S17 S2: The Creative Supply Chain Every Brand Needs (And Most Don't Have)

A billion-dollar ad budget sounds like it solves everything. It doesn't.

Nik shares a recent experience he had sitting in on a CMO offsite for one of the largest consumer brands in the world, expecting the conversation to be light-years beyond anything a $10M or $50M brand deals with. Instead, he found the exact same problems: slow creative production, personalization that doesn't scale, and attribution that never tells the full story.

In this solo episode, Nik breaks down why more resources at a big company often means more dependencies, not more speed, and uses the "telephone game" as the perfect analogy for what happens when a single test has to pass through strategy, brand, legal, and five other teams before it ever runs.

He also gets into:

Why lean, scrappy brands often move faster than teams with 10x the budget

The real cost of approval bottlenecks on how fast you can learn

Why deliberate angle testing beats "spray and pray" every time

A first look at the "creative supply chain," the framework Nik's been using with clients to source, produce, and test content on repeat

If you've ever wondered why growth feels harder the bigger your team gets, this episode is for you!

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