Happy Wednesday!
Google just dropped Universal Cart, Omni, and Glasses.
Today’s Squad
Alex Walser (Founder & CEO, Savant Syndicate) → 12:40 CT
Jared Gutstadt (Founder & CEO, RebelAudio) → 1:45 CT
Top Stories
AI Traffic Update - Gemini is Winning - ChatGPT shed nearly 24 points of AI traffic share in 12 months while Gemini roughly quadrupled and Claude 6x'd. The monopoly era is cracking — Google and Anthropic are the ones eating.
“Lower value human capital” - Standard Chartered's CEO went on Bloomberg and described the 7,500 workers he's replacing with AI as "lower-value human capital." The quiet part just became the press release.
Meta is serving 200% the ads it served in 2020 yet users only grew 38% - Meta is serving 107% more ads than it did in 2020 against just 38% user growth — and most of that user growth came from Asia, not your buyer. Your CPMs aren't broken; you're fighting 50% more ads for the same shrinking pool of qualified eyeballs.
Why You Should Cold Call Abandoned Carts
By Colin Dougherty // 2 min. read
Every DTC operator I know is busy ideating the next AI UGC variant, briefing 47 hooks to a creative strategist, or refreshing their Meta dashboard like a slot machine. Meanwhile the most underused growth tactic in ecommerce right now is the phone call.
Nobody is calling their customers.
Kasra Moradi at Multiply has cold-called 200–300 of his weighted vest buyers and abandoned carts over the last few weeks. The result isn't just recovered revenue. It's a real-time product roadmap most brands would pay an agency six figures to build.
He's getting feedback he can act on the same day: strap mechanism complaints, sizing fit issues, the exact words people use to describe why they bounced at checkout. He's flying to his manufacturer in China next week with actual data instead of vibes from a nine-question Typeform.
Your customers are also your best UGC studio.
When a buyer says they love the product on the call, Kasra pitches them an affiliate link before hanging up. No agency brief. No $4K creator retainer. He's putting recordings of those same calls onto his product page — conversion rate up 30–40% in two weeks.
The math is absurd.
The DTC industry is spending millions building AI tools to simulate what one founder with a phone can do for free.
Meta is broken. CPMs are climbing. The whole game is iteration speed on creative — and the fastest creative engine is the customer who just bought from you.
Stop building dashboards. Start dialing.
Highlight Reel: Cody Wittick (CEO, Kynship) on How to Brief Creators — ”Don’t.”
Timeline: Town Square
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Axon by AppLovin - Reach 1B+ new customers; advertise on mobile games.
Seguno - the Shopify-native marketing suite for brands that run it themselves.
Insense - The all-in-one UGC and influencer marketing platform.
Postscript - Make more money from every SMS message.
Proxima - Use real conversion data to power your creative briefs.
Northbeam - Measure the “unmeasurable,” make your marketing profitable.
Rokt Aftersell - More profit from the orders you’re already getting.
Universal Ads - TV ads that deliver for performance marketers.
See you live,
Ecomm Cowboy Team