Thank you for your responses to the hiring and job scams newsletter last week. If you missed it please take a read after Harry dropping some branding wisdom.

On this week’s MU
A little teaser: Most law firms are quietly printing money while spending less on marketing than you did last quarter’s offsite. Harry’s latest MU post shows how their obsession with billable hours, cookie‑cutter brands and AI denial is creating a once‑in‑a‑generation opportunity for bolder, braver marketers. If you want a live case study in what happens when a whole industry under invests in brand, innovation and AI, maybe start with the lawyers 😉

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Traditional Law Firms Are Dying From Marketing Myopia - AI Is Just The Final Bullet

Harry Lang - Training leaders at The Oxford AI School - Connect On Linkedin. Read more of my MU articles here.

Why did you appoint the last law firm you worked with? Or if you’re a lawyer, why did your last client hire you? Chances are, yours and their decision making process was based on one or more of these three things:-

• Reputation - you had a particular legal issue they specialise in solving

• Recommendation - somebody you know and trust said they’d be a good pick

• Remuneration - you’re required to employ a credible lawyer, but wanted to spend the bare minimum

This has been the way for eons. Law was - and is - a serious business dealing with serious topics with serious implications. People want safe, secure, reliable lawyers and are prepared to pay a premium to ensure they get the result they need. In turn, law firms in the UK and beyond have made an extremely profitable niche for themselves by eschewing innovation - effectively creating a domain in which a safe, solid, and perceptibly boring law firm is seen as a reputable, trustworthy and reliable law firm.

Bear in mind that law firms are B2B and B2C businesses, with clients who decide whether to pick them over another costly room full of highly educated suits. There’s very little in the way of brand differentiation, and I reckon they all look the same on purpose, fearing that standing out might make them look somewhat less ‘lawyer-ish’.

Blands Not Brands

Just look at how lawyers represent themselves to the casual observer - corporate, generic, safe gatekeepers of the law. Reassuring but purposefully bland experts who can be trusted to keep you out of trouble whilst divorcing you from large sums of money. As a marketer, I’m astounded that nobody has seen fit to update the model by creating a law firm brand with a more appealing, engaging and differentiated positioning in order to stand out from the lookalike crowd beyond price and reputation alone.

This question came to mind recently when I had a fascinating discussion with a former law firm CEO. He estimated that legal firms in the UK spend around 3% of their net revenue on marketing. Not on brand, not on their marketing headcount, not on digital media costs, not just on events - 3% to cover ALL OF IT!

1.7%

It turns out this 3% figure was a generous overestimation, representing only the upper quartile of law firm marketing spends. The Law Society’s 2026 Financial Benchmarking Survey found that the median law firm spends just 1.7% of fee income on marketing, and that figure includes the salaries of its marketing team. A quarter spent no more than 1%, while even the upper quartile begins at only 2.8%. Among firms turning over less than £2 million, the median is a frankly pointless 0.9%.

Split even that upper quartile 3% across multiple channels with multiple client industry sectors and multiple media, and you rapidly get to a place where the spend is meaningless - so insignificant as to be barely perceptible. The only conclusion you can draw is that lawyers don’t think marketing is a high priority for their future business success - it’s a wasteful, frivolous cost centre that only exists to drain partner equity pots.

Perhaps they’re right, but how does this measly 3% compare with the percentage of revenue spent on marketing by other notable industries?

Everyone else, including other professional services businesses, are happy to invest in marketing to a significant scale in the long term, one presumes because they’ve seen commercial benefits as a result. It’s only lawyers who are clearly above that sort of long-term strategic thinking.

A brief scan of the UK’s top ten law firm websites should give an inclination on where their pitiful marketing budget is being spent. You might think they’d be pretty good at differentiating their brands in other ways other than expensive ad campaigns and celebrity endorsements, right?

You’d be wrong.

Blending In

Law firms seem to care so little for brand differentiation, they apparently briefed the design of their websites to an apathetic twelve year old with a free Wordpress account and a secondhand copy of the Black’s Law Dictionary.

The problem is, law firms are demonstrating significant growth without the need to invest in marketing. The recent Law Society survey reported that 85% of firms achieved year-on-year fee growth, 55% grew by at least 10%, and 22% grew by at least 20%. This is all well and good, but just IMAGINE what they could achieve with a little imagination and a cohesive integrated marketing strategy, rather than just sitting on their hands enjoying stable organic growth?

This is what I mean - the below site might look familiar to any of you lawyers reading this. It should - it’s an AI generated amalgamation of the homepages of the top ten law firms in the world, and it’s the epitome of corporate cookie cutter design. A soup of mediocrity without one single redeeming feature. Its design on such an unimaginatively turgid level, the AI that produced it pulled out its own plug afterwards.

Think I’m being unduly unfair? Like I’m kicking those wealthy heartbreakers and lawmakers in a fit of pique through some misplaced career success jealousy?

No - I’m not.

Ripe For Disruption?

This is what those top ten law firm websites actually looked like before I smashed them together into a merged montage:-

JUST LOOK AT THEM! The identikit, lookalike headline placements alone make me want to Napalm my laptop and demand a refund from Getty Images on their behalf.

“Yes, I’d very much like to buy my funeral from these people”

“Or maybe a new suit?”

“Perhaps shop for colour swatches, specifically brown, blue, black and grey ones”

“...Or hire a photographer, but very specifically a short one who can only shoot impressive buildings from ground level…”

Just imagine, for one second, how easy it would be to dominate share of voice as one of these top ten law firms if you just took a dose of strategic and creative bravery:-

• A slightly more uplifting colour swatch?

• A brand personality that has some actual personality?

• A tone of voice not inspired by 16th century Franciscan monks?

• A font suite that doesn’t make you crave Comic Sans?

• Imagery not stolen from the 2003 Moss Bros catalogue?

• Copy that made me feel anything but sleepily morose?

• Website UI that took me on a journey to somewhere - anywhere - worthwhile?

And that’s just for starters, before we spend any of their hard earned cash on events, PR, content marketing, KOLs, sponsorship and paid media…

• Innovating with new tech to speed up case management, client communications and billing? That just means less billable hours on the clock.

• Deploying agentic AI to increase the speed and accuracy of mundane research and replicable task efficiency. How can we maintain our hourly rate if clients know we ‘cheated’?

• Updating brand and marketing capabilities to create a more appealing, inclusive and human organisation so clients and employees feel a greater emotional attachment and loyalty to our business. What?! And risk decades of stoic sameness and reliable partner equity splits?

Oh no you don’t - my bolthole in the Cotswolds costs a fortune to heat in winter!

Billions

According to a 2026 report by The American Lawyer, the top ten law firms generated revenues ranging from $3.1 billion to over $10.5 billion for the 2025 fiscal year.

Notably, Kirkland & Ellis made history by becoming the world’s first firm to cross the $10 billion single-year revenue milestone. They might see this as a prize to covet, but undoubtedly the Big Tech and AI behemoths will see it as a formerly impregnable vault ripe for raiding.

Enter AI

Which brings us, eventually, to the question of AI.
All industries will benefit / succumb to AI eventually. Some have embraced it, and are thriving as a result. Others, like many law firms, clearly see it as a threat to their livelihoods and are flapping desperately in the other direction like a besuited Icarus, failing to recognise that the glowing pot of gold they can see on the horizon is actually an AI-fuelled inferno for their business.

Chill out - nobody’s trying to replace you. AI systems can’t operate without a human in the loop, but just think like a client for one second. If you’re choosing between two lawyers, and one is faster, cheaper and better because they’ve embedded AI in their systems, which one would you choose?

Automation, research capabilities, business management, marketing, performance management, billing automation, client communications, case drafting - they’re all right there in shiny LLM packaging, and they’re getting better every week.

The dominant legal tools are a handful of tailor made AI platforms sitting on top of the leading foundation models. Harvey is the market leader while CoCounsel from Thomson Reuters’ runs it a close second. Then you’ve got Legora, Luminance and a handful of challenger brands fighting to grab land, eyeballs and budgets. They all do largely the same things, namely document reviews, due diligence, contract analysis, legal research and first drafts.

Of the legal behemoths, both Slaughter and May and A&O Shearman rolled Harvey while Linklaters picked Legora, Freshfields went balls deep into Anthropic. Adoption across the rest of the industry is more scattered with 41% of law firms reporting integrated use of generative AI. Separately, more than half of all firms surveyed have given staff no training on responsible use and crucially, they don’t plan to. Metaphorically, you have a train steaming way down the tracks and a number of carriages rolling backwards towards a precipice.

You’d need to have your head so deep in the sand you’re seeing kangaroos to miss the fact that these early, massive ‘AI Adopter’ law firms have already made their moves, so my advice would be to embrace the age of AI, nurture change, encourage differentiation and relish the inevitable chaos that such foundational change tends to ignite.

Some commentators have flagged fears the legal AI tools are simply hoovering data to preempt their ultimate goal of replacing the very clients who are funding them, but this has been largely (and unsurprisingly) denied by the Harveys and Legoras of this world.

Harvey states unequivocally that it does not train its models on client data and “...client documents are used at inference time only and then not absorbed into the model’s weights”. It runs tenant-level isolation, ethical walls, audit logging and contractual guarantees that a law firm’s client data stays within its own gated garden. Whether this is true or not will only be revealed in the course of time, but commercially it stacks up - Harvey has ballooned to a valuation of more than $11 Billion by looking after its law form clients and playing by the rules - it’s not incentivised to sh*t where it sleeps.

Innovate & Market To Win The Legal Game

So not all lawyers hate AI and innovation - but some of them seem to reject the premise of change. If you’ve made a niche as highly profitable as this, and retirement is beckoning you from a hill five years distant, why on earth would you choose to make your services cheaper, easier and faster? You’d be the turkey voting for Christmas, which is all well and good until rival firms take the initiative with that critical first mover AI advantage, leaving you scrabbling for ‘no win, no fee’ clients like an ambulance chasing hack.

Change and progress are inevitable, as demonstrated by the industry heavyweights, but it’s not too late to join the bandwagon. Act now, and you become the chased rather than the chaser.

Fail to do so and you’ll be stuck with the other legal also rans - a morose corporate website, a fraying suit and the well thumbed brochure for a French chateau that you once dreamed of owning.

Thanks for reading this week Harry.
If you would like to read my previous MU articles, select your favourite here

Harry Lang runs The Oxford AI School which teaches teams the basics of AI in an intuitive and practical way. The school has modules to cater for numerous industries, including law firms. Harry is the author of ‘Brands, Bandwagons & Bullsh*t,’ available on Amazon. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, check out his socials or email him to book an AI training course at Harry@TheOxfordAISchool.com

PS. Here are the 3 campaigns & smart choices you might have missed:

1. Why Cocktails Are So Important In Tennis 🎾

2. GLP-1 Food Friendly Product Vs Anti GLP-1 🙃

3. How To Integrate AI Into Design - Puma x Man City 🥅

Article Sources

• The Law Society/ Hazlewoods Financial Benchmarking Survey 2026

• Clifford Chance revenue hits £2.4bn - Legal Business

• Kirkland reaches $10.5bn revenue - The American Lawyer

• 41% of firms using generative AI - Thomson Reuters 2026 report

• 54% of firms provide no AI training and don’t plan to - 8am 2026 Legal Industry Report (ABA)

• Slaughter and May adopts Harvey firmwide - Artificial Lawyer

• Linklaters rolls out Legora - Artificial Lawyer

• Freshfields’ partnership with Anthropic - Law.com

• Harvey market position & $11bn valuation — Modern Counsel

• Harvey: Security by Design (does not train on client data) — Harvey

• Harvey AI security & data privacy — AI Vortex

• Law firm marketing spend benchmarks (~2–5% vs ~7–10%) — MyCase

• 2026 marketing budget benchmarks for professional service firms — Align

This week I wanted to tackle a worrying trend as we ramp up to hiring season. The job scams and the scam market.

Remember if you missed last week’s music infused deep dive by Paul Thomas you can always read it here, there has been some brilliant feedback on here and on LinkedIn.

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Now onto how to protect yourself against bad actors:

By Danny Denhard - Coaching marketing & growth leaders, consulting with marketplaces and challenger brands and advising business & marketing leaders.

Today there are two parts, part 1 a real life story and then part 2, clear ways to protect ourselves against the problems we are facing.

Part I: Inside Look At A Very Realistic Scam

Picture this, you open your emails and you have a headhunter offering you a chance at a dream job.

The job spec is almost perfect, you tick almost every box and you’ve seen the CEO being a little critical of the marketing.

It has the perfect title, huge salary, tailored to your background and wants to discuss in more detail.

So you do a quick check, you see the person in seat, you check the latest round of podcasts and high profile interviews, and it all seems to align.

You do a quick LinkedIn search, the exec headhunter comes up in a search and you think ok, seems legit…

You send your updated CV/resume, you have numerous back and fourths and then you’re asked for a couple of documents you haven’t heard of.

So you do some due diligence with friends out in the States, you speak to people you trust here and all seems ok.

So, you go for it.

A question comes up, do you have a professional executive document reviewer?
They can ensure you match against what the hiring committee looks for and ensure you can go as far as possible.

You submit your details and the hiring manager and first rounds of checks need a specific format doc, the hiring committee has asked for this specific document format and you have to complete two docs.
The recruiter recommends someone and recommends you reach out.

You think about it, you think lets explore some more.

You reach out, and the prices come back; there are 3 paid packages. Low, medium and extremely high.

The alarm bells should go off, but everything seems to be kosher so far.

You do some research and you find a couple of issues, some warning signs, but everything else seems ok…right?

This is where you should stop, but if you decide to go further, they’ll nudge you on iMessage or WhatsApp, they’ll use the fear tactic of missing deadlines.

They can become a little more pushy, they can provide company information, bank information and even offer references…

This is just one risk executives face in this job market.

There are many more scams but this seems the most sophisticated one out there. I know a handful of people who have fallen into this trap. I know someone who even went through rounds of interviews and then the headhunter suddenly completely disappeared.

So I dive into how we can protect ourselves below.

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Part II: How The Playbooks Work And How To Protect Yourself

Exec targeting is not random. It is built on repeatable, well tested playbooks that borrow language, timing and process from legitimate executive search. With modern tooling it is simple to clone real processes and automate most of it.

Here are 3 of the most common patterns, followed by practical guardrails.

1. The “Phantom” Executive Search Firm

Here, scammers impersonate or invent a retained search firm.

They will often:

• Register lookalike domains that are one character off a real firm, or simply steal the name and online presence of an existing boutique.

• Populate profiles with stolen photos and bios, usually lifted from real recruiters or executives.

• Build a site with an AI generated look and feel, retelling other firms’ case studies and stories to back up the pitch you receive on email or LinkedIn.

• Lead with a “confidential” mandate, often a stealth scale up, a PE backed turnaround, or an unannounced C suite replacement.

The process is structured and familiar:

• A discovery call

• A “culture fit” conversation

• A technical, assignment or working project interview, sometimes even a supposed call with the “Chair” or “Founder”

Each stage is there to build trust and lower your guard, while collecting personal, corporate and financial information.

2. The Extortionate Resume And Branding Review

Once trust is built, the conversation shifts and quick.

The supposed hiring manager or partner explains that the board is “very particular” about how candidates are presented.

They may:

• Insist you use their “preferred partner” to rewrite your executive summary, leadership narrative or board profile.

• Position it as a necessary investment to “present you properly at this level,” with fees often starting around $/£1k and going up from there. The assumption is that executives have both the money and the time.

• Use time pressure: “the board is reviewing a small slate this week,” “we need this locked in before the next committee.”

The work, if it appears at all, is usually generic.

More recently the work is of a decent quality, which makes the scam feel more legitimate.

Their real goal? It is the upfront fee, not the placement.
Sending you completed documents is simply part of the theatre or game for them.

There are now entire fake companies built with AI site builders, with edited stock photos, edited scraped Glassdoor reviews to make it seem legit and even going to the lengths of faking Companies House entries are all steps people take to appear real in the UK.

Similar steps are taken in the US and Canadian markets with many creating LLCs and equivalents.

3. The High Profile Job Ads And Application Racket

A newest variant is the fake high profile job ad.

You see an attractive role. You apply. They accept your application, set up a call, and then you never move past “the first round.”

The point is not to hire. It is to capture your CV, your personal information and, ideally, more data they can monetise or abuse later.

Many of these are run almost end to end with AI automation and unfortunately off the shelf tools:

• Posting ads across platforms

• Running short, automated interviews

• Sending follow up and rejection emails

The tells:

• Poor grammar or slightly off language

• Basic automation errors

• Low quality avatars or edited stock imagery that feels out of sync with the brand.

• A site that looks polished at a glance, but falls apart when you read it closely or aloud. The words are fine but not how real operators in that space talk.

In all cases, check:

• The site, including domain age and registration

• The sites template - You likely should be able to spot an AI site, they all look and feel the same

• The names and email addresses

• The actual companies behind the job ads

Practical Guardrails To Protect Yourself

Here are guardrails that will protect you and where need your organisation.

• Start with the basics. Read the full email address, character by character. Is it a cheap TLD instead of .com?

• Is it a low cost domain option you have never seen associated with that brand?

• Is there an extra letter in the name? Does the format match the real firm’s email pattern? A single character can be the difference between a trusted brand and a clone.

Use cross channel verification as standard.

• If a recruiter emails you, find their official profile on LinkedIn or on the firm site and reach out there: “I received an email from this address about a mandate. Can you confirm it is legitimate?”

• In some setups, fake recruiters claim to work for the brand on LinkedIn, so check work history, connections and activity. If you try to connect or ask for confirmation and only silence, or the firm itself does not recognise them, treat it as a major warning sign.

Genuine search partners respect careful candidates.

Follow the money! In legitimate executive search, candidates do not pay to be placed.

If you are asked to pay for anything linked to consideration, CV or resume rewrites, coaching, clearances or onboarding kits, treat it as a hard red flag. There are professional services that can and do help here but usually high-end executive search firms roll this into the service.

There are good reasons to invest in your own development or personal brand. Those decisions should be yours, on your timeline, and not conditional on a single “opportunity.”

Please watch out for the platform shifts.

• If a process moves quickly from corporate email and LinkedIn to WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal, be alert, especially if this happens before any formal documentation. Signal will protect identity and phone numbers as it is privacy driven by default.

• Sometimes secure channels are appropriate. Often, in these cases, they are about reducing traceability and oversight.

It is not that executives should never use these tools. The issue is speed and insistence. Moving there very early and keeping everything there is a clear warning sign.

Here are two other approaches being leveraged:

1. Region Specific Scams: There are also region‑specific scam patterns, e.g. visa‑linked “sponsorship” fees, relocation scams, many large companies will pay for relocation but many are falling into the trap of following international work and relocation and is a big long scam that you invest time and money in.

2. Niche Approaches: There are elaborate scams that sit inside of alternative recruiting channels, industry specific Discords, localised and tech focused Slack communities and some have moved towards industry forums) where fake roles are seeded.

🚩 Beware Of Big Brand Name Scams: Right Now: There are ongoing and scams using Airbnb, Netflix, Spotify and Google, major tech companies are prone targets.

Beware: Unsuccessful Interview Work & Presentations Are Being Implemented

When I reached out to industry colleagues, many suggested how their interview work and interview presentations are now being used and deployed after unsuccessful interviews.

Unfortunately, this isn’t new but is becoming more common and some of these are interviews are coming through recruitment firms and exec headhunters.

This is a tricky and sensitive topic for many different personality and conflict averse people. Here are a ways we can protect ourselves here?

• Manage expectations up front: Only present your presentation/worksheet but do not share the breakdown pre or post interview. This can be declared upfront to manage any awkward conversations.

• Treat interview decks as strong previews of your thinking, not fully detailed plans: you can manage this expectation from early in the process. This enables you focus on diagnosis, options, and priorities rather than complete campaigns and roadmaps, and they still need your judgment

• Only share high‑level thinking and anonymised past examples: avoid building a custom, plug‑and‑play plan, especially financial models and budgeting

• Document what you shared (you can record online interviews/transcribe etc), when and how: this will create a timeline and will allow you to call out bad behaviours, directly or through recruitment company. More frequently we are seeing horror stories shared on LinkedIn without real information which isn’t helping this behaviour

• Send over a NDA: This is becoming a more normal practise and potential legal ways to protect your work if used and provides a way to be paid for your work.

None of these are fool proof however a few practical ways to protect ourselves and our sanity.

Ambition, Curiosity And Caution

I personally know COOs, CFOs and co-founders who have been caught in elaborate schemes and been burnt in interview “work” being used post unsuccessful process.

I have also seen suspect roles in WhatsApp groups and private communities being shared. People being helpful and wanting to help industry peers with roles, unfortunately this is how many scammers have worked out how to play the scale game.

Many of the smartest people I know have been single out and some pulled into these operations.

Our ambition is not the problem in executive leadership, it’s often the point of our leadership.

Wanting bigger mandates, harder challenges and more meaningful work is healthy.

However, in this market, though, ambition without structured scepticism is a liability.

The best employers and search firms will expect you to check who they are and what they are asking you to step into. Taking a moment to read the domain properly, validate the recruiter, or push back on any request for payment is not being awkward, it is being professional.

At the C-suite level, that mix of curiosity and caution is not just self preservation. It is what modern, responsible leadership looks like and we have to protect ourselves first.

I know how tough it is out there and Harry has shared a number of his personal challenges when he was job hunting. So, I hope you found this MU useful, if you have experienced any of these and would like to share your story (we will happily share anonymously and pseudonymously (where we share non distinguishable information you choose to share) to protect industry colleagues, please do share to mu@dannydenhard.com or hit reply.

I would love to keep this post updated with the new and updated scams, so if you receive any, please do reach out.

3x hand selected marketing inspirations from this week:

1. 🍩 The surprise Krispy Kreme x Pokémon collab - catch them if you can…

2. 🍸I dipped into the Gordon’s archive and found this gem from the 1970s

3. 🧼 A shampoo bottle made of soap that doubles as a 2 in 1

Bonus: If you’d to dive into football sponsorship and the evolution in the Premier League, I took a deeper dive on my blog (yes, I still blog).

Thanks for reading today and have a good weekend.
We will see you again next Friday.

— Danny Denhard (come say 👋 on email or on LinkedIn)

PS: If there are certain sections you’d like to share with friends and colleagues to protect them, you can copy and paste the following:

• Phantom Exec Search Firm - https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/i/211014325/1-the-phantom-executive-search-firm

• The Extortionate Resume & Personal Branding Review - https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/i/211014325/2-the-extortionate-resume-and-branding-review

• The Scam Job Ad Racket - https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/i/211014325/3-the-high-profile-job-ads-and-application-racket

• How To Protect Yourself - https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/i/211014325/practical-guardrails-to-protect-yourself

• Unsuccessful Interview Work & Presentations Work Being Implemented Scam - https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/i/211014325/beware-unsuccessful-interview-work-and-presentations-are-being-implemented

This week Mr Paul Thomas returns with Marketing loves to hide behind “best practice” but what if that’s exactly what’s holding you back?

Paul shows how stepping outside your industry, and even your own function, will unlock sharper ideas and stronger commercial results. Paul teases stories from his past (enjoy the Britpop record stores to fibre broadband scale-ups) and shares how perspective beats playbooks when you’re trying to grow, this is packed full of song titles and lyrics - Paul’s calling card.

If you missed last week’s interview on how to win with PR and comms definitely take a read or watch here.
» If you would prefer to listen as a podcast, we are now live on Apple Podcasts & Spotify.

By Paul Thomas - Fractional CMO and The Sound Of - Listen To His Podcast

Marketing has an originality problem.
We call it best practice.

Work for an organisation long enough and it’s inevitable that you become institutionalised to some degree. However diverse the hiring policy, cultures breed groupthink. Norms you might have challenged on day one become Just The Way It Is quicker than any of us notice or would care to admit.

There’s no time, and often little incentive, to look outside, question the accepted wisdom or take a risk in the name of curiosity.

The same happens within specialisms.

Paradigms emerge.

Laws of gravity set in.

In marketing, it’s putting the customer at the heart of everything we do, product-led growth, The Long and the Short of It, CRM golden rules, pricing principles and whatever else is dominating LinkedIn this week.

These ideas aren’t wrong per se. Most became popular for a reason.

But when we stop asking whether they are on point Right Here, Right Now it’s easy to drift into mediocrity.

Attempts to broaden our thinking through peer networks, conferences and webinars can make things worse. We hear from people doing similar jobs, facing similar pressures and reading similar reports. We forget that B2B marketing still benefits from copy consumers would love, and that B2C processes can benefit from B2B funnel rigour.

The current zeitgeist gets reinforced. The reassuring average becomes the ambitious target.

Before long, we’re in “no one got fired for choosing IBM” territory.

Yes, we’re going agentic. We’re already testing ChatGPT ads. We only buy programmatic. Direct mail is dead. Our competitors are all doing it.

We call it benchmarking. Sometimes it is simply copying within narrow spreadsheets and paradigm norms.
And for a while, it can appear to work.

The KPIs you’ve set using industry benchmarks feel achievable.

You might even hit them for a cycle or two. If you’ve drunk enough of the attribution Kool-Aid, it can feel like you’ve cracked it.

A rising market can make ordinary decisions look inspired.

But it never lasts. Customers move. Competitors learn. Companies get bloated. Technology and bureaucracy slow things down. What was once distinctive becomes familiar.

Through it all, you’ve been so focused on the inside view that you’ve lost sight of the outside.

Looking back, I’ve been lucky enough to catch a few rising tides. I worked in record shops at the height of the Britpop-fuelled CD boom. I moved into telecoms just as smartphones, apps, and 4G revolutionised the category. More recently, I worked in fibre broadband as challenger brands capitalised on incumbent sluggishness in sorting out the nation’s Wi-Fi.

Where I’ve learnt most - and probably added most value - is when I’ve crossed over.

I moved from working behind the counter in individual record shops to buying music at scale for multiple retailers. That taught me that buyers spend almost as much time selling as salespeople do.

Having sat in judgement on which compilation albums were marketable in Woolworths, I then got the chance to create and launch them into the same market for Sony BMG.

Everything I’d experienced further down the supply chain helped me understand what retailers needed and made me more credible when selling to them.

I produced and launched UK number-one albums.
I also got humbled regularly because around 70% of our concepts bombed.

For context, a three-in-ten hit rate was considered top quartile. It still stings.

The lesson wasn’t simply how to spot a hit. It was how to manage the whole process so that the winners paid for the misses and the portfolio still returned a decent profit.

When the credit crunch drove me to Orange in 2008 as a “good port in a storm”, I discovered that asking in May what the plan was for Christmas counted as a surprisingly subversive question.

This was a mega-brand helping define the future of connectivity. But the Argos catalogue deadline was six weeks away and nobody had decided which new phones we wanted to put in it.

The internal planning cycle said there was time. Retail said otherwise.

My previous world gave me a different clock.

Later, I joined a fibre scale-up that wanted to professionalise its commercial growth approach. My advice was to leave much of what EE and BT did to one side while sticking firmly to a few proven product, pricing and commercial principles.

That might sound contradictory. It isn’t.

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Cover the track but make it your own. Borrow the principle, not the playbook.

Outside-in thinking doesn’t mean automatically rejecting established expertise. It means separating the disciplines that endure from the rituals an industry has stopped questioning.

We doubled the customer base and revenue. Not because we blindly copied the incumbent, or because we did the opposite for the sake of it, but because we were selective about what we borrowed.

When I set out on my own in 2025, I called the business pro-spective.

The driving thought was that an outside perspective is valuable, but it shouldn’t always require a battalion of consultants, a vast transformation programme and a fee capable of creating its own EBITDA problem.

In all the roles I’ve described, I was no stranger to becoming institutionalised myself. I was part of the groupthink, too busy to get my head up and look around.

My edge was usually that I had arrived from somewhere different: the buyer who now needed to sell; the retailer leading product marketing; the big-company person learning how scale-up and private equity-backed businesses really work.

It has taken a year of self-employment and several clients for me to understand that more clearly.

My commercial experience, marketing savvy and leadership skills are the support acts.

The main event is perspective: curiosity, pattern recognition and the willingness to approach a familiar problem from an unfamiliar direction.

Rental refrigeration can learn from telecoms. Newspaper publishing can borrow from retail. Property PR and sports ticketing can reveal ideas that work elsewhere. In return, each new sector adds to the breadth of thinking I can take into the next one.

That doesn’t mean parachuting in with a bundle of supposedly clever answers.

It means asking better questions.

It’s also why I still draw constantly on my earliest retail experience. Why I visit call centres and warehouses, ride along with engineers and take every opportunity to hear from customers directly.

Retail taught me to follow both the customer and the money through the whole system: ordering, pricing, merchandising, serving, payment, returns and complaints.

When a business feels complicated, going back to that end-to-end journey often helps me work out where the things have gone out of tune.

So, if you sense it’s time to go outside more often, here are four questions to ask:

1. “If my business is making pop music, what might it sound like as a heavy metal cover version?” What would be different if we operated in another sector?

2. “Who’s Top of the Pops?” Who is doing something unusually well - and which of their methods could we steal? The more different the industry, the better.

3. “Who will challenge the arrangement rather than simply applaud the song?” A good producer won’t replace what makes you distinctive.
   They will help you turn it into a hit.

4. “Which belief would I question if I joined this business tomorrow?”

   And why have I stopped questioning it now?

Best practice tells you what worked somewhere else.
Perspective helps you decide what could work Here and Now.

It’s always good to get Another Point Of View…

» Paul is a Fractional CMO and The Sound of… keynote speaker, combining business thought leadership with pop music to help teams find their growth rhythm. Connect with Paul on LinkedIn

Here are 3 refreshing doses of marketing from this week:

1. 👜 What’s in my bag with Vagisil

2. 📲 Hinge x Substack short stories with famous authors

3. 🍕 Domino’s new pizza in shape of a… domino

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend and we will land back in your inbox next Friday!

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

PS I created a free worksheet to help your LinkedIn journey with Alicia’s brilliant interview

Thank you for the great feedback from last week’s newsletter.
If you missed how to master LinkedIn interview with Alicia Teltz I highly recommend you read later today.

👉 Remember if you want to have your say or give us feedback just hit reply, drop us an email on mu@dannydenhard.com or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

This week I sat down with Andy Barr.

• He has been at the centre of PR and crisis comms for the last 30 years.

• Andy was one of the pioneers of digital/online PR and has many war stories to share.

• As we get into in the interview, Andy and I were one time competitors and have often spoken at the same events but haven’t had chance to sit down and really break everything down. So this week, we finally did.

• It’s a wide ranging conversation from how to win PR, when to work with press and journalists, how to think about modern day crisis comms and why black hat AI and agentic is going to cause many CMOs major headaches.

• I highly recommend you listen or watch the whole interview but if you’re short on time right now, I’ve broken down the Q&A and the most important takeaways and my hidden gems below:

Listen To The Podcast

Listen on Spotify

Or On Apple Podcast

Watch On YouTube

Important Timestamps:

• 1:30 - What Works In PR Right Now?

• 3:21 - How To Run Reactive Newsjacking

• 5:57 - How To Cut Through The PR Noise

• 10:38 - When To Work With Press Versus Going Direct

• 13:49 - When To Leverage Founder Led Channels

• 18:04 - When Saying Nothing Is The Best Tactic

• 18:19 - The Crisis Comms Playbook

• 22:32 - Why You Must Go And Meet Your Haters

• 28:40 - The Rise Of AI Misinformation & Manipulated PR

• 36:39 - How To Fix OpenAI’s Reputation

By Danny Denhard - Coaching marketing & growth leaders, consulting with marketplaces and challenger brands and advising business leaders

The Current State of PR & Media Tactics

Q: What tactics are you seeing working today?

• “Effective storytelling” remains the primary tactic that successfully translates across every modern platform.

• High-authority tier-one media is still relevant, but Andy highlights the power of online communities like Reddit and how far it now reaches.

• Reddit has “almost replaced Press Association,” and a strong placement there can drive enough traffic to “cause a client’s site to fall over”.

Q: What is going to work in PR for the next 12 months?

• “Reactive newsjacking” as the absolute fastest way to build a brand from the ground up.

• Andy suggests for leaders to ignore the buzz around “AI PR” or “GEO PR” as nonsense compared to the speed and effectiveness of reactive media.

Q: Are there core areas that you know are gonna work almost every time?

• PR professionals should “lean into the news agenda” and align their reactive content with what is currently trending.

• Incorporating high-interest topics like “TikTok,” “OpenAI,” and “ChatGPT” into reactive pitches is a quick way to gain coverage.

@prandybarrIf I was a business owner launching a new brand tomorrow, these are the 6 #PR moves that I would make to succeed. Based on my 30’years of launching brands including Huel, Wild Deodorant and Myvouchercodes. #prexpert #SME #businessowner

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• Modern PR requires a combination of strategic ideation, tactical execution, and technical knowledge to get through the noise.

Q: Is there a framework people could borrow to get that cut-through with journalists?

• The framework for successful reactive PR centers on “speed and quirkiness”.

• Providing a “memorable quote” is essential to sticking in a journalist’s mind and building a long-term roster relationship.

• Barr notes that being memorable is key: “If you’re memorable, even for being an idiot, people come back to you”.

Media Relations & Direct Communications

Q: When should people use the press?

• Andy’s rule of thumb is to “use press all the time” to maintain a consistent brand presence.

• He advises building relationships with the “freelance army” that now powers many major media titles.

• Brands should follow a “proactive schedule of going to media every two or three weeks” with high-quality data or vibrant stories.

Q: Is there a rule of thumb for going direct via founder-led or employee-generated content?

• Successful brands like Marks & Spencer demonstrate the power of “amplifying their other members of their sort of C-suite or senior leadership team”. Here is the example of M&S’s Director of Product Development Kathryn Turner we discussed

@kathrynlturnerWe’ve upgraded our beans (just two ingredients! 🫘) and teamed up with @Bowel Cancer UK to celebrate the power of fibre. #kathrynturner #marksandspencer #productdevelopment #kathrynsigneditoff #beans

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• LinkedIn is currently “really powerful for brand building” when used for consumer-facing or trade-focused executive messaging.

• The modern media landscape demands “rich content,” such as video, to accompany traditional reports and findings.

If you’d like to dive into ECG further, Chris Hutchings and I went deep last year - watch on YouTube

Below is another one to look at how branded flywheels can work if you have the right team members and connected PR team.

Q: When should brands actually say nothing?

• In crisis situations, “apologise without admitting liability” and then take a strategic period of time out of the media spotlight.

• Going quiet helps “take the fuel out of the fire” and prevents reactive statements from generating new rounds of questioning.

• Andy advocates for “letting your stakeholders and ambassadors fill that gap” in the news media instead of the brand itself.

The Future of AI & Reputation Management

Q: Are you seeing any black hat or gray hat tactics to manipulate AI models?

• Andy predicts a shift into “AI skullduggery,” mirroring the early days of SEO “skullduggery” and black hat tactics.

• Misinformation is a growing risk because “AI is confusing repetition with fact” and filling knowledge gaps with potentially fake data.

• The next major PR battle will be countering deliberate misinformation that competitors or bad actors place into AI training sets.

Here’s my take on why I’d be investing into better reputation management tools from the podcast:

My 3 recommended actions following my prediction:

1. Audit Your LLM Results Today: Prompt the major AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) on your company, executive team, and products. Identify hallucinated details, missing context, or negative biases before AI agents pick them up and push these out. Remember LLMs without connecting to web search act very differently.

2. Aggressively Fill AI Knowledge Gaps: LLMs invent or extrapolate fake news when they encounter an information void. Publish structured, authoritative, and easily crawlable content (clear FAQs, more owned content like executive bios, official press responses) to directly feed models the ground truth.

3. Shift from Reactive PR to Agentic Monitoring: Stop relying solely on traditional social listening or news monitoring tools. Implement tools and processes designed to track conversational search engine outputs, LLM summaries, and synthetic media references in real time

Q: What would you do to help save ChatGPT’s reputation?

• Andy’s primary advice was to “get some grownups in the room” who can make strong PR-led decisions at the C-suite level.

• OpenAI needs to address internal conflicts, such as having “two CMOs,” and establish a unified “content strategy” that moves away from “shooting at the hip”.

• Barr suggests that CEO Sam Altman should “step away from doing any comms for a bit” and focus on showcasing product expertise rather than headline-grabbing statements.

My Hidden Gems

Here are my personal gems from the interview that you will likely miss if you don’t get chance to listen or watch the interview in full:

1. Andy rightly points out that AI models are beginning to confuse repetition with truth. Something to leverage or address.

2. While everyone talks about the "shrinking media," Andy points out that the power has shifted from employed journalists to a massive, underpaid, but incredibly hungry "freelance army. This might be something you look to double down in with the mass layoffs and move to independent journalism.

3. Andy admits he looked like an "idiot" for his infamous Loch Ness quote right before the housing crash. But that "idiot" moment kept him on the BBC's expert roster for two decades.

4. Crises are often caused by stupidity, not malice - it is a key takeaway when the next time you enter the war room and remember positive intent

5. We point out that the OpenAI’s leaders aren't acting like CEOs; they are acting like "alpha geeks" competing for the smartest-guy-in-the-room title not for the best CEO or best company leader - well worth remembering with your boss or for your company.

👉 Please go and connect with Andy on LinkedIn and watch his great TikTok’s - he really has been there, seen it and done it.

This Week Doses: There were a few launches this week that flew under the radar, you might want to see:

• ⚽️ Arsenal x Cadburys champions chocolate

• 🥪 Greggs reframing of lunch/picnic as quicknic

• 💉 Ozempic sponsorship in WTA tour

Thanks for reading this week, we land in your inboxes again next week with the return of Paul Thomas with marketing has an originality problem.

Have a good weekend,

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

Thanks for your feedback on last week’s daily dose - if you missed it, here’s my run down of your free daily swipe file to inspire and entertain your team.

This week we have something a little different. An interview with Alicia, we go deep into how to make LinkedIn successful for your business.

Transitioning from a high-flying corporate career to the unpredictable world of entrepreneurship is a challenge few master, Alicia has taken it in her stride.

I sat down with friend of Marketing Unfiltered Alicia Teltz, if you are active on LinkedIn you will definitely recognise Alicia and her LinkedIn deep dives.

Alicia has navigated some of the world’s largest organisations, including working at LinkedIn and Gartner and is now running a successful mini media and training company The Hype Department.

Alicia is currently launching The Hype Challenge (starts on Monday), a 5-week LinkedIn Cohort & Posting Challenge aimed to help highly capable entrepreneurs and corporate professionals to finally get recognised for their brilliance and monetise their expertise through LinkedIn. Find out more ↙️

THE HYPE CHALLENGE

We explore the essential lessons learned along the way and dive deep into the mechanics of building a personal brand that truly resonates.

From mastering the LinkedIn algorithm to leveraging the exposure effect (exposure effect is a psychological quirk where we start to prefer a person, song, or product simply because we’ve encountered it repeatedly and it feels familiar) for trust to how she has translated onto her popular newsletter on Substack.

This conversation provides real actionable insights for any marketing leader looking to cut through the digital noise and drive meaningful business conversion (whether for you as a fractional leader or as a Marketing Leader).

» Connect with Alicia on LinkedIn and on her Substack

Corporate Background vs. Entrepreneurship

What key lessons from your corporate background at SAP, Mastercard, Gartner, Hootsuite, and LinkedIn have been most valuable in your journey as an entrepreneur?

The funny thing is that nothing really prepared me for entrepreneurship. When you work at a big organisation and all of the companies I’ve worked for were huge organisations; even Hootsuite had thousands of employees before they made cuts and made me redundant you get everything given to you. You get frameworks, existing clients, software, blueprints, inbound leads, absolutely everything.

When you’re an entrepreneur, you have to figure it all out yourself. You are reliant solely on yourself to land clients, market yourself, and show up. It is a whole different game. So basically, I have learned nothing from corporate life that prepared me for this! Even though I was in sales, I think it’s just the general sales skills that I developed being a B2B sales professional for 15 years understanding customer needs and their pain points, and then how I can help them overcome these rather than just feature-dumping.

For example, if you’re selling software, I’m not just telling them how this helps with a specific task; I help them understand how this helps them achieve their broader goals. The same applies when you sell to customers directly (end users). If they are corporate professionals, how does this help them succeed in their role and get that promotion? Because they don’t necessarily care that the company makes X amount more money when they use my software.

Ultimately, why do people show up on LinkedIn in the first place?
It’s because they want to achieve something.

Most likely, they want to use it as a channel to make more money, and they want more money because they want more freedom and want to chase their dreams. I always try to connect it back to the bigger picture.

Leverage The Exposure Effect

Often you will recommend your followers and subscribers to leverage the exposure effect with LinkedIn and content. What are tangible ways for marketing leaders to do this?

To quickly recap, the exposure effect (or mere-exposure effect) is an experiment that Robert Zajonc, a Polish psychologist, conducted in the 1960s. He found that the more often we hear or see someone, the more we rate those people as likeable, competent, and trustworthy. We also see actually from a Gartner study that trust is the number one factor when people make a buying decision. This is the same whether you sell B2C or B2B, because in the end, it’s still business-to-people.

There is always a human being making a buying decision, and every buying decision is first made emotionally and then justified logically afterwards with spreadsheets and data. What you really need to do as marketing leaders is understand how you can build trust with your potential customers.

The best way to establish that trust using the exposure effect is by being visible. LinkedIn is the perfect place because it allows sales representatives or executives to establish trust over time. They show up, showcase their skills and expertise by sharing content that displays how knowledgeable they are and how their products work (again, connecting back to how the product impacts people’s lives).

If you do that long enough by also showing your human, authentic, emotional side, it builds that trust.

Cut Through the Algorithm

When every update on LinkedIn could be seen as an ad, how do you cut through the algorithm and drive conversation and business conversion?

You need to show up as a human and not just as a robot promoting your company, your products, or your services. Share who you are:

• What are your interests?

• What are your hobbies?

• Connect with people on a human, emotional level.

This is how you cut through the noise of the ads. Once you have built a bit more of an audience and shown up multiple times, you can then weave in bottom-funnel content.

If you think about content as a funnel, I always recommend:

• Top-funnel content: ~70% - General industry insights, emotional/personal content geared towards the masses to grow visibility.

• Middle-funnel content: ~25% - Designed to build trust; getting into the nitty-gritty of how you help customers achieve their dream goals using your products).

• Bottom-funnel content: ~5% - The real call-to-action or hard sell.

Try to share as much top-funnel content as you can. Being overly “salesy” is only a fraction of the time.

The Biggest Mistake on LinkedIn

What is the biggest mistake people make on LinkedIn right now?

Showing up too polished. Everyone is so transparent on LinkedIn; you show up with your real name, and everyone can see where you went to school, where you work, and who you are connected with (previous companies, current clients). Because of this, people are really scared to show up, so they stay in the “safe zone.”

Staying in the safe zone means content gets really, really boring overly polished, overly corporate. Everyone is terrified of saying the wrong thing, getting backlash, or being “cringe.” Because they put out boring content, it just doesn’t perform. Not in the world of AI we are currently in, where we are inundated with content.

Show up as your true, authentic self. Don’t worry if there is a typo in it. Don’t worry if you might get a bit of backlash you can always discuss it further in the comments or put out a follow-up post. If you are scared, simply frame it as, “This is my opinion, and I welcome a discussion around it; I want to learn.” That really helps you get over the fear of posting.

Mastering the Persona Bubble

You have made the point that you need to master the persona bubble. How would you recommend marketing leaders and CMOs align their profile and content to match their target audience bubble?

LinkedIn has confirmed (via Tim Jurka from the LinkedIn Engineering team, who designs the algorithm) that the platform decides whether your content will be distributed further based on:

1. How your profile is set up (your skills and experience).

2. The actual content you are sharing.

3. Who you are engaging with on LinkedIn.

If there is a mismatch between your profile setup, who you engage with, and what you talk about, the algorithm gets confused. You need to look at your profile and ensure your content matches it.

A QUICK TIP: Download your LinkedIn profile as a PDF (click the three dots on your profile), upload that generated CV into an AI tool, and ask, “What do you think this person is an expert in? Give me the top 5 themes.” See if those themes actually match what your content is about.

Everything, who you engage with, what you write about, and how your profile is set up should be geared towards your ideal customers.

This can be challenging if your ideal customers are in a different industry to yours (e.g., if you are an HR software company selling to accountants). You still need to state on your profile that you are a software developer, but it will be a bit trickier to be super clear to the algorithm.

Just try your best to stay out of the “tech bubble” and get into the “accountants bubble.”

Create A 3-Pillar Content Strategy

When you recommend using a balanced three-pillar content strategy, what are the three pillars to use, and what percentage breakdown would you recommend?

I recommend focusing on Business, Thought Leadership, and Personal content.

• Business (Behind the Scenes): Team updates and what is currently happening. If you are a solopreneur like me, build in public. I publicly set a goal of hitting $100,000 for my launch, and I’m taking people on that journey. It’s like watching a Netflix show people are desperate to see the outcome! For larger companies, if you are raising funds (e.g., a £5 million round), take people on that journey. It creates hype, gets people talking, and opens up opportunities.

• Thought Leadership: Showcasing your unique expertise and skills. If you are an HR software company, have your finance team talk about finance within the software industry, your legal team talk about legal issues, and your marketing team talk about marketing tech. Share your own unique lens and predictions for the future of your industry.

• Personal: Establishing trust. Showcase who you are as a person. Do you have a dog? A family? What are your hobbies? Share lessons you’ve learned, vulnerable moments, or even if you recently got married.

The Split: Keep it evenly weighted at roughly 33% - 33% - 33%.
If you only share personal stuff, people might like you but won’t learn from you. If you only share thought leadership, they might learn from you but won’t remember or trust you.

High-Value Content Beats Likes

LinkedIn has recently moved away from surface-level likes. What are the best ways to craft high-value content to get out of your existing audience and network?

There are three crucial elements in today’s LinkedIn algorithm:

1. “Save-Worthy” Content: One of the key indicators for LinkedIn now is how many high-quality comments, saves, and sends (shares in the DMs) you are receiving. To trigger the “save” button, you need to include a step-by-step guide, a blueprint, or something highly actionable that people will want to reference later.

2. Authenticity: It needs to be unmistakably human. People must instantly see that a real person wrote it, not an AI.

3. Emotion: You need to trigger someone to feel something excitement, hopefulness, inspiration, motivation, or feeling seen and understood.

Become A News Distributor

One of your recent recommendations was to become a news distributor. How should someone in a senior position position themselves to stand out and add value?

LinkedIn wants to become a global news broadcaster. They want credible voices to talk about what is happening in the news because it is the best way to distribute information from various angles and expertise. If you write content about current events in your industry, it is typically heavily supported by the algorithm and might even be picked up by LinkedIn’s editorial team to be featured in their own news section.

Putting the phrase “The future of [Your Industry]” in front of your job title or content is incredibly powerful. It opens up discussions, shows you are thinking strategically outside the box, and proves you are in tune with where the industry is heading.

You Can Transfer Success to Substack

You have successfully transferred your LinkedIn success to your Substack. What are a few secrets you could share?

As a one-woman show, I don’t have time to completely create fresh content for both platforms from scratch.

My primary secret is recycling. I started on Substack by recycling my best-performing LinkedIn posts (the ones that performed incredibly well on LinkedIn naturally perform well on Substack too). I send out one comprehensive weekly newsletter, and then I write two to three short notes per day. These notes are largely motivational just giving people a quick check on my energy, a quick thought, or a brief lesson without going too in-depth.

I also started doing Substack Lives (webinars), which have performed really well.

Here is a recent deepdive from Alicia she ran on both Substack and LinkedIn:

Live video is incredibly important to connect with your audience and showcase what your product is all about.

The biggest mistake people make with live webinars is just demoing their product.

Instead, you want to deliver genuine value, thought leadership, and actionable insights. Leave the audience feeling like they learned something vital, which naturally leads them to your product or service. Work with a creator if your corporate lives are feeling a bit too boring; they know how to entertain and engage an audience!

The 5 Key Takeaways (and what to do)

1: Leverage the exposure effect (trust comes from repetition)

Post consistently so your audience sees you often enough to feel familiarity and trust.

• Action 1: Pick a sustainable cadence (e.g. 3–5 posts/week + 5–10 thoughtful comments/day) and stick to it for 90 days.

• Action 2: Talk about similar themes repeatedly so people can quickly associate you with a specific expertise.

2: Cut through the algorithm by being human, not corporate

“Every update is an ad” unless you show up as an actual person with interests, stories, and emotions.

• Action 1: Add 1–2 personal details or opinions in each post (what you felt, what you learned, what you’d do differently), not just features or corporate messaging.

• Action 2: For every “promo” post, publish at least 5 non‑sales posts that educate, entertain, or make people feel seen.

3: Use the 3‑funnel / 3‑pillar frameworks to structure content

Funnel split: ~70% top (visibility), 25% mid (trust, how you help), 5% bottom (clear CTAs).

• Content pillars split:

  • ~33% Business (behind the scenes)

  • 33% Thought leadership

  • 33% Personal.

• Action 1: Map your last 20 posts into funnel stages and pillars; rebalance so you’re not over‑indexing on bottom‑funnel or only personal posts.

• Action 2: Plan your next 4 weeks with this mix, e.g. each week: 2 thought leadership posts, 2 business/behind‑the‑scenes, 2 personal.

4: Align your “persona bubble” so the LinkedIn algorithm isn’t confused

LinkedIn looks at your profile, your content, and who you engage with. If they don’t match, reach drops.

• Action 1: Rewrite your headline, About, and Featured section so they clearly reflect the niche you want to be known for.

• Action 2: Download your LinkedIn as PDF, paste into an AI, ask “What is this person an expert in?” and compare the answer to what you want to be known for. Fix the gaps.

• Action 3: Engage daily with creators and prospects who sit inside your target industry “bubble”, not random topics.

5: Create high‑value, “save‑worthy” and news‑tied content

The algorithm now rewards saves, DMs, meaningful comments, and timely topics.

• Action 1: Once a week, publish a step‑by‑step, screenshot‑worthy post (checklists, frameworks, templates) designed to be saved.

• Action 2: Once a week, react to a fresh piece of relevant news with your angle: “The future of [your industry]” + what it means for your audience.

• Action 3: Audit each draft with three checks: (i) is it actionable, (ii) obviously written by a human, and (iii) Is this emotionally resonant?

Connect With Alicia or join her upcoming cohort starting in a couple of days

Have a great weekend and we will land in your inbox again next Friday!

Danny & Harry

For a lot of you I know you will on your summer holidays so something a little lighter from me with some marketing and business inspiration.

Harry’s villain piece from last week might just have been read by the Argentine football team as they became the villains of the week.

Onto this week and your daily dose of marketing inspiration:

By Danny Denhard - Helping Companies Through Exec Coaching & Consulting

Each year I set myself a challenge; this year I undertook several private and public challenges, one of my public challenges is a public swipe file, I call The Daily Dose.

Flick through here > https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1h_YmXIzWXPgBmI9Dc-PvBbhANS-XwP72FAKbFXBP3wA/edit?usp=sharing or here’s a PDF download

Daily Dose Download

11.5MB ∙ PDF file

Download

The daily doses to date - www.dannydenhard.com/dailydose

Download

Daily Dose is a curated daily (yes daily) swipe file (great ideas to keep a copy of and be inspired by in the future). It’s designed to inspire, educate, and entertain, but more importantly, to be genuinely useful for busy marketing, product, and business leaders.

One thing I miss from not having a team or consulting with a Marketing team is sharing and discussing campaigns, products and smart uses of tech and apps.

The best teams I have been part of (one of my leadership teams I was part of had this exercise as a core part of the ELT meeting) and run, have open and creative sessions sparked from curiosity and an ability to be inspired or reject other people’s work.

Rather than dumping links or headlines, every day edits follows a simple, practical framework:

What it is, Why it matters and How to use it.

So instead of just watching trends go past or not keeping a record of something timeless (not just over indexing on timely which a lot of marketing teams are now guilty of, we all chase that dopamine hit) you get a clear breakdown of how to apply them to your own brand, campaigns, and products.

What A Daily Swipe File Does For Teams

A swipe file is a bank of proven ideas, copy, and creative that you can draw from when you need to move quickly. I select slides as its the easiest and most open format to share and create comments for only the cost of my time.

I often recommend in my coaching to create a shared space (on Notion, Slides, your internal wiki, Teams/Slack although chat apps are very hard to extract the knowledge (although agents are making this easier) and often chat channels are ignored) where you’d discuss each and the trick is to turn this into a daily discipline gives teams a real edge:

• Keeps ideas flowing laterally: By comparing very different brands and sectors, for example, a Stella Artois bus stop ad versus Sephora’s in‑store experience, teams are nudged out of their usual thinking patterns.
  You see how ideas travel across categories, not just within your niche.

• Stops every project starting from zero: Instead of staring at a blank page, teams can lean on tested frameworks, partnership models, and positioning approaches they’ve already seen work elsewhere.

• Builds a habit of strategic analysis: Because each example is broken down into the why and the how, it doubles as on‑the‑job training. People don’t just save good work; they learn to reverse‑engineer it.

• Keeps everyone aligned and ahead: The same set of cultural shifts, tech changes (like Agentic AI), and platform updates are landing in everyone’s inbox. Less time trawling for updates, more time acting on them.

There is a trade‑off: you’re curating and interpreting other people’s work rather than inventing everything from scratch. But for most teams, that’s a strength, not a weakness.

The process and collaboration is important and will help inspire your team and cross-functional teams. Want to copy this or roll this out?

My Process?

• I will scroll through Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Substack app, YouTube, go through my RSS (I’m proudly old school), read numerous newsletters (industry dive newsletters are great for this) and go through 5x automated alerts. I’m also part of a couple of great communities who share high quality work and discuss further. I will also often receive Whatsapp messages from industry friends and ex-clients and ex-colleagues which I can also include.

• I screenshot, create a vanity URL on my tool created by Chris Hutchings (thanks for the gift), knock up the slide on Keynote and then share onto Google Slides, X and Substack.

• Yes I could automate a lot of this but that doesn’t build any muscles and I’m enjoying the process. Maybe there will be a video series coming to a short form platform near you.

I’m now a month into the experiment, and here are some core themes (there are some personalised themes from my walks, social feeds and consumption diet; to keep it as neutral as possible I have 5x daily alerts to source great examples)

The Key Themes

The deck captures where marketing is heading in 2026/2027: more creator‑led, more conversational, more human, and more selective about quality (anyone can be about quantity). I also covered the 6 key themes for H2 on MU87.

1. Athlete‑Led and Creator‑Owned Brands

Endorsements are moving from influencer “hold the product and smile” to actual ownership and product creation:

• Cole Palmer’s Cole’d Ice with GoPuff: Pebble ice with electrolytes led by a footballer, tightly linked to his personal brand and lifestyle. It shows how athletes can credibly stretch into functional products, not just merch.

• Tom Holland’s Bero: A premium non‑alcoholic beer and shandy line aimed at luxury travel and recovery. This leans into the sober‑curious and performance‑driven consumer, rather than the old “celebrity slaps logo on lager” approach.

• Keely Hodgkinson x Nike: An organic apparel collection tied to her values and performance story, instead of yet another series of generic sponsored posts. Keely stands out as she is a social native who gets the platforms

• Invisible Sunscreen by Karolina Muchova & Priscilla Honn: A skincare line announced in the middle of Wimbledon, meeting a real, visible problem in full public view.

The upside: deeper authenticity, better margins, and long‑term brand equity.
The risk: not every athlete or creator has a good idea and will struggle to prove a coherent product vision. Audiences are increasingly quick to spot a cash grab…

2. Conversational and Agentic AI in Marketing

AI is moving from background automation to front‑of‑house experience:

• Amazon chat‑based banner ads: Static banners are being replaced with interactive Alexa chats. Customers can ask questions there and then, leading to a reported 14% uplift in click‑through rate and 7% uplift in ROAS. It turns ads from a broadcast into a mini helpdesk - I suspect once these are more known they’ll influence more transactions

• AEO (AI Engine Optimisation) & Agentic Commerce: The funnel is towards shifting to Chat → Citation → Sale. Some people ask an AI, skim its justification, and then buy. That means brands need to be optimised for AI systems (and moving towards agentic comms) as much as for human search.

• Publishers reducing Google dependency: Media companies are actively diversifying away from search, spending more time building direct audiences, events, and licensing content into AI ecosystems. Some are even talking about blocking Google and we are seeing other industries considering this)

The opportunity is new, high‑intent touchpoints.
The flip side is loss of control: you’re increasingly at the mercy of opaque AI ranking and routing.

3. Human‑Centric and Inclusive Design

The work that wins increasingly respects people’s time, attention, and sensory load:

• Sephora’s Quiet Hours: Global in‑store “quiet hours” with dimmer screens, softer audio, and fewer sensory triggers. Framed for neurodivergent and sensory‑sensitive shoppers, but in reality, a calmer experience benefits almost everyone. Expect more to follow suit.

• Smart, simple OOH: Campaigns like Stella Artois’ “The Perfect Serve” at Wimbledon bus stops, or Inch’s Cider calling itself the “official drink of sitting on some grass”, show that a clear, context‑aware line can cut through more than a clever paragraph nobody reads.
  

The benefit is accessibility and memorability.
The challenge is resisting the urge to over‑explain or over‑optimise every pixel.

4. Ecosystems and Unusual Collaborations

Brands are increasingly leaning on partnerships to borrow emotion, story, and reach:

• Kraft Heinz x Disney: Everyday cupboard items tied into Disney stories across parks, cruises, and media. It turns basic products into prompts for family memories. Smart and likely cost-effective over the length of the partnership

• Slate x Crayola: Vehicles in classic Crayola colours with the line “growing up is optional” – blending utility with nostalgia and play.

• Hot Ones x Netflix: A YouTube format that travels onto Netflix and, in turn, promotes Netflix’s own shows. It proves digital‑first IP can scale into more traditional premium environments.

The upside is fresh energy and shared audiences.
The risk is dilution if the partnership feels forced or values don’t line up.

5. Quality Over Quantity: The Counter‑Trend

As feeds fill up with low‑effort, cost of living increases and unstoppable AI‑generated content (aka AI SLOP), there’s a clear swing back towards fewer, better, deeper:

• Sneaker brands slowing drops: Nike, Adidas, New Balance and others are easing off constant limited drops to tackle “Dunk fatigue”. Fewer releases, with more focus and better storytelling, are regaining some scarcity and desire.

• Colossus and long‑form audio: While much of the industry chases short‑form, Colossus is betting on deep dives, detailed profiles, and high‑quality paid for narration by an award-winning narrator. It’s optimising for trust and retention, not just impressions.
  

If you find a daily dose/slide you like you can copy and paste that specific slide by copying and pasting the URL like https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1h_YmXIzWXPgBmI9Dc-PvBbhANS-XwP72FAKbFXBP3wA/edit?slide=id.g3f3267fa73b_1_6#slide=id.g3f3267fa73b_1_6 for the most clicked daily dose so far, the Boz (Meta CTO) & Nicholas Thompson interview.

Have a great weekend and if you’d like to chat through the process or introducing your own swipe file hit reply or email me on mu@dannydenhard.com

This Week: As the World Cup draws a close, we have our very own Leo Messi of marketing newsletters Harry writing about the villain of football (or basically the sporting world) Giovanni Vincenzo Infantino and the many sides of his actions and what marketing can learn from it…

Last Week: If you missed last week, I broke down Reddit & how to balance the risks and benefits and how to think about ChatGPT ads.
Last weekend I created a 10 point action sheet for MU readers, its free to download on Google Docs.

Now onto Harry’s unfiltered take….

Every Story Needs A Villain, While Football Has Several (Except They’re All The Same Person)

By Harry Lang - Connect On LinkedIn

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by The Oxford AI School - where your teams can learn basic AI in an easy, practical and fun way

The truth about great leadership is that the best purveyors go about their task with minimal fanfare. They exude quiet confidence, motivating, educating, strategising and cajoling their teams over a long period of sustained success without feeling the need to become the hero or the focus of their own story.

Look at our late Queen who, apart from the actual fanfare that occasionally greeted her arrival in a room, exhibited all these traits and more in a career spanning over seventy years. Humour, gravitas, common sense, strength and intelligence all wrapped up in a diminutive, bejewelled package.

Getinfantino

Now have a look at the other end of the leadership scale - FIFA’s abhorrent President Giovanni Vincenzo Infantino, a man so bereft of positive traits his Who’s Who entry should simply read:-

“A preening, contemptuous dick - don’t emulate him in any way”.

So how does Gianni get to collect over $6 Million a year (plus backhanders) as leader of football’s governing body?

Sinfantino

Infamous multi-headed wronguns originated from Greek mythology, most notably the Lernaean Hydra and Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the passage to Hades. Infantino, however, is a lawyer who was born in Switzerland, has Lebanese citizenship by marriage and speaks seven languages, meaning he’s most closely related to Chimera, a fire-breathing creature with the heads of a lion, goat, and snake (although he’s clearly only ‘The Goat’ in his own mind/ bedroom).

Adminfantino

He started his slithery climb up the walls of football power as a legal administrator at UEFA in 2000, eventually coiling himself into FIFA in 2015 when he went for the top job at FIFA in the 2016 Extraordinary Congress.

Winfantino

In February 2016, he was elected FIFA President for a period of three years. Football died a little that day.

Assassinfantino

By elbowing out his competitors and dismissing his detractors, he managed to cling on to the walls of football power for ten years, with a powerbase so honed there’s no clear rival prepared to challenge him before the next World Cup.

Mannequinfantino

He may be a power hungry, media savvy roll-on deodorant of a man, but he knows that to maintain control at this level, it helps to be backed by the very few men more powerful than him. That Trump FIFA Peace Prize? A genius piece of ego-massaging nonsense that bought him the backing of the most influential dumbass in the world. Then there was the last World Cup in Qatar. What does Qatar have? Sand and shit loads of money (Gianni has no interest in sand).

Toxinfantino

During his reign, he’s been accused of facilitating sportswashing (which I wrote about at length for Marketing Week back in 2022), cozying up to autocrats, manipulating FIFA voting, daisychaining sponsors, a lack of transparency, corrupting the game, creating an ethical vacuum and force-feeding bloated tournament schedules like he’s stuffing a Foie Gras goose. In fact, if he did have one discernable trait, it would’ve died of loneliness long ago.

Chagrinfantino

On his watch the beautiful game has morphed into an embarrassment, looking every inch the elderly Hollywood starlet, manicured, plucked, acid washed and stapled until it became the bastard child of the original sport.

Ginfantino

During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, he defended the tournament hosts when they decided to ban alcohol sales in the stadia for religious reasons, controversially stating:-

“I think personally if for three hours a day you cannot drink a beer, you will survive”

Major sponsor Budweiser was understandably a little miffed.

Alladinfantino

Why was he so keen to park the biggest football tournament in a country with only twelve pro teams that had never qualified to play itself? OK, so this one’s a little more straightforward - it’s shiny and rhymes with ‘bold’. He found a lamp in an unknown middle eastern desert, rubbed it and a genie appeared, granting him three wishes. Gianni likes having his wishes granted.

Zeppelinfantino

If history has taught us anything it’s that all good despots eventually come to a sticky end. Their hubris, greed and flaky grasp of what is true or right causes them to ultimately succumb to an Icarus moment, sparking a PR explosion of stratospheric proportions before crashing to the ground in a heap of burnt reputation dressed in the remnants of a shiny Boggi Milano suit.

This moment for Kremlinfantino really should have come about in 2022 in Doha. Remember, gay people were made to feel particularly unwelcome at the Qatar World Cup and a reported 6,500 migrant workers died constructing the stadiums. It was off the back of these abhorrent events that Gianni gave a sickening pre-tournament press conference where he announced:-

“Today I feel gay, today I feel like a migrant worker”
The man is a rotten apple presiding over a punnet of maggots. If the ugly game ever hopes to become beautiful again, it needs to throw him in the bin.

Harry Lang runs The Oxford AI School to teach teams the basics of AI in a fun, easy and practical way and is the author of ‘Brands, Bandwagons & Bullshit,’ available on Amazon. You can connect with Harry on LinkedIn, check out his socials or email him at Harry@TheOxfordAISchool.com

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

PS Need Some Inspiration? If football isn’t your thing but you would like to inspired by social ads, here is a great example from Bud and an organic piece of social content by adidas that is very smart in execution.

If you enjoyed this article theme, you will l❤️ve

• The New Balance Playbook Reverse Engineered

• Ferrari’s Modern Day Marketing Masterclass Reverse Engineered

• Storytellers Are The New Commercial Weapon

This week I am coming to you with two questions I have been asked a lot the last few weeks and wanted to share my takes and recommendations.

The first is on the risk rewards of Reddit and the second is ChatGPT ads something to consider?

» If you missed Harry’s honest take on AI on the eve of his AI school launch, please dive in below:

Here are few interesting marketing moves from the last week you might have missed that might be of interest, (i) Amazon banner to chat ads (ii) adidas extension into workwear (iii) Sephora’s quiet hour.

Inspire Me Some More

Let’s dive in to today’s newsletter

By Danny Denhard - Let’s Connect On LinkedIn
- Speak to me about coaching, consulting and CMO advisory.

Is Reddit Worth the Risk for Marketers/Brands?

Reddit is both one of the hardest platforms to control for brand safety and one of the most genuinely “human” places online.

For CMOs, the question is not whether it is risky, but whether the upside justifies managing that risk. I have worked with a small number of brands who have had a strong Reddit presence and it was not pain free and often caused real and regular concern across the team and SLT.

The Case Against Reddit

Reddit’s community moderated structure creates real exposure. Conversations are messy, blunt and often suspicious of overt marketing. A clumsy activation can turn into a visible thread of criticism that is hard to contain.

Brands also have less control than on identity based platforms. You are entering communities that feel they own the space and will quickly call out self serving behaviour.

Historic links with controversial subreddits still influence perception in cautious or regulated organisations, slowing internal approval and reducing appetite for experimentation.

The Case For Reddit

At the same time, Reddit hosts exactly the kind of human, context rich content that is becoming scarcer elsewhere.

People use it for honest reviews, product comparisons and advice before purchase, which makes it powerful across the full funnel, from discovery through to decision.

Because users are not tied to real world identities, they are more candid about needs, anxieties and frustrations. This gives marketers unfiltered insight and a live test bed for messaging.

Campaigns that engage with criticism, such as Dove’s, show that open dialogue and radical transparency can increase trust rather than weaken it.

Reddit’s decentralised, moderator led structure is difficult to copy, which makes its communities defensible.

Its content is also highly visible in search and to emerging discovery tools, so earning authority in key subreddits can shape how your brand is found in future.

What Marketing Leaders Should Do

• Learn the platform, invest significant time and energy into learning the platform, the platform’s sub-culture and the nuance of Reddit vs other social networks.

• Treat Reddit as a participation channel, not just an inventory source - be fully aware redditors will go for any opening to press and critique you and your brand (just ask Reddit CEO Steve Hoffman aka u/spez or listen to his appearance on Semafor Media podcast to hear the behind the scenes stresses, strains and successes)

• Set clear guardrails and a subreddit whitelist to manage brand safety.

• Invest in people who understand community culture and can respond with empathy.

• Use listening to inform product, service and creative, not only media.

• Plan for criticism and show how the brand will engage with it in public.
  

Reddit is not a set-&-forget performance platform. For marketers willing to trade some control for deeper human connection and sharper insight, it can be one of the most valuable and future proof environments in the media mix. But for others who are time poor and looking for spray and pray it won’t work for you and might do you more harm than good.

FWIW - I built a Reddit cheatsheet back in Feb, if you are at the start of your journey, i’d recommend reading, i’ve included standout examples of brands (like Adidas and 1password) using and leveraging Reddit.

Helpful So Far? Hit Share ↙️

Share

How Should We Think About ChatGPT Ads?

ChatGPT now has close to 1B monthly users. Brands want to show up where real problems are being solved, not just where keywords live. That’s what makes ChatGPT ads interesting: they’re one of the first true problem‑state marketing channels.

When someone types “our sales reps keep losing deals at the proposal stage,” that’s not a keyword, it’s a confession. Being the ad that offers a “proposal coaching playbook” in that exact moment is showing up in the problem state, not just the category.

Why ChatGPT Ads Feel Different

Instead of bidding on brand terms and hoping to intercept demand, ChatGPT ads let you:

• Appear as part of a conversational answer, not just as a banner or sidebar.

• Align with a specific problem described in natural language. ChatGPT are selling themselves as natural language and being hired for problem solving, consider how you play here.

• Offer a solution that feels more like help than a hard sell - be creative.

In reality, this is still paid media but it’s paid media that’s closer to the real questions your customers are asking and much closer to the mid to the bottom of the funnel. It is set up for problem asked → problem solved → conversion.

Remember chat is building it’s paid Chat → Citation → Sale engine - ads is an essential part to monetise it’s high percentage of free users.

The Measurement Tension: Content vs Ads

Most marketing teams are stuck between two imperfect bets:

• Publish more content, on more platforms, and hope to be cited in answer engines and AI overviews.

• Bid on inventory you can at least track (impressions, clicks, conversions) and justify to a CFO.

The traditional “bid → click → convert” model is what your C‑suite already understands.

The emerging “chat → citation → conversion” model is harder:

• Prompts are opaque and iterative, not a single clean query.

• Being cited is unpredictable and hard to reverse engineer.

• Attribution from “answer mention” to “site visit” to “revenue” is messy.

This is why many leaders will default to ads first: they look safer and more measurable, even if they’re early and imperfect.

Key Watch‑Outs Before You Spend

Treat ChatGPT ads as test‑and‑learn, not a new budget sink.

• Inventory is early: formats, policies, and performance will shift rapidly. Users are savvy and have worked out how to ensure ads often do not appear.

• Some markets complain of high CPM, research this upfront and keep an eye especially in smaller markets.

• Traffic is often coming in as “direct” as UTM have been known to be stripped out.

• Be mindful there are often high bounce rates from Chat ads - the more refined the prompt the less likely there will be bounce.

• You don’t see the full conversation: you’re entering a context you only partially understand (no prompts are included).

• Brand safety and guardrails matter: tight creative, smart copy, clear exclusions.

• Many report successes in ChatGPT ads are dependent on an associated offer, which suggests many are looking for discounts and savings inside their prompts.

• Over‑reliance risk: this complements not replaces brand, product, and organic work. The more trusted and known your brand is, the more likely you’ll be cited and actively named in prompts over time, so you needing to pay should reduce down. Don’t get too high on the paid ChatGPT supply.

• UK & EU regulators haven’t said much on the offerings, expect recommended changes in the UK and across Europe
  

When ChatGPT Ads Belong On Your Roadmap

Ads should be on your 6‑month plan if you are:

• Launching in a crowded category where you need to show up in real problems, not just generic searches.

• Competing with incumbents who dominate brand and category terms.

• Under pressure to prove “AI‑era” experiments with clearer attribution and ROI.
  

Think of it as a balance:

• Keep investing in durable, high‑quality content and brand building (long‑term visibility, citations, and trust).

• Layer in targeted ChatGPT ad experiments mapped to specific problem states and journeys, especially from your internal data and third party sites collating information and insights for you to answer.
  

What To Do Next:

1. Map problem states: Gather the real phrases your customers use (use sales calls, support logs, community threads) – not just keywords, but complaints and confessions.

2. Turn these into offers: For each problem state, define a sharp, specific solution (hint: playbook, tool, framework, diagnostic, template).

3. Design tight guardrails: Clarify where your ads should and shouldn’t appear, and what language is non‑negotiable from a brand and compliance perspective.

4. Set CFO‑level metrics: Decide in advance how you’ll judge success – cost per qualified visit, pipeline influence, incremental revenue – and keep the experiments small and time‑bound.

5. Build the story for the C‑suite: Frame this not as “chasing another platform,” but as testing a more measurable way to show up at the exact moment a customer describes their problem.

It’s not “organic content or ChatGPT ads.” It is both – but the mix, and how you explain that mix to your C‑suite, is what will decide whether this feels like a smart experiment or another AI distraction.

Your Takeaways In Bullets:

• Reddit for brands is high‑risk, high‑reward: low brand control, community backlash risk, and historic controversy vs uniquely honest, human, search‑visible conversations that give deep insight and full‑funnel impact. Don’t just try Reddit you need to be in it and living it to understand its multiple subcultures.

• Winning on Reddit demands participation, not just media buying: you need people who understand subreddit culture, clear guardrails/whitelists, active listening, and a plan to publicly engage with criticism. As a CMO / Marketing Leader you need to be under the skin, you need to GET Reddit

• ChatGPT ads = “problem‑state” marketing: instead of keyword and keyword matching, you show up inside conversations where users confess real problems, offering helpful, solution‑oriented responses embedded in the answer. Understand the problems you are solving.

• Measurement tension: content vs ads in the AI era: leaders are stuck between investing in broad content hoping for citations in AI answers vs buying trackable inventory; ads feel safer but “chat → citation → conversion” is where behaviour is shifting.

• ChatGPT ads are early and messy: evolving formats, potentially high CPMs, UTMs sometimes stripped, high bounce risk, limited visibility into the full conversation, brand‑safety concerns, and dependence on strong, often discount‑driven offers. Go eyes wide open into the ChatGPT experiment

• Recommended playbook for CMOs: map real customer “problem states,” turn them into sharp offers (playbooks, tools, diagnostics), set strict guardrails and CFO‑friendly success metrics, and run small, time‑bound ChatGPT ad tests alongside ongoing brand and content work.

Have a great weekend and if you ever have feedback happily hit reply or email Harry and I on mu@dannydenhard.com

Thanks,

Danny Denhard

PS if you have something to say or something unfiltered you want to share anonymously we’d love to talk!

This week we have Harry delivering wise words on AI and its first to third order effects on Marketing.

A personal thank you for your feedback and replies on last weeks 6 trends for H2. The move to full funnel seemed to kick the hornets nest…

Now, onto

It Is Possible To Have Too Much Of A Good Thing – Just Ask AI About ‘Doc Diarrhoea’…

By Harry Lang, Launching The Oxford AI School Next Week, Connect On LinkedIn

When a constant raft of low cost AI tools meets incrementally more simple usability, everyone can work bigger better smarter and faster. Twinned with a global power race, and we’ve got a problem…

Over the past year or so, I’ve been playing catch up. A new job in a new industry with new channels and new people. At the same time, new AI tools were arriving like a slurry of overexcited hubris, promoted in the media, by influencers and over Slack channels every single day.

One week Lovable was the big ‘I AM’, the next Clawbot was everyone’s best mate. Somewhere underneath, Claude started to lay the foundations to eventually become the daily driver of record.

Everyone’s got a take on AI. The tech bros say it’ll 10x your business. The naysayers say it’ll take your job, fry the planet, and hallucinate its way through your token budget in hours. Meanwhile the consultants are charging telephone numbers to tell you that you must have an AI strategy (preferably theirs) before you go obsolete.

While there are a gazillion upsides to all this frenetic, competitive land grabbing, nothing this universally adopted comes for free. The Tokens paying for the earth-warming server farms are subsidised to the hilt, loss-leading in the finite style of Icarus, except instead of flying closer to the sun, the server cities are bringing the sun to us, scoffing Greenhouse gas exuding fossil fuels at the same pace a Scottish football fan chugs Budweiser.

It’s not the App building, vibe coding, deck doctoring utopia the LLM turbo-bros would have you believe, so I thought it would be worth doing a teeny tiny reality check to look at the potential downsides next to the amply promoted upsides before we all float away on the hype bubble (or drown under rising sea levels).

The Value/Cost of AI Adoption

The real question is what this stratospheric innovation will actually cost you/ us/ our kids, and whether the people pushing you to adopt it faster have factored any of that in (TL;DR they haven’t).

Looking For Goldilocks

So where the hell Is the sweet spot?

If you don’t have the budget to deploy AI well, then you definitely don’t have the budget to do it badly. The ‘not too hot/ not too cold’ line is extremely thin, so pick two or three tools that solve specific problems in your workflow then measure actual output quality, not just speed. Don’t let subscription creep turn ‘AI efficiency’ into a new leaky bucket cost centre that nobody’s managing.

The 2035 Scorecard

If current trajectories hold, this is where we’ll probably end up:-

• Productivity gains: Real, measurable, and likely to plateau once the tools mature and adoption equalises

• Cost savings: Real for large companies, but mixed for SMEs once true implementation costs kick in

• Misinformation risk: AI output volume is scaling faster than human verification can ever hope to. And don’t get me started on agentic mediation…

• Brand differentiation: The brands that survive will go balls deep into what AI can’t do.

• Regulatory pressure: The compliance cost of AI misuse is so far down most priority lists as to be entirely irrelevant. THAT WILL CHANGE.

• Environmental damage: Well, if you’re comfortable kissing goodbye to Southampton, Dublin, Cardiff, Bristol, Peterborough, Hull and chunks of London, then there’s absolutely nothing to worry about

AI amplifies whatever you point it at then tells you you’re doing an awesome job. If there’s one thing us human beings share is that we bloody LOVE a compliment, so be enthusiastic, sure, but it’s time to be a little cynical, too, and stop believing all the shit we get served in exchange for a poorly executed prompt.

Which brings us neatly on to one of the most common (but least acknowledged) downsides of the AI era:- ‘Doc Diarrhoea’.

With everything becoming so bloody easy and efficient, I’ve seen a massive increase in this phenomena. Every day, and after every meeting, people scamper off with their Gemini,. Firefly or Granola notes and start ‘being productive’. New GTM drafts, research papers, campaign ideas, customer analysis, White Papers are sharted out like confetti at a wedding. We’re all generating far too much for the sake of production and a clear instance of ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’.

In my last role, I hit a staggering thirty eight hours of meetings one week, and it rarely dipped below thirty. Every day, my team and others would share such docs, spat out by Claude and their agents.

Nobody ever read them.
Nobody had the time.

In a world where AI is meant to make us more efficient and productive, Doc Diarrhoea is doing the exact opposite, so IMHO there’s a serious need for tighter RACI processes and protocols to pivot this wasteful enthusiasm in more positive and productive directions.

It might seem a bit weird that a guy on the cusp of launching an AI training school for local SMEs is being such a Debbie Downer, but I’m firmly of the view that honesty is the best way for us to escape the hype bubble faster.

We need to craft a pragmatic, world friendly version of ‘The Age Of AI’, to mitigate Doc Diarrhoea and to progress in a more holistic, less power hungry, greed-fuelled, ‘profit at any cost’ way. To achieve that, we need to collectively work towards a more sustainable, positive, people friendly way of harnessing this incrementally powerful tech (especially before Gen AI kicks in…).

The next ten years will sort businesses into two groups: those that use AI to do more of the same at lower cost, and those that use it to do something better. The first group will compete in a race to the bottom while the second will make themselves harder to replicate whilst benefiting humanity and the planet.

You need to decide which group you’d rather be in, and you need to do it soon.

As a reminder, Harry is launching The Oxford AI School next week to help as many SME professionals as possible learn to use AI well, in a way that's practical, fun, easy and sustainable.
Please connect with Harry on LinkedIn and please follow the school’s socials here.

Thank you for the great and supportive comments and replies to Harry’s career pivot and becoming a startup teacher.

Onto this week where I share the 6 key trends coming in H2/2H you should be aware of and planning to work through in coming weeks.

→ If you agree or strongly disagree happily hit reply or comment and let me know what you think.

Leave a comment

The 6 Key Trends To Keep An Eye On & Work On For H2

By Danny Denhard - Exec Coach / Consultant / Advisor

H1 was the warm‑up. H2 is where the real work starts.

The noise around AI, agents and “the future of marketing” has hit a new peak, but underneath the hype, there are a handful of very real shifts already changing how customers discover, decide and buy.

The brands that win over the next 6 (to 12) months won’t be the ones chasing every shiny tool, LLM update and spreading themselves too thin; they’ll be the ones quietly rewiring their commerce, their funnels, their data and their creative to be ready for both humans and, in some cases, machines (well, agents).

Below are 6 trends I’m watching closely - from agentic commerce and claw‑driven workflows, to the return to full‑funnel marketing, hyper‑personalisation and native ad platforms, and what they actually mean for how you operate in H2.

There are, of course, a few realities to factor in:

1. The macro environment and shifting consumer spend, alongside realignment towards AI budgets, will shape how fast any of this moves.

2. Talent and org constraints will dictate how far you can go when you’re dealing with limited headcount, cross‑functional blockers and the need to upskill teams (spend those L&D budgets wisely).

3. SMBs will have to play to their strengths – local presence, referrals, word of mouth, rather than over‑investing in agentic and unproven platforms as larger competitors and industry leaders can and will.

4. Regulation will sit in the background of all of this, especially with Alphabet, Meta, Amazon & the major AI providers under sustained scrutiny.

These are not just predictions but practical shifts you’ll feel in your numbers, your org and your roadmap in the next two quarters and into 2027.

Agentic Commerce

Like AI, agentic is becoming table stakes. Agentic is not a new trend, nor is it something we have seen huge evidence of working yet, but there are two important tests and shifts underway:

1. Google are testing with Gemini Auto Browse (through Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription), starting with the Pixel 10 and Galaxy S26 devices. The agent can perform multi-step tasks on behalf of the user, with booking a parking spot, re-ordering items, and filling out forms without human interaction required.

2. Universal Commerce Protocol (being dubbed as Frictionless Shopping) is now fully open. Co‑developed between Shopify & Google and is backed by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Stripe, and several major retailers, it’s available to any developer with no approval flow. In practice, that means every eligible Shopify merchant’s catalogue is now syndicated by default into ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and the Shop app. Shopify claims AI‑driven discovery through catalogue converts at roughly 2x scraped product data, and there’s now order attribution that shows exactly which AI channel drove each sale. For the first time, “AI brought us a customer” can show up as a clear line item, not fuzzy assumptions.

The speed of adoption will be lower and slower, but as we have witnessed since the start of AI, there will be pressure on Marketing leaders to be first and fast in driving their business forward.

SMBs will feel the demand to be part of this, however, the investment required may be too high and doubling down on your strengths and referrals might make all the difference. This is where you will have to choose your battles wisely.

Expect more demand from large providers to shift your website to be ready for agents and humans, with requests on API’s, structured and markup data and enabling automated transactions. Product will have to have a busy quarter ahead!

Pressure On More Full Funnel Activity

I’ll say it, CMOs will be under more pressure to run more activities, especially at the top and middle of the funnel.

The top of the funnel and middle of the funnel have been under scrutiny throughout the last decade on the over-focus on performance marketing. With the pressure to influence AI and LLMs, there will need to be a stronger demand to use full-funnel marketing techniques and tactics.

Video will continue to grow with short-form video used across platforms, mid-form content created to cut through snackable and forgettable content and long-form will see more investment as a scalable way to create more video content and chop up into clips and be remixed by customers.

We will see smart brands move towards multi-platform discovery (via social, AI chat, and looking to leverage visual search).
If “41% of Gen Z users check social platforms before traditional search engines” there will be continued emphasis placed on social search and enhanced discovery.

Measurement and attribution in this phase is going to be more of a challenge; mediated discovery and tracking citations and recommendations are going to continue to be hard and messier than H1. Working through attribution and measurement will be paramount.

There will be internal battles proving social commerce and native shoppable experiences are worth the extra time and investment required. Many will start to experiment in retail media networks (RMNs) as they continue to grow and see continued large investments.

Leadership teams, PE Owners and boards are notoriously short-term on demanding performance and often rightly so; however, in this time period, the demand to do more with less is very real, as is showing you are influencing AI and LLMs so continuing to influence AEO across multiple channels as well as signalling brand strength will be critical.

Hint: Consider how you will reward customers and look to tactical uses of treatonomics (rewarding customers for loyalty and repeat purchases).

Expect more deep-rooted experiences with existing customers, events (local and national), meet-ups and investing in deeper two-way value exchanges. Many brands will look to build more community and promote micro-communities (even Mr Beast is building a creator community app), especially with the vocal backlash to AI by younger and older generations.

Use Of Agents & Claws

Claws and agents are being pushed hard by industry influencers and AI brands. Despite the security risk and IT blocking, shadow AI usage is increasing, and the pressure to have teams of agents or claws is on the increase.

Many startups and scaleups should expect pressure on using agents and having a huge percentage of work automated, while larger firms will be battling internally with allowing safe use of claws or creating safe environments to be able to test claws.

For the majority, the next 12–24 months will be more about operationalising this, augmentation, orchestration and governance before wholesale automation but as we all know we will be the ones pushed to be first.

Safe experimentation will likely be the powerful message for the rest of the year, while we work through blockers, compliance challenges, procurement requirements and proving safe usage. Or, until a major hack or series of hacks happens in agents and claws.

Being informed might just be your competitive advantage…

Citation To Sales ~ Chat → Citation → Sale

We are now in the phase where AEO/GEO should begin to see positive returns. We have to be aware of chat to citation to sales through LLMs. Some major brands are suggesting a positive impact, but many aren’t.

Expect increasing pressure on making investments in AEO work, as the squeeze for ROI from AI continues and not just from token or agent spending.

The operational cost will be high but something you and your team will have to across.

You will have to co-lead on major UX and UI changes, be across constant AEO tactical shifts and making adjustments made to remove AI slop ranking and declining influence of platforms (like we have seen with Reddit and LinkedIn)

Shift to Hyper Personalisation

Something we have all spoken about for years is being able to create more personalised experiences through our products and our marketing, despite changes to third-party tracking and storing data, we are at a point where we can build and create hyper-personalised marketing and product use, helping to connect deeper to our customers.

Something that is being reported by some users is the overly creepy targeting and information being used in ads and product nudges. Be careful that you aren’t seen overstepping or breaking data policies.

While working on personalisation, you will have to measure and track the influence and value being seen.

Expect customer expectations to increase with more sophisticated marketing, look to build direct relationships (through more subscriptions, two way communities and more personalised loyalty programs); unifying data across your touchpoints for more seamless experiences.

One to one will beat one to many and one to all - proving the investment might be your biggest hurdle in coming weeks.

Native Ad Platforms

We are going to see the evolution of native ad platforms in more immersive spaces.

A great example is EA, they have launched their own native advertising platform, allowing brands to be part of the gameplay, with Coach integrated into The Sims, Lowe’s, Red Bull and Visa into EA26. Madden NFL and College 26 is also involved in the early rollout. Expect to see more options, more niche players entering this space, and greater customer value optimisation.

Remember, with native platforms (as we saw with ChatGPT ads) there will be measurement constraints and a huge increase in creatives and outputs.

Native ads (there are some interesting developments happening on the likes of Substack and Beehiiv too) and in‑game ad networks need bespoke work, creatives and measurement frameworks to be built and applied.

+ 3 themes bubbling under the surface to keep an eye on:

1. AI Glasses - Meta (with their own designed glasses), Google And Snap are all releasing AI powered glasses. Away from the privacy concerns, there is real opportunity to be integrated and the canonical app and product experienced through voice and glass interface

2. Athletes as product creators not just promoters - there are a number of athletes bringing products to market rather than just invest or be a sponsorship vehicle. Cole Palmer’s Cole’d ice cube products including an Electrolyte ice cubes with GoPuff stands out, while others push into drinks and food. Deep collaboration might just be your new unlock

3. More algorithmic/AI filtering & summarisation - plan for more aggressive filtering across emails, feeds and social inboxes, expect less tracking, less depth of reading/engagement and AI summarisation to be used where core messages might be missed or overviewed.
   Expect AI driven digests to have another wave of influence too.

So in H2/2H, expect to

• Continue your optimisation journey for platforms where discovery happens (social, marketplaces, AI tools).

• Focus on integration Hybrid AI creativity (aka AI + human creativity)

• Improve the use of data + privacy/trust

• Be under pressure to increase the use of agents and claws

• Use more performance + brand campaigns while connecting full funnel activities.

• Look into different ad networks, like gaming platforms, retail media and CTV

• Prioritise measurement (attribution, orchestration) as AI and experimentation in a fast-moving landscape.

• Reward top performers who will excel at collaborating with AI strategically, without losing authenticity and having a negative impact.

• Build defensible moats through deeper relationships with customers through communities, first-party relationships, and distinctive creatives.

If this all feels exciting but slightly overwhelming, you’re not alone!

The gap I keep seeing is never a lack of ideas or tools; it’s the time, support and structure to turn them into a clear plan the whole business can get behind.

If you’re a marketing leader and you want help with stress‑testing your H2 strategy against these trends, translating them into your practical, prioritised roadmap, or pressure‑testing how your team, plan and budget stack up hit reply or email me at mu@dannydenhard.com and tell me a bit about your company, your biggest challenge, and what H2 success would actually look like for you and I’d love to help you.

Thanks for reading and go and have a great weekend and we will see you again next week!

Danny Denhard

Part 1 - Death of a Job

This week, I left my newish CMO job after only six months in the role. That’s the headline, but underneath there’s quite a lot more to it.

It’s not easy to admit you’ve failed, and quitting a position in the current market might sound a little nuts – and perhaps more like utter insanity for a man in his late forties...

The L1 Blockchain I worked for was backed by a notable venture builder, and when joined back in January I had high expectations and even higher hopes. Working at a blockchain backed by a triple Unicorn sounded like a dream ticket to future success (and potentially riches), but despite wanting to do it, I didn’t pause to ask myself whether I could do it.

This was partly down to hubris, partly necessity after a prolonged gardening leave but also because for the first five rounds of the interview process I’d been going after another, totally different job - a Marketing VP position in a B2C metaverse gaming venture (a role significantly closer to my wheelhouse).

An organisational pivot their end closed the metaverse gaming door whilst opening a new, bigger door - a CMO position in their new blockchain entity. I didn’t have any experience whatsoever in blockchain, Web3, nor did I have expertise in marketing crypto, a DeFi protocol, nor the channels used to grow any of them.

I knew early on (like, day 1) it would be something of a challenge.

Add to that another protocol launch, a repositioning, a brand refresh and subsequently three other GTMs (all planned for my first three months) and I went from ‘excitable newbie’ to ‘drowning swimmer’ in what? Less than a month?

It’s a highly innovative organisation and has a fabulous team, but the pressure of vertically steep learning as I was building got too much, too quickly. The crux was that I couldn’t hack it, and for someone who prides himself on being resilient, I became increasingly worried about how I could possibly graft, learn and think my way out of trouble.

‘You can’t quit’ was the record playing around my head on repeat every morning at 4am when I‘d inevitably wake up, working as hard as I could to stay afloat whilst slowly but steadily sinking.

I know plenty of quality marketers who are struggling to find a job right now. It’s grim out there (as I saw first hand last year) and not a time to be voluntarily exiting a salaried position, so I tried to push on and make it work by any means possible.

It turns out, I couldn’t.

I came back from a week-long conference in Vegas, started a new week facing a number of uphill challenges and immediately hit a wall. My wife C had seen me overcome profssional adversity in the past, but she’d never seen me like this.

She took one look at me - frantic, anxious and lost - and she called it. I was done.

The relief of knowing I could stop pretending I was the right person for the job was immediate.

Being open about failure is tricky, especially in the professional realm. Confidence and your track record are two of the most tangible and essential traits you carry with you. They’re like your LinkedIn badges of honour. I was leaving with neither, and ego is a cruel mistress, but I recognised that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something to change really was a fast track to madness, or at the very least some form of breakdown.

So why the openness? The accepted wisdom for ‘personal brand protection’ would be to bury this ‘failure’ deep in my psychological substrata, pretend it never happened and move on in a more suitable role.

However, I’m a firm advocate in owning your own story, both good and bad, and I like to think about problems in a brutally honest way, starting with myself.

I took an opportunity, gave it my best shot, it didn’t work out, so I’m moving on.

The world didn’t end, and whilst my ego and confidence might need a few repairs, I’m happier not pretending I can morph into something I’m most certainly not.

I’ve been through some interesting and challenging phases in my career over the last quarter of a century, convinced that when things got tough I had the mental fortitude and creative stamina to hack it. In this instance, I couldn’t – and I guess this is the point I want to get across:-

If you’ve been out of work for a while, both your head and your circumstances will tell you that ANY job is the right job. I’m here to say that if you find yourself in that situation, you should double down on your due diligence, self-assessment and pragmatic decision making before saying ‘Yes’.

I didn’t think there was anything worse than the constant frustration and financial implications of being unemployed – turns out, I was wrong.

Part 2 / Birth of a Purpose

OK, so with my exit rationale out of the way, on to more positive things. I wanted to start something new where I could be my own boss again, launch and scale a business and have fun doing it for the next few years.

I usually have at least ten crap business ideas floating around my desktop and context folders at any given time, most of which come to me on a dog walk in the morning and have been discounted as unfeasibly shit by early afternoon.

However one idea just refused to die.

I was on a train down to London a few weeks ago shortly after resigning. With my marketing hat on, I sketched out an EXTREMELY honest skills audit followed by a rough cut Ikigai Matrix.

Plotting my skills and interests into four categories spat out some chewy bubblegum for my brain: -

• What I love (work edition)

  • Writing, coming up with ideas, mentoring, organic marketing

• What I’m good at (work and home edition)

  • Public speaking, motivating teams, creative problem solving, growth

• What the world needs (commercially leaning)

  • AI skills training delivered in a fun, non-technical, bullshit-free and affordable way

• What people will pay for (pragmatically leaning)

  • Basic, practical and local face to face or virtual AI training designed to be simple and fun that will stop busness owners and their teams becoming obsolete at work

I realised the AI race has progressed so quickly it’s left a huge chasm in its wake:- a proportion of UK professionals stuck pensively at the start gate. By the time they were being told to Claude Code their own AI agents and Apps via TikTok and LinkedIn ads, they felt like admitting how little they knew would be perceived as weakness.

With heads in the sand and the ChatGPT App being used like a Google search because ‘…Yes, I totally use AI every day”, there seems to be a massive opportunity for simple, pragmatic and fun AI training to take UK professionals ‘From Zero to One’ with Claude, GPT, Perplexity and Gemini before honing their theoretical and practical skills and tools awareness down the line.

The business plan wrote itself – and thus was born ‘The Oxford AI School’.

I’ve been using AI at a base level for the last couple of years, but only in my recent role did necessity and time pressure across multiple projects require me to upskill rapidly. Encouraged by the CEO, I brought in my friend Oren Greenberg to run a custom eight week advanced AI training course with its foundations in Claude Code. The team, myself included, were able to massively increase our work output and, with the right methodologies in place, mitigate any quality seepage.

With the benefit of the theoretical training and armed with my new AI power skills (OK, so I’m maybe a five out of ten) I set to work on a train journey back from London to the Shires. By the time I passed through Oxford, I had a live website and 24 hours later, I’d drafted a one pager vision, GTM, product roadmap and brand guidelines plus an expanded website through Claude and Netlify, research White Paper via Perplexity, sales funnel ICP plan, social and content workflows through GPT and a few brand assets and logo concepts using Nano Banana.

In fact, it took me longer to decide on the brand name and source the domain than any of the above tasks.

I don’t need nor want to build an ego massaging tech behemoth. I’m focusing on individual professionals and SME teams, initially around Oxfordshire and local environs. Early research tells me there are more than enough potential clients within easy reach and if that goes to plan, there are all sorts of angles available, from regionalisation to productisation.

As an example, I shared an Uber to the cricket with a random construction industry CEO the other week. By the end of the ten minute ‘so what do you do?’ chat, he’d asked for my details, pending an upskilliing course for his whole leeadership team. Pitches don’t get much easier than that.

In the near term, I plan to build the courses, grow awareness, acquire new students and teach – and that works just fine for me. I like starting things from scratch. I like getting my hands dirty. I like ‘mother of invention’ growth challenges.

And I like to be responsible for my own destiny.

I’ve come to realise that half of the game with AI is understanding how powerful it actually is, while the other half is knowing how to effectively unlock that power whilst mitigating crud. I’m excited to demystify this burgeoning and ever-changing technology and unlock that power for everyone.

Roll forward a few weeks and here we are – T-minus one week til launch day. I make no apologies for my unashamed self-promotion in our newsletter and would be hugely grateful if you could share TheOxfordAISchool.com site and go nuts on the socials to help get it off the ground. The programme modules start at ‘zero to one’ by design, and my ICPs at launch are very purposefully in Oxfordshire, London and the surrounding areas. I’ve built basic custom courses for specific sector ICPs including SMEs, Law Firms, Accountants, IFAs, Estate Agents, Farmers, and Pubs & Restaurants.

If you feel burned out in your job but stuck by the inevitabilities of economics, circumstance and fear, then please do get in touch. And if you’ve buried you head in the sand and want to get started on your own AI learning journey in a practical, fun and easy way, you know where to find me.

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As of this week, Harry is a director and trainer at The Oxford AI School. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and please follow and share the school to boost those useful early numbers on Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube - thank you!

→ If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, please help us grow by hitting the ❤️ or sharing www.marketingunfiltered.co on LinkedIn or in your favourite communities

Good Morning Leaders!

From time to time we curate a list of must read, must watch and must listens and share so you and your peers & teams can be inspired to take action or avoid their mistakes.

So this week I have collated some belters for you to improve your content diet and take with you for the next few weeks.

» Remember to copy and paste the links below to your peers or team or hit the share button below

Share

MUST READS

1. Dish from Waitrose has surpassed one billion combined downloads, views and listens since 2022, making it “the world’s most successful branded podcast” and the only branded show in both Apple and Spotify’s global top 100 (& UK top 20).

   • It’s hosted by foodie/radio and TV presenter Nick Grimshaw and renowned chef Angela Hartnett (who this week got her own line in Waitrose), it blends food, life and culture with celebrity guests; listens are up 35% year‑on‑year and the Tom Holland episode reaching 2.3 million people.

   • Their audience is increasingly video‑first and leaning younger: almost 30% of UK podcast listeners and 35% of YouTube viewers are under 35, and is another example of how people now watch rather than listen to audio (the format is more TV than podcast now). There are few branded podcasts that have nailed it but Dish and Zoe’s podcast are brilliant examples.

2. The Amazon Prime Video streaming smash Off Campus had a very obvious (so much so it got some heat on social) but smart integrated brand campaign with Liquid IV.

   • It turned what could have been a simple sponsorship into a full-blown plot integration with in‑universe ads, rink branding, and character-led campaigns aimed at tapping their highly engaged fandom.

   • TW: It has strong cultural relevance and showing strong signs performance (early results are strong from the interview), while the show also treads a fine line around brand safety and fan authenticity in a show that deals with sex, teen drinking nightlife, and a sexual assault storyline.

3. A good and actionable breakdown of how the LinkedIn algo has changed and how you should think and plan content, especially when using AI and hint they suggest those LinkedIn pods are being nuked…

4. Whatsapp AI Growth Engine - Watch out for this, as the EU has told meta they have to open WhatsApp up to rival AI firms, watch out for Perplexity and ChatGPT to go back onto the platform (they used it to grow usage before the shut down at the end of 2025) and look out for Claude and others to join the race where there are 3billion MAU’s and for many its becoming their canonical inbox.

5. Monzo’s Powerful Referral Engine: “Monzo stated that 79 per cent of new customers in FY2026 were acquired through word of mouth, which includes referrals” - paying out approximately £29.5 million in referral bonuses in the last financial year. This year will show if it worked or not.

6. Book Recommendation: The Algorithm: The Hypergrowth Formula That Transformed Tesla, Lululemon, General Motors, and SpaceX - I really enjoyed this book by Elon’s right hand. If you want to look behind the door of how Tesla redesigned their workflows, their campaigns and their business through LEAN Processes (this took me back to the early part of my career and reminded me of how I use it without thinking) this is a great shorter read/listen. If you like the look of the book I highly recommend you check out Gwynne Shotwell, the brains behind SpaceX and credited to turning Elon’s ideas into reality

7. This is how you take your podcast from a 6 → 10 and stand out in this saturated world (create a set that looks like you’re interviewing on Mars)

MUST WATCH

• 🤣 Probably my favourite style of humour Marketing on TikTok (creativity definitely works best on TikTok right now)

• 🔥 Another great interview by Substack with their media founder show Open Tab, this time with journalist/editor legend Joanna Coles (if you watch the video you’ll under the fire emoji)

  • Joanna talks about her love for Substack & YouTube and talks about the importance of the platforms for modern media and the publication she co-leads The Daily Beast)

• 🤖🤬: talks through why everyone hates AI (probably the best short explainer out there)

• 🤔 Myth or Mythos: The Atlantic CEO, covers the latest AI model drop from Anthropic and talks through his thoughts and how they’ve been smart downgrading your usage to lesser models with specific asks and prompts and how they are preventing open source models from using distillation (prompting 1000s of times and copying the answer to use in their models for free consumer use) (BTW Nicolas is a brilliant example how to build an audience for yourself and for your publication)

• 🚀 Reach for the sky! Porsche x Toy Story 5 is the collaboration you didn’t know you need but goes to infinity & beyond

• 🍔 Whopper! Burger King and talkSPORT show how you can collaborate together with big sporting names and make it feel natural rather than a dedicated ad.

MUST LISTEN

1. The invisible costs of outsourcing to AI - and the knock on effects on your team

2. How to build billion dollar brands - this isn’t all brand new but Rohan Oza drops some nuggets from Poppi, Vitamin Water and his time as an investor on Shark Tank

3. New Luxury Status Symbols with Ana Andjelic - When talks luxury the world should listen, I loved her appearance on . 4 great items to listen out for: (i) The evolving nature of status, (ii) the quality (well made) vs. advertising challenge especially in the East vs. West markets, (iii) the issue many brands are having with algorithmic branding & (iv) the ferrari trap (which plays into our Ferrari masterclass article from last week)

➕ Two Tools For You To Try

1. Search expert & friend of Marketing Unfiltered Carl Hendy has built a Google Profile to find your Google profile URL instantly (you can follow people, brands and creators on Google search) -

   https://search.audits.com/

2. Another friend of MU & storytelling legend David Pullan launched an exec storytelling tool to help you find your story to share in interviews etc - https://danny.thestoryspotters.com/

If you like this format hit reply and let us know OR hit the ❤️ button above.

Some of our recent must reads

1. Ferrari’s Marketing Masterclass - for the car and non car lovers

2. Unpicking Google’s AI Search - for anyone who will be impacted by less traffic from Google

3. How To Learn From Political Marketing - for those who need to understand tribal movements

4. EQ Is The Missing Weapon In A Leaders Arsenal - for any leader who needs to understand emotional intelligence

5. Why Your Agentic Team Might Be Your Next Biggest Issue - for everyone wanting to understand how AI is going to impact future team design

SHARING IS CARING 💕: This weeks newsletter can be shared by copying and pasting → https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/85 into Slack, Teams or Whatsapp ;-)

Go and have a great weekend!
Danny Denhard - let’s chat about coaching, consulting or advisory

Welcome back. Grab your favourite caffeinated drink because today I continue my reverse engineering series with Ferrari’s masterclass in board-level bravery or absolute brand madness, depending on which side of the Milan stock exchange you sit on.

Quick Disclaimer: I am not a petrolhead or really into cars, (but I have worked with McLaren and other auto brands) & more importantly I appreciate the brand and this modern approach to marketing, so let’s dive in.

» If you missed last week’s free Google guide to surviving their upcoming AI first Mode get it here:

Enter The Ferrari EV

By now, you’ll have likely seen the headlines about the Ferrari Luce (Model Code: F222), Maranello’s first fully electric vehicle.

It has sent shockwaves through the automotive world, wiped billions off their market cap overnight (but then rebounded strongly), and triggered visceral outrage from traditional petrolheads who are calling it a bloated, five-door “appliance”.

But as modern marketing executives, we need to look past the surface noise and understand the genius behind their marketing efforts.

This launch was never about creating a consensus. It was a calculated combustion, a strategic rocket aimed squarely at engineering attention on an unprecedented global scale.

Ferrari didn’t just launch a car; they have rewritten the luxury playbook by methodically decoupling the brand from its acoustic heritage, intentionally polarising their audience, and utterly deactivating traditional media gatekeepers.

Let’s dissect the boardroom reality of this controlled detonation.

1. The Strategic Power of Polarisation (The Power of “No”)

Broadcast marketing is dead. True brand power lies in knowing exactly who your product is not for, and having the executive scar tissue to say it out loud.

Ferrari’s Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer, Enrico Galliera, openly embraced a polarising aesthetic. By delivering a tall, five-seat executive liftback saloon instead of a classic low-slung supercar, he built an immediate filter.

Then came the genius stroke of audience deselection.

Galliera’s explicit statement advising traditional Ferrari owners, “Please don’t buy the Luce” was a flawless execution of reverse psychology.
It achieved three critical objectives:

1. It neutralised inevitable criticism by admitting the car wasn’t built for purists.

2. It created extreme exclusivity by defining who the car was not for. The best marketing combines inspiration and aspiration

3. It made the Luce instantly magnetic to a new, tech-wealthy global elite who want to distance themselves from ‘old-money petrolhead culture’.

The data confirms this brutal pivot: 70% of launch invitees were not existing Ferrari drivers but likely made them want one…

The company signalled a massive push to capture younger tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and China who value the LoveFrom minimalist aesthetic over V12 nostalgia.

The polarisation was a deliberate mechanism to engage their legacy customer and energise a far more valuable, future-proof one.

The Marketing Timeline

2. A New Blueprint: Creator and Platform-Led Media Strategy

Legacy automotive publications are less powerful and have far less influence.

They evaluate yesterday’s metrics (track-day lap times) rather than tomorrow’s buyers (UX and material honesty).

Ferrari deliberately stepped away from engaging them.

Instead, they orchestrated a dual-track timeline on the evening of May 25, 2026, completely controlling the narrative window:

External Storytelling

Exclusive access was granted to science-tech producer Cleo Abram on HUGE*. Her interview was a masterclass in narrative control, focusing entirely on design philosophy and material honesty. By pairing Sir Jony Ive and Ferrari Design Chief Flavio Manzoni, the content resonated deeply with the design and technology community. This engaged tech twitter, tech press and drew direct comparisons to the shuttered Apple car that Jony Ive was part of.

Simultaneously, Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) dropped a deep dive on Auto Focus, praising the consumer tech experience, the layered OLED instrument cluster, and the tactile feel of physical dials. Crucially, Brownlee later highlighted how Ferrari’s exclusion of critical legacy auto journalists allowed the brand to prevent negative, track-focused comparisons from hijacking the reveal.

Then Ferrari’s Storytelling

Ferrari’s official video series is good, but their 4th installment is great modern storytelling featuring their F1 drivers Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, designers from LoveFrom (including Marc Newson) and execs from Ferrari, a good blend for Ferrari fans and outsider commentators.

3. Viral Domination Through Clipping

Mainstream media is losing its punch. Ferrari bypassed costly traditional ad buys and instead leveraged clipping services including Mr Beast’s platform Vyro, a recently launched, decentralised clipping marketplace.

This is one reason why the launch went so far and wide.

Ferrari indirectly incentivised thousands of independent micro-influencers, “clippers” (via Cleo’s HUGE* brand campaign) to edit and distribute short-form, high-engagement clips of Cleo’s video.

Then organic clipping and video distribution happens, especially from powerhouses like Marques Brownlee podcast and short form reviews, knowing these would spread far and wide across TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.

This was paired with hundreds of tech journalists and influencers who organically posted and clipped their moments from the HUGE* interview and surrounding tech experts content.

Suddenly, social media algorithms were flooded with high-quality, hyper-focused tactical moments: the prime example was Jony Ive explaining why touchscreens don’t belong in luxury cars, and the satisfying, machined click of aluminium switches.
These details are like bees to honey...

This decentralised army successfully crowded out the negative narrative from purists raging on traditional forums.

This changed the conversation from “where is the engine noise?” to “look at this engineering craftsmanship.”

4. Executive Framing and Institutional Shielding

At the executive table, you cannot let short-term market panic dictate long-term strategy.

Yes, the stock fell 8.4% in Milan trading, erasing $4B in short-term market cap but it bounced back. Ferrari built an institutional shield to weather the storm and they hold strong and the price returned.

How? They manufactured moral and cultural legitimacy by staging high-level institutional stunts, presenting the Luce to Pope Leo XIV at Castel Gandolfo and Italian President Sergio Mattarella at the Quirinale Palace.

This framed the EV as a culturally significant milestone aligned with national industrial pride and carbon neutrality, dampening the purist backlash.

The executive alignment was ironclad. Look at how they reframed the controversy:

• Design Chief Flavio Manzoni defended the radical look with boardroom poetry: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, Tradition is the preservation of fire.”

• CEO Benedetto Vigna looked directly at institutional investors and stated: “When you use technology that leapfrogs, the design must also be a leapfrog.”

They positioned Ferrari not as a brand losing its way, but as a bold leader ready to define the ultra-luxury EV segment on its own terms.

In recent years, Jaguar created much hype with a rebrand with a car way off in the future, this time around Ferrari used an incredibly well thought-through plan and executed it to dominate feeds and conversations.

The questions that will need to be asked and answered by the CMO & their exec team in the coming weeks:

• Will the Luce be a big post-launch success?

• Is the product good enough to sell to its richest and biggest critics once the hype dies down?

• Will the future new customer invest huge amounts of money in an EV that has a huge price tag vs other EV vehicles that don’t?

• Does the car have actual product market fit, can it sustain this hype?

• Does Ferrari’s cult status have enough cache to bring Ferrari superfans to an EV that is deliberately different and originally weren’t excited about?

What If Growth Isn’t Consensus?

Let’s challenge conventional marketing thinking.

What if a successful launch isn’t about just keeping your oldest customers happy? What if true growth means intentionally de-prioritising those customers who anchor you to the past, so you can capture the demographic that owns the future?

Ferrari proved that their brand is likely going to be a moat.

By leaning into their uncool truth, blending tradition with targeting a fresher audience, and weaponising decentralised platforms like Vyro, they delivered a new blueprint for how luxury brands must command attention and control their narrative in the digital age.

» Thanks for reading. Send me a note with your feedback by hitting reply.

Have a great end to your week.

Danny Denhard

PS If you enjoyed today’s reverse engineered post, check out my reverse engineering of new balance playbook

Good Morning Leaders. Good week?

This week we return with how Google is quietly shifting from a search and advertising behemoth into a full-blown “AI Engine”, using Gemini to control more of the customer journey from query to completed cart while squeezing the open web in the process.
For marketing leaders hooked on “free” Google traffic, this is another wake-up call to diversify channels, think like media companies, and redesign your playbooks for an AI-first, agentic commerce world.

Recommended Steps To Protect You:

I brought in expert SEO and MU marketing leaders to offer actionable steps to help shape the future for Google’s AI latest and boldest shift.

» Here is the free Google Doc guide

If Marketing Unfiltered provides value to you, please share on social or your favourite marketing group by copying & pasting www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/83 to help us to hit our mission in helping marketing leader tackle the business world.

“Danny what’s your opinion, have we hit peak Google traffic yet?”

That was the question while we sat around the hotel pool in Lisbon, discussing what risks on the business.

The FD had strong views on where we were vulnerable and where we had to smartly invest.

The co-founders didn’t believe we hit max traffic yet. They were both right.

My take (back in 2012) was we were hitting the upper limits of where we can go without larger, more expensive diverse marketing efforts. We launched on TV, we pushed social harder, we collaborated with influencers and made PR work in an industry that struggled to before that point.

We won in a large number of the animal themed famous algorithmic updates, leading to a call between us, one of our largest merchants in the UK and a well know Google rep to help the merchant after a crushing penalty.

At a previous offsite we already had a lengthy conversation about diversifying traffic and reducing the reliance on Google.

Was There Ever ‘Free’ Traffic, Really? Even back then, it was hard to get off that “free” Google traffic pipe and many are addicted to the organic traffic dealer. When you couldn’t rank and get it free, you had to pay, right?!?

It wasn’t all roses, a large international expansion plan was hit hard on day one after the acquisition was announced, the acquired site was completely wiped from the SERPs, which led to follow up large acquisition of their largest competitor. That was a stressful and educational moment.

We diversified our marketing efforts across the properties, we removed most silo’s and it helped the company-wide collaboration play win. We celebrated a follow up IPO and ever since they have had to navigate a number of algorithmic changes while ramping up other marketing efforts.
I always fondly look back at that time of my career and hold many ex-colleagues in the highest regards.

When I swapped dominant algorithms from Google’s to Facebook’s, the same diversification plan applied, we had to shape our user behaviour and rely less on Facebook’s feed (to platforms they also owned) and their efforts to launch their own version of our product...

Channel diversification has been an important theme of my and no doubt your career(s) ever since.

I bet you have shaped and reshaped in similar ways throughout your career too.

Breaking Up With The (Traffic) Dealer

In 2021, a company I was helping, needed to diversify and build out their brand, we landed on every company has to become a media company (everyone is creating more and more media, but there was no reason barring the platform told you so) we have to move first to Entertain, Inspire and Educate (EIE framework) our audience.

I remember the light bulbs going off in the virtual room (in our annual planning cycle) it was something everyone agreed on and was a foundation to shifting into a native low referred traffic environment we were moving into.

They have gone on to create some impressive campaigns and still win riding the Google traffic wave.

Enter today’s market, its now incredibly difficult to generate traffic from any network or platform or you choose the simple pay-to-play model…

→ Here is your free expert recommendations to how to handle Google is AI search or read on Google Docs or hit download ⬇️

The Google Rebirth Expert Guide Google Becoming Ai Search Q&a

650KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The Race To Zero? Or Death To The Open Web?

Nilay Patel (The Verge editor in chief) famously dubbed Google Zero on a podcast in May 2024, he predicted the move towards zero traffic from the SERPs and asked the Alphabet CEO on a follow up podcast about how AI is going to help or hinder customers. Nilay ask a similar question to Sundar again this week.

Over time Google has evolved from their start as a search engine to an advertising engine, optimising every pixel to generate more revenue through more and more ads and the investments from CMOs have followed.

Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, was clear back in 2012 “competition is just one click away”, if they controlled or removed that click they became the controller of the “open” web.

Now in 2026, Google are controlling (free and paid) clicks more than they ever have.
The question that keeps coming back to me is:

Where will our value exchange be?

The AI IO

Last week Google openly hinted to a new future. Google IO was Google’s official AI company outing, it was showing off how well they could leverage their properties to place Gemini throughout every surface, every touch point and every interaction it can.

In the press tour shortly afterwards, Sundar Pichai was asked a smart question: Is the classic blue links going away?

“I think it’s important to bring users along the journey as well as making sure the product is working for their expectations [...].
People are responding positively, we can see it in the long-term metrics of the product [...]
We didn’t have AI mode a year ago, but now a lot of people are experiencing it. I think we’ve made it more seamless [...] so it’s a continuum, but I don’t think sources and links will always be there as part of it.”
— Sundar Pichai

Entering The Agentic Future: Following up from this quote, Pichai suggests Google ‘are looking to do more for the user’, hinting a move towards agentic commerce, while at the IO they pushed Google Spark (their new agent similar to openclaw) and there are subtle hints at the two worlds combining.

» Here’s a quick video run down on the event.

Google’s Big Bet For Alphabet

Google’s play is a familiar one from the large tech giants, be the utility, help more & control more to become the agentic partner of choice.
Whether that’s the current gatekeeper of the internet to the newest startups, they are all battling it out to take you from chat to completed cart as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

Google’s history and future is an essential lesson to learn for marketing and business leaders, their latest evolution is:
Search Engine → Advertising Engine → AI Engine

AI engines have

• search (human led and hybrid agentic),

• discovery (find, review and highlight to consumers) and

• completed commerce.

Often blurring these lines to reduce friction.

It’s been a slow deliberate change and one we marketing and business have seen coming. It’s time now to act accordingly.

Iteration Beats Innovation At Large Companies

Google is an iteration company, it doesn’t have to innovate, it can and does take a step back, uses data and user intent to see signal through a lot of noise and rolls out iterative changes, slowly but surely shifting user behaviour and shifting CMO budgets.

Google’s iterative approach over the last 3 years has been critical, they could have gone all in with Gemini, they could have added Gemini and AI overviews much earlier and rightly didn’t.

A few factors we have to call out:

There has been a tsunami of AI content ever since, (some slop some not), they have had to understand the quality, then the value quantity of content and then balance updates.

Making this bigger strategic bet has taken huge confident and executive debate, forecasting & reforecasting and high trust that they evolve Google search into AI search and not just another answer engine.

Bigger Paying Picture?

As the LLM race has become, it is a race to converting free into paying subscribers. Could subscriptions and agent commerce revenue replace their reliance on advertising? Or will it be a pay to play in Google’s latest ecosystem? Google’s free search to agent (via Gemini spark) completion is something they are subtly teasing.
My bet is we will be paying for more placement, for more surfaces, touchpoints and less data…

Google’s biggest threat in this era might well be themselves…but that is for another MU newsletter ;-)

A huge thank you to Beth, Carl, Kevin, Simon and of course Harry for adding their expertise on our supporting AI Search Guide.

READ THE RECOMMENDATIONS

Have a great end to your week and we will land in your inbox again next week.

Danny

PS: If you missed recent posts, enjoy Harry’s take on how to learn from modern day political marketing and my take on how to recover your brand identity.

Today’s newsletter from Harry isn’t just about Britain’s drift to the Right – it’s another demonstration in how marketing through modern media, precise messaging and working with platform algorithms are influencing many at scale.

If you missed recent MU’s definitely read you cannot bury your head in the sand anymore and the 2027 CMO nightmare and what to do about it.

Thanks for reading today and enjoy your long weekends,

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

I Used to Laugh At Britain’s Right-Wing Bigots.
I’m Not Laughing Anymore.

Britain’s migration towards the Right isn’t a fringe movement. The channels and methods that have accelerated it (and how others responded) just takes us there faster, so perhaps understanding is more useful than apathy.

Earlier this week, I made a comment under a post on LinkedIn, as I tend to do when I’m up early and my interest nodules are tickled. The post itself was about the disaffected political middle of the UK, and despite not being connected to the original poster, I felt obliged to chuck my two Cents in.

Yes, the post was quite a few postcodes away from my usual content habitat, so I can only assume LinkedIn served it to me so I could spread my intellectual wings in new and interesting directions…

A senior media figure had posted about the recent ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, framing the attendees not as extremists, but as ordinary, fearful British people.

I replied that my concern wasn’t with the ‘fearful middle’. It was that their visible, legitimising presence at a right-wing rally gave permission to more nefarious, racially motivated behaviours on the periphery. Give it a year of such advocacy, I said, and the fringe might start to look less abhorrent.

Give it two, and it might sound normal.

The first reply I received was short and to the point (even if the point was blunt and had absolutely nothing to do with what I’d said): -

“Of course. Like attacking our police force with sledgehammers1 type of distasteful. We want to do anything possible to prevent that type of behaviour, don’t we? The courts think not.”

And there it was - the pivot from polite social interaction to divisive land grabbing in a few short keystrokes.

I’ve been thinking about this brief exchange ever since, because it feels like a snapshot of what’s happening to political discourse – and the state of our country – on the UK’s digital, social and traditional media platforms every day.

Yep, I Got It Wrong

For the past couple of years, I’ve treated the proliferation of Nationalism in Britain with the same casual disdain that I viewed my daughter’s Labubu collection or any Kardashian. I occasionally marvelled at the stupidity of it all from the comfortable distance of my intellectually smug, progressively liberal bubble.

Yes, I’m aware I can be a dick. Sue me.

What I completely miscalculated was that apathetic ridicule doesn’t shrink movements, nor does it recognise the underlying issues that amplify socio-political division.

In a nutshell, every condescending sneer from a self-regarding liberal like me is a recruitment poster for Reform and their ilk.

Every sneering op-ed about ‘disaffected’ voters trying to have their voices heard and written by someone who lives in the cream end of Britain’s curdling milk bottle can be used as ammunition.

I didn’t take them (or the changing winds of our country) seriously, and in doing so, I dismissed the most powerful political narrative in the land: -

That the establishment was perceived to be mocking ordinary people.

The Economics of Anger (Which Are Actually Quite Simple)

What us professional liberals find so uncomfortable is that the economic anxiety and anti-immigration sentiment in the UK might actually be legitimate.

Wages in Britain have been stagnant (effectively net reducing) for over fifteen years. House prices have become so obscene that an entire generation has stopped considering homebuying entirely. The Cost-of-Living Crisis is a dictionary definition, and SME owners are drowning in compliance costs, energy bills, salaries, tax and shrinking margins. Public services are visibly falling apart, and farmers are looking at 2027 and 2028 as loss making years already.

For many British people, things are a bit shit.

Meanwhile, the politicians who promised to fix these issues (during government stints branded in both colours) have done the exact opposite with all their intellectually stunted and selfishly ego-driven might.

When people are scared or feel ignored, they get small, they look for explanations and eventually, when they’re cornered, they fight back. In my race to be apathetic, I forgot to ask one simple question:
‘Why?’

For the last decade or so, people in the socio-economic middle of the UK have been panic searching for answers and meaning – anything or anyone who could make it all make sense. So into this void of uncertainty marched the jack-booted mouth breathers new breed of politicians in the shape of Reform, Restore Britain, Advance UK and their ideological cousins who provided the nipple of an answer on which the masses could suckle: -

Immigration.

It’s not an accurate reason to ascribe to Britain’s problems in any meaningful sense, but immigration was a simple, visible and PR-able patsy. It’s even easier to hurl blame bombs towards ‘those not from round these parts’ when you’re standing in an A&E queue with your child for six hours or struggling to pay the bills every month.

Understanding why people believe something is not the same as agreeing with it, but I, for one, have been far too busy pretending that the shift rightwards was a bit of an absurdist joke, like the Daily Mail comments section or a Farage promise. I recognise and regret this mistake now.

The Pipeline Nobody Wants to Talk About

Social media didn’t invent the ‘new right’ of British politics, but it definitely helped build its credibility by dripping misinformation honey into the earholes of disaffected voters who were searching for answers.

The big social platforms have weaponised radicalisation, placing right wing party leaders behind iron clad, defendable defences while their minions and followers acted with impunity, scattering mortars of scurrilous untruths and Claymores of divisive suggestion across battlefield Britain.

This polished the somewhat unpolishable turds at the helm with a veneer of respectability, thus making the whole sordid operation functionally invisible to the people it was designed to influence.

Angsty knicker wrangling about ‘algorithms’ and blaming Big Social is how we avoid confronting what’s actually happening here: -

The modern hard-right operation is not a bunch of angry white men in gentlemen’s clubs sipping Scotch while discussing ‘New England’ (well, not just that) but rather a sophisticated, multi-channel communications powerhouse with talent, money, impunity and bravery.

Yes, bravery. They’re changing the narrative and, like their mentor Trump, they don’t let such fripperies like ‘the truth’ stand in the way of a good story. Whether you like the characters or not, that takes some doing.

The New Marketing Approach

Some of their video output may look hokey and transparent to us marketing professionals, sure, but to an older, tech-allergic middle Englander, it reads as authentic and relatable.

To them, it’s a breath of fresh, honest, pragmatic air.

Just imagine what Reform’s comms monkeys will be able to achieve when they really understand the nefarious capabilities of Digital Twins and Deepfakes…

But I need to go back, eventually, to my newfound measured positioning. I must applaud some of the tactics from a professional viewpoint. The language deployed has been tactically massaged with real precision: -

‘Illegal immigrants’ replaced ‘asylum seekers’ - not by design, not by accident, but because one phrase invokes sympathy whilst the other demands punishment.

‘Two-tier policing’ became a rallying cry overnight, seeded through social and trad media and amplified through the mainstream press until it felt like accepted wisdom.

‘Free speech’ was rebranded as a right-wing cause, so any attempt to moderate hate speech (no matter how backhandedly delivered) could be painted as censorship.

This is all textbook power comms, in which those who control the story control the debate – and the outcome.

Then there’s the high volume/ low quality (sorry ‘authentic’) video content machine the Far Right deploys with aplomb.

Short, emotionally charged video clip such as: -

A confrontation on a high street, a court ruling, a crime involving a person of colour - allstripped of context and distributed across X, TikTok, Telegram, Truth Social and FB simultaneously with a legion of loyalists and bot farmers ready and waiting to pour meths of outrage on the ensuing flames.

The influencer layer is where it gets really interesting. A new generation of political commentators, some unashamedly partisan, building audiences of Millions on socials and a new crop of pseudo political, socially sympathetic podcasts.

These commentators act as a highly functional bridge between the aggressive fringe and the more acceptable middle. Someone who would never watch a ‘Britain First’ snippet will happily listen to an hour-long pod debate that claims to independently interrogate the immigration issue from both sides.

Giving credit where it’s due, they’re extremely good at this bit, and it’s scarily effective.

Marketing Effectively On All Fronts

Of course, social algorithms don’t care either way. They care about your eyeballs, attention and wallets. Anger, outrage, confrontation and disgust are some of the most attention-amplifying emotions going.

The mainstream media needs to be credited, too. Front pages of all colours have treated small boat crossings as an existential threat to British civilisation, like they’re an Armada threatening to eviscerate our national plums and surgically orphan us from everything we hold dear.

Like the drip drip drip of soft social news feeding, newspapers serve as a daily conditioner that makes the language and logic of the hard Right feel less like hate induced nonsense, and more like a brand of common sense shared by everyone except you.

As with the social algos, outrage sells papers, and papers sell ads, whilst FOMO and fear retain subscribers. The economics of attention and the economics of radicalisation are as interconnected as twins in the womb.

Now Just Add A Pinch Of AI to That…

Political parties theoretically operate under a set of quite stringent rules around what they can say and how they can say it, guided by spending caps, advertising standards and Electoral Commission oversight.

The Parties themselves are, supposedly, accountable while their social media output can be traced, challenged and reported on. ‘Follow the rules or be damned’ is the message, which has been heard and ignored by pretty much every party across the British political spectrum. The Right is just better at this ignorance.

AI has driven into this lazy domain like a Deliveroo driver at a Weightwatchers party, causing unstoppable and immeasurable havoc. Deepfake videos of politicians saying things they never said, AI-generated voters posting believable but bullshit testimony about made up data linking immigration to crime and fabricated local news site networks optimised for AI SEO reporting on communities that don’t have a functioning local paper anymore.

They all push a consistent and effective ideological line while looking indistinguishable from legitimate journalism.

Thanks to AI, all of this is cheap to produce and immediate to distribute, meaning the first snippet of a story many will hear (and the key sentiment they’ll trust) will be owned by the originator.

Beyond the Right-Wing minions, influencers, Podcasters and comms professionals, the political parties themselves are learning too, using AI to micro-target and A/B test political messaging at scale.

They can identify the emotional triggers of specific voter segments at a postcode level of granularity in near real time and serve them content calibrated to move them into favourable directions, both emotionally and politically.

Welcome to Digital Marcoms – The Dystopian Version.

The real skill in is how effortless it all looks and feels to us liberal cynics and the middle ground target audiences alike.

We feel safe in our mockery bubbles, whilst the moderate voters feel like they’re being listened to, for once, rather than coerced or worse - ignored.

Instead, they feel like they’re being educated – let in on some secret knowledge vault, the combination being their own research, asking the right questions and discovering the truths that mainstream media can’t or won’t give them.

This is what I meant in my LinkedIn comment, and what the reply illustrated so succinctly: -

It’s The Hope That Destroys You

Ten years ago, Nigel Farage was nothing more than a pinstripe-wearing pub bore - a pint swilling, chain smoking, grandstanding fartbox spewing Capitalist idealism and sniggering racist suggestion and dressing it up like the acceptable Pret sandwich of politics.

People like me dismissed him as a joke – another nail in the Right side of the coffin.

People like the everyman voter felt the winds were changing and, in secret, they finally had an oracle - a Pied Piper of Pragmatism who honed his craft (i.e. not letting the truth get in the way of a powerful message) from the king of the method, Donald Trump.

I was wrong – and they were right.

Today, Farage leads a British political party which supersedes the Conservatives and is causing Labour serious headaches. Meanwhile, parties to his right act as his political pathfinders, shielding by his public persona whilst gaining real traction through more underground means.

How did these outliers get their social and political profile? Casual racism is a content genre with millions of followers, whilst misogyny, rebranded as ‘masculinity’, is being force-fed to teenage boys via Manosphere accounts on YouTube and TikTok like a daily intravenous Red Bull shot of hope.

Give it two more years on the current trajectory, and what looks like edgy and unpleasant ‘fringe’ behaviour today will feel like the warm cozy glow of the centre tomorrow.

Trust me – this is how it works, and why they’re doing it.

So What the Hell Do We Do?

See, here’s the problem – my problem. I’m doing it again. I’m sliding into a one-sided litany, looking down from my high horse, sneering at the behaviours and beliefs of others and the motives behind them. I can’t fix the problem because…

I AM THE PROBLEM.

…or at least part of it. It’s a me problem before it’s a they problem. And that, in itself, is a problem.

They don’t think what I think. But what they believe and what I believe is a totally different - and much more salient - question.

I need to understand what the moderate middle believes before they stroll towards the warmer, more accepting voting booth of the Right and, crucially, I need to understand why they believe it.

Maybe, with patience, understanding and a significant ego extraction on my part, the divide that I (and others like me) have manifested will pull together towards a more pragmatic and functional distance.

Get closer, and there’s a chance we may engage in a more progressive and positive discussion that could (and those italics are doing some serious heavy lifting here) improve the direction Great Britain is moving in.

Genuinely. Not as an exercise in tolerance or intellectual hubris, but as a necessity for our country.
Our friends.
Our neighbours.
Our children.
Us.

That challenge starts with me.

This week we have Harry back tackling how you are dealing with LLMs and AI vs running away from it.

Last week I shared my time travelling experience and brought you ways to plan for H2 and this time next year:

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend and we will see you again towards the end of next week.

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

In the AI Arms Race, Are You A Bazooka Or A BB Gun? As LLMs and AI tools improve daily, burying your head is not an option

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You Wouldn’t Hit Yourself Over The Head With A Hammer. Nor would you leave it on the table and expect it to build an Ikea chest of draws while you sip a Latte on the sofa. LLMs are tools, and as with any tool, they’re useless without human intervention.

This is true for now - General AI might have a word to say about the premise when it arrives like an alien species and decides, rightfully, that the solution to all Earth’s woes is to exterminate its most pervasive parasite, namely us.

Earlier this week I ran a poll on LinkedIn with a simple question: -

What’s your competency level using AI for work?

The scoring criteria were relatively straightforward:-

0-2 - I’ve tried AI tools a handful of times but don’t use them as part of my regular workflow.

3-5 - I use AI tools regularly for specific tasks but still rely heavily on trial and error to get useful outputs.

6-8 - I prompt deliberately, iterate efficiently, have used agents with purpose and AI meaningfully accelerates my output quality or speed.

9-10 - AI and agents are deeply embedded in how I work and my results would be noticeably worse without it.

The results from 70 responses were interesting - 51% scored themselves 6-8 and only 8% claimed they’d yet to hop on the AI party bus.

However the survey results come with a couple of significant caveats:-

First, my network leans towards my own contemporaries, namely vintage (OK, older) marketing, iGaming, Web3 and technology professionals.

Second, I shared the survey with my friends in the CMO Circle Community which comprises 563 senior marketing professionals.

Just take a glance at the current state of the marketing industry and it’s no surprise that this community has been upskilling like a Victorian blacksmith the day after the first train chugged past his yard.

The results were kind of what I expected, with most senior professionals using it daily, intentionally, and with something to show for it but with a relatively significant 33% cohort either starting their journey or only dipping in occasionally. I regularly come across peers who treat AI at work with the same energy as a kid being forced to try broccoli ‘because it’s good for you’.

There’s a gap forming, and it’s widening daily.

The Illusion of Adoption

Here is what ‘learning AI’ from the ground up tends to look like in practice. Someone asks ChatGPT to write them an email. They get something that sounds like a BS corporate press release from 2011, so they tweak it heavily, and conclude that AI is either useful but limited, or significantly overhyped. They’ve used AI in the literal sense, but they haven’t even begun to understand what it’s capable of. This is surface-level adoption, and it’s commonplace (33% according to my straw poll)

McKinsey’s 2024 Global Survey found that while 65% of organisations now report using generative AI in at least one business function, the overwhelming majority are using it for narrow, low-complexity tasks. Drafting copy, summarising documents, basic Q&A that might be better achieved through Google. In some respects this low voltage level of AI use is like buying a Ferrari and only using it to drive to Lidl.

On the other hand, a 2023 MIT study found that workers who used AI effectively completed tasks 40% faster and produced outputs rated significantly higher in quality by independent evaluators. The only difference between the two groups being their understanding of tool usage and capability, and that capability is stretching every single month.

As Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, put it in what’s now known as a cliche of the species:-

“AI is not going to take your job. Someone using AI is going to take your job.”

Personally, I would take a more nuanced view - someone using AI better than you will ALWAYS beat you in an interview process.

Who’s racing ahead, and who’s burying their head?

The finance sector is one of the most advanced adopters, though the gains seem to be more concentrated among upper tier employees. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs have built proprietary AI models for data analysis, compliance and portfolio management. At the analyst level, many are still using AI the way a student uses it the night before a deadline. PwC’s 2024 AI Jobs Barometer found that tasks equivalent to 28% of the working week in financial services are now theoretically automatable.

Marketing has perhaps the highest volume of casual AI usage and despite what my survey suggests, marketers have some of the lowest scores in quality of application. Few have built any kind of structured workflow. As someone who has spent 25 years in this industry, I find it genuinely frightening how complacent our industry is. Content that once took a day now takes an hour. I built a credible website and GTM plan on a one hour train journey.

The marketers who do not adapt might not be fired, but they will become visibly, quantifiably less valuable and employable than the ones who do.

Legal is a fascinating case study in institutional resistance meeting an unstoppable force. The legal profession has always been conservative about new tools, and understandably so, but the dam is breaking. AI-powered platforms like Harvey and Luminance are now used by some of the world’s largest law firms. Research suggests AI can review contracts in minutes that would take junior lawyers hours, with comparable accuracy.

The concern about AI hallucinating case law is legitimate and worth taking seriously, but it’s a training problem - there’s a day coming not very far into the future when it will be human-level in quality and accuracy, so pretending imprecision protects against redundancy is simple, old fashioned apathy and is a high risk, low reward strategy.

HR has perhaps the highest untapped opportunity and the lowest meaningful adoption. Recruitment, onboarding, performance documentation, compliance training, policy drafting: virtually every high-volume HR task is a natural AI application and just look at Jack & Jill, the AI recruitment platform:- one day one in early 2025 it was clever but a bit shit and now, having raised $20 mil at a $600m valuation it has a serious (and seriously impressed) client roster.

Operations is where the real money is. Process optimisation, logistics, predictive maintenance, supply chain analysis: high-complexity, high-reward applications that go far beyond what a single prompt can achieve. However at the team leader and project coordinator level, AI literacy is often non-existent, especially in older, more traditional organisations.

Product sits at an interesting intersection. Product managers are broadly more tech-adjacent and quicker to experiment (validated by my recent experiences with a Product Director who is clearly level 10+ with an army of agents pulling all his workflows together seamlessly). Using AI to synthesise customer research, identify customer needs in qualitative data and stress-test hypotheses is an awesome product strategy, yet many product teams are lagging behind.

Sales is where the divide is starkest. Salesforce’s 2024 ‘State of Sales’ report found that high-performing sales reps are 3.5 times more likely to use AI tools than their underperforming counterparts. Not marginally more likely - three and a half times more likely. If you’re in sales and are not building your AI skills daily, you may as well explore a career selling encyclopedias door to door.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 85 million roles may be displaced by AI and automation by 2030, while 97 million new roles will emerge better suited to a world where humans and machines divide the labour rationally.

What Using AI Well Looks Like

It’s absolutely not about being an expert in every tool - that would be a frickin’ nightmare, not to mention absurdly time consuming. New ones appear every 11 minutes or so, so instead of getting lost in that minefield of malevolent tech, you’re better off understanding base theory and learning what you need to know to excel in your specific role:-.

• Learn how to structure a problem so that AI augments your judgement rather than replaces it.

• Learn how to prompt effectively - get it to question you back (this works brilliantly).

• Learn how to build systems rather than one-off queries.

• Learn how to interrogate answers rather than picking the first result off the shelf like a discount packet of Hobnobs.

What’s Next?

If this is starting to feel like a reflection of you in the ‘casual user’ mirror, someone who’s dabbled but not built anything structured nor significantly useful, that’s excellent - you have foundations and enthusiasm and just need to turn your AI learning volume up a couple of notches. I’d suggest speaking to the likes of Oren Greenberg (who joined us on MU last year) to expand your skills and stay up to date with the latest AI tools capabilities.

If you’ve not started at all, I want to tell you something plainly so there’s no equivocation: the gap between ‘you’ and ‘useful’ is smaller than you think, and the cost of waiting is bigger than you can imagine. If you want to take your AI skills from zero to one, I’ve heard good things about The Oxford AI School.

Whether you think you’re level 1 or level 8, your competitor businesses (as well as those pesky 500+ candidates vying for that job you want so much) are not sitting on their hands, hoping this will all blow over like some weird dystopian dream.

Harry Lang is the CMO at Somnia, a leading Blockchain and author of the 5 Star rated marketing guidebook ‘Brands, Bandwagons & Bullshit,’ available on Amazon. You can connect with Harry on LinkedIn

We had a great response to John’s AI take last week. If you missed it, enjoy it below.

This week I picked up my crystal ball and offer a journal entry from a CMO and the challenges we are going to face.

» You can always let us know what you think by hitting reply (or emailing mu@dannydenhard.com) to lets us know directly or leaving a comment

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The CMO’s 2027 Nightmare:
When Agentic Teams Break and No One Cares

By Danny Denhard - Connect With Me On LinkedIn

27th April 2027

Today was a rough day.

Paul handed in his notice, his agentic team can’t keep up.

His team and their agents can’t do it anymore.

The site keeps going down and the Product team won’t help.

The API stays up. So everyone seems ok??

The rushed TikTok video with 20% discount code went viral (thanks Reddit).

We’ve had record API calls and TikTok shop sales.

We would have had record traffic but the bots took us down again. No-one seems to care.

The agent team went rogue and replied to numerous comments and caused another huge s-storm with legal. Our General Counsel wants heads or bots to roll but again the rest of leadership team just don’t care and happily point the finger to the revenue dashboard in green.

I asked the HR agents about what to do and how to handle all of this - to protect the team and it said there wasn’t a plan and needed to book into the remote HR company and it would be 5 days for an appointment.

It then reminded me of the company goals and I had to deliver on 2.5:1 ROI and we missed our revenue target by 12% last quarter.

Not to mention, it also reminded me of the headcount replacement policy - every headcount replacement needed a business case to be submitted. I’m all for HR agents to have performance in mind but this just ignores our people first value we all agreed on 2 weeks ago!

The CPO and CTO both refused my quick call request and SOS message on slack. I received automated agents saying when they’re available, in 3 days time!
3 DAYS!

My EA agent automatically booked the meeting and without waiting outside their next meeting together they’re not going to prioritise. Are they ever going to take this seriously? Or they are too high on their own supply.

The CEO told me to cheer up on our 1-2-1, “be happy I’m near target already”, but he never gets why the API being up but the site being down is an issue in 2027 and why the site downtime is causing long term brand issues.

Brand will be a massive issue if the APIs go down and performance drops after customers realise our product is just about good enough.

The COO and CRO are demanding performance, they don’t see the website as important since the recent agentic wins, but we are a consumer brand and our website is our home and hub.

When I asked my peer group on WhatsApp, they all said they’re experiencing the same sort of thing, how has it come to this?
LinkedIn is equally a negative read.

My exec coach told me this is where you need to step out and create critical distance, not step up or step in like I always do, I can’t save the day or the week when i’m too close to the action. Create critical distance!
He is right, I should do this.

Action? I need to revisit these 3 things:

1. My mental health, this isn’t helping me, my apple watch is telling me i’m at a dangerous stress level again

2. Time for me - a walk, a long lunch, a weekend without hundreds of slack pings and emails about the issues I raised and no-one else would fix

3. My org design and how AI is helping or hindering it, for everything the agents and claws have done well it’s done much badly or made my team so stressed and unhappy they’re all looking for an exit.

I can do this can’t I?

For the rest of this year and next, we are going to be full of challenging events, from new issues like agentic commerce, new agent and claw team members, humans battling with agreed company values and leadership teams fighting on if websites and social are important etc.

The truth is without working through the issues, mapping out scenario planning and creating plans (with backup plans) it could feel like an accelerated nightmare. If you don’t have a planning session booked in - I strongly recommend you create a session and lead from the front.

Help Is At Hand

I previously created an org design newsletter back in June and October last year, here are the slides with exercises you can move forward with - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1013vJLFdMg_qRyfJwprVnTfo1wQ6Rfa4t7bMphptIOk/edit?_bhlid=2eb0c6559ad174e72f28908b52356f7e8671fcb1&slide=id.p1#slide=id.p1

Here are a few ways you can be inspired and run an exercise to plan and re-shape your department moving forward:

Long Form Interview To Help

I interviewed Dr Kelly Monahan on preparing and building AI & helping to shape strong and flexible culture (watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Pocketcasts)

If you would like more future planning assistance, we have a 79 other posts full of helpful resources, here are 4 I hand selected to help you prepare for the above issues and build for the future:

1. The next era of Marketing Teams and org design

2. The modern day CMO and what it’s going to take

3. The resilience guide

4. Brand mini masterclass

Thanks for reading again today and have a great end to your week!

Danny Denhard

If you missed last week’s article, here is my flexible framework for how to guide your brand forward.

This week we have the Mr John Lyons returning to MU, breaking down why AI is your research partner not a content machine.

Have a great weekend and we will see you this time next week.

The Wrong Starting Point

By John Lyons, Fractional CMO

Most marketers are using AI to generate output.

Blog posts, social copy, email sequences, ad creative. The tool does the work, you do the publishing, everybody looks busy.

The problem isn’t the tool. It’s the brief. Or more to the point, the complete lack of a brief.

Why? Because LLMs are predictive.

They don’t know what good looks like - in your category, for your brand, for your market. And based on the mediocre chocolate box art and video clips the tech bros swoon over, it doesn’t know what good creative looks like in any way.

They know, solely based on everything they’ve ever been fed, what’s most likely to be the case.

And here’s the bit that should make you uncomfortable as a marketer. They’ve been fed a lot of marketing content, and most of it’s total shit.

Gary Vee. Simon Sinek. Neil Patel. Scott Galloway.

All of them have been scraped, indexed, and weighted by the same models you’re relying on to do your marketing thinking for you. And of course those big, but completely misguided, voices have been echoed by their acolytes to give them and their thoughts undue authority so they’re going to be picked up as fodder by your LLM over marketers whose success has been based on knowledge and training rather than their ability to self-promote.

So, if you don’t tell your LLM what good looks like before you ask it to do anything, it’ll average everything it knows. Which means it might hand you survivorship bias dressed up as strategy.

Shit in, Shit out. Just faster. If you’re cool with diarrhoea, sweet.

The Underlying Principle

Marketing is about the market.

Not the marketer, not the brand team, not the founder who built the product and knows it inside out.

The market. The people who will or won’t give you their money, depending on whether they can see their problem being solved by whatever you are selling.

This is where AI can actually be useful, if you use it properly. Not to generate content you couldn’t be bothered to write, but to get closer to how real people think about a category, a problem, a purchase.

That’s a research job. And it turns out LLMs are bloody good at it, provided you set them up correctly and treat their output with a degree of scepticism.

The distinction matters. AI as a content vending machine is commercially dubious. AI as a research tool with a trained eye over the output is genuinely valuable.

Start With Principles, Not Prompts

Before I built HatGPT, my custom research tool, I did something most people skip entirely. I sat down and wrote out my principles of marketing. What good looks like. How I actually think about product market fit, category entry points, ICP definition, messaging. Not a list of tactics. A set of instructions about how marketing really works.

Then I used AI to help me stress-test and structure it. I asked it to tell me its assumptions, its priorities, where it had gaps. I asked it to interview me, essentially, so I could respond to questions rather than build from scratch. That process surfaces the biases the model has picked up, and gives you the chance to correct them before they contaminate everything downstream.

My first prompt in building HatGPT.

This step is the one people too often skip. They open ChatGPT, type a prompt, and wonder why the output feels generic. It’s generic because you haven’t told it anything about how you think. You’re getting the average of the internet instead of a tool trained on your actual approach.

If you want it to think like a trained marketer, you have to tell it what that means.

Where To Get The Truth From

Once you’ve got the principles in place, the next question is where the tool goes for its information. This is the bit that makes the biggest practical difference.

The instinct is to point the AI at the brand’s website and ask it to work out who the customer is. Don’t do that. The website tells you what the brand thinks about itself and who their customer is.

That’s not the same thing as what the market actually needs.

Instead, move away from the category label and look at the problems that drive people into the category in the first place.

If you’re working with a B2B print supplier, nobody wakes up thinking “I need B2B print services.” They think “we need a brochure for the trade show” or “our letterheads look embarrassing.”

Those are the category entry points. That’s where you find the real language.

Step 1 from the ICP voice research framework knowledge file, identify relevant conversations.

HatGPT is set up to go to Reddit, Quora, trade forums, and industry discussion boards, and find the most repeated questions and topics around the problem the product solves. Not what the brand says it solves. What real people are actually talking about and asking about, in their own words.

That gives you something useful, a basis for synthetic research grounded in real data, not in what the AI guesses the customer might be like.

What people are really asking about Zoho CRM’s category.

Synthetic Research, Done Properly

From that foundation, you can build synthetic ICP characters trained on what real people are saying. You can use those characters to interrogate messaging alignment, test pricing assumptions, assess product market fit, and review how a brand is positioned against the needs it claims to solve.

The ICP profile created by HatGPT to interrogate.

There are tools being built specifically for this.

Evidenza, founded by the people behind the LinkedIn B2B Institute, is set up as a synthetic way of doing brand tracking surveys and category buyer surveys. It’s a serious attempt to solve a real problem, and the underlying thinking is sound.

For me though, the limitation is inherent to how LLMs work.

They run to the middle. They pull out the average, the most likely, the statistically representative response.

For quantitative brand tracking, that might be directionally useful, and of course it’s a fraction of the cost of a proper panel. But if you want the scruffy edges, the outlier behaviour, the thing that doesn’t fit the pattern and turns out to be your most interesting insight, synthetic research won’t reliably give you that.

That said, the margins are closing. The speed is incomparable, and the cost is minimal.

Depending on budget and timeline, there’s a strong case for using synthetic research as a first pass, or as a directional check before committing to full research spend.

But I use it for qual.

I use it to ask questions, review messaging, test pricing structures, and assess product market fit. For quant, with statistical confidence at the edges, you still need the real thing.

The HAHAH Model

The other thing that changed how I work with AI was learning about what John Bennett calls the HAHAH model in his book Don’t Surrender Your Thinking. It sounds like something a motivational speaker would put on a slide, and John is certainly a motivator, but the underlying logic is right.

Human input. AI output. Human review. AI revision. Human Acceptance.

My first input is always to tell it in as much detail as possible what I want to achieve and why, and ask it to tell me how it would go about creating an instruction block for a custom GPT, what assumptions it would make, what priorities it would work to, what external data or knowledge it needs and to ask me any questions which would help improve the process.

That way, you are not only getting the best out of the AI, you are getting it to tell you how it intends to work. Which means you know in advance the areas where you need to top-load correct thinking.

The Human review and AI revision part iterates as many times as you need until the output is genuinely acceptable.

It’s collaboration, not instruction. You’re not typing a prompt and publishing whatever comes back. You’re running a feedback loop, correcting the model’s assumptions each time, pushing it closer to what you actually want.

The HAHAH method, as created by AI. And yes, it took several iterations to be not shit.

HatGPT went through that iteration process many times when I first built it, and it still does.

The instructions get refined. The knowledge base gets updated. The output gets better. That’s not a bug in how AI works, it’s the feature. If you treat it as a one-shot tool, you’ll get one-shot results.

What You Actually Get At The End

HatGPT takes a URL. It summarises what the business does, identifies the apparent ICP from the site, trains itself on what that ICP’s needs actually are based on real forum and community data, builds one or two synthetic characters, and interrogates them to assess product market fit. Then it produces a score, with a clear steer on where the gaps are.

HatGPT ready to be put to work.

The reason product market fit is the output, rather than a content calendar or a brand audit, is deliberate.

It’s a concept that founders and tech businesses connect with immediately. They know their product. They’re usually far less clear on whether the market can actually see their problems being solved. The answer, most of the time, is that it can’t. Not clearly enough, anyway.

That gap is what good marketing closes. Not with more content. With clearer thinking about what the market needs and whether the brand is positioned to meet it.

The TL,DR Version

AI is incredibly useful when you treat it as a junior researcher who needs a proper brief, a clear set of principles to work from, and a trained eye over the output before anything goes anywhere near a client or a channel.

It’s commercially useless when you treat it as a content vending machine. Which, unfortunately, is how most people are using it right now.

Give it better instructions. Point it at better sources. Use it for research, not production. Iterate properly. Then decide what to do with what it finds.

That’s it. The rest is just prompting.

If you want to take HatGPT for a run, you can find it at www.hatgpt.co.uk

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Harry’s Vegas revelation last week caused as much surprise as his recommendation to explore prediction markets as a customer feedback and forecasting tool. Thanks to everyone who hit reply and commented over on our LinkedIn.

This week I’m tackling the reshaping of “Brand’ after the over influence of channels and platforms over the last ten years. I offer flexibility within a framework (my favourite way of approaching any problem), with a new brand quadrant x chess board to shape where you place yourself, how your Brand can move and offer some flexibility.

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Stop Playing Brand Checkers: Use the Brand Chessboard To Regain Control

I have been part of a number of conversations where companies felt like they had lost their Brand… and there isn’t a system or framework that helps them.

I believe this debate is not happening enough, and we have to ask how we actively reshape brand. The recent era shifts include (i) SEO (ii) Social Media (iii) COVID (iv) short form video and then for the current era… AI.

The problem is often: how do we guide the team on where brand starts and stops, where it ends, and where it does not play?

The shape of brand has changed; it’s ballooned for most, shape-shifting constantly and becoming deformed from the different external influences, from social media channels, to platform dominance, to how new forces in brand like:

• Events - including connecting Marketing activities to new calendar events and news events and trend chasing

• Politics - commenting and marketing around political decisions, new presidents, and laws that have been passed
  and

• Culture - where cultural changes and subcultures have come to the forefront

These have become ‘zones’ many companies have ventured into to gain relevance and brand resonance with potential customers, and it has led many to lose their identity

You (Likely) Think You Are Bigger And More Flexible Than You Are

Here (gif below) is how and where many brands believe they operate: big, wide-reaching and important. This is often misleading and dangerous internally.

I have been working on ways to rethink and centralise how we bring it back to help guide business leaders and colleagues.

Introducing The New Brand Quadrant → The Brand Chess Board Approach To Reshaping Brand

The chess board is a way to demonstrate simply the important factors at play and how to think about where your home square is and if/how you can move squares.

The Colour System: The chess board has a simple colour scheme:
- Red for extreme positions (not squares many companies would want to place in without specific purposes or positioning, or would choose to move to),
- Orange squares are hot or hard to play in
- Yellow for squares that can lead to issues,
- Green are traditionally safer squares.
- Blue is often seen as a positive or safe square, depending on how you are dragged into specific debates.

The brand chess board is a way to place yourself across the 4 axis that impact and attract customers and opinion on our Brand(s).

Guardrails: You can then say where you can naturally play and the moves you can make - helping to guide the company and the customers while building out the right guardrails.

Examples:

• If you are tech-forward or a truly innovative company pushing the limits, you will want to be high in C

• If you are a brand that connects to culture and drive culture you will see yourself in C4 and C5

• If you are a brand that has allowed politics to overly influence where you play, you could move from B3 towards C3.

Where Do You Place Your Brand?

The first question would be where do you place your own brand today?

I stress tested the chess board, Gemini and I created a list of brands and placed them across the board in the relevant square.

There are some patterns:

• The large and listed businesses will place into the middle zone (C2 & C3), where they are seen and operate as visionaries and have some flex to move squares from time to time - time to time they are dragged into other squares by their decisions or content

• Content platforms are shaped by the content and its perceived meaning, often dragging them into the politics zone and influencing how they market and promote their services to different creators and audiences.

• The “anti” brands lean heavily into politics, from Rumble (the video platform for conservative and far-right leaning creators and audience) and the rebellious brand that is Brewdog (lets see what happens to their square post sale). This is not right or wrong, it is where you have selected to operate in and likely helping you to win albeit with constant questions and charged conversations for your placement and product decisions

• Culture shifting and culture influencing brands like OF are on their own square, the way they have reimagined their industry and became a platform for what their CFO smartly calls “small business owners” is powerful and unique - OF is likely the only brand that could easily move towards events and politics and not be harmed.. (their creators can expand and shift away from their adult core, and as a platform they will be uniquely safe)

• Visionary companies like Chinese company BYD, NVIDIA’s with their thoughtful and industry leading investments in chips and AI and Space X have placed them into the highest vision square. These brands MO is to stay there and drive the industry forward, slipping back or trying to move towards events or culture will likely negatively impact them.
  These brands are often brought into political debate because of their tech and the connected power but aren’t placing themselves there.

• Red Bull is another stand out, their brand is connected to their own big events but also shaped by how they show up in sports, particularly in their ownership & sponsorship of sports teams: 7 football teams ownership (or majority ownership), 5 motorsports teams, 2 ice hockey teams, and investments and deep sponsorship in cycling, Paris FC, Leeds United FC, sailing, skate and surf teams.

The New Moves In Brand Reshaping

If you have moved to be shaped too heavily by events and trending topics you can move from D3 and move to C3 in a fairly flexible way.

If you are a brand that has allowed politics to overly influence where you place you could move from B3 and move towards C3.

Brands Disjointed By Their Marketing Efforts

Many brands allowed channels and platforms to confuse where their brands moved to, one move is (usually) fairly trivial and has flex in it for most but moving two moves on the board can be a real challenge or feel like a huge leap often going against brand momentum.

Move On Up? If you are in C3 and feel like you need to move to C1 that is a difficult move but an aspirational move. This will often be a long deliberate process.

Shift To Political Leaning? Moving from C3 and wanting to become politically driven that is a really hard move and something you will likely struggle to come back from if there are any issues.

Caution: Brands shouldn’t try to move more than two moves in any direction, those that do struggle with their identity and can hinder how customers think and feel about you, while internal team members will question motives and confuse future campaigns and projects.

This week Duolingo’s CMO said they are stepping away from unhinged marketing and going back to creator army’s and concentrating on “Reddit, WhatsApp, and good-old-fashioned blogging” - lets see which square they land themselves in…

External Warnings

It is important to note that outside influences can be truly impactful, with customer sentiment and now non customer videos causing huge backlash and moving you into squares you will not want to be seen as operating in. This is where your leadership and guidance makes all the difference.

Comms Issues & Challenges: YouTube, Disney, Amazon and Starbucks have all been pulled into political issues with how their content is being framed, CEOs miscommunicating their perspectives, managing internal incentives via press interviews and using politically charged statements all influence how your brand is shaped and placed.

Always Be Testing: Something you will want to push is testing, on where you sit and where you want to play - guided by how many squares away you are from where you want to test and play. Pushing out political statements can alienate, leaning into cultural debates will put you in the crosshairs and connecting to large events you have never been connected to before will create questions.

Test away but know too many square shifts will have a knock on effect.

I CHALLENGE YOU!

The real challenge I want you to undertake is asking your exec team, your social team, brand team, agencies and if you are brave enough customers on where do they place your brand on the chess board?

I have run this a few of times recently and it is truly enlightening.

I bet the answers do not align and very often it will enrage & then engage many important colleagues into a good structured debate.

So which square do you place your brand in?

Where do you think your colleagues will place you?
And how will you bring everyone back to the same squares and the moves you can make?

Still struggling with this and want to chat through? Drop me a email here or just hit reply.

↗ Share: You can hit forward to share with your team or copy and paste https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/78 and share in Teams or Slack for the team to complete the challenge.

FYI: This was part of a much larger deep dive into brand shaping and the evolution of brand, including how CEOs act as brand extensions and new storytelling brands are constantly reshaping how their brand shows up - often not in a good or positive way.

If you would like a run through of this deck, hit reply or the ❤️ button and I will record as a presentation run through.

Thanks for reading again today. Go well and have a great end to your week. We will land in your inbox again next Friday!

Danny Denhard

Have you seen the explosion of interest in the Prediction Markets the last six months or so? Some suggesting its just betting rebranded, some suggesting its just insider trading and others suggesting its the sanest way to gain true insights from interested parties.

Harry delivers another brilliant post on why his trip to Sin City to the Prediction Markets conference will be the start of how Marketers could leverage the platforms and gain real customer insights.

If you missed any of the last two week’s posts definitely check out Simon’s piece on change agents and my New Balance marketing playbook reverse engineered.

Have a great weekend and we will land in your inbox again next Friday.

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What Happens In Vegas Affects You All…Why Sin City Will Help Predict The Future Of Everything

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Next week, I’m flying to Las Vegas for the first time and those who know me might find that a little surprising.

“But Harry, didn’t you spend seventeen years working in online gambling? And didn’t you used to love a late-night party before your need for a decent night’s sleep overtook your desire to see every sunrise? How on earth did you never go to Vegas?!”

Fair points both of them but the fact is, Vegas never appealed to me.

I always viewed it as an artificial sandbox, a skin-deep pretence at fun that had the cultural depth of Pot Noodle and was actually a repository for the worst of human behaviours (see also the new cultural vacuum champion: - Dubai).

Added to that I worked in gambling, so if I ever did go, I wanted my Vegas story to be 10X the crazy/ hilarious/ unusual that everyone else came back with.

I’ll tell you how little I wanted to go to Vegas: -

In around 2010, I went to L.A. to do some skydiving. I popped down to San Diego for a night to stay with some friends, one of whom, Brad, is a photographer. While he left the next day for an assignment in Vegas, I went surfing, only to get a call from Brad late afternoon: -

“You wanna come and be my assistant tonight?”

“Who are you shooting?”

“I’m backstage, At Alice Cooper”.

I still didn’t go and yes, I still regret that myopic decision.

So now, over fifteen years later, I’m off to Vegas for a prediction market conference, flying via Denver for reasons I can only assume relate to jet fuel prices and the Strait of Hormuz.

For those of you of a non-gambling disposition, prediction markets are on-chain betting markets in which people back the outcomes of binary events. Any binary event, in fact, and it’s popular stuff.

Between them, The Wall Street Journal estimates the two market leaders, Polymarket and Kalshi, are worth around $40 billion.

The thing is, this eye watering amount isn’t the most interesting thing about prediction markets – it’s their ability to read the future.

The sheer volume of data they’re able to accrue across geo-politics, sports, financial trading and crypto means their output is a scarily accurate reflection of what’s most likely to happen next.

As a result, Prediction Markets are making financial analysts obsolete.

Prediction markets are often seen by those outside Web3 as just another medium for gambling.

A new technology monetising the second oldest pastime on earth, but that view ignores a significantly more impactful use case.

Kalshi (the second biggest PM after PolyMarket) recently signed a deal with Fox News to share its ​prediction data which is now incorporated into numerous ​FOX News channels. According to Reuters, it will “...provide forecasts linked to ​political, economic, weather and cultural events”.

Kalshi said ​around ⁠70% of its visitors use the platform to view forecasts rather ⁠than ​for trading (betting), flagging a growing ​demand for crowd-sourced probability data as a reliable information medium.

In January, PolyMarket signed a similar deal with Dow Jones having received a $2 Billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) that valued it at over $9 billion. Data feeds from Polymarket are now being used to create the algorithms that influence trading in the global Brent crude futures market (the very same market that has me detouring via middle America next week).

The most important exchange for trading of Brent crude futures? Yep, that’ll be ICE, which rapidly launched a trading tool. According to a report in The Guardian this week, the tool provides a data feed of PolyMarket’s prediction markets to help traders “...consume crowdsourced probability assessments” as “market signals”.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, UBS et al charge millions for expert analyst forecasts. ICE is now feeding its traders crowd-sourced probability data from an anonymous blockchain platform. When you realise which one performed better in predicting the last election, the last oil spike, the last rate decision, the last weather system, you’ll know this isn’t an anomaly.

None of this works without the infrastructure underneath it. The next era of prediction markets will need blockchains with enhanced AI resolution that can handle the volume and speed that global financial signals demand.

Prediciton Markets As A Crystal Ball For Marketers

This crystal ball opportunity matters more than most people in marketing have realised.

Marketers spend billions every year trying to predict human behaviour. Focus groups, brand trackers, sentiment analysis, social listening tools, quarterly brand health studies. The entire research industry exists because the future is opaque and decisions need to be made in advance. What if the future was already being priced in real time, by millions of people with skin in the game?

That is exactly what prediction markets do. And the signal quality is extraordinarily accurate.

When Kanye West announced his presidential run in 2020, PolyMarket traders had assigned it a 3% probability of going anywhere within 48 hours. Brand teams were still briefing agencies. When the Federal Reserve held rates in March 2024 against widespread analyst expectation of a cut, Kalshi had been pricing a hold at over 70% for two weeks.

While the Oscars shortlist leaked cultural momentum leaning towards Oppenheimer, prediction markets had priced it as the frontrunner months before the ceremony. This isn’t because market makers had inside information, it was because they aggregated what millions of people actually believed, rather than what a panel of twelve said in an air conditioned Hollywood broom closet.

This is the part that should unsettle and excite every marketer and business leader reading this.

Your brand strategy is built on data that looks backwards. Sales figures, campaign post-mortems, attribution models, NPS scores. Even the most sophisticated real-time social listening tools tell you what’s already happened. Prediction markets tell you what people currently believe will happen and that distinction is not subtle.

It’s the difference between a rear-view mirror and a windscreen.

Prediction markets have already demonstrated their accuracy in domains that matter to marketers. Category momentum questions on platforms like Kalshi, tracking whether a specific product category would outperform its sector within a defined timeframe, have consistently outperformed analyst consensus.

Political prediction markets called Brexit, Trump 2016 and Trump 2024 correctly when polling and punditry failed spectacularly.

Sports prediction markets priced team-sponsor sentiment shifts faster than any brand tracker on earth. And these are not outliers – they’re now the norm.

Now consider the marketing applications that are already within your reach.

A prediction market run on your category could tell you, in real time, what informed participants believe the probability is that your next product launch will resonate. Not what a sample of 400 recruited respondents says in a focus group but what people who have thought about it, and are willing to stake something on it, actually believe.

The difference in signal quality is not marginal.

Brand safety and cultural risk assessment through prediction markets could replace the current haphazard methodology. When prediction markets are applied to cultural flashpoints, sponsorship decisions and talent associations, they surface crowd-assessed risk probabilities before a campaign goes live rather than after it tanks.

Campaign outcome markets are already being piloted internally by a small number of agency groups. Before a major campaign launches, internal and external participants predict measurable outcomes against defined benchmarks and the resulting probability distribution tells them more about genuine confidence in the creative than any focus group debrief ever will.

Competitor intelligence is perhaps the most immediate application. Prediction markets on product launches, leadership changes, pricing moves and category disruptions are already running on public platforms.

That data is available. Most marketing teams are not looking at it.

The broader implication is this: - Marketing has always claimed to be the discipline closest to the customer – we’re meant to represent the customer and speak for the customer – that much is unequivocal.

Prediction markets, when applied to brand and category questions, are the first mechanism that actually delivers on that claim at scale and in real time. They’re not a replacement for strategy – they’re the most honest knowledge feed you’ve ever had access to.

The marketers who recognise this early will have an advantage over every competitor still commissioning quarterly trackers and waiting six weeks for a blended soup of a report.

Prediction Markets aren’t just a platform that let people to bet on the News - they’re anonymised databases that allow the masses to highlight what happens next.

It’s now a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’ the likes of Kalshi and Polymarket will shake off their ‘grimy gambling platform’ label and become elevated in the public perception as the most accurate information medium available.

The bigger question is when prediction markets are recognised to be the most valid forecasting medium, who will own the crystal ball?

Harry Lang - Follow on X or Connect on LinkedIn