10 Takeaways from the eCommerce Growth Summit 2026

Last week, the StudioHawk team headed to the annual eCommerce Growth Summit hosted by Evocative Media, and you best believe we came back with a lot to think about. 

Evocative Media are a Sydney-based eCommerce growth agency specialising in paid social, paid search, and owned media. Founded by Jess Vassallo in 2014, their annual Growth Summit brings together some of Australia's sharpest eCommerce and marketing minds for a day of sessions, case studies, and honest conversation about what's actually driving results. Speakers across the day included Kain Vassallo and Bella Lovric from Evocative Media, representatives from Ksubi, Decjuba, Yotpo, Checkout Components, Lorna Jane and more.

One theme ran through almost every session: AI is taking over targeting. Which means creative is fast becoming the last real competitive advantage brands have. 

Here are the 10 things we took away.

1.  The Creative IS the Targeting Now

This wasn't just a Meta observation. It came up across TikTok, Meta, and paid social broadly. Platforms are audiences distribution to AI, which means your creative brief has become your targeting brief. 

On Meta, the Andromeda update made this structural. The platform now matches creatives automatically. Advantage+ and broad audiences are the default. You no longer tell Meta who to find. You give it the angle, and it does the rest. 

TikTok's Smart+ operates on the same logic.The platform's AI handles distribution. Your job is to give it enough material to work with. 

If your creative only speaks to one type of person, your reach is limited. Not because of your audience settings, but because of your brief. The brands that understand this are building creative strategy around diversity of angle, format and persona. The ones that don't are optimising audience targeting on a problem that the platform has already solved for itself. 

2. Try Using 20 Creative Angles, Not One Winning Ad

One of the most concrete numbers from the summit: aim for around 20 distinct creative angles. Not 20 versions of the same concept. 20 genuinely different angles, each creating its own "surface area" for the platform to find the right viewer. 

Most brands aren't even close. They have one or two concepts in market, running to fatigue, wondering why performance drops off. 

Winning brands at the summit had strong testing frameworks. They weren't betting on a single hero ad. They were running structured experiments across hooks, formats, and messaging, and letting the data pick winners.

The best creative teams aren't producing more. They're producing more combinations.  

3. Creative Diversity Has Four Dimensions - Most Brands Only Vary One 

One of the standout frameworks from the day. True creative diversity means varying across four different axes: 

1. Persona: Who is this speaking to? Their preferences, pain points, behaviours, demographics. 

2. Angle: What's the hook? Price anchor, social proof, problem/solution, founder story, comparison, benefits-led.
3. Format:  Static, short-form video, long-form video, carousel, instant experience. 
4. Style: Polished branded content versus raw, lo-fi UGC. 

Five versions of the same static ad with different copy isn't a test. It's the same bet, five times. Vary on each axis and you're actually building the surface area. 

4. One Asset Should Turn Into Thirty 

The modular creative framework reframes the production challenge entirely. The goal isn't to create more content. It's to get more combinations out of what you've already made. 

The approach: develop one winning concept, structure it by Hook, Deliver, Guide, iterate each section two to three times, then combine elements to stay ahead of creative fatigue. 

Three hooks x one deliver x three CTAs x three options = a significant number of distinct ad variants from a single shoot. 

When a creative wins, don't retire it. Iterate on the same concept, same day, no reshoot. You can change the hook, text overlay, CTA, thumbnail, audio, emojis, and category or SKU without going anywhere near a camera.

Winning concepts don't expire. The surface-level execution does. 

5. TikTok's Audience Isn't Who Most Brands Think It Is

Isabella Sheridan and Tim Ng opened their session, Winning EOFY on TikTok: Platform, Performance and Creative Strategy, with a stat that still catches people off guard: the average TikTok user in Australia is now 33 years old. The platform is also skewing more male than the prevailing perception suggests. 

If you've been writing off TikTok as a Gen Z platform that doesn't fit your customer, that assumption needs revisiting. Particularly for eCommerce brands with a broad adult audience.

Despite the cost of living pressures, Australians haven't stopped spending. They're spending more intentionally, which means creative needs to work harder to justify the purchase, not just prompt it. And engagement and purchasing activity spikes sharply leading into EOFY, so if you're not already planning for that window, now is the time. 

6. Discovery Has Changed. Most Campaign Structures Haven't Caught Up.  

The way consumers find and buy products has fundamentally shifted. People aren't just searching and converting. Products are being discovered through social content, creators, AI tools, communities, and recommendation engines, often before anyone has typed a single search query.

This is where SEO becomes more relevant, not less. StudioHawk's Head of SEO, Charbel Raffoul presented on exactly this at the summit, drawing on our latest eCommerce white paper, Chosen, Not Clicked, which is built on 21 months of GA4 data across 100 eCommerce brands. The data tells a clear story: 91% of eCommerce brands are already receiving ChatGPT referral traffic, with ChatGPT referrals growing 19x YoY. Most brands just aren't tracking it yet. The brands that are building organic visibility and brand authority now are the ones that will get chosen as AI search continues to shape how people discover and buy. 

7. Stop Obsessing Over a Single Metric 

Rachael Ward, Head of Digital at Ksubi, presented one of the more grounding sessions of the day. The argument: no single metric tells the full story, and the brands that anchor on whatever their dashboard defaults to are measuring their way to the wrong decisions. 

The discussion moved through MER,COS,ROAS,CAC and Contribution Profit. Contribution Profit was the standout. It measures profit after variable costs, which gives a far more honest picture of marketing performance than ROAS alone. A campaign with strong ROAS and poor contribution margin is just burning money efficiently. 

The growth metric hierarchy that came out of this: 

Retailers start by managing channels. As they scale, they manage customers. Leading retailers manage profitable business outcomes. Most brands are stuck at tier three. 

8. AI Handles the Distribution. You Still Have to Win the Attention. 

Every platform is pushing AI-driven campaign solutions. TikTok Smart+, Meta Advantage+, Google Performance Max. That theme ran through the whole day. 

But the unanimous counterpoint: creative was repeatedly called out as the biggest lever for performance. AI is automating the plumbing. It can't automate the idea. 

The toolstack doing the heavy lifting: 

• Claude/ChatGPT: hooks, scripts, copy variations, subject lines. The daily grunt. 
• Higgsfield: AI generated visuals and videos. Fast concept creation, product shots, social-first content from prompts. 
• Opus Pro: video repurposing. Long-form to short-form. AI finds the best moments, adds captions, reformats for every platform. 
• Motion: creative measurement. Asset-level performance tracking, fatigue detection, the feedback loop. 

AI handles the volume. Humans handle the direction. That division of labour is the unlock, and it applies equally to SEO content production. 

9. Three Channels, Three Completely Different Messages

One of the clearest sessions of the day covered owned channel orchestration and called out the single biggest mistake brands make: copy-pasting the email into the SMS. 

different job, different message.

• Email (the educator): why the product is worth it. Reviews. Inspiration. 
• SMS + WhatsApp (the closer): urgency, scarcity, one-tap. 
• Push (the nudge): soft reassurance, logistics, friction-free. 

The example that landed. Email at 2:14pm: "Here's why this jacket is worth it." SMS at 4:23pm: "Only 2 left in your size. before it's gone." Push on Tuesday morning: "Hey, we saved your cart for you." 

Same customer. Same product. Three messages doing three distinct jobs. 

10. If the Email Isn't Shoppable and Isn't Rendering, It Isn't Working

The owned media session flagged two email mistakes that share the same root problem: treating email like a design exercise rather than a conversion tool. 

The all-image email looks great in Figma. It renders badly on slow connections, gets clipped by Gmail, scores worse on spam filters, and is completely invisible to anyone with image loading turned off. A live text and image hybrid solves this. The email works even when the images don't load.

The non-shoppable email has beautiful imagery and compelling copy, then sends users to the homepage. Every email needs a direct path to purchase. Product tiles with links. CTAs tied to specific SKUs. The fewer clicks between "I want this" and "I bought this," the better.

This principle extends beyond email. It's the same logic that drives good landing page architecture from SEO. A high-intent organic visitor landing on a generic page has the same problem as a committed email subscriber with nowhere to go.     

Final Thoughts

Sitting across every session was a thread we kept on coming back to: the brands winning across paid, owned, and organic channels are thinking about the person first, and the platform second. 

The persona-first creative approach being talked about in paid social is keyword research by another name. The intent signals that tell you what content to create also tell you what ad hooks will land. The discovery shifts changing how people find products are the same shifts changing what it means to rank.

Search data is audience intelligence. The best growth marketers in the room already knew this. 

A big thanks to Jess Vassallo and the Evocative Media team for putting together a genuinely valuable day.

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