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Charlie Cole watched FTD go from a $1.8 billion publicly traded company to a $60 million bankruptcy auction in eight months. His first day as CEO was March 23, 2020, the first day of national lockdown.

Before that he ran digital at Tumi, Samsonite, Lucky Brand, and Shift Nutrition. Today he’s interim Chief Digital Officer at Thuma.

This episode is a tactical sit-down on what actually drives growth right now in a Meta + AI world.

In this episode:

• Why “creative is the new targeting” is only half the answer
• The exact death spiral most DTC brands follow on the way to margin collapse (no sale, semi-annual sale, sale page, sitewide 20%, Amazon, done)
• How Charlie engineered personas at FTD across customer, consumer, and event
• The florist’s choice insight: highest NPS in the category, by 20-40%
• The 2011 Dr. Oz campaign that nailed funnel congruency before anyone called it that
• Why personalization was a misnomer until about two years ago
• The three “swimsuit for vacation” shoppers who should never see the same page
• Why YouTube is still massively underutilized, and why most brands run it wrong
• The product question that decides whether any of this matters

Who it’s for: DTC founders and operators scaling from $10M to $250M who want to grow without turning their brand into a discount machine.

What to steal:

• Build acquisition around your highest-LTV segments, not your lowest CAC
• Treat creative and landing pages as one system, not two teams
• Stop letting platforms grade their own homework on attribution
• Audit where you sit on the discount death spiral before it owns you

Timestamps:

0:00 Career Journey Into Ecommerce

2:48 Inside the FTD Turnaround

14:20 How Customer Behavior Changed During COVID

23:18 Creative Is The New Targeting

36:05 AI’s Biggest Ecommerce Unlock

43:02 Why Most Brands Test Creative Wrong

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