For many direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, scaling on Meta means producing more ads. Joshua Davis argues that’s backwards. The CEO and Head of Strategy at Davis Creative Agency says the brands that scale most efficiently first identify a single high-performing narrative, then adapt it across audiences, formats, and creators, instead of chasing volume for its own sake.

That philosophy drives Davis Creative Agency, a nine-person Los Angeles boutique Joshua co-founded with his wife in 2024. Focused primarily on Meta performance creative for ecommerce brands, the agency operates on monthly retainers with performance bonuses, a model Joshua says supports long-term partnerships over one-off campaigns.

“I never came from a place of selling,” Joshua says. Instead, he approaches every campaign by asking how to tell the right story to the right person rather than how to convince someone to buy.

That perspective was shaped over a decade before the agency existed. After studying film, Joshua directed short films and music videos, then moved into documentary and branded work before joining BuzzFeed in 2016, where he learned how social platforms provided immediate feedback on what resonated with audiences. Senior creative strategy roles at TubeScience and Alpha Lion followed. By the time he launched Davis Creative Agency in 2024, he had developed a distinct view of what most performance creative gets wrong and why storytelling remains its biggest competitive advantage.

Film School Built the Skill That Most Performance Shops Don’t Hire For

When Joshua moved from documentary production into performance strategy, the expectation was that he would leave storytelling behind. He did not.

“You would put a video up, and you start getting likes or dislikes and comments immediately,” he says of his BuzzFeed years. “So you knew what the audience liked right away. Whereas when you do film and television, you don’t know.”

The discipline that carries most directly, he argues, is copywriting, specifically the kind that makes a viewer feel that what they are watching is for them rather than at them. “Certain agencies are really good with hooks. Certain agencies are great with visuals,” he says. “But I think relating to the customers is something that our agency does really well.”

That instinct surfaced early. A BuzzFeed collaboration with Nike placed Joshua inside the brand’s elite athlete training program for a week, and the resulting video, featuring gear and equipment in context rather than as a pitch, performed strongly. The experience set a template: brand integration earned through story, not asserted through copy.

The same logic now governs how Joshua distinguishes between performance and branded creative. Performance work addresses the customer’s problem directly: the ad names a need and positions the product as the solution. Branded content works the other direction, building a case for why the brand’s identity should command loyalty. He cites Apple’s early “Think Different” campaign, which presented a worldview rather than product specifications, as the benchmark for what branded work is trying to achieve.

“For a brand, it’s to show them why you, over someone else,” he says.

One Winning Ad Can Build 50. The Work Is Finding It.

The core of Davis Creative’s methodology is what Joshua calls the “golden script,” a foundational narrative built per client that survives iteration.

“They become these winning ads, and we can iterate off of them,” he says.

From three core winning ads, the agency can produce 50 by adjusting demographic targeting, creative persona, format, and tone while the underlying logic stays intact. The nine-person team reaches output volumes that would typically require more headcount because the iteration work becomes mechanical once the foundational creative is proven.

Finding that script begins with diagnosis rather than production. Before any creative begins, Joshua goes into a prospective client’s ad library looking for the demographic they are not reaching, the format they haven’t tried, the angle they haven’t explored.

“I can look at an ad library and see, ‘You guys are missing a whole group of people I don’t think you’re even talking to right now,’” he says. The diagnostic frequently reveals that a brand’s actual customer differs from the one they expected. Accelerating that discovery, he says, is where the agency’s value starts.

Creative Control Is Often What Breaks Performance

The most persistent friction Joshua encounters is brands that hold their own identity so closely that their advertising cannot reach the customers who would actually convert.

“Certain times brands get stuck if they’re too tied to their own personal brand story,” he says. “If you hold on to it too tight, not thinking about your customer, you’re never going to get the customer.”

The analogy he reaches for is a creative one: the best artists understand that once a work is released, it belongs to the audience. For brands, he argues, that means relaxing the grip on brand guidelines enough to let the customer’s actual need, not the brand’s preferred self-image, drive the message.

When disagreements arise with a client, his resolution is testing rather than overriding. “We should at least test it,” he says. “If it doesn’t work, we can kill the ad immediately.” Which clients are willing to do that has become a selection criterion. Davis Creative prioritizes relationships where the client trusts the agency to operate as the expert.

Meta’s Volume Orthodoxy Has a Quality Problem

The question Joshua hears most often from DTC brands scaling on Meta is how to produce more creative faster. His answer is that they are asking the wrong thing.

“I think they are convinced that more is what leads,” he says. “Quality is still better than quantity all the time. The misconception that you need volume to scale and be successful on Meta is not true.”

His position is not that volume testing is pointless, but that volume deployed without a proven foundational creative is expensive iteration in the wrong direction. He emphasizes that the “golden script” methodology resolves the apparent conflict: find what converts, then scale from that core rather than producing volume in search of it.

The KPI environment has also shifted in ways that make quality more consequential. New customer acquisition has moved ahead of total sales as the primary benchmark for many DTC brands, replacing the earlier focus on lifetime value.

“You might get 100 sales but only 30 new customer sales,” he explains. “That’s not a success in their eyes because they want as many new customers as possible.” Volume of undifferentiated creative can sustain aggregate sales figures while failing to bring in the new customers brands need to grow. That, in Joshua’s telling, is what a quality-first approach is designed to prevent.

TikTok and Meta Are Different Audiences, Not Just Different Channels

Davis Creative produces performance creative across Meta and TikTok, and Joshua doesn’t treat them as interchangeable surfaces for the same content.

The key variable is how much explanation the audience will tolerate before they disengage. On Meta, the demographic skews older, shaped by decades of television and infomercial conventions. “That demo can handle being explained a little bit more,” he says. 

On TikTok, the threshold is lower and the pace is faster, and performance depends on whether the viewer connects with the personality on screen before engaging with the product. “TikTok you experiment more. A lot of times you’ll do less scripting. You rely on personalities more,” he says.

The form he sees gaining traction across both platforms is what he calls “yapper ads”: low-production, personality-driven video that reads as unedited. He reads their rise as a signal rather than a trend. “The fact that it has become the number-one new UGC style tells me that people are craving authenticity and human connection,” he says. Audiences are not more persuaded by a well-produced ad; they are more likely to believe a real person. What shifts between Meta and TikTok is how much production polish the audience will tolerate before the content stops feeling real.

The Industry Is Moving Toward Storytellers. Voice Will Decide Who Wins.

Joshua sees the next five years in DTC marketing as a continued compression of the distance between storytelling disciplines and performance practice. Big brands are already adopting direct-response creative tactics, and the people producing performance work are increasingly coming from creative backgrounds rather than media buying.

“A lot of the great storytellers are coming into marketing more because it’s easier to access, easier to find work in this space,” he says, pointing to the spread of whitelisting deals and UGC as mechanisms opening the field to people with creative rather than algorithmic backgrounds.

For Davis Creative, that convergence is the environment the agency was built for. The differentiator, Joshua argues, will not be methodology but perspective.

“If you don’t bring your own unique perspective, it just falls flat,” he says. “Bringing your individual voice to marketing is going to be a big part of the future.” 

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