Mack Reynolds thinks the most consequential targeting decision a brand makes now happens in the creative brief. Platform algorithms match content to people so precisely, he argues, that the volume and variety of a brand’s ads decide how many audiences it reaches.
Before joining Shuttlerock as SVP of Global Creative Strategy in April 2026, Mack was Global Creative Strategy Lead at Meta’s Creative Shop, after a decade at agencies including Ogilvy and Cramer-Krasselt. Shuttlerock, in his description, is a creative engine that produces ad content at scale with strategic craft added.
He sat down with Net Influencer Senior Editor Ceci Carloni to discuss shrinking production budgets, the two ways brands get high-volume creative wrong, and where AI belongs in work he would sign.
1. The Algorithm Rewards Volume and Variety
“The algorithms have gotten so good at finding the right people for the right content that it’s become less about how you buy the media,” Mack said.
Broad audience buys now do the work, in his view, because the algorithm can match any asset to the right person.
His team recently tested that with Hilton in London, building dozens of assets for each property where the hotel group had used a handful. Mack said bookings rose 13% and reach grew 40%.
“The more opportunities an algorithm has to try different things out on different people, the more likely it is to succeed,” he said.
2. One Big Idea Is Giving Way to Fifty
Mack measures the change against his own 20-year career. In 2011, he worked on Corona’s “Find Your Beach” campaign, built on one thought, that the beach escape is a state of mind. Budgets limited the team to one or two occasions.
“Now I would think of 50 different ways that you needed a mental escape,” Mack said.
His work with Cosmetic Capital follows that logic, with creative for getting ready for work, the gym, a night out, and a work-to-event day that calls for all-day wear. “In the past, I think an advertiser might just pick one that they thought was the biggest occasion,” he said.
More occasions mean more assets. Budgets are moving the other way.
3. Budgets Are Shrinking as Content Demands Multiply
Citing a Gartner CMO spend study from last year, Mack noted that 39% of CMOs planned to reduce agency budgets, while paid media accounted for nearly 31% of total marketing spending.
Many CMOs still expect five times as much content, he said, under pressure from executives chasing higher returns on ad spend. “We want the money to be going towards reach and towards getting in front of people,” Mack said.
His prescription for media is constant presence. Instead of a TV-style flight that spikes, trails off and goes quiet, brands need what he calls “an ongoing, always running creative system.” Mack positions Shuttlerock as the way to produce that volume without losing the brand.
4. Generic Scaling Is the Worse of Two Traps
Volume brings two failure modes. Generic scaling happens when a brand, unsure of its budget or strategy, makes two or three assets and runs them everywhere. “Maybe it’s on brand, maybe it’s consistent, but you’re really not allowing yourself to reach the maximum number of audiences,” he said.
Creative dilution is the opposite. Brands overproduce disconnected content that people cannot link to the brand. Mack pointed to a WPP study with Oxford’s Saïd Business School that he recalled as finding that about 84% of purchases go to brands buyers already favor. Distinctiveness still pays.
Of the two, he considers generic scaling worse. “At least in the creative dilution sense, you’re trying,” he said. The failure, he argued, is over-control of which message to run. “Even if one is compelling to 50% of the people, you’re leaving 50% of the other people on the table.”
5. The Wall Test Catches Lookalike Creator Content
A handful of videos running all year signals generic scaling. For dilution, Mack recommends a wall test.
“If you’re looking at your work and you can put it up on the wall, and you put up some of your competitors’ work and it looks the same, you’re probably in the creative dilution space,” he said.
Creator programs are a frequent cause. Mack sees brands reuse the same kinds of creators making the same POV-style content. “It seems great because you’re getting the reach, but is it really building your brand? Because it looks just like everybody else’s,” he said.
The creators he rates highest “really know their audience and they really stick to it,” which keeps their brand partnerships natural. For brands, his advice is to test more versions of the brand promise within brand-safety standards. “One thing that I learned at Meta over all those years was we were almost always wrong about the content that we thought would perform the best,” he said.
6. AI Raises the Premium on Distinct Creative
Sameness is also the risk Mack sees in AI, where a marketer can type a brand into a prompt box and get back a polished video. “Is it original and breakthrough? Because that’s really what creativity is,” he said.
He joined Shuttlerock after its founder told him the company was in the business of saving creativity. As tools level production, Mack argued, creativity is what still separates brands.
Agentic shopping raises the stakes. Mack expects agents such as ChatGPT and Meta’s Muse to learn from the work running on their platforms. A challenger brand that frames itself around value therefore has a better chance of surfacing when a shopper asks for something cheaper.
His line on AI is disclosure. Avatars that show products on different body types are fine with him. “When you have an AI creator who’s talking to camera as if they were a real person, but not being open and honest about that, I think that’s where I start to draw the line,” he said.
7. The First Fix Is a System Measured on Incrementality
For a team with one agency, one brand book and a flat budget, Mack would start with the brief. He would replace the linear campaign with a creative system built on hypotheses about what different audiences want to hear.
Shuttlerock applies that model with NinjaTrader. It pairs mindset hooks with platform features and offers to bring new users to the company’s futures trading platforms, then tracks which combinations work.
Measurement starts with the business objective. “In almost every case for every business, it has to be incremental something,” Mack said, whether purchases, downloads or new users. Diagnostics come next. For Hilton, he said, the data might show which messages drive families and which drive business travelers, and each finding feeds the next brief.
Mack calls this the start of a golden age of creativity because expensive software and production costs no longer stop people from bringing ideas to life. The tools that make sameness cheap also make variety affordable.
Shrinking budgets still pull brands toward a few generic assets, while the algorithm rewards variety and buyers reward a brand they recognize.
“When advertising is at its best, it’s honest,” Mack said.
Cecilia Carloni, Interview Manager at Influence Weekly and writer for NetInfluencer. Coming from beautiful Argentina, Ceci has spent years chatting with big names in the influencer world, making friends and learning insider info along the way. When she’s not deep in interviews or writing, she's enjoying life with her two daughters. Ceci’s stories give a peek behind the curtain of influencer life, sharing the real and interesting tales from her many conversations with movers and shakers in the space.
Mack Reynolds thinks the most consequential targeting decision a brand makes now happens in the creative brief. Platform algorithms match content to people so precisely, he argues, that the volume and variety of a brand’s ads decide how many audiences it reaches.
Before joining Shuttlerock as SVP of Global Creative Strategy in April 2026, Mack was Global Creative Strategy Lead at Meta’s Creative Shop, after a decade at agencies including Ogilvy and Cramer-Krasselt. Shuttlerock, in his description, is a creative engine that produces ad content at scale with strategic craft added.
He sat down with Net Influencer Senior Editor Ceci Carloni to discuss shrinking production budgets, the two ways brands get high-volume creative wrong, and where AI belongs in work he would sign.
1. The Algorithm Rewards Volume and Variety
“The algorithms have gotten so good at finding the right people for the right content that it’s become less about how you buy the media,” Mack said.
Broad audience buys now do the work, in his view, because the algorithm can match any asset to the right person.
His team recently tested that with Hilton in London, building dozens of assets for each property where the hotel group had used a handful. Mack said bookings rose 13% and reach grew 40%.
“The more opportunities an algorithm has to try different things out on different people, the more likely it is to succeed,” he said.
2. One Big Idea Is Giving Way to Fifty
Mack measures the change against his own 20-year career. In 2011, he worked on Corona’s “Find Your Beach” campaign, built on one thought, that the beach escape is a state of mind. Budgets limited the team to one or two occasions.
“Now I would think of 50 different ways that you needed a mental escape,” Mack said.
His work with Cosmetic Capital follows that logic, with creative for getting ready for work, the gym, a night out, and a work-to-event day that calls for all-day wear. “In the past, I think an advertiser might just pick one that they thought was the biggest occasion,” he said.
More occasions mean more assets. Budgets are moving the other way.
3. Budgets Are Shrinking as Content Demands Multiply
Citing a Gartner CMO spend study from last year, Mack noted that 39% of CMOs planned to reduce agency budgets, while paid media accounted for nearly 31% of total marketing spending.
Many CMOs still expect five times as much content, he said, under pressure from executives chasing higher returns on ad spend. “We want the money to be going towards reach and towards getting in front of people,” Mack said.
His prescription for media is constant presence. Instead of a TV-style flight that spikes, trails off and goes quiet, brands need what he calls “an ongoing, always running creative system.” Mack positions Shuttlerock as the way to produce that volume without losing the brand.
4. Generic Scaling Is the Worse of Two Traps
Volume brings two failure modes. Generic scaling happens when a brand, unsure of its budget or strategy, makes two or three assets and runs them everywhere. “Maybe it’s on brand, maybe it’s consistent, but you’re really not allowing yourself to reach the maximum number of audiences,” he said.
Creative dilution is the opposite. Brands overproduce disconnected content that people cannot link to the brand. Mack pointed to a WPP study with Oxford’s Saïd Business School that he recalled as finding that about 84% of purchases go to brands buyers already favor. Distinctiveness still pays.
Of the two, he considers generic scaling worse. “At least in the creative dilution sense, you’re trying,” he said. The failure, he argued, is over-control of which message to run. “Even if one is compelling to 50% of the people, you’re leaving 50% of the other people on the table.”
5. The Wall Test Catches Lookalike Creator Content
A handful of videos running all year signals generic scaling. For dilution, Mack recommends a wall test.
“If you’re looking at your work and you can put it up on the wall, and you put up some of your competitors’ work and it looks the same, you’re probably in the creative dilution space,” he said.
Creator programs are a frequent cause. Mack sees brands reuse the same kinds of creators making the same POV-style content. “It seems great because you’re getting the reach, but is it really building your brand? Because it looks just like everybody else’s,” he said.
The creators he rates highest “really know their audience and they really stick to it,” which keeps their brand partnerships natural. For brands, his advice is to test more versions of the brand promise within brand-safety standards. “One thing that I learned at Meta over all those years was we were almost always wrong about the content that we thought would perform the best,” he said.
6. AI Raises the Premium on Distinct Creative
Sameness is also the risk Mack sees in AI, where a marketer can type a brand into a prompt box and get back a polished video. “Is it original and breakthrough? Because that’s really what creativity is,” he said.
He joined Shuttlerock after its founder told him the company was in the business of saving creativity. As tools level production, Mack argued, creativity is what still separates brands.
Agentic shopping raises the stakes. Mack expects agents such as ChatGPT and Meta’s Muse to learn from the work running on their platforms. A challenger brand that frames itself around value therefore has a better chance of surfacing when a shopper asks for something cheaper.
His line on AI is disclosure. Avatars that show products on different body types are fine with him. “When you have an AI creator who’s talking to camera as if they were a real person, but not being open and honest about that, I think that’s where I start to draw the line,” he said.
7. The First Fix Is a System Measured on Incrementality
For a team with one agency, one brand book and a flat budget, Mack would start with the brief. He would replace the linear campaign with a creative system built on hypotheses about what different audiences want to hear.
Shuttlerock applies that model with NinjaTrader. It pairs mindset hooks with platform features and offers to bring new users to the company’s futures trading platforms, then tracks which combinations work.
Measurement starts with the business objective. “In almost every case for every business, it has to be incremental something,” Mack said, whether purchases, downloads or new users. Diagnostics come next. For Hilton, he said, the data might show which messages drive families and which drive business travelers, and each finding feeds the next brief.
Mack calls this the start of a golden age of creativity because expensive software and production costs no longer stop people from bringing ideas to life. The tools that make sameness cheap also make variety affordable.
Shrinking budgets still pull brands toward a few generic assets, while the algorithm rewards variety and buyers reward a brand they recognize.
“When advertising is at its best, it’s honest,” Mack said.
Listen to the full conversation on “The Big Three” podcast.
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