This is a conversation about why speed in marketing is useless without learning, why video view counts are a meaningless vanity metric, and why most e-commerce growth stalls are actually ecommerce creative testing problems disguised as media buying issues. In this interview, Maria Ruocco breaks down how to build creative operations that actually drive conversions.
The 48-Hour Ad Audit: How to Fix Struggling Campaigns
Admetrics: If you were hired to fix struggling ecommerce ads today, what are the first three things you would audit in the first 48 hours?
Maria Ruocco, (Co-Founder, TheFormulaAI): First, I would audit the creative pipeline, not just the winning ads. Most struggling accounts do not have a media-buying problem at the beginning; they have too few real creative hypotheses being tested. I would look at how many hooks, offers, formats, and product angles are being tested each week, and whether each variation teaches the team something.
Second, I would audit the match between the ad promise and the landing page. If the ad sells speed, confidence, savings, or status, the product page has to continue that exact story. A lot of ROAS gets lost because the click is treated like the finish line instead of the handoff.
Third, I would audit margin and CAC reality. Some ads look bad because they are bad. Others look bad because the team is optimizing for a surface metric instead of profitable acquisition. I would want to know contribution margin, payback expectations, AOV, repeat purchase assumptions, and what the team can actually afford to pay for a new customer.
Building a Creative Testing Framework: Speed vs. Learning
Admetrics: The Expensive Lesson: What is the most expensive mistake you've made in your career, and how did it fundamentally change your current workflow?
Maria: The expensive lesson is that speed is only useful when it creates learning. It is very easy to ship more assets, more campaigns, more content, and still not know why something worked. That changed the way I think about creative work. Now I prefer smaller, clearer tests. One hook changes. One audience promise changes. One format changes. If a team uses AI to produce volume without a testing structure, they just create more noise. If they use AI to make controlled creative experiments faster, the workflow becomes much more valuable.
Why Dashboards Can't Replace Creative Diagnosis
Admetrics: Tool vs. Talent: Is there a specific tool people in ecommerce over-rely on, when they should be focusing on a specific skill instead?
Maria: People over-rely on dashboards. Dashboards are useful, but they do not tell you what to try next unless someone knows how to interpret the behavior behind the numbers. The skill to build is creative diagnosis: looking at an ad and asking, "What belief is this trying to change? What objection is it answering? What moment of the customer journey is it speaking to?" Once a team gets better at that, tools become much more powerful.
Admetrics: Tell us about a project that succeeded specifically because you ignored standard best practices.
Maria: One pattern I like is testing imperfect creative before polishing it. The standard advice is often to make everything look finished and brand-perfect before launch. But for early creative testing, that can slow teams down and hide the real signal. For ecommerce, a rough hook, a direct product demonstration, or a simple founder-style explanation can outperform something more polished because it feels specific and immediate. The point is not to publish careless work. The point is to learn which message has pull before spending too much time perfecting the wrapper.
Admetrics: What is one golden rule in ecommerce that was true five years ago but is actually harmful today?
Maria: "Keep your brand message consistent everywhere" can be harmful if people interpret it too rigidly. The core brand should be consistent, but the creative angle should adapt by channel, audience, and stage of awareness. A TikTok-style video, a retargeting ad, a product page, and an email do not need to sound identical. They need to make the same product truth feel native to the moment where the customer sees it.
Admetrics: Which one metric do most people obsess over that you find almost entirely useless?
Maria: View count, on its own. A high view count can mean the hook was broad, funny, controversial, or just cheap to distribute. It does not necessarily mean the creative is building purchase intent. I would rather understand thumb-stop rate, click quality, conversion rate by creative angle, and what happens after the click. Views are useful only when they are connected to a real business question.
Using AI to Scale Your Ecommerce Creative Operations
Admetrics: If you had to bet your entire budget on one specific trend for 2026/2027, where are you putting the money?
Maria: I would bet on creative systems, not single creatives. The brands that win will not be the ones that occasionally produce a great ad. They will be the ones that can continuously turn customer insights, product pages, reviews, objections, and competitor signals into new creative tests. AI helps because it lowers the cost of turning an idea into a testable video, but the real advantage is the system around it.
Admetrics: How are you using AI to do things that were previously impossible, rather than just using it to save time?
Maria: For us, the exciting part is not only making one video faster. It is making many meaningful variations possible for teams that could not afford a full creative production cycle every week. An ecommerce team can take one product page and test different hooks: price objection, social proof, use case, comparison, seasonal offer, founder explanation, or problem-solution angle. Before, many teams had to choose one or two bets. With AI video, they can explore the creative map much more quickly and find the message that deserves more investment.
Admetrics: What is one thing you believe to be true about ecommerce that almost nobody else agrees with you on?
Maria: I think a lot of ecommerce growth problems are creative operations problems disguised as media buying problems. Teams often look for the next targeting trick or bidding adjustment when the bigger issue is that they do not have a reliable way to generate, prioritize, test, and learn from creative ideas. Paid social rewards teams that can learn fast. That is an operational capability, not just a campaign setting.
Final Thoughts: Listen to the Customer First
Admetrics: Thank you for sharing your expertise. To wrap up, what is the single best piece of advice you would give to someone just starting their career in e-commerce, and where can our readers go to follow your work?
Maria: The best advice I would give to someone starting in ecommerce is to get close to the customer before getting clever with tactics. Read reviews, watch customer videos, study support questions, listen to objections, and look at what people say before they buy and after they regret not buying sooner. The best creative usually comes from customer language, not from a brainstorm in isolation.
