“The market will tell you your hero. You can’t decide it.”

How do you build a brand after you've seen the inside of 30 others?

Connor Rolain and Cody Plofker sit down with Ari Murray, Chief Digital Officer at Salt & Stone, who spent four and a half years as Chief Growth Officer at Sharma Brands before going in-house. They dig into what it takes to lead growth for a single brand after years of running it for dozens at once.

You’ll learn when to hire an agency versus build in-house, and why the answer changes as a brand matures. Ari shares how Salt & Stone approaches acquisition without discounting, why discovery sets are central to their DTC funnel, and how she thinks about first-order AOV in a scent-driven category where customers can't smell the product before they buy.

They also discuss session growth as a daily obsession, the real cost of dabbling in new channels without enough commitment, and why the line between brand and performance is too often drawn in the wrong place.

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Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026

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Aftersell

https://9ops.co/4i3bb5

Prescient AI

https://www.prescientai.com/operators

Richpanel

https://9ops.co/richpanel

Operators Newsletter

https://9operators.com/

Are you making decisions based on data that proves causality or just correlation?

Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad), Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge), and Cody Plofker (CEO, Jones Road Beauty) dig into what it means to build a truly incrementality-first marketing organization.

They break down how to string together consecutive channel tests — using each result to build the next hypothesis rather than testing in isolation. They share real examples from their own accounts, including how a 20% budget shift to brand video drove a 40% lift in incremental results, why TikTok Shop is proving to reach a new audience for HexClad, and how Jones Road diagnosed and rebuilt a struggling Meta account from first principles.

The conversation also tackles the nuance of measuring upper-funnel channels like CTV and YouTube, when directional reads are enough, and how to build a culture where your team learns to think incrementally without being told to.

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Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026

https://motionapp.com/thumbstop-pulse/creative-benchmarks-2026?utm_campaign=marketing-operators&utm_medium=sponsor

Haus

https://www.haus.io/operators

Prescient AI

https://www.prescientai.com/operators

Richpanel

https://9ops.co/richpanel

Aftersell

https://9ops.co/4i3bb5

Operators Newsletter

https://9operators.com/

Is media buying dead or just evolving?

Cody Plofker, Connor MacDonald, and Connor Rolain unpack Meta’s integration of Manus AI into Ads Manager and explore what it signals for the future of paid growth. The hosts discuss whether AI-driven automation is making traditional media buying obsolete and what this shift could mean for ecommerce teams navigating an increasingly agent-led landscape.

The squad also covers how they’re already applying AI inside their brands, from campaign execution to CRO workflows + internal tooling — evolving growth roles, cross-channel decision-making, and how teams are rethinking structure in response to more capable AI systems.

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Motion Creative Strategy Bootcamp

https://motionapp.com/2026-creative-strategy-bootcamp-paid?utm_source=marketing-operators-podcast&utm_medium=sponsor&utm_campaign=marketing-operators&utm_content=creative-strategy-bootcamp-2026

Richpanel

https://9ops.co/richpanel

Aftersell

https://9ops.co/4i3bb5

Rivo

https://www.rivo.io/operators

Prescient AI

https://www.prescientai.com/operators

Operators Newsletter

https://9operators.com/