In this episode of the Startup CEO Show, host Mark MacLeod interviews Prezza Kajabi, co‑founder and CEO of Motion, about the evolving demands of modern marketing. Kajabi explains that the sheer volume of creative assets required for paid‑social campaigns forces teams to adopt hypothesis‑driven testing and rigorous naming conventions, yet most organizations still analyze performance in spreadsheets or generic BI tools that are alien to creative teams. Motion was built on the principle of creating an analytics product for creatives, translating performance data into a language that designers and copywriters can understand and act upon. This bridge gave rise to a new hybrid role – the “creative strategist” – a person who is equally comfortable with data and imagination. Motion has championed this role through a virtual Creative Strategy Summit, which grew from an empty launch to 17,000 registrants. Kajabi also notes that AI is accelerating the convergence of creative and analytical skill sets, making the ability to combine extreme creativity with extreme data rigor the key competitive advantage for future marketing teams.
It's harder and harder for companies to get attention through marketing these days. Competition is fiercer than ever. Markets are noisier than ever. Prezza Kajabi, co-founder and CEO of Motion, tells us how the future of marketing is a mix of both right-brain creative ideas and left-brain analytical data crunching. Listen and learn.
Yeah, cuz the, to answer the question of what works is not a simple question. Like if you, if you run, part of it is that like the volume of creatives that people run today in particularly paid social advertising is a lot. Like if you want to deploy any kind of a meaningful budget, you have to produce a ton of creative and feed that into the algorithm and see what sticks and see what works. The best teams had this taxonomy around the elements that were part of their hypothesis. So like. If I'm creating an, a set of ads and I'm putting them into, into Meta to run them, the teams themselves usually have some hypotheses around what are we testing? Like what, what do we care about? It's kind of like how product teams will apply event labels when people are using their product so that they can go back and see what's working. So you have to go and set the event variables of like what it is you want to track based on like the the hypotheses that you have. And so the problem is if you, if for a lot of people weren't really good at that, at like writing good naming conventions, and then when you have, when you pull out that data and you wanna analyze it in a spreadsheet, it's a very strange place to do creative analysis. So prior to Motion, people would have like these data platforms, like whether it's like Tableau or like at the time it was called Google Data Studio, now it's Looker. Or honestly, just like pivot tables and spreadsheets, and they would export that data and try to figure out, okay, this like ad underscore this, that, and the other variable versus this other one. And like, you don't have the frame of reference of the actual creative and you can't bring the creative team into that discussion and say, hey, like we're evaluating our creatives right now. Let's talk about it. So you're looking at just like a boring sheet of data. That's not the right environment for like a creative brainstorming discussion.
Right.
So I think the reason was that, um, and this is something I think as we get into the era of AI, I think it starts to become even more interesting, but since the beginning of the internet, anybody who ever built a data product or an analytics product built it for data people, obviously, right? Who else are you gonna build a data product for? But then. The thing that needed to happen was that creative people needed to start wrapping their heads around performance data. And so our, our design principle that went into the product was that what if you built an analytics product, but it was built for creative people, not built for data people. Data people do have like the tooling already. They don't, they don't need another one, but creative people are completely blind to performance data and it's creating a really big friction between teams that needed to bring, build the bridge between their growth people and their creative people were like really coming from different worlds. And so what we started to realize over time with Motion is that we're, we're, we're almost like a translation product where some people speak two different languages and we're like, hey, you two actually need to like talk to each other. So we need to find a common language that you understand and you understand. And what started to become really interesting is that there, have always been people— everyone knows a handful of people like this that are like, this person is really creative, but they're also really analytical. There's kind of a rare combo, but they exist. And we found that the best companies had these types of people. And, and it could be that somebody was from like a more traditional data background, and once they started to get exposed to the creative side, and like, this is actually pretty interesting, like, I'm, I'm I'm having a good time. And they were curious and then they developed their creative side a little bit more and they became these balanced individuals that were like part analytical, part creative, and vice versa. We had a ton of stories from people who were designers. They got introduced to Motion, they started to see data and they started to connect the dots and then they became really good at the data side. And in the early days of Motion, we were like, hey, this, there's something happening here. We need to, we need to like call this out as like a new type of job. And we weren't the ones to like name this job, but we definitely popularized it. There was a term of the creative strategist that a bunch of people were like starting to use, but like no one really knew what that role was. We just noticed that some of the best teams were like calling this out as a dedicated job role. And so Motion basically went all in on this individual job role. We're like, this is the future as far as we can tell. This creative strategist role seems really important. Who knows if this name sticks or not, but we need a new way to express this like type of person who is equally data-driven and creative. So we push that role pretty hard. We do a virtual event every year called the Creative Strategy Summit. The first year we did it, it was like crickets. Like no one, no one really showed up and no one knew what it was. The one that we did this year in October, had 17,000 people register. So yeah, like now we look at our CRM, if we search by like job role creative strategist, like pages and pages of people with that job role. And so this idea of like skill sets collapsing, I think is a, is a common theme that we're seeing right now with AI where, you know, if you're a person who's like really good at design, you might be able to like build stuff now and not be limited by an engineer. And like these, these kind of like, where does, the line and another line again with regards to like talent. And so in the marketing world, like this feels like the most important skillset ingredient for the marketing teams of the future is you have to combine extreme creativity with like extreme rigor on the data side and the people and the teams who figure that out are the ones whose companies are going to grow the fastest. We have like no doubt about that at this point.
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