From the Diary of Andy Ellis

For business owners and marketing managers whose campaigns are well targeted, well measured and ignored.

Two e-commerce businesses came on board running what Andy Ellis calls “pretty standard performance creative”. He didn’t touch their targeting and he didn’t rebuild their Meta campaigns. “We changed the creative,” he says. For both, the new work was built around “more emotion and human connection that actually made sense for their category.” The following month, both doubled their online revenue and had record months, in what was normally their off-season. The growth didn’t stop there, he says. Both have kept building on those results since. Same targeting, same campaign structure, better creative.

Andy is clear about where the idea underneath that came from. He credits The Creative Dividend, research published by System1 and Effie and written by Andrew Tindall, which analysed 1,265 campaigns representing $139 billion in market share and argues that “good enough” creative is often the most expensive choice. The same research found that while most marketers say creativity matters, 41 per cent say it is still seen as a risk.

Andy is the Founder of Toasty Marketing, which he started in Christchurch this month and describes as New Zealand’s anti-boring marketing company. Toasty puts strategy, creative and performance together: the idea, the work that brings it to life, and the measurement of whether it did its job. It’s for businesses with something to prove, the phrase from the post in which he announced it, and for the ones that, as he puts it on his profile, “can’t simply outspend everyone else.” What those businesses are otherwise paying has a name in his vocabulary. He calls it the boring tax.

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The five minutes at the end

Ask Andy what the reader gets wrong and the answer isn’t about targeting. “We’ve become obsessed with short term ROI and fallen into the performance marketing trap,” he says. “Performance matters, but boring marketing is expensive.” The trap, as he describes it, is one of proportion. “We spend hours optimising audiences, budgets and platforms, then give the creative five minutes at the end.”

That order is backwards, in his view, because of what creative does over time. “Creative is one of the biggest profit multipliers marketers can control,” he says. “Great creative drives sales and leads now, but it also makes people feel something, remember the brand and think of you when they come into the market later.” He has written the same argument on LinkedIn in blunter terms: brand building gets called the long game, so it waits at the back of the queue in the marketing plan, while “those dull, forgettable sales campaigns” cost money in wasted media. The post ended by asking when brand building gets moved to the front.

“Boring marketing is expensive because if your creative makes people feel nothing, you’re paying to distribute something nobody cares about, when great creative should help you sell now and make your brand easier to choose later.”

Andy Ellis, Founder, Toasty Marketing

Getting out of the trap starts, in his telling, a long way before the ad.

Before the idea

The first thing he tells someone whose marketing nobody is noticing has nothing to do with the ad itself. “First, get your marketing orientation right,” he says. “That means understanding the category properly, talking to customers and using good quantitative and qualitative data to find the real human insight underneath it all.”

He’s specific about where that insight doesn’t come from. “You are not going to find that sitting behind a desk asking AI for an idea. AI can give you an answer, but your customers are far more likely to give you the insight that leads to genuinely great creative.”

The two e-commerce results at the top of this piece are what that looks like in his account: creative built around emotion and connection that “actually made sense for their category”, with the campaigns underneath it left alone. He learned the commercial side of that somewhere specific: on the phone, selling fasteners.

Fasteners, then Mint

Andy has spent over 14 years in marketing, and the first of them don’t appear on his profile. “Straight out of high school I was already doing design and marketing work around Christchurch, including work for F45 gyms, music and DJ artists, and squash events,” he says. “It wasn’t the neat corporate marketing career path at that stage, but I was already creating campaigns, designing work, promoting events and helping businesses and artists get noticed.”

“Mainland Fasteners was probably where it became a more traditional full-time commercial marketing role,” he says. He joined the Christchurch company in 2017 as a warehouse storeman and moved within three months into a role that combined sales, marketing and design. He stayed over five years. In that time he was the company’s telephone salesman of the year three times and redesigned all of its branding.

In late 2022 he joined Mint, in Christchurch, as an account manager. Across nearly three years there he moved through four roles: account manager, marketing strategist, strategy team lead and head of client service. From September 2025 he was Digital Manager at Zib Digital New Zealand, leading its Christchurch pod, until May 2026. Toasty followed in September 2026.

What he wants a reader to take from that record is in his own words. He’d like them to think he “understands the commercial side of marketing, but he also really cares about making work people actually notice, feel something from and remember.” The caring part shows up most clearly after hours.

The evenings nobody asked for

Ask Andy for a habit a colleague would recognise as very him and he describes a failure to stop.

“I find it very hard to leave an idea alone. If someone says something in a meeting and I can suddenly see the campaign, the headline or some ridiculous way we could bring it to life, I want to make it immediately.”

Andy, Founder, Toasty Marketing

The cost is real and he counts it. “I’ve lost a lot of evenings to things nobody asked me to work on because I thought there was a better idea hiding in there,” he says. “I’m probably losing money doing work nobody asked for but showing the client something they never expected and then loving it… nothing beats it!” It’s the part of the job he’d tell a beginner to build first, before the platforms.

Learn to be a marketer first

Someone starting out in marketing who wants to be doing what Andy does in five years gets one warning and a list.

“Don’t get too obsessed with becoming a Meta or Google expert before you learn how to actually be a marketer. Platforms change, AI will keep changing everything, but people are still people.”

Andy, Founder, Toasty Marketing

The list is the same one he gives for getting orientation right. “Learn why they buy, talk to customers, understand the category, learn strategy and get really bloody good at creative,” he says. “That stuff will take you a lot further than knowing where every button is.”

He has asked a version of the platform question in public too. A couple of months before Toasty he posted a single line: “I feel like the moment someone says they used AI to create something, people think it should cost less….Is that fair?” He left the question open.

Where Andy Is Now

Toasty Marketing is a month old. Andy announced it on LinkedIn in September 2026 with a post that began “Cat’s out of the bag” and set out who it’s for: businesses with something to prove. The people he most wants reading this are business owners and marketing managers. “Sometimes that is a challenger trying to take on a much bigger competitor,” he says. “Sometimes it is an established business that knows its marketing has become a bit too safe.” What he’d like them to conclude is that he understands the commercial side and cares about the work, and, ideally, “We should probably talk to Toasty.”

The thing outside marketing that he wants in the piece is older than the career. Before any of it he was a professional squash player, ranked 256 in the world, and he played beach handball for New Zealand.

What comes next fits in one line of his. He’s “trying to make marketing fun again.”

The Andy Ellis Playbook: what happens before the ad runs

Get your marketing orientation right first. Understand the category properly, talk to customers, and use good quantitative and qualitative data to find the real human insight underneath it all.

Ask the customer before you ask the AI. AI can give you an answer. Your customers are far more likely to give you the insight that leads to genuinely great creative.

Change the creative before you touch the targeting. Same targeting, same campaign structure, better creative: two e-commerce clients doubled their online revenue the following month, in their off-season.

Don’t give the creative the five minutes at the end. It’s one of the biggest profit multipliers a marketer can control, and it works now and later.

Make the idea when you see it. If the campaign is visible in the meeting, build it, even if nobody asked.