Creatives
At scale, the goal isn't to improve unit economics, it's to prevent them from degrading. Combat CAC inflation through high creative velocity. Calm saw 10% weekly CAC increases with low creative output versus 0.1% with high output (5,500+ ads total).
"I think at that scale what you realize is it's not about making your unit economics better. It's about sustaining your unit economics because you're, you're just going to be dealing with attrition like the whole time. And so I think, uh, what we saw for sure is that when we didn't, we made 5,500 ads over my time there, when, when things were going more at the five or 10 ads a week deal, what we saw was about an attrition to our CAC of like 10% a week as opposed to like 0.1 a week or whatever, you know, when we were really cranking."
How Calm Added 1.2M Subscribers with Creative Marketing Tactics at 30:43 · Featured in Growth Gems #136
Creatives
Position your marketing on the 'creative curve'; differentiated enough to capture attention but familiar enough to be understood. This balance between novelty and familiarity is the sweet spot for high-performing creative.
"There's a really great book about that called The Creative Curve. Um, which I think has been one of the best framings as a marketer that I've ever found is that you want to be constantly positioning yourself on the place that that is differentiated enough to capture attention, but familiar enough to to like, for people to understand it."
How Calm Added 1.2M Subscribers with Creative Marketing Tactics at 41:58 · Featured in Growth Gems #136
Sylvain's take: 
Purchased!
Creatives
Don't judge creative performance by your own taste—immerse yourself in the algorithmic extremes where your target users actually live. The 'weird' content at the bottom of algorithmic rabbit holes often has far more engagement than mainstream content.
"If you're looking at an algorithm of someone at 10 scale, it is like the most dark, like bottom scraping of the internet thing you've ever seen. Just like crazy brain rot, like just, uh, the the wildest stuff ever. And you see the engagement between these two things, like, you know, someone who's at the beginning of the portal versus someone who's gone all the way to the bottom and it's actually pretty popular at the bottom. There's way more engagement."
How Calm Added 1.2M Subscribers with Creative Marketing Tactics at 43:28 · Featured in Growth Gems #136
Creatives
The world is always changing and what works today is not going to work tomorrow, so you got to be adaptable and stay on it. But you also don't want to be ahead of the curve, you want to be on the curve.
"You just got to stay hungry. I think, I mean, the world is always changing. You just got to be adaptable and stay on it. Like, what works today is not going to work tomorrow. Um, so I, I don't think you want to, I think I was talking about this, you actually don't want to be ahead of the curve. You want to be on the curve."
How Calm Added 1.2M Subscribers with Creative Marketing Tactics at 50:35 · Featured in Growth Gems #136
Creatives
Creative iteration velocity is critical at scale. You need to be extremely analytical in how you break down the messaging and test different formats.
"I joined the team and we were spending like over $100,000 a day on Meta, which at that time was like, I don't think there was too many advertisers doing that that weren't like major brands. Um, and we only were making like five creatives a month or something, like five, 10 creatives a month. And I come from gaming where where I had seen like what I kind of understood at that point how big of a deal the creative iteration was."
How Calm Added 1.2M Subscribers with Creative Marketing Tactics at 12:43 · Featured in Growth Gems #136
Sylvain's take: Nick mentioned that starting to work with Tube Science was an inflection point at the time.
They’re the ones that came up with the “fried egg” concept, and apparently eggs are a whole thing. I couldn’t find this specific example, but if you’re interested in that kind of hooks check out the video below by Manson Chen:
Creatives
Test longer ad formats (60+ seconds) to improve user quality and conversion rates. While top-of-funnel metrics may be similar to shorter ads, longer formats allow you to qualify users more effectively, resulting in significantly higher trial-to-paid conversion rates.
"At that time, there was a lot of stuff like the standard practice was like let's you should do a 10 to 15 second ad and that's like the the belief system. And what we actually saw is that usually like the top of funnel would be no different between like a 10-second and a 60 minute 60-second ad, but we had this like opportunity to qualify customers so much more and, like, continue just like rolling with value propositions and really like digging into personas and, like, demonstrating value."
How Calm Added 1.2M Subscribers with Creative Marketing Tactics at 19:50 · Featured in Growth Gems #136
Sylvain's take: They also discussed this is often true of onboarding flows as well.
Nick shared that if your ad is 15 seconds, you might lose the undecided people watching it entirely which is a missed opportunity. At Calm, longer was better.
He also told me that he’s since learned that creative diversity and having a good mix of placement and audience-specific content tends to be the best for overall performance. So my conclusion is that you need both short and long videos.
Creatives
The intersection of analytical rigor, cultural attunement (particularly when it comes to copywriting), and being religious about competitive intelligence gives an edge and a sustainable competitive advantage.
"I think a lot of these things I learned at Column around cultural relevance, or and like social listening, cultural insight, how to like scale through data driven uh, frameworks and like that sort of consistency, uh, combined with the swagger, like that's like a lot of tense scale, like we have. I think we're different in that we have a real philosophical point of view."
How Calm Added 1.2M Subscribers with Creative Marketing Tactics at 33:08 · Featured in Growth Gems #136
Creatives
Create ads that blur the line between paid advertising and organic content. The goal is 'suspended reality' where users can't immediately tell if they're seeing an ad or native content, dramatically improving engagement and performance.
"We are, I think, just really on the money when it comes to like whatever the most relevant cultural like internet trend is or like um, like able to sort of like create the sense of, of suspended reality for people on socials where they're like not sure if they're seeing an ad or if they're seeing uh seeing content."
How Calm Added 1.2M Subscribers with Creative Marketing Tactics at 33:49 · Featured in Growth Gems #136
Sylvain's take: I’ll share a direct quote from Nick on the topic from later on in the episode:
“The social listening comes from everywhere. I mean, we are kids who grew up going to land parties and on early Reddit on like Geo Cities on like you know, gamers who are on like IRC [...]. The way we think about it is we try to figure out when the esoteric crosses over into the mainstream. That’s like the perfect activation moment.”
Creatives
Identify the intersection between viral content trends and your target user psychographics then reverse-engineer the social dynamics into your advertising. Calm discovered that 'oddly satisfying' content (cutting kinetic sand, ASMR, Rupe Goldberg 3D animations, etc.) resonated perfectly with their users. This sophisticated "social listening" completely changed the growth trajectory of the company for months.
"I think at the the internet at the time, probably the largest cultural trend was oddly satisfying. So, we're talking about like kinetic sand, cutting kinetic sand, or like yeah. Um, like power washing or like even if it's just like ASMR more generally. This was when you would pull up Instagram or Snapchat and you would look at just the verality metrics like this. This stuff was going insane in view and reach. It kind of mapped on to, for some reason, the psychograph of Calm users perfectly."
How Calm Added 1.2M Subscribers with Creative Marketing Tactics at 15:00 · Featured in Growth Gems #136
Sylvain's take: Nick talked about the fact that a large subset of users consume algorithmically-driven ‘weird’ content, so ads that blend into that experience allow you to reach them and can dramatically outperform conventional creative approaches.
Rather than share a couple of videos directly here, below is a LinkedIn post from Nick where he links to his Pinterest board of Oddly Satisfying creatives.
Creatives
The basic iteration of video ads is about isolating the four largest levers: text hook, visual hook, copy sequence, and visuals. By iterating on that level, you can create wins almost indefinitely.
Paid Social Creative Frameworks, Building Teams for Successful Creative Development · Featured in Growth Gems #100
