Connor MacDonald of Ridge on e-commerce bloodbath: Meta worse, consumer sentiment at year lows, tariffs freezing capex

Summary

Connor MacDonald, CMO of Ridge Wallet, paints a bleak picture of the direct-to-consumer advertising environment heading into 2025 — weak consumer sentiment, a deteriorating Meta platform, and tariff uncertainty freezing capital expenditure plans across the industry.

The data points he cites are stark. The DTC Confidence Index, which tracks consumer sentiment on spending daily, hit its lowest reading since October 2024 as of March 18. A contact at Meta described the current climate for B2C growth brands as a "bloodbath." Ridge sells minimalist wallets — a discretionary, gift-oriented product — which makes it acutely exposed to softening consumer demand.

Why Meta is worse

Meta's degradation has two sources. Some of it traces back to iOS 14, when Apple restricted the data Meta could access, shrinking the attribution window from 28 days to 7 days and reducing advertisers' ability to exclude existing customers from targeting. On top of that, Meta has begun weighting click-based outcomes more heavily and serving ads to warmer, more familiar audiences. The net effect is that brands trying to generate awareness and incremental demand — which is most growth-stage DTC brands — find the platform increasingly useless for that purpose. MacDonald says Meta is aware of some of these issues and working to address them, but the structural privacy constraints from Apple are outside their control.

Meta commands roughly 30% of all digital ad spend, so when the platform underperforms, the damage is industry-wide.

LLMs as an ad channel

MacDonald is skeptical that LLMs will be the next breakout discovery channel for Ridge. He draws a distinction between high-intent categories — mattresses, insurance — where people actively search and LLM ads could be valuable, and impulse or awareness-driven categories like wallets, where the volume of commercial searches on ChatGPT is too low to move the needle. Ridge's growth has historically come from discovery channels like Snapchat and TikTok, where the brand can reach millions of people who weren't looking for a new wallet. He sees Threads ads as a more plausible near-term opportunity than LLM advertising.

On organic LLM presence, MacDonald is relaxed. Ridge is an established brand with significant Reddit coverage, which means it already surfaces in LLM responses without deliberate optimization. He expects to pay more attention to LLM SEO as competition increases, but it is not a current priority.

AI in the creative workflow

The clearest operational change at Ridge is using AI to accelerate the upstream creative process. Two performance creative strategists now use Claude to concept and write briefs at five to ten times their previous pace, with more novelty in the output. The downstream work — video editing and ad assembly — is handled partly through Icon, an AI video editor that can pull from Ridge's existing library of footage (described as thousands of hours sitting in Google Drive) and stitch together targeted concepts on demand, such as creative aimed at 40-year-old men in the midwest.

Stunt marketing

Ridge runs an annual sweepstakes as its signature brand activation. Last year's campaign centered on two gold-plated Cybertrucks, which appeared in roughly 24 YouTube videos — including content from MKBHD, JerryRig Everything, and Colin and Samir — before the winner took a cash payout and the truck was auctioned on Doug DeMuro's Cars and Bids. MacDonald says the truck appeared in YouTube creator videos performing three times better than standalone content, so the strategy was deliberately to get the vehicles into as many videos as possible. A larger activation is planned for August, with more cars and bigger placements.

For creator partnerships more broadly, Ridge is shifting from a spray-and-pray model — thousands of sponsored creators and billions of views — toward deeper, longer-term integrations. MKBHD is the flagship relationship, and MacDonald says the goal is to build an "Avengers team" of creators and celebrities around that anchor partnership.