, but has the creative chops to translate those insights into consumable content. They bring together the “what to do” and “how to do it.”

One early creative strategist we met was Alicia. She read one of our eBooks on the creative strategist role while she was working as a graphic designer at a major brand and the light bulb went off for her. She told me, “Wait a second, I’m really limiting myself as a creative person, wasting cycles by waiting for somebody else to tell me what to do or what’s working. But Motion can lower my data-related barriers to better understand the big picture. That makes me a better collaborator, a better contributor, and makes my job a lot more fun.” It was career defining for her.

The same thing is happening at a pretty phenomenal scale in our industry. Every year we host this virtual conference called the “Creative Strategy Summit.” The first year we did it in 2022, I think there were about 1,000 registered attendees, which honestly for us was wild because most B2B companies struggle to get 100 people to show up to a webinar. It was a big success for us, so we decided to run it again in 2023 and we got 5,000 registered attendees. We were blown away! But this past September, we ran it for the third time and 18,000 folks registered to attend. That is crazy rapid growth in any world.

Q: Amazing. What do you provide? Is it mostly tutorials and opportunities for networking?

Yeah, so it’s a two-day event for the CMO, head of growth, and creative people. It covers a range of topics about marketing’s changing role, new approaches to improving marketing productivity and, of course, excelling at creative strategy. All these individuals and groups are triangulating around this problem. Anyone involved in the production of performance marketing and creative is a target, including media buyers and growth marketers, who are constantly pressed to better understand how to work with creative people. And creative people are showing up in huge numbers. They intuitively realize that the cost of creation is to head to zero, and that they better find ways to add value beyond editing video. I mean, bad creative can still stain a brand.

So, marketing leaders come to learn how to get their teams to work better together and role members come to learn how to do their jobs more effectively, generate better outcomes, and improve their impact. And all are coming to better understand how best to marry the art and science of marketing. In fact, we baked that notion into the agenda. We have one track called “The Art” and another called “The Science.” We encourage attendees to cross-pollinate.

You know, the one other thing that we keep hearing through our conference and customer conversations is that everybody feels this sense of urgency to improve marketing and recognize that this intersection between art and science is the best place to start. For a long time, the art/science conversation was interesting and, honestly, kind of wistful. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could bring these two sides together? Maybe someday.” But someday is now. Our customers are saying, “We absolutely need people who are good at both, we need them now, and we can get them up and running with Motion.” We believe the market is demanding this role at industrial scale, and people are rapidly gravitating towards it, and we’re just trying to provide the language and the tools to the ecosystem to make the creative strategist a productive reality.

Q: Motion is your fourth startup, three of which you started. Is there one key founder lesson that you’ve learned along the way? And, if there is, how are you baking that learning into Motion?

Focus on a customer problem worth solving. When you’re innovating and building and scaling a company, the imagination of your team can run wild. It’s super exciting to throw around ideas. And, let’s be honest, if you’re working with great people, you throw around a lot of great ideas. The whole process is captivating and inspiring. But if you don’t keep that process rooted in a very concrete, important customer need, then you’re just dreaming. I think that’s the thing that upended our effort to sustain Shoelace. We had all these great ideas about where and how to pivot, but we didn’t stay grounded in a real customer problem. We talked to a lot of customers, but, really, we worked our problem and avoided considering many of the painful discoveries we made about the actual role Shoelace played in our customers’ operations.

We most certainly did not repeat that mistake when we started Motion. We went deep, and I mean deep, into that tension between data and creative in marketing. We talked to countless marketers and studied the process mismatches, the personality conflicts, the organizational failures, and the rationalizations everybody used to explain sub-optimal outcomes in marketing. We knew that this was a meaningful problem to solve. We knew that excellent software tools could suture data and creative together. And we knew that our team could make it happen. We foresaw the emergence of the creative strategist role and how we could facilitate that development.

To make sure we kept that focus, when we started our company, we intentionally hired and organized around the problem we chose to solve. Recently, we documented our company values and right at the top is, “Solve the right problem.” We’re a pretty decentralized organization. And we do come up with a lot of great ideas. But our team has gotten really good at calling a “time out” and huddling virtually to remind ourselves of the problem we’re trying to solve. We still entertain healthy debate and conversation, but we constantly test whether we’re losing track of the core problem we’re solving.

Culturally, I think our team does a great job of introspection when we have disagreements. Often, the disagreement stems from a misalignment of information or perspective. That’s usually easily fixed by sharing information or clarifying perspectives. We find that emphasizing alignment typically brings people back to the touchstone of solving the core problem. And when we get back to that point, the team’s energy and commitment always skyrockets because, well, improving marketing’s effectiveness and performance is a problem worth solving.