DAVID KOVES

AI Systems at R2G Labs I Ex-Google I $500M+ Ecommerce Revenue Generated I B"H

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

Your creative is the targeting now.

Meta reads the ad and finds the buyer. The angle does the work your audience settings used to do. Stop obsessing over interests. Start obsessing over the idea.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

300+ brands. $500M+ generated. One boring lesson.

There is no secret tactic. There is a system. That's the whole thing.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

Better creative is literally cheaper reach.

Meta weighs your bid by how well it expects your ad to perform. Good creative is a bidding strategy, not a design choice.

[Kasper Dolk | CRO & LPs @kasper_dolk]

One of the biggest PDP winners for us:

Make the USPs/store benefits under the ATC button clickable. We saw that in heatmaps & session recordings people were clicking the USPs, meaning they wanted more info on it.

Instead of static copy, each benefit opens a popup with more info on:

• Shipping
• Product quality
• Payment options
• Returns & guarantees

It allows you to handle objections exactly where the buying decision happens. simple implementation to try on your store.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

The fastest way to kill a good product is to advertise it like everyone else advertises theirs.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

Your ad isn't underperforming because the hook is weak. It's underperforming because it's talking to nobody in particular.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

After 13 years and 300+ brands, the pattern is boring: the winners test angles, the losers test colors.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

Most brands don't have a creative problem. They have a sameness problem. Every ad looks like it came from the same template because it did.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

If you're afraid to pause an ad, it's already controlling you instead of the other way around.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

A brand with no point of view is just a price tag. People remember opinions, not features.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

After enough accounts you stop guessing. The data tells you what to make next if you bother to read it.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

You don't scale what works. You scale what works and stays fresh. Those are different jobs.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

Before we write a single ad for a brand, I sit down and read about a hundred reviews. Theirs, and their competitors'.

The first time I did this, I expected to skim for stars and move on. Instead I got stuck. Page after page of people describing the exact same ache in their own words, then the exact moment it lifted.

I realized I'd been trying to invent language that was already sitting right there, written by the people I was trying to reach.

We wrote that ad almost entirely out of phrases customers had used. It outperformed everything clever we'd brainstormed in a room.

The lesson stuck. The words that sell aren't the ones you craft. They're the ones you find. People will tell you precisely how to talk to them if you slow down long enough to listen.

Strategy that starts in a vacuum stays in a vacuum.

Go read your reviews before you write another word. The best copywriter on your account is the customer.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

Most ads answer questions nobody asked. Start with the objection living rent-free in your buyer's head.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

A brand came to us convinced their best ad was tired. Same product, same offer, fresh creative every week, and conversions kept sliding.

The ad wasn't tired. It was written for one person who doesn't exist.

Here's what we found. They had one message aimed at an average customer. But there is no average customer. There are five different buyers staring at the same product, and they are not in the same place.

Someone who has never heard of you needs the problem named first. They don't know they have it yet. Someone who knows the problem needs to believe you actually solve it. Someone comparing you to a competitor needs the one real difference. And someone who already trusts you just needs a reason to buy today.

Same product. Four different first lines.

We stopped writing to the average and wrote to the stage. The product suddenly sold to people the old ad spoke right past.

The takeaway. Match the message to where the buyer actually stands. The average person is the one customer you never have.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

Every brand thinks its product is the story. The customer's problem is the story. Your product is the ending.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

13 years, lesson #2.

Most brands cycle through an agency a year. I've watched it from the inside more times than I can count. New deck, new onboarding, new round of promises, and twelve months later the same plateau they started on.

For a long time I blamed the agencies. Some of it is on them.

But the more brands I saw do this, the more I realized the churn itself was the problem. Not any single agency. The switching.

Every time a brand changes shops, the learning curve resets to zero. The new team spends three months relearning what the last team already knew. The hard-won insight about the customer, the angles that worked, the things that quietly failed, all of it walks out the door and has to be rebuilt from scratch.

Nobody owns the compounding because nobody stays long enough to compound.

The brand pays for the same lesson over and over and wonders why it never breaks through.

Your next agency should be your last. That's not a slogan. It's a different way to build, where someone stays long enough for the learning to actually stack.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

The agencies charging the most usually do the least. The work is in the thinking, and thinking is invisible on an invoice.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

AI won't write your winning ad. It will help you make 40 versions of one faster.

The idea, the angle, the insight about why someone actually buys, that still comes from research and judgment. AI is a fantastic production tool and a terrible strategist.

Use it to move quicker, not to think for you.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

Discounting is what you do when you've run out of reasons to buy. Build the reasons first.

[DAVID KOVES @davidvkoves]

For years we priced our work the way every agency does: a retainer for a bundle of hours. It felt safe. It's what clients expected. Nobody questioned it.

Then I sat in one too many calls where a client was quietly frustrated, and I finally understood why.

Hours lines your incentives up against the people paying you. It rewards looking busy. It rewards the long meeting, the padded report, the work that fills time. And the client never wanted hours. They wanted outcomes.

We were both being reasonable and pulling in opposite directions.

Re-pricing around what we actually move was the scariest change we ever made. It meant we only win when the client wins. No hiding behind activity. If the work didn't move the number, that was now our problem, not a line item.

I was genuinely afraid it would break the business.

It did the opposite. It fixed the most things of anything we've ever changed, because for the first time we and the client wanted the exact same thing.