The question most global brands are struggling with in digital media is not what to say. It is how to say it simultaneously, across dozens of platforms, formats, and placements, without losing the brand in the process. Mack Reynolds has a name for what that struggle costs, and has joined Shuttlerock as SVP of Global Creative Strategy to build the systems that address it.

“The proliferation of all of these platforms and formats and partners has really brought on a creative complexity tax,” he says. “For a lot of marketers, it causes a lot of angst and frustration and doubt. For us, we really see it as the greatest growth opportunity in history.”

Mack leads a newly formed global creative team at Shuttlerock, bringing together strategists, designers, and AI specialists tasked with helping brands produce and personalize content at scale. His background makes the case for the hire. Before joining Shuttlerock, Mack spent eight and a half years at Meta’s Creative Shop, most recently as Global Creative Strategy Lead, creating scalable creative systems for clients including Nike, P&G, and Mars. Before Meta, he spent a decade at traditional agencies: at Ogilvy, his team helped SC Johnson’s brands earn the company’s first Gold Lions at Cannes; at Cramer-Krasselt, he developed the “Find Your Beach” platform that returned Corona to growth after four years of decline.

Shuttlerock was founded in 2011 in New Zealand by CEO Jonny Hendriksen and now employs more than 300 people across more than a dozen countries. The company describes itself as a “creative development system,” combining human craft, creative strategy, and proprietary technology through its Shuttlerock Cloud platform to help brands in travel, retail, and consumer packaged goods create content at scale. 

When Mack first spoke with Hendriksen, one phrase resolved his decision. “This mission of saving creativity and realizing this sort of future of one-to-one marketing,” he says, “was absolutely a mission that resonated with me.”

The Creative Itself Became the Targeting

Eight and a half years advising brands from inside Meta produced an insight that most outside observers still underestimate. On feed-based platforms built around social discovery, the relationship between creative quality and audience reach is direct in a way that demographic data alone cannot replicate.

“What you really learn working inside the platforms is just how valuable the content that you’re making is,” Mack says. “The creative and the content itself has become the targeting.” Content that resonates with a specific person, on a platform built to surface what people want to engage with, functions simultaneously as a distribution mechanism and a brand signal. It reaches audiences not because a media buyer placed it against a demographic profile but because the content matched what that person wanted to see.

That shift has also compressed the distance between discovering a brand and buying from it. Mack argues that in many cases that distance has been “completely eliminated” by modern platforms. He has carried this logic under the same phrase for 20 years: all marketing is performance marketing. For brands, the practical consequence is that treating upper-funnel brand investment and lower-funnel performance creative as separate disciplines is both outdated and costly.

Brands Fail at Scale in Two Predictable Ways

Most brands producing content at volume fall into one of two failure modes. Mack names them “generic scaling” and “creative dilution,” and argues they represent opposite ends of the same mistake.

Generic scaling happens when a brand prioritizes consistency over relevance. The brand looks recognizable across all of its content, but the sameness becomes a ceiling. “You’re doing great on maximizing your brand look, and it’s always the same, but it’s so the same that you’re underutilizing AI’s ability to connect to different audiences for different reasons,” Mack explains.

Creative dilution is the inverse. Brands speaking to too many audience segments through too many creative expressions lose the central identity that would make them recognizable across all of them. “You’re doing too much diversity; it doesn’t have enough to do with your brand overall,” he says. “You’re missing an opportunity to really build a sense of connection and relatability over time.”

What works, in his framework, is a centralized idea expressed in multiple ways, calibrated to different motivators, life stages, and category entry points, without abandoning the brand’s identity in the process. “The more brands are able to really find a centralized idea that they can make relate to so many people in so many different situations,” he says, “that’s really where the investment starts to take off.”

The Space That Shuttlerock Occupies

Shuttlerock’s positioning as neither a software tool nor a creative agency is a response to the volume problem. Mack describes its role as “creative amplifier,” a partner that works alongside agencies and in-house teams to take established creative foundations and produce a broader range of relevant content from them.

Image: Shuttlerock Briefing Product Shot

“The thing that’s different about today than maybe ten years ago is the volume of content that’s needed and the complexity of managing some of those systems,” he says. Shuttlerock’s work spans messaging and strategy, editing and automation through Shuttlerock Cloud, and what Mack calls “lo-fi” content: platform-native video built by pairing curated creator partners with its own creative teams. The goal is to produce content in the visual and editorial language that social platforms reward, not content adapted from other channels.

Image: Shuttlerock Catalog

The catalog video and shopping content work, including engagements like Hilton, illustrates the range. A hotel brand needs dynamic content that reflects inventory, season, and audience intent simultaneously; Shuttlerock’s technology automates that differentiation at scale while the creative team maintains brand consistency, says Mack. The Nestlé relationship, which he describes as one of the company’s most strategic, takes the same approach: identify the core essence of the brand, then find the ways it can speak to different people across different motivations and moments without diluting itself.

AI Stops at the Inauthenticity Line

Mack frames AI in Shuttlerock’s work as a production and personalization tool, not a substitute for the human judgment that determines what a brand should say or how it should land with an audience.

“The trap for the industry is going to a place where it’s incredibly inauthentic,” he says. A recent report described wellness companies using AI-generated influencers to sell health products. For Mack, that example crosses the line “between art and inauthenticity,” he draws explicitly. “Nobody wants to live in a world where everything that they’re seeing is completely disingenuous.”

Where Shuttlerock uses AI is on the production side: outfit variation in product content that helps consumers picture the product in their own lives, automated localization for global campaigns, and time- or weather-triggered dynamic content. In each case, the creative decision has already been made. “If you’re using AI as a part of a tool to craft a more relatable, more real story,” Mack says, “that’s great.” His definition of what a creative does in that context is unchanged. “Throughout time, creatives are problem solvers and storytellers,” he says. “The best creatives are finding ways to do something that just shocks and surprises and delights you.”

The Case for Starting the Creative Conversation Sooner

Mack’s immediate priority at Shuttlerock is structural: content strategy needs to enter the conversation at the planning stage, not as an operational task assigned after the main creative has been decided. The ability to produce content that responds to the time of day, current search demand, or seasonal context depends on decisions that have to be made before any execution begins.

“Filling the media ecosystem with content is not an afterthought,” he says. “This requires a great deal of strategic thinking and insight and creative planning to really capitalize on all of the different opportunities that you have.” For marketers, the advice applies the same principle inward: understand clearly who you are and what drives people to choose you before investing in the volume of execution that follows. Once that foundation is in place, the creative complexity tax becomes something to deploy rather than endure.

“This is probably the greatest time to have a great idea in the history of humanity,” Mack says, “because of all of the tools that you have to be able to bring that idea to life.”

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Check Out Our Podcast