Most ecommerce operators would call 15,000 ads in four years a content factory. Mark Broadhead calls it a sorting machine.
Mark is Head of Creative and Growth at The Lad Collective, the Brisbane bedding brand co-founded by brothers Bill and Ed Ovenden. He joined as the founders’ first employee four years ago when the team was still running out of a warehouse in Logan, and is now the person behind the Meta account that has taken the brand past 200,000 customers and into a North American licensing deal with iFabric Corp.
Nathan Bush tracked him down because his LinkedIn posts are something special. They go against the standard growth playbook, shared experiments that did not work, and treated creative as something to be tested rather than perfected.
Mark runs the Meta engine the way most would envy. He has shipped roughly 15,000 ads, found about 10 unicorns, and built a system around the strike rate rather than fighting it. He treats every ad as disposable, every idea as worth testing, and every tool as something to try before deciding whether it sticks. His thinking is not always mainstream, the rhythm is brutal, and the lessons translate beyond bedding.
This episode picks up from where founders Bill and Ed Ovenden left off in episode 160, several years and a lot of corner straps later.
“I have no idea what’s going to work. As long as we’re talking about what our product is, let’s try it because it might work.”
In this episode, with Mark Broadhead, Head of Creative and Growth at The Lad Collective, we cover three things worth taking into your own business:
- Why looking at your category for inspiration is the fastest way to look like everyone in it
- What a 10-in-15,000 strike rate tells you about how often you should be publishing
- How content pillars let you scale one good idea across many formats in the Andromeda era
Don’t Study The Category You’re In
The most useful thing Mark said in this conversation has nothing to do with Meta account structures or creative tools. It is about where to look for inspiration. He does not study other bedding brands. He watches Liquid Death and Dr Squatch. He looks at brands that have broken out of their categories rather than the ones sitting next to him in his.
“I don’t have a big thing where I look at any other bedding brands or all the ads. I just don’t do it. I’m looking at your Liquid Deaths, your Dr Squatch, all those types of brands. I’m looking at other disrupting brands.”
If your reference point is the brand directly competing with you, you end up looking exactly like them. The Lad Collective’s brand moat is not the product feature, which is patented but can be copied. It is the way the brand looks, sounds and behaves online. The cheeky tone, the willingness to publish things other bedding brands would never sign off on, the 80/20 rule Mark openly stands by: if you piss off 80% of Australia, the 20% who love you is still a big number. That is harder to copy than a corner strap.
Stop benchmarking against your category. Find three brands outside your space that are doing something interesting and ask why they are getting attention. That is the gap your competitors have not noticed.
The Unicorn Rule
Mark has run somewhere around 15,000 pieces of creative over four years and found about 10 that really cut through. The strike rate is under 10% and most of those did not look like unicorns when they went live.
“I have this rule, if anyone gives us anything, there is a 99.9% chance I’m going to put it in the ad account just to find out. I tried to give very little feedback. I have no idea what’s going to work.”
The number matters for two reasons.
First, it resets expectations about how often great ads actually happen. They are rare even when you are doing everything right. Second, it tells you something about the right approach to production. If most ads will not work, the goal cannot be to make every ad perfect before launch. The goal is to publish enough to find the unicorn. Mark’s view is that in the current Meta environment, the ad is the experiment, not the artefact.
Most operators are holding ads back because they are not polished, because someone in the room has an opinion, or because the asset does not quite feel on-brand. Mark would publish it. Then he would publish four more variants of it. The unicorn is out there somewhere, and you are not going to find it on the drafts board.
Pillars Over Hooks
The other piece of Mark’s system worth stealing is how he organises content. Rather than making endless variations of the same ad with a tweaked three-second hook, The Lad Collective works in pillars. Street talk. Founder-led. UGC. Non-verbal. Green screen. Each pillar has a distinct visual signature, and a single piece of strong copy can run across all of them as completely different ads.
The reason this matters is Andromeda. Meta’s optimisation system now relies heavily on visual context. Two UGC ads filmed in the same bedroom by the same creator will be bucketed by the algorithm, even if the copy and styling differ. To open up new audiences, you need genuine visual variety, and pillars force that variety in a structured way.
Mark’s most recent count had 205 ads live across roughly 260 campaigns. The goal is closer to 1,000 live ads, with content now sourced through a customer-driven UGC pipeline that has started to feed itself organically. Customers see The Lad Collective using UGC, reach out, fill in a form, and get added to the rotation. For most operators, reaching 1,000 ads is unrealistic. Getting to genuinely different pillars is. Map your existing creative against three or four pillar types to identify the gaps. Ationships will find new value in the touchpoints they used to think of as pure support.
The Takeaway
The Lad Collective is four years from launch, has 200,000 customers in Australia, and is signed into the US through iFabric, with an Austin office in the works. Mark’s role has grown alongside it, from making TikTok videos two days a week to running the creative and Meta engine for a brand on a global push. What comes through clearest in this conversation is that none of it is precious. Every ad is disposable, every idea is worth testing, every tool is something to try before deciding whether it sticks. That mindset is the actual moat. The corner straps just opened the door.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does Mark Broadhead avoid studying other bedding brands?
Because looking at brands that directly compete with you is the fastest way to end up looking like them. Mark’s view is that the brands worth studying are the ones breaking out of categories entirely, like Liquid Death and Dr Squatch. The Lad Collective’s competitive advantage lies not in product features but in its brand voice and creative system, which are much harder for competitors to replicate than a patent.
What is the Unicorn Rule, and what does it mean for ecommerce operators?
Across roughly 15,000 ads in four years, The Lad Collective has found about 10 that genuinely scaled. The strike rate is under 10%. The implication for operators is that great ads are rare even when you are doing everything right, and the answer is not better production but more volume. Publish more, hold back less, and let Meta sort out the winners.
How does The Lad Collective use content pillars on Meta?
The team organises content into distinct visual pillars, including street talk, founder-led, UGC, non-verbal, and green screen. Each pillar has a unique visual signature, which lets one piece of strong copy run as completely different ads across multiple pillars. This is particularly important under Meta’s Andromeda system, which heavily relies on visual context and will bucket two ads filmed in the same setting as variations of the same ad.
What AI tools is The Lad Collective using in ad production?
Mark uses Higgsfield for AI video generation, Kive for creative organisation and production, and Claude for design tasks and prompting workflows. He treats AI as a production pillar alongside founder-led, UGC, and street talk content, rather than as a replacement for creative strategy. AI lets the team make ad concepts that would previously have required full production days, but the decision about what to make still sits with humans.
Based on Episode #635 of the Add To Cart podcast with Mark Broadhead, Head of Creative and Growth at The Lad Collective. Join the Add To Cart community for free.
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