First Media US

The easiest way to lose with branded content is getting admired instead of saved. 🌹 This rose ravioli video wins because it does the opposite. It starts as “no way I can do that”… then every step removes doubt… and the payoff looks like something you’d make for someone else. That’s why it earns saves.  It’s not a recipe but a repeatable creative pattern. Here’s the framework behind this So Yummy video: 𝟭) 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲-𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿 The first frame creates curiosity fast. 𝟮) 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽-𝗯𝘆-𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝗱𝗲-𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 Each cut answers the viewer’s next question before they ask it. 𝟯) 𝗚𝗶𝗳𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝘆𝗼𝗳𝗳 It feels like a dinner-party flex, or “send this” moment. 𝟰) 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 Same structure, infinite variations; fillings, sauces, holiday versions, brand integrations. 𝟱) 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝘁’𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘁 Don’t make people “remember it later.” Give them one next step while the motivation is still there. 🔎 Want to know if your content is being admired or acted on? Share one recent post and your goal. We’ll point to the single change that usually turns saves into outcomes: https://lnkd.in/efzK4PzU

Wait, did your affiliate plan just… …send traffic to your Amazon listing before you’d buy from it? Yeah, it did. That’s the hidden leak in most affiliate strategies. Affiliate growth fails when “Amazon” is treated like the strategy. Amazon is the checkout lane. The strategy is the loop: off-platform discovery → Amazon PDP → convert → iterate → scale. If you are driving cold, off-platform traffic and your PDP is not conversion-ready, you end up paying to educate shoppers… then losing them at the moment that matters. A quick self-check before you spend another dollar on off-platform traffic: Would you buy it from your current PDP in 10 seconds? Is your title, imagery, A+ Content, and reviews doing the selling work? Is your offer clear (price, promo, bundle, Subscribe and Save where relevant)? Are you in stock and stable on Buy Box? If you want a fast gut-check on whether your PDP is ready for off-platform demand, we’ll tell you what to fix first before scaling traffic: https://lnkd.in/efzK4PzU

Frictionless production is raising the trust bar for buyers. When content becomes easy to produce (AI, templates, endless variants), teams respond with volume. The unintended result is predictable: everything starts to feel interchangeable… trust drops… action drops - because friction never disappears. It moves. When brands remove friction from production, they often push it onto the buyer. Now the buyer has to do more work to answer: Is this credible? Is this for me? What do I do next? Can I trust this enough to buy? 👉 Our answer is what we call good friction. Good friction is brand discipline that makes buying feel effortless. That’s what the “Good Friction Loop” in the graphic is showing, with a real example from Walmart x So Yummy: ✔ Won attention natively with recipe-first creative, then sent viewers to a shoppable hub (85M+ views; 154K clicks). ✔ Removed the “where do I buy?” pause by making the destination a shoppable landing page built for action. ✔ Gave intent a next step with clear CTAs, then followed up based on engagement signals, not everyone. ✔ Scaled what the loop was already proving with dynamic ads (3x ROAS; 27K direct purchases). ✔ Kept the loop alive with new entry points like Unbox’d, which drove nearly 7M views and 63K clicks. This is where 2026 is heading anyway: tighter budgets, shifting algorithms, and rising pressure to prove ROI. Brands cannot afford awareness without a conversion path; executives want shoppable, attributable content. 🔎 If you’re seeing “plenty of attention” but not enough action...Share one piece of content and where you want the buyer to go next. We’ll tell you where friction is landing on the buyer, and the single change that usually unlocks the loop: https://lnkd.in/efzK4PzU

Most Mother’s Day content dies at “aww.” This one moves at “send this.” That “send this” moment is what brands should be designing for. Because on Mother’s Day, the best distribution strategy is emotional; people do the forwarding for you. 🎯 This video hits the three drivers: 1. Immediate payoff; you see the “flower” take shape fast. 2. Low friction; the steps feel doable, not aspirational. 3. Social trigger; it’s the kind of thing you tag someone with. If you’re a brand trying to win holiday moments without copying the same template every year, the play is building formats that naturally create shares and saves, then scaling them across channels. That’s the difference between holiday content that gets likes and holiday content that creates momentum. If you’re planning a Mother’s Day creative and want a repeatable format that can scale beyond one post 👉 https://lnkd.in/efzK4PzU

When reach becomes the goal, outcomes become an accident. The video is the simplest metaphor for what a lot of teams are doing right now: Throw more audiences… more angles… more “content”… and hope something lands in the glass. But 2026 is not rewarding hope. Budgets are tighter, algorithms keep shifting, and the pressure to prove ROI keeps rising. Brands can’t afford awareness without a conversion path; executives want shoppable, attributable content. If you want a simple way to stop chasing reach and start engineering outcomes, here’s the operating model we see work: 1) Pick one ICP, not “everyone.” 2) Pick one conversion path, not “link in bio.” 3) Pick one measurement truth, not five dashboards. Then iterate on creative with the same discipline you use for spend. 🎯 If you want to pressure-test your current plan and identify the one change that will move it from reach-first to outcomes-first: https://lnkd.in/efzK4PzU

If your margins can’t carry CAC, no pricing model will save you. “Pay for results” sounds like it removes risk. In reality, it forces clarity. If the unit economics don’t work, a performance test will just surface it faster. That’s why we use a quick readiness filter before we explore performance pricing. You’re ready when: ✔ You know your LTV (even a range). ✔ Repeat purchase or subscription is real. ✔ You have margin to pay for acquisition. ✔ You can ship new creatives weekly. ✔ Success is measurable. If you’re strong on most of these, performance pricing can work. If not, you’ll be happier with a different engagement model until the fundamentals are in place.

If you send TikTok traffic to your Amazon PDP today, would you be proud or panicked? Off-platform demand is not the hard part. The hard part is what happens after the click. The short video attached is a good example of off-platform creative that can spark incremental discovery. But discovery only turns into Amazon revenue when the loop is ready. 👉 Here’s a quick readiness check we use with Amazon-first brands before scaling traffic: 𝟭) 𝗕𝘂𝘆 𝗕𝗼𝘅 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 If you can’t hold the Buy Box and stay in stock, you’re just paying to send shoppers to someone else. 𝟮) 𝗣𝗗𝗣 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗰𝘀 Images, title, A+ content, reviews, and price anchoring have to do the heavy lifting for cold traffic. 𝟯) 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗴𝘁𝗵 Bundle, promo, subscribe and save, whatever your category requires; the offer has to win fast. 𝟰) 𝗠𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 You need a way to evaluate “did this move the SKU” without guessing. 𝟱) 𝗜𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 Off-platform works when you can update the page and creative weekly, not quarterly. 🚀 If you want help setting that loop up, start here: https://lnkd.in/efzK4PzU

The scary part of instant design is not the output. It’s the distribution lag. ChatGPT Images 2.0 is making it easier to generate structured marketing assets, including dense text and multi-image sets, fast. So “making the asset” stops being the bottleneck. But most teams will still take weeks to: approve it, deploy it, and learn from it. Vote below, then share what you think becomes the biggest bottleneck: strategy, QA, or distribution.

If your content makes people want it, then sends them to search, you’re funding competitors. The moment you introduce a detour, you introduce drop off. And that detour is usually a search bar. That’s why product tagging matters. When the product is tagged in the video, buying becomes the next step, not a separate journey. No “I’ll come back later.” No “what was that brand called?” No competing listings. That’s also why social commerce is becoming the new shopping behavior. Social channels put social proof right next to the buy button, and the path can go from browsing to checkout in seconds. We’ve seen how powerful that can be. In First Media’s 360° Shoppable Walmart campaign, So Yummy’s organic recipe content drove 154K clicks to the shoppable landing page. If you want to see what this looks like on your brand, we’ll map one of your top videos to a shoppable path and the exact metrics to watch👉 https://lnkd.in/efzK4PzU

Most performance budgets are paying for experiments. Ours are funded by us. That’s the fastest way we know to reduce wasted ad spend. Most brands are not anti-performance marketing. They are anti-paying to learn. Because the classic setup looks like this: You pay fees plus spend. You fund the testing. Then you hope the plan scales. The model we’re building at First Media flips that risk. You pay for results. We fund the tests. We scale what works. When the partner only wins when results happen, the operating system has to be different: ✓ Tighter measurement ✓ Faster creative iteration ✓ More disciplined testing ✓ Scaling based on proof, not promises. That’s what an accountable performance system looks like in practice. It turns creative into learnings, then turns learnings into scaled outcomes, without asking the brand to bankroll endless experiments. If you want a buyer-first breakdown of what this could look like for your current paid creative and testing roadmap, we’ll share the framework and tell you what we’d test first: https://lnkd.in/efzK4PzU