What if the most powerful customer insight tool in ecommerce is hiding inside your SMS program?

Mike Manheimer (Chief Customer Officer, Postscript) joins hosts Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge) and Cody Plofker (CEO, Jones Road Beauty) to dig into how brands are getting more out of their SMS programs. They cover what most brands are doing wrong about messaging frequency, how conversational commerce is reshaping the acquisition funnel, and why the data from texts may be the most valuable, untapped signal in right now.

The conversation moves from holdout testing and subscriber LTV benchmarks to Postscript’s AI product, Shopper, and the surprisingly specific objections that are quietly blocking purchases. It also covers what RCS means for the future of mobile messaging, why org structure shapes SMS performance more than most brands realize, and the single thing a five-to-ten-million-dollar brand should do first to unlock more from the channel.

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Motion Creative Benchmarks Report 2026

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

Rivo

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Prescient AI

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Richpanel

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Aftersell

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Operators Newsletter

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“If you’re not staying unhinged, you’re not building a memorable brand.”

What happens when a two-time Emmy-winning TV anchor walks away from the newsroom to help build one of the most talked-about baby formula brands in the country?

Kim Chappell (Chief Brand Officer at Bobbie) sits down with Cody Plofker (CEO at Jones Road Beauty) and Connor MacDonald (CMO at Ridge) to explore what it means to build a purpose-driven brand in a highly regulated, deeply emotional category. Kim shares how a journalism career shaped her instinct for storytelling, why trust is her team’s most important metric, and how Cardi B landed in Bobbie’s inbox because she was already a customer.

From navigating the 2022 national formula shortage — and the $300M in revenue Bobbie deliberately walked away from — to launching the first breastfeeding billboard in Times Square with Molly Baz, Kim breaks down how bold creative decisions get made inside a fast-moving startup. She also digs into Bobbie’s partnership philosophy, the brand values that guide every campaign, and why celebrating customer cancellations has become one of their most powerful retention moves.

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Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026

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

Rivo

https://www.rivo.io/operators

Prescient AI

https://www.prescientai.com/operators

Richpanel

https://9ops.co/richpanel

Aftersell

https://9ops.co/4i3bb5

Operators Newsletter

https://9operators.com/

Are you exhausting your audience or just exhausting your strategy?

Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge) and Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad) dig into the mechanics of reaching net-new audiences on Meta, breaking down which lever moves the needle most: creative diversity, signal engineering, or landing page strategy. They also revisit a Ridge case study showing how optimizing for the wrong purchase event quietly cannibalized an entire product category’s growth.

The conversation shifts to building a DTC marketing function from scratch, what the first senior hire should look like at a $30M consumable brand with deep retail roots, what to pay them, and how to think about the lifecycle marketing role that follows. They close on a standout YouTube incrementality test result where Amazon captured more than half the revenue lift, and what that pattern reveals about upper-funnel channels and where customers actually convert.

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Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026

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

Aftersell

https://9ops.co/4i3bb5

Haus

https://www.haus.io/operators

Prescient AI

https://www.prescientai.com/operators

Richpanel

https://9ops.co/richpanel

Operators Newsletter

https://9operators.com/