April, 2026.- In the saturated advertising ecosystem of 2026, where the average consumer is hit by thousands of visual stimuli every day, the “impression” metric has become the industry’s great self-deception. Ric Motti (ex-Spotify) and Nick Bell (ex-D&AD President and Global CCO at DDB) have launched 3 Chillies Creative Studio with a premise that acts as a cold shower for marketing departments: you can generate a billion impressions without touching the heart of a single person. For this duo, the obsession with short-term performance and blind reliance on Google and Meta platforms have eroded the essence of branding. Their manifesto, “You’re hot, or you’re not,” is not just a provocative slogan; it is a surgical diagnosis of an era where optimization cannot save a brand that nobody cares about.
Ric Motti brings the perspective of the sophisticated client. After years at Spotify—a platform where cultural relevance is the only valid language—Motti understands that sustainable growth does not come from “buying” attention, but from earning it. His focus at 3 Chillies is “Earned-First,” a strategy that prioritizes organic impact and cultural fluency over massive media spend. On the other hand, Nick Bell brings the creative pedigree of big networks but with the agility of an insurgent. Bell argues that the way back for brands trapped in the performance marketing arms race is to reclaim the craft of branding and the ability to enchant the public. Together, they have structured a studio that fills the gap between traditional big agencies—experts in scale but slow in culture—and PR agencies, which understand the ephemeral but lack long-term brand building.
In this double interview with Roastbrief, Motti and Bell break down why short-termism is the most expensive and inefficient choice a CMO can make. They discuss the need to “kill reach” as a vanity metric and propose a model where creativity is born from solid systems and genuine kindness toward the viewer. From using AI to free up creative time to the importance of historical research in fiction, as seen in parallel industry projects, 3 Chillies positions itself as the strategic partner for brands seeking to stop being background noise and start becoming protagonists of the global conversation. It is an invitation to stop managing numbers and start managing passions, proving that in the business of attention, only those who dare to burn manage to light the way to the future.
Nick Bell:
1. The “Hot or Not” Manifesto: 3 Chillies launches with a deliberately provocative message: “You’re hot, or you’re not.” What does “hot” mean in the context of brand creativity, and how do you diagnose whether a brand has lost its heat?
Hot means cutting through, getting noticed, engaging, moving, motivating, making an impression, being memorable, being loved, being talked about. In other words, being outstanding. Most brands have no heat at all. They play it by numbers, tick boxes and overestimate people’s interest in them.
2. Freeing Brands from the Cult of Google and Meta: You’ve positioned the studio as a way to free brands from over-reliance on tech platforms that reward spend and short-term performance. How did we get here, and what’s the path back for brands that feel trapped in the performance marketing arms race?
If you wanted to sell something to someone face to face, you wouldn’t start selling at them the moment you met them. You’d try first to engage them, charm them, win them over. It doesn’t matter how many people you pay to meet, if they don’t warm to you they’re not likely to buy from you.
3. Optimisation Can’t Fix a Brand Nobody Cares About: This is a powerful line. In a world where algorithms decide engagement in fractions of a second, how do you convince marketers—who are under immense pressure to show quarterly results—to invest in long-term brand heat over short-term performance metrics?
The question suggests it’s ‘all or nothing’. Whilst a sustained belief system helps build a brand, shorter-term communication that pollutes the world and actively makes people dislike a brand isn’t going to show anyone the quarterly results they want.
4. Earned-First, Brand-Craft Driven: 3 Chillies combines “cultural insight, earned-first thinking and brand craft.” How do these three elements work together in practice? Can you walk us through how they’d come together for a client campaign?
Seek to understand the person you want to communicate with. Not just their age and socio-economic group but who they are, how they live, how and where they spend their time, what interests, moves and motivates them.
Now you understand something about this person, how do you connect your brand with them in the most compelling way possible? Instead of ‘what is the best ad you can create?’, what is the most impactful, meaningful and rewarding way your brand can show up in their life?
Now you have the idea, how are you going to execute it so well that it will truly make a behaviour changing impression on this person?
5. The Agency Model Gap: You’ve argued that traditional agencies excel at scale but struggle with cultural impact, while PR-led models understand earned attention but lack long-term brand thinking. Where does 3 Chillies sit in that landscape, and how are you structured differently to bridge that gap?
Right bang in the middle.
Between us, with the respective experiences and skills we have developed, we offer the best of both worlds. 3 Chillies is structured differently because this is who we are and what we believe. It is our raison d’etre, our start point, our belief system and mission.
6. From D&AD President to Startup Founder: You’ve had a remarkable career, including serving as D&AD President and global CCO at DDB. What drew you to launch a startup at this stage, and what can you do now that you couldn’t do within a larger agency network?
Thank you. A number of things drew me to launch this start up. Despite opportunities to do so before, it had never felt quite right and so I had never done it. Importantly, we feel that everything is too traditional and that there is an opportunity to offer brands something more effective and better. And as important as anything else, being independent we have the freedom to follow our beliefs and shape our own destiny.
Ric Motti
1. The Client-Side Perspective: You’ve sat on the client side at Spotify, so you understand the internal pressure marketers face to show fast results. How does that experience shape the way 3 Chillies approaches client relationships and the conversations you have about short-term tactics versus long-term brand building?
My team at Spotify had a critical mission: hit the company’s subscriber targets each quarter. We had this motto: “as careful as necessary, as innovative as possible“.
So we focused on hitting our targets in the quickest, most efficient and safest way. Once that was assured, we allocated resources (budget, capacity, everything) to innovate and learn.
Why did we do this? Because we could hit our targets for a few quarters doing the exact same thing, but at some point there would be diminishing returns and it wouldn’t work. We needed to keep ahead of the problem.
All companies have short-term goals and need to show fast results. The smart companies allocate time and budget for long-term goals. The latter is where we can be most helpful.
2. “A Billion Impressions Without Touching Anyone”: That’s a powerful line from your launch statement. In a world where marketers are drowning in data and dashboard metrics, how do you help them distinguish between activity that merely registers and work that actually connects? What’s the alternative metric you’d rather they track?
We all see tens of thousands of logos each day. Some argue we are exposed to 5000 ads per day. If Instagram shows 1 pixel of your ad for 0.000001 second, that counts as an impression. And people “see” 4999 other ads each day. How’s that impression helping you?
Unless people pay attention to what you’re saying, there’s no point. That’s why we say attention can’t be bought, it has to be earned.
In terms of metric: first, let’s kill reach. On its own, it’s a vanity metric that means nothing with the current media formats.
What do we use instead? The honest answer is: it depends. It depends on the business problem, the stage of the company, what the goals are. Before we propose any measure of success, we need to understand what you need to do. You can’t just swap one universal metric for another.
You also have to be careful about optimising around a single number. It’s a basic principle: when a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good metric. The moment you’re managing to it, you’re gaming it. Impressions. CTR. Even revenue, in isolation, can be gamed in ways that erode a brand. (See: Nike.)
3. The Spotify Lens: Your time at Spotify—a platform that sits at the intersection of tech, data, and culture—must have given you a unique view of how brands can earn attention. What did you learn there about the relationship between cultural relevance and platform strategy that you’re now applying at 3 Chillies?
Spotify can’t fake cultural relevance: it needs to be perfect. When it’s 90% there, people sniff out the dissonance. It has to be 100% cool, 100% interesting and/or 100% relevant.
I once talked to one of the editors of the Who We Be playlist, he spent weeks in the Caribbean to understand what was picking up heat in the scene there. The focus was very much in understanding culture and being part of it, while toeing the line to avoid the “how do you do, fellow kids” effect.
That’s why our principle is: you’re hot or you’re not. Brands can’t do things halfway, be somewhat interesting, dip their toes into culture. Doing that is a huge waste of money, and the fastest track to irrelevance.
4. Earned-First, Not Platform-First: The studio’s model is built on creating work designed to travel organically rather than rely on heavy media spend. How do you convince marketers who’ve been trained to think “paid first” that earned attention is a viable, scalable strategy?
When there were four TV channels, “paid first” made total sense. But the more attention (and media) gets fragmented, the more you have to throw money at the problem. The less interesting you are, the more money you need. This plays right into the hands of money-hungry tech platforms.
Our starting point is the exact opposite: first we understand what we’re selling, then we understand the audience, then we create something that they’ll be interested in, and finally we propose the best way to get the message noticed.
This amplification can be done through creators, through the press, and certainly through paid media… if you’re smart about channels and formats. Ideally a mix of all those. That’s what earned-first thinking is about.
5. The Cost of Short-Termism: You’ve said that “focusing only on short-term tactics is the most expensive, inefficient choice you can make.” For a CFO or CMO under pressure to deliver this quarter, how do you make the business case for investing in work that might take longer to show returns but builds lasting brand heat?
Here’s what I would say: if you’re under pressure to deliver this quarter, do what you got to do. Put all your resources into that, use the strategies you feel comfortable with. At that stage, I’m not sure we’re the best studio to help you.
But… as you know, if you keep doing that, there will come a quarter when you will NOT reach your goals. The approach will get stale. And when it does, it’s too late: not only CAC will rise, but you’ve already eroded your brand. You know it, we know it, there’s all sorts of data that prove it.
When you’re ready to tackle that problem, give us a call. But don’t wait until the next quarter. The earlier we start understanding the challenges and thinking together about solutions, the better the results will be.
6. The 3 Chillies Proposition: With co-founders from D&AD/DDB, M&C Saatchi, and Spotify, you bring a unique blend of creative pedigree, sports/entertainment storytelling, and client-side platform expertise. How do these three perspectives come together in the work, and what can clients get from 3 Chillies that they can’t find anywhere else?
We all have a lot of experience, so we had a chance to learn the best from different models. And, most importantly, learn the worst too.
Big creative agencies are built to fill a media plan. Any attempt to create something attention-grabbing comes from hardy, smart creatives that have to fight a system (account, strategy, finance…) that sees no reason to support their initiatives.
On the other side, PR agencies get culture and earned-first thinking, but focus on quick wins that don’t really build brands.
When big networks put their creative and PR agencies together, it becomes a turf war. I’ve been in those… and I’m not proud. The result is disjointed and expensive.
We have fewer layers, faster decisions, integrated thinking. In short, we built the studio I wish I could hire as a marketer. Simple, no?
