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

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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

This week we have Simon Swan back with his monthly newsletter, Simon digs into why so many “transformation” programmes stall and why the real operating system for change isn’t a new AI platform or a shiny innovation lab, but emotionally intelligent people working in the right way. Simon also introduces his SPARK framework which will likely help you in your next big change project.

Thank you for your feedback and the love shown for my reverse engineering of New Balances rise since 2020. If you missed it enjoy it below.

Thanks for reading again today and have a great weekend

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Change Agents Need A Skunkworks: Why EQ Is the Missing Operating System for Transformation

Most organisations do not struggle to come up with ideas, they struggle to make new ideas stick.

That’s because the organisation lacks the discipline of creating and putting in place an operating model or system.

That is why I keep coming back to the skunkworks model.

Years ago, I wrote about skunkworks as a way to support digital transformation:

“A small, protected, cross-functional group with enough autonomy to test new approaches away from the drag of business as usual”.

I still believe that.

Fast forward 10 years to now and I’d update my thinking to:

A skunkworks only works when it is driven by the right change agents and shaped by emotionally intelligent leadership.

In other words, the structure matters, but the human system matters more and that is especially true now.

Enter AI

AI is making it easier to automate, analyse, generate and optimise. But it is also exposing something many organisations have ignored for too long.

That the real constraint is often not the technology but more so starting with Emotional Intelligence rather than platforming. It is the fear, lack of trust, rigid hierarchy and low psychological safety that’s not being addressed

It is managers who still think transformation is a rollout plan instead of a social shift. Amy Edmondson describes psychological safety as a key factor in healthy teams and says a leader’s job is to create a space where people can speak up, make mistakes and bring their full selves to work.

That is not a soft side issue. It is the condition that allows experimentation and learning to happen at all. This is where the idea of the change agent becomes more useful than ever.

Change Agents

The real change agents inside organisations are usually the ones who connect dots across functions, challenge outdated assumptions, learn in public, influence without authority and make new ways of working feel practical rather than abstract.

That sits very closely with Jane McConnell’s “gig mindset” work, which grew out of more than a decade of research into organisations in the digital age and then shifted focus from the group to the individual.

Her argument is that organisations need more people who operate with initiative, adaptability and breadth inside formal structures, not just outside them.

No More Hidden Innovation Lab

Today, a skunkworks should not be thought of as a hidden innovation lab off to one side of the organisational chart. It should be a practical engine for organisational learning.

A small, trusted unit that can test better ways of working, prove what works, and then help the wider organisation adopt the change, in other words, to create a repeatable path from experiment to operating model tied back to the business objectives.

Why This Matters More In The AI Era

Seth Godin’s Brainwashed still feels relevant because it challenges the old compliance mindset many organisations still reward.

Seth argues that people have been trained for obedience when what the modern economy needs is connection, generosity, initiative, courage and the ability to ship work that matters.

AI raises the value of those qualities rather than reducing it. When generic production becomes easier, human judgment, empathy, creativity and trust become more valuable, not less.

That lines up with what we are seeing more broadly.

Start Small

Amazon’s two-pizza teams were designed to keep teams close to customers, reduce communication overhead, and increase ownership through small, single-threaded teams.

Adobe’s Kickbox gave employees a structured way to develop new ideas from the bottom up and later open-sourced the method.

My own experience at the Met Office reinforced the same lesson. The progress there did not come from a single big-bang programme.

It came from starting small, proving value, linking work back to purpose, and building internal belief over time. The Digital Academy helped people think differently, connect across departments and build digital culture as much as digital skill. That is what a good skunkworks does at its best: it creates a place where new behaviours can be tried, seen and then scaled.

The Practical Framework: SPARK

If I were building this approach inside an organisation now, I would use a five-part framework.

S — Select the right change agents
Start with people, not org charts. Choose a small cross-functional group of credible operators.

Key Insight: Curiosity, influence, adaptability, resilience, generosity and the ability to work across boundaries. You are building a catalyst team.

P — Protect the space
Give the team real cover. Protected time. Senior sponsorship. Permission to test. Skunkworks fail when they are expected to transform the organisation in the gaps between BAU meetings.

Key Insight: Small-team models work because they cut decision friction and increase accountability.

A — Anchor the work in a live problem
Give the team one meaningful challenge the core system struggles to solve. That might be onboarding, content operations, approval speed, internal capability building, customer journey friction or AI workflow adoption.

Key Insight: At the Met Office, progress accelerated when digital work was tied clearly to the creation of digital principles we used to anchor the work.

R — Run on EQ as well as process
This is the missing bit in most frameworks. Use rituals that build trust and reflection, not just status updates. Check-ins. Retrospectives. clear team norms. Honest discussion about resistance.

Key Insight: Compassionate leadership matters here. That kind of leadership helps people feel heard, lowers defensiveness and creates the conditions for change to spread.

K — Knit the learning back into the organisation
A skunkworks is only useful if the wider business changes. Build internal champions. Share tools and methods. Train managers.

Key insight: Translate experiments into simple playbooks others can adopt. The goal is to make its ways of working normal.

The core skills to build

The old model of capability often overvalued technical depth and undervalued human range. I believe we are seeing this change where the core skills companies will need from their workforce will be centred around:

• Sensemaking — knowing how to interpret signals, ask better questions and apply judgment in ambiguous environments.

• Curiosity — testing, learning and acting before everything is certain.

• Cross Team collaboration — working across silos based on skills and shared outcomes, not just formal reporting lines.

• Learning agility — updating how you work as tools, expectations and markets change.
  

Human & AI Future

A scan of LinkedIn and you’d assume the future all about AI literacy but rather, It is about human agency.

AI can accelerate output, but it cannot replace the people who make sense of change, bring others with them and create the trust needed for adoption.

I still believe in skunkworks more centred around social technology for driving transformation not structural transformation.

And to do this is by gathering the right people, giving them enough space, equipping them with the right emotional and practical skills, and let them model a better way of working before the rest of the organisation is ready.

Because that is how real change usually happens.

Want To Go Further? This is a great podcast to listen to help you understand how people are driven and what science and research studies

Definitely connect with Simon on LinkedIn

Simon On LinkedIn

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend

Danny & Harry

As a reminder if you missed it, last Friday I offered a number of Growth ponderings to how help you shape the future. Thanks to the kind people who replied and said its nice to reminded you can and should be a change agent.

This week I wanted to inspire you with a change of pace, offering you the modern-day brand turnaround story: New Balance. NB managed to turn a “suburban dad shoe” company into a $10 billion cultural driving force.

We’re going under the hood of how they did it and, more importantly, what it means for you as a CMO or VP of Marketing inside a complex, political, often distracted organisation.

The New Balance Playbook Reverse Engineered

This is not a trainer/sneaker story. It’s a playbook for using brand, operations, and ambition to shape both your business and your customers’ opinions – even if you’re currently seen as the “uncool”, “legacy”, or “stuck” brand in your category.

1. Start with a Single Muse, Not a Broad “Target Market”

Before New Balance could become culturally relevant, it had to get radically specific about who it was talking to.

In 2019, leadership “quieted the noise” and centred everything around one target consumer: the 18–34-year-old “global independent”. This wasn’t a persona slide; it was a forcing function.

It gave product, brand, and commercial teams permission to stop trying to serve everyone. Decisions became simpler:

• Does this campaign speak to the global independent?

• Does this product look and feel like something they would wear?

• Does this collaboration earn us credibility with them?

For you as a CMO, this is the first uncomfortable truth: if your teams are trying to hit every demographic and every channel, they’re not being strategic – they’re operating out of fear.

Narrowing the muse is how you create edge. Edge creates talkability. Talkability creates disproportionate growth.

2. Action Plans, Not White Papers

When COVID hit and revenue dropped to around $3.3 billion, New Balance didn’t respond with theoretical rewrites of the five-year strategy. CEO Joe Preston asked for something much less glamorous and far more powerful: action plans.

Cross-functional teams were given three things most organisations talk about but rarely operationalise – the 3 A’s: Accountability, Authority, and Autonomy.

The agenda narrowed to the few topics that mattered, and timelines were tight.

From a Marketing perspective, this is the difference between “brand guardianship” and “brand leadership”. This is what I call brand coaching vs brand policing. Why? Policing always leads to resentment within businesses.

Brand guardianship protects assets.
Brand leadership moves markets.

In a crisis – and for many categories, the post-pandemic years have been a rolling crisis the job of the CMO is to shrink the scope, sharpen the priorities, and force decisions into motion:

• Fewer decks. More decisions.

• Fewer “options”. More clear trade-offs.

• Fewer committees. More accountable owners.

New Balance used wartime constraints to accelerate a decade-long repositioning project. Most brands used wartime as an excuse to pause, delay, or over-analyse. That’s a choice.

3. The Strategic Pivot: Owning the “Uncool Truth”

The heart of the New Balance turnaround is brutally simple: they stopped trying to escape who they were.

For years, the brand carried the “dad shoe” stereotype – chunky, practical commuter shoes.

Instead of pivoting into hype-driven reinvention and abandoning that heritage, they did something braver: they leaned into it.

They treated the “uncool truth” as the starting point:

• Known for comfort and orthopaedic credibility.

• Core silhouettes were chunky, grey, functional.

• Associated with lawn-mowing, not front-row fashion.

Rather than running from that, they asked: What if this is the moat?

Over a 10–15 year period, they reframed their “dad brand” into “heritage performance” and then into “ironically cool” premium fashion.

The now iconic 990 went from suburban cliché to high-fashion staple, not through gimmicks but through constraint: tighter shapes, elevated materials, more considered colour stories.

Authenticity became the growth lever.

When the market swung towards normcore, comfort, and “quiet luxury”, New Balance wasn’t chasing the trend; it was ready for it.

For CMOs, the lesson is clear: there is almost always an “unfashionable” or “uncomfortable” truth about your brand. You can fight it (and lose), or you can embrace it and use it as the anchor for something distinctive and enduring.

4. Collaboration Architecture: From Logo Slaps to Cultural Brokers

If authenticity was the foundation, collaborations were NBs bridge.

New Balance didn’t treat collaborations as hype releases to juice quarterly demand. They treated them as a translation layer between heritage and modern culture.

Instead of stacking logos with anyone who’d answer the phone, they built a “cultural broker” model:

• Partners like Stone Island, Aimé Leon Dore and Joe Freshgoods weren’t asked to decorate existing products; they were invited to reinterpret them.

• Storytelling was rooted in specific geographies – Washington D.C., Chicago, London – not just another brand with a generic idea of “urban culture”.

• The design language cleaned up the dad shoe aesthetic for luxury and streetwear while keeping the core DNA.

The outcomes were measurable: collaboration-driven media impressions spiked; New Balance became one of the fastest-growing brands on StockX (secondary markets are signal for cultural change); and organic endorsements from figures like Rihanna and Timothée Chalamet reframed the 990 as part of the “off-duty” uniform of modern icons.

The point for you: collaborations are no tjust another tick box exercise or a substitute tactic. They are an amplifier of long-term strategy.

If you haven’t first defined your uncool truth and your muse, collaborations will be noisy, inconsistent, and forgettable. With those in place, they become compounding assets that pull your brand into new circles of relevance.

5. The Rising Star Model: The Brand as Co‑Protagonist

New Balance’s approach to talent is another deliberate departure from category norms.

Where many sports brands overspend on established superstars – renting borrowed interest – New Balance backs ascending talent: pre-peak, high-upside, aligned with the challenger narrative.

Coco Gauff is the flagship example. Signed early, supported consistently, and positioned not just as a sponsored athlete but as a co-author of the brand story through platforms like “Call Me Coco” and “We Got Now”.

Across sports, the pattern repeats:

• Basketball: a guard-heavy roster and quiet superstars like Kawhi Leonard to underscore performance legitimacy.

• Football: young, culturally resonant players such as Bukayo Saka and Arsenal team mate Eberechi Eze (seen below with chess grand master Magnus Carlsen) to unlock global youth relevance.

• Olympic and women’s sport: athletes like Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone to anchor a serious performance narrative.

• Cultural ambassadors: Jaden Smith and Jack Harlow bridging sport, music, and culture.

The cost base is smarter. The brand equity is often much deeper. The narrative is coherent: New Balance stands with rising, hard-working, often understated talent rather than loud, finished products.

As a marketing leader, the question isn’t “who’s the biggest name we can afford?” but “who can we grow with – and what story are we co-writing?”

6. Operations as Brand Equity (and Story Fuel)

Most brands treat operations as a cost centre. New Balance turned theirs into a story.

While almost every competitor fully offshored production, New Balance kept six factories in the United States. That decision wasn’t framed as nostalgia; it was framed as an operational and emotional moat:

• Deeper process knowledge.

• Shorter feedback loops.

• Higher quality control.

• Authentic “Made in USA” resonance with values-driven consumers.

• A parallel “Made in UK” story for their other core market.

For CMOs, this is one of the most underused levers: your supply chain, your quirks, your constraints are often more compelling than any campaign line.

Behind every operational choice is a narrative about what the company values.

Your job is to surface those truths, tell them honestly, and connect them to the muse you’ve chosen.

The reported sales figures show impressive growth1

7. Terrifying Goals and Human-Centred Leadership

Perhaps the most uncomfortable part of the New Balance story is the ambition.

After the pandemic hit, leadership didn’t aim to “stabilise”. They aimed to double. The plan to reach $7 billion by 2026 was hit two years early. Now the target is $10 billion.

These aren’t vanity numbers. They’re alignment devices. When everyone understands the size of the ambition, the organisation is forced to behave differently. Small bets, incremental campaigns, and safe decisions no longer make sense.

At the same time, Preston understood this level of ambition breaks people if you treat them like machines. His philosophy casts executives and employees as athletes: recovery – sleep, nutrition, mental health – is non-negotiable.

He normalised vulnerable conversations on topics like Alzheimer’s and mental health and found these sessions often generated more engagement than pure business updates.

For you, this duality matters:

• Your targets should scare you a little.

• Your culture should make it safe to pursue them.

Brilliant marketing cannot compensate for a burnt-out, cynical organisation. New Balance’s rise is the product of an entrepreneurial, scrappy culture welded to disciplined, data-rich global execution – not one or the other.

8. The New Balance Canvas: A Playbook for Modern CMOs

Strip the logos away and you’re left with a framework you can take into your next offsite.

1. Identify the “uncool truth”
   Stop denying your brand’s most obvious stereotype. Name it. Own it. When you are set up use it as an anchor instead of a liability.

2. Choose constraint over reinvention
   Pick your most recognisable, even “unfashionable” product, proposition, or capability and make it the hero. Refine, don’t erase.

3. Architect cultural brokers, not random collabs
   Work with partners who can translate your heritage for specific subcultures and geographies. Depth beats breadth.

4. Back rising stars early
   Invest in up-and-coming talent – athletes, creators, influencers and customers – and build platforms where they co-author the story, not just pose in the campaign.

5. Turn operations into narrative
   Look hard at your factories, logistics, customer service, data, and processes. There is brand equity hiding in the way you work.

6. Use BIG numbers to force real choices
   Set ambitious, numeric goals that demand different behaviour. Missing a bold target is less dangerous than never setting one.

Underneath all of this sits a simple belief: you are not a passive respondent to market forces. You are an active shaper of them.

My 5 Coaching Notes

Here are five personal notes I added to my brand essentials docs for coaching and consultancy clients:

1. Culture Can Be Your Commercial Engine

• Treat culture as a core route to market, not a comms channel; if you’re not in the conversation, you’re not in the consideration set.

• Anchor everything in a clear brand truth and a consistent “in‑character” behaviour set, then give teams permission to take calculated risks that earn you a seat in culture.

• The bar is not “did we post?” but “did we create a moment?” – the London Marathon pub or a 990 ad that works for supermodels and dads are templates for intent, not accidents.

2. Brand Scale Comes From Disciplined Experimentation, Not Bigger Media Plans

• Brand scale is the output of a system: for NB, roughly 50% proven, 30% calculated risk, 20% high‑variance experimentation hunting for the next big unlock.

• You scale by graduating ideas: 20% bets that work move to 30%; 30% plays that deliver become 50% foundations. This is how one‑offs become playbooks.

• Treat search and other leading indicators as an early warning system for future revenue so the C‑suite sees brand as a growth engine, not a cost centre.

3. Balance Local Edge With Global Coherence

• At NB scale, the real work is holding the tension between local sharpness and global consistency: avoiding “out of character” local wins that dilute the global asset.

• Start with a globally coherent brand truth and personality, then let local markets interpret it through their own cultural codes and occasions, not their own strategy. Tactics roll into departmental plans that roll up to company-wide strategy.

• The CEO and CMO job, together, is to coach (not just police) this balance: protecting the core while giving local teams room to be interesting, relevant and commercially aggressive.

4. Differentiate By Behaving Like a Challenger, Whatever Your True Size

• Challenger is a mindset, not a market share position: you’re challenging norms, categories and consumer expectations, not only the current number one.

• In “low‑interest” or cluttered categories, the win comes from being the one brand that feels human, opinionated and emotionally available when every product “does the job”. Make customers feel something.

• Make it explicit: are you trying to be best or biggest? That choice should show up in your partnerships, creative risk appetite and the types of stories you tell.

5. Treat Transformation As An Operating Model, Not a Project

• Moving from product‑led to brand‑led is not a rebrand; it’s a rewiring of how you set strategy, brief teams, measure success and allocate risk. This takes true management (day to day) and leadership (vision setting and inspiring the team).

• Vertically, you still need category and product teams to hit the number; horizontally, you need a strong brand spine running across the business so every touchpoint feels like the same company.

• Transformation sticks when marketing clearly connects brand work to commercial outcomes, so the organisation sees experimentation, cultural relevance and consistency as non‑negotiable, not “nice‑to‑have marketing stuff”.

The Wrap Up

New Balance went from “lawn-mowing dad shoe” to runway staple not by chasing every trend, but by committing long-term to a coherent, authentic, and occasionally uncomfortable strategy.

As a CMO or VP/Head of Marketing, you hold the same levers: who you choose as your muse, what truths you’re willing to admit, which constraints you embrace, and how brave you’re prepared to be with your goals.

Take this playbook to your boardroom. Quiet the noise. Pick your muse. Choose your “uncool truth”. And start shaping the market’s opinion of you, before someone else does it for you.

Listen Further

Here are two great resources that helped me break down New Balance, from an interview by The Profile’s with their CEO and an interview between Forbes and their CMO

If you would like to take away the core lessons as a deck, hit download below:

The New Balance $10b Blueprint

12.5MB ∙ PDF file

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Let me know if you would like this series to continue by hitting the ❤️ button or hitting reply and telling what you think.

Have a great weekend (and for those who celebrate a long weekend with Easter) and we will see you next week!

Thanks,

Danny Denhard

I think it is safe to say Harry’s article on the marketing of the Manosphere kicked a few hornets nests…a little like Louis Theroux Netflix did in his documentary ;-)

This week, I’ll plant a seed into your head about Growth and how it’s different to what you think it is. I have 4 observations (and ALOT of questions) about how you can work towards a new breed of growth.

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What if growth isn’t net new users? ⭕️

What if growth is thinking about the circles of people around the user?

What if growth was leveraging your user to use your product more but through friends and family? Growth can be different

Less Is More 🔗

What if growth was spending less time on your app?

What if growth was spending less time on your website?

What if growth is sending a request & receiving a link to complete the transaction?

Growth Is Focus 🎯

What if growth is killing off your Android app?

What if growth is a faster website and better user experience?

What if growth is quicker logistics, quicker deliveries, getting known for your service…?

Chat Over Scroll? 💬

What if growth is more chat, less scroll?

What if growth is qualifying you through smart questions and uploads, and less scrolling and guessing where your customer need to go to?

What if conversation is the next big conversion lever?

Accuracy As A Lever To Pull 🩻

What if growth is uploading a long list of likes, dislikes, allergies and your body type?

What if growth is building custom products and bespoke products vs generics with high returns.

What if growth is hyper personalised higher priced products, not cohorts based on generics?

Voice Not Type 🗣️

What if growth is voice based not type and scroll?

What if growth is having conversations with your customer, based on guided conversation threads?

What if growth is a new part of your app or site? An ‘always on’ companion

Time For Growth Rebrand? 🔓

Growth especially Performance Marketing is hitting the limits of being overly optimised, it’s all starting to look and feel the same. It is time to rebalance this.

Growth and Product Growth has for a long time been about more, more people, more nudges, more scrolls, more “asks” from us. More = more, more rarely = less.

What if growth is now about being the company who helps others gain smarter discounts through their friends and family members. This is something that could be measured and embraced.

What if growth doesn’t let algorithms define and dictate what you and your brand are and achieve…

What if growth is about less time with an app or site but a quick chat leading to a complete transaction link inside of the chat interface you live in already? This is already possible.

What if growth is less overheads and tech to maintain? Instead, it’s about the best service to gain growth.

Or what if growth is actually helping customers using their natural language or their native language? Being hyper connected and an interface providing long-term help. Being highly trusted like a creator or a podcaster is...

Growth should/would/could look different, feel different and interact different.

Pure play growth often reminds me of the famous Henry Ford quote:-

- If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

It’s on us to understand the difference between what customers say they want and creating campaigns and products that our actually customers want.

The biggest growth impacts I’ve had in my career have come from thinking differently, stepping up and building solutions customers wouldn’t know they wanted or needed. In some cases, the most successful actively ignored feedback, as it’s my job to make the feature or campaign easy to learn, easy to use, easy to share and then easy to personalise. And when they haven’t been super creative, growth initiatives has been operationally astute.

Growth is going to be high trust, high speed and high fidelity.

Growth is capital ‘B’ Brand, is definitely operational - it’s technical, creative, rethinking what’s being used and misused and then rethinking what’s been done and optimising the experiences.

A business leader is supposed to be a change agent (and i don’t say that lightly). Sometimes we forget this in our everyday battles while arguing who owns what with the CPO, CRO and CFO…

Growth comes from the unexpected, from the unpredictable and often from the hard to measure. Business growth is often built more on gut feel and experience as much from a model or complex set of forecast models. What if Growth comes from rethinking how your customers work and who they’re connected to, with more marketing nudges, emails and messages…

As a Growth or Marketing leader, it’s our job to drive change, to be a ‘change agent’. So the question to think about today is:-

What flavour of growth will you try next?

Let me know by hitting reply or hitting button below to chat directly

4 Observations From This Week

• Agentic AI Is Being Primed To Take Centre Stage: Marketers are being primed to shift toward AI agents as the new promise land of the operating system for personalisation, predictive analytics, creative execution, and decision-making, positioning AI as core infrastructure rather than just a tool. Keep an eye as these promised land tools are still early and buzz definitely doesn’t = success.

• Agentic Commerce Push Ahead: OpenAI have rolled out their partnerships Sephora and Shopify this week, the question remains will customers want to shop by search/prompting in a chat window for a product or set of products? (the irony isn’t lost that I push this could be a growth tactic)

• SEO Being Positioned As GEO/AEO: With AI-powered “search” dominating conversations, the focus is moving from traditional SEO to Generative Engine Optimisation and AEO. As Brands we must optimise for zero-click answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and the other conversational platforms to stay visible but the ways of tracking and reporting is murky to say the least. Be mindful treating SEO and AEO as the same discipline as although very similar AEO will look to move from content - citation to click to checkout and optimise throughout these touchpoints (I go into detail why AEO and SEO are different here)

• Short-Form Video & Micro-Drama Dominate: As I suggested in our 2026 predictions - Short-form video remains the top content investment for many brands, while the “micro-drama” formats (with large brands now sponsoring and creating their own) gaining strong algorithmic traction on platforms like TikTok and Reels driving engagement and conversions. Expect to see a huge push of micro drama ads and brands becoming even more unhinged to cut through the algorithmic feeds. Here’s a good podcast breaking down the micro-drama landscape

Harry’s favourite article from this week

Trashing the ‘science’ behind ad research: System1 and Effie recently published “The Creative Dividend’ a 122 page, self congratulatory puff piece about how creativity and media work together to drive reliable, predictable, and repeatable business results. Daniel Gilbert, CEO of Brainlabs was having none of it, instead pulling out an arsenal of chainsaws, pick axes, Claymores and intercontinental ballistic missiles to rip it a new one. It’s an extremely well constructed take down that raises questions over the tension of research crafted under the umbrella of vested interest- go an read it here

Thanks for reading this week and have a great weekend!

Danny Denhard

Welcome back to #73, this week we switch up the pace with Harry tackling the making and marketing of the Manosphere.

If you missed last week’s MU, Paul delivered a great reminder of how internal boredom and chasing algos hits Marketing teams.

If You’re Sick Of Hearing About Moneymaxxing Manotools, You’ve Only Got Yourself To Blame

‘Absurdism’ is one of my favourite words. Albert Camus proposed the philosophical sentiment that us humans exist in a meaningless, chaotic universe, but have a passionate need to find meaning and purpose in anyone and anything that crosses our synapses. Absurdism Highlights the constant (and ultimately futile) conflict between our search for meaning and the irrational universe.

Camus suggested that to maintain sanity, we must embrace this absurdity – rather than becoming despondent because of it, we should find freedom and joy despite it.

So far, so Camus – he wasn’t always bang on with his hypothesising around sources of joy (I had to read L’Étranger for my French A Level, and it made me sad in both French and English). However, with absurdism, he may have stumbled upon something in 1942 which gets proven every minute of every day in the AI-enabled, socially amplified, divisively weaponised and intellectually divorced era of the mid 2020’s.

Absurdism is why the Manosphere such a powerful and influential phenomenon.

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The Louis Theroux Effect

Much has been written about the recent Louis Theroux Manosphere documentary. I haven’t watched it and I probably won’t. If I want to spend an hour in the company of preening, misogynistic, brain-farting dickheads, I can just think back to the five years I spent as a student at Harrow in the late 1990’s.

What Theroux has done (which he does extremely well) is to take a disturbing segment of society and set it free – allowing it to self-immolate, fuelled by a mix of ego, perceptive wealth, social reach and baby oil.

The so called ‘manosphere’ (I disagree with this title on principal as IMHO, the bad actors in this space show all the manly traits of rice pudding) didn’t materialise out of nothing so much as it metastasised. You can trace its roots back to men’s rights forums at the start of the century and pickup artist communities (remember ‘negging’? Pfft…) that festered in some of the darker corners of the internet.

These were safe spaces in which male loneliness evolved from common or garden teenage angst (which has been around since Cain and Abel decided petulance was easier than puberty) into abject entitlement while nobody was paying attention.

Turbo boosted through gamer communities, the dark web and social media algos that fed such social discrepancies, these male hidey holes became petri dishes for incel culture, growing apathy, entitlement and rage like a Monty Don allotment.

The 2008 financial crisis acted as an accelerant, after which a generation of young men who’d been promised economic freedom found themselves out of work, out of ideas and fleeing reality online 18 hours a day.

Smart Tech Or Smart Business?

The proliferation of smartphones transformed any charismatic narcissist with a divisive playbook into a media powerhouse and big social tapped into this pulsing vein (eyeballs = revenue, after all) by rewarding outrage over nuance.

Throw in a pandemic that isolated millions of teenage boys in their bedrooms with nothing but WiFi, a dopamine deficit and a diminished sense of self-worth and you had the perfect storm – a vulnerable, lost audience of millions looking for someone – anyone – to make it all make sense.

Mocking ‘the manosphere’ as a fad or a joke is a massive mistake. Just because its proponents are clowns doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken extremely seriously. It’s evolving far faster than any regulatory or educational response to it. Tate gets arrested and his engagement goes up, and this hasn’t gone unnoticed by others in the space. Andrew Cortes may as well have ‘Outrage equals eyeballs’ tattooed on his forehead as a reminder of his business model every time he looks in the mirror (which, one assumes, is constantly).

So what if platforms occasionally ostracise creators who take their outrage schtick too far into the realms of the illegal? They just pack up their man bags and ‘women should serve me’ playbook and migrate to Rumble, Telegram, Discord or their own subscription sites, taking their audiences with them like a shiny, penis-wielding Pied Piper.

The result? They can stop pretending there are rules they need to adhere to, shedding the last pretence of societal moderation on their way out.

Next Gen

You can be sure the next generation of manosphere front runners won’t be as obvious as Tate et al. Instead, they’ll be AI-enabled, algorithmically fluent, and sophisticated enough to avoid the overtly crude misogyny that gets them shadow banned or blacklisted.

Regulating any industry where harm is a feature is notoriously difficult, but difficulty isn’t an excuse. These preening twats are able to lie, con, cheat and profit with impunity because they operate in an environment with zero accountability. They can say anything, to anyone, at any time, on platforms engineered to amplify the worst of it. Big Social is structurally incapable of giving a shit, because outrage is engagement, engagement is revenue, and self-regulation is just PR lawyer’s addendum.

That leaves legislation, and not the toothless ‘online harms’ frameworks that take years to pass and are obsolete before the ink dries. What’s needed is platform-level liability that makes the infrastructure as accountable for distribution as the creators are for production.

The next gen wankers (Manoprick 3.0, if you will) will be the T2000 wipe clean version -legally-Tefloned to protect their ‘brand’. They’ll replace old school rage bait with plausibly deniable self-improvement content that radicalises young men by inference rather than instruction.

Meanwhile, the disciples are getting younger and more engaged as the manosphere expands and optimises itself. Kids as young as ten are swallowing this bulls*t and asking for more, and the parental awareness gap is as expansive as it is unforgivable.

The Response Required…

Taking lessons from effective problem gambling support frameworks, sector specific regulation twinned with education and end user support, delivered in the right media at the right time with, crucially, the right TOV is a good start.

The response needs to be as multi-channel, socially adept and organically customised in the media where young men live online. Any workable solution must be as digitally and technologically literate as the problem itself, which means platform-level accountability enforced through legislation, not self-regulation.

It means age-appropriate media literacy embedded alongside Maths and English in schools.

It means constant and engaging counter-narratives delivered with the same production quality, tonal intelligence and platform fluency as the content they’re competing against.

The manosphere won’t be defeated by outrage or moral panic.

It’ll be outgrown when we give young men something better to click on.

The UK government is aware of this problem, but as usual they’ll approach the solution in all the wrong ways.

First, you need to understand WHY the audience of young men feels so lost that they’ll lap up any scurrilous bullshit offering an escape from eternal loneliness.

Then you need to educate young men - not by preaching, but by engaging and entertaining them, offering hope as an output, not the suggestion that they’re the ones at fault.

Finally, regulate the hell out of Big Social who clearly love breaking the world one piece at a time and selling off the parts for gold.

Monetised Issues

Until the cost of hosting this abhorrent content exceeds the ad revenue it generates, nothing will change, so we need to act as a society, swiftly, intelligently and decisively. Fail, and we’ll lose entire generations of young men for good, sending ourselves back to the 19^th Century on a societal level.

Either that, or embargo the sale of jaw flexers, baby oil and penis injections - that might keep some of these odious turds offline for a few months while we try to put the brakes on our collective decent into hell...

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Bonus Content / The Concisely Absurd Manosphere Glossary

• Alphas and Betas — A binary wolf pack theory repackaged as a personality brinkmanship, where every man is either a dominant silverback (yay!) or a simpering doormat (boo!)

• Chads and Stacys — The manosphere’s archetypes of peak desirability. He’s jaw-chiselled and dominant, she’s attractive but vapid. (See Ken/ Barbie for reference)

• Cuck — A reignited medieval insult for any man who shows empathy or respect for women

• Gymcel - A subset of the incel movement that promotes bodybuilding as a means to overcome celibacyTL;DR – guns without EQ aren’t always enough

• High-value male - A reference to someone with superficial markers of value like fitness, wealth and, apparently, a rental Lambo.

• AWALT — “All Women Are Like That” — the cheat code that lets Chads dismiss half the planet, including their own mother.

• Red Pill / Blue Pill — A Matrix rip off, suggests the delusion that women secretly run everything to the detriment of men (or at least particularly fragile some men)

• Sigma male - The Lone Wolf archetype – meant to be a metaphor for strength, instead suggests a lost, howling dog that needs a haircut

• Simp - An insult targeting men perceived as excessively kind, deferential or supportive of womenAKA normal, egotistically secure men

• Wagecuck - A slur mocking men with regular jobs who aren’t, you know, money maxxing in Dubai with plastic teeth, tits and tans and a credit card bill that would sink Coutts

Thanks for reading again this week, if you have something to say on this article hit reply or add a comment.

If you have something important you’d like to share with over 2500 Marketing Leaders get in touch

Have a great weekend and we will see you next week!

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

Today we have Paul Thomas returning for his second instalment on Marketing Unfiltered serving up a great reminder - maybe we get bored of our ads before our customers do…

One More Time - Your Customers Aren’t Bored, YOU Are.

There’s an advertising concept I’ve always been sceptical of called “wear out”. The theory is that after a while, ads become less effective as audiences get bored of them.

But if that’s the case, why are Jet2 still using “Darling Hold My Hand” nine years on - and why has it just gone viral on TikTok with over a million uses of the sound?

@warnermusicaustraliaDarling hold my hand 🗣️🗣️🗣️ Credit: @rosie #jet2 #jet2holiday #jessglynne #holdmyhand

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The ad that supposedly should have worn out years ago is now soundtracking millions of videos and being parodied live at Jess Glynne concerts.

What if there are vested interests at work here? Because agency commercial models have tended to be linked to production rather than creativity and value, it’s no surprise there’s a push to keep doing new work. As one analysis put it, wear-out “seems like a practical reason to be able to bill for new projects on a regular basis.”

The evidence backs this up. System1 tested 50,000 ads - some very soon after launch, others up to 7,000 days later. If wear-out were real, older ads would score worse. They didn’t.

Analytic Partners ran a similar analysis and found that of 50,000 campaigns pulled for showing wear-out, only 14 were actually experiencing it.
Mark Ritson’s verdict:

“Consumers don’t get tired of ads. Only advertisers do.”

History Repeats Itself

In my first job at HMV I must have heard “Fields of Gold - The Best of Sting” nearly a thousand times across December. No amount of staff pleading could get the in-store CD changed. Why? Because each hour, new customers heard it and bought it.

In subsequent roles I’ve pulled my hair out at perfectly good campaigns being changed because “it feels like it’s time to move on”, or “we’ve been pitched a great idea”, or a new CMO or agency wants to make their mark. It’s wasteful, vain, and bonkers.

I got another reminder at a recent Run For Cover gig. Sweet Caroline - half the band rolls their eyes when it’s on the setlist. As usual, it brought the house down.

They’re not bored of it. You are.

And it’s not just external messaging that this applies to. At EE and Hyperoptic both organisations had a clear “North Star” purpose.

The problem with these strategic goals is that they tend not to change much and progress often isn’t measured in weeks or even months.

The temptation creeps in to “talk about something else” at the all hands or annual company kick off. But, especially where the organisation has a large front line contingent of engineers and customer service call centres, a consistent message around connecting everyone everywhere or bringing full fibre to millions of homes across the UK shouldn’t get old.

Sure, you might remix the delivery for freshness but the vision bears repetition. Just because the privileged few in HQ are tired of hearing it doesn’t mean those with proper jobs are.

Test It

So before deciding something’s worn out check whether the problem is actually you. What’s the data saying? Have you swallowed the myth of wear-out? Pound for pound, making existing assets work harder is likely to give a better ROI than prematurely creating new ones.

If this resonates, it’s exactly the kind of commercial challenge I work through with clients at pro-spective. Sometimes the highest-value thing a fresh pair of eyes can do is tell you to stop changing things and help you get more from what’s already working. If you’d like to explore that, feel free to drop me a message.

Connect With Paul On LinkedIn

Read Paul’s First MU Article ⬇️

Thanks for reading again today and have a great weekend!

Danny & Harry

This week: Simon returns and offers us a way to address the current ways of working and challenges our thinking to shift from a rigid role approach to helping team members embrace adaptive capabilities.

Not only to improve company performance but importantly, ensuring constant professional development.

In the shift towards Hybrid AI team and AI assistants joining teams, Simon offers a 4 step framework (i) Audit, (ii) Mobilise, (iii) Augment, and (iv) Measure to roll out.

Looking to get in front of 2500 Marketing & Growth leaders? Get in touch with us mu@dannydenhard.com to discuss your options

Why EQ & ‘Change Agents’ Are The Future of Talent Strategy & Company Performance

In environments shaped by AI, automation and constant market shifts, competitive advantage is increasingly defined by how quickly people can apply their skills in new and evolving contexts.

Today, a key question is no longer simply whether the right person occupies the right role, but whether the capabilities are in place to evolve as strategy, technology and customer expectations change.

The focus is shifting from roles to resilience and that means developing people who can adapt, re-learn and align their skills to where the business creates the most value.

The question is no longer
“Do we have the right people in a specific role?”

It is rather:
“Do our people have the capabilities to adapt, re-learn and evolve to the needs of the business?”

Individuals are too re-assessing how they position themselves in the world of work and the journey they decide to take

Author Rishad Tobaccowala, in his manifesto, “The Company of One Mindset” observes that “It is projected that in 2027, 86.5 million people will be freelancing in the United States making 50.1 percent of the population”.

Tobaccowala argues that your career is no longer defined by tenure or title, but by how well you keep your skills current and can deliver value independently…

From Roles to Capabilities

Skills-based workforce mapping, internal talent marketplaces, and re-skilling opportunities are alternative methods to how we could be replacing rigid employment structures where you are measured by the job description and not the more lateral skills that could be deployed across a company

But change to a capability mindshift also means a change to what is defined as good “leadership”.

There is an important balance to consider here.

There is a need for more leadership, and that won’t be delivered through top down processes, but rather from people that can complement their management skillsets through Emotional Intelligence.

As Jenny Burns, CEO at Magnetic describes:

“If efficiency and profit become the only measures of success, AI will simply amplify the worst instincts of leadership.
If we anchor AI in human-centred leadership, it can amplify the best.
The future of leadership isn’t AI or humans. It’s humans choosing how AI is used and what truly matters”

Enter the Change Agent: The Hidden Multiplier

The “Change Agent” is a growing trend inside organisations that perhaps offers a glimpse to the future as to how employees and employers adapt and an evolving team development.

Rather than being led by a “fixed role” mindset the change agent adapts, relearns and moves themselves inside an organisation where their mix of skills are needed, tasked to work in specific areas inside an organisation.

These individuals are not always “formal” leaders, but they are catalysts who connect strategy with execution, challenge legacy processes, and break down silos.

As discussed in my previous work on change agents, organisations that empower these people build momentum from within and embed transformation in the culture itself.

A handbook for leading change inside organisations

Kelly and Medina found these individuals share a consistent profile, they are future-oriented, energised by possibility rather than certainty, and willing to challenge the status quo not for recognition but because they genuinely believe the organisation can do better

In their book, Rebels at Work, they define characteristics of leading change as someone who “doesn’t regard recognition as a driver for them, but problem-solving and improving the way things are done, are. They care about ideas and making a difference at work more than creating the ‘right impression”.

Leadership and Self-Awareness

To initiate an alternative approach in navigating a career path inside organisations to drive meaningful change starts with leaders who are confident in driving opposing views forward that supports more so the benefit of the organisation rather than getting their own personal needs, ego or expectations get in the way

“How can you lead others if you can’t lead yourself?”

Behind the confidence of senior leadership often lies a more complicated reality.

EQ Leadership

The antidote begins with self-leadership, a developed sense of who you are, what you stand for and where you are taking others.

It is this internal clarity that allows leaders to move from reactive to intentional, and to build the kind of psychological safety that capability-led cultures depend on.

And there’s a growing suite of courses and views on this approach:

Training courses such as “The Compassionate Leader Pathway” demonstrates that empathy, self-reflection, and intentionality are not soft skills but business-critical capabilities.

Leaders who develop these qualities can guide their organisations through complexity, empowering both capability growth and culture change.

Leadership Can Be Test & Learn

Chris Barez Brown, founder of Upping Your Elvis backed this up in a recent video championing that good leadership moves away from the text books and more to honing skills through experimenting, test and learns and trying new things out to add value in becoming a good leader i.e. use your initiative, energy to your work, critical thinking and being inquisitive

This is reinforced by a simple but powerful idea from leadership advisor Thomas Barta: Bravery = Purpose minus Fear as discussed on Jon Evans Uncensored CMO Podcast:

If you want to lead with more courage, either deepen your sense of purpose, reduce the fear holding you back, or ideally do both.

For leaders navigating capability-led change, this is more than a motivational prompt — it is a practical lens.

The change agents and self-aware leaders this article describes are not fearless.
They have simply developed enough clarity about why they are doing something to act in spite of the doubt.

So it requires deliberate choices about how people are deployed and how people decide (and encouraged) to show up.

The organisations that move fastest on this are not waiting for structural permission. They are making deliberate choices today across four areas:

A Modern Four-Step Framework for Capability-Led Change

1. Audit – Map current capabilities and opportunities
Identify the skills, experience, and adaptability inside your teams.

Where do you have embedded change agents? Where are the gaps? Use workforce mapping, internal talent marketplaces, and performance data to understand not just what people do, but what they could do with support.

💡 Example takeaway: Look at your digital, analytics, and commercial teams — which individuals are quietly driving improvements or innovating within processes? Capture and recognise that capability.

2. Mobilise – Deploy people where they’ll have the highest impact
Shift from fixed roles to capability-driven assignments. Move people onto initiatives that stretch their skills and align to business objectives.

Empower your internal change agents to lead pilot programs or cross-functional projects.

💡 Example takeaway: A marketing analyst who thrives in collaboration could be seconded to a product innovation initiative — their impact and learning far exceeding the original job description.

3. Augment – Leverage tools and data to amplify skills
AI, analytics, and automation should complement people, not replace them. Provide digital dashboards, real-time insights, or smart workflow tools to let teams work more efficiently and make better decisions. The goal is to enhance capability, free up leaders for strategic thinking, and let change agents multiply their effect.

💡Example takeaway: Use a data visualisation platform to help internal teams spot trends themselves, rather than relying solely on external consultants. Build processes for test and learn initiatives to turn trends into new ways of working inside the organisation and provide a platform to feedback this new approach and learnings

4. Measure – Link capability and culture to real outcomes
Move beyond KPIs that focus on activity. Track how capability building, team alignment, and change agent deployment influence business outcomes such as revenue growth and customer satisfaction.

💡 Example takeaway: When a cross-functional team pilots a new process or digital initiative, measure not only the revenue or traffic uplift but also the learning, adoption, and collaboration patterns that emerge.

The organisations that will outperform are those that treat capability as a strategic asset. They understand that growth depends on people who can learn, redeploy their skills and work fluidly across boundaries.

Technology will continue to accelerate performance, but it will not replace leadership.

In fact, the more AI is embedded into Marketing and Operations, the more human judgement, emotional intelligence and self-awareness will differentiate high-performing teams from average ones.

Efficiency alone is not a strategy, but the direction and decision making is.

Talent strategy is no longer about managing headcount or filling roles.

It is about deliberately building the capabilities that drive revenue, innovation and customer value and creating a culture where those capabilities can evolve as fast as the market demands.

Simon Swan.

Simon is a Digital Marketing & E-Commerce Director → join him on LinkedIn

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Thanks to Simon for a great mini guide to rethink traditional leadership and offer his 4 step framework you can take on yourself.

Have a great weekend and we will see you next Friday

Thanks,

Danny Denhard

PS If you are struggling with AI and leadership, here are a number of ways to improve using a few techniques

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This week we dive into what new TV ad formats aka 'commercial enhancement' really means for CMOs, brand affinity, and the future of live sport. Could your brand be generating resentment instead of equity?
Let's talk about where the line is where we can't uncross.

Thanks for reading last week’s metrics and communication article, from the feedback it’s safe to say it is something CMOs and their directs needed to read.

Would you like to us to cover something? Or have a question you’d like us to answer anonymously? Complete this short form below

1 Question Form

Are Ads The Problem? Are Platforms To Blame, Or Are We?

The relentless encroachment of advertising into previously untouched cultural spaces is clear in ITV’s recent in‑game adverts during the Six Nations rugby broadcast.

Traditionally, commercials have been kept to dedicated ad breaks on UK TV. Now, they are making unprecedented “mid‑match incursions” into the live viewing experience.

This Scrum Is Brought To You By…

During 20‑second pauses for scrums, ITV deployed a split‑screen that replaced the stadium audio and commentary with the orchestral soundtrack of a Samsung mobile phone advert. Later in matches, the same intrusive format was used for Virgin Atlantic.

These ads triggered 300+ Ofcom complaints on the first weekend of the Six Nations:

@ofcom.org.ukOur latest TV complaints update 📺 This week a GB News programme, two Six Nations matches, and Love Island are on the list. #TV #sixnationsrugby #loveisland

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This mirrors the stop–start nature of American sports, where every pause becomes a “sponsored moment”. ITV have framed this as a necessary “commercial enhancement” to keep premium sports on free‑to‑air television.

The unspoken truth: without advertising money, many premium sports broadcasts simply wouldn’t exist.

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The BBC already spends a large percentage of licence fee revenue on sports rights (rumoured to be around £150 million per year).

It’s not just rugby and free‑to‑air channels. We’ve seen an extra ad slot added before kick‑off on Premier League coverage on Sky Sports, and new ad units integrated into TNT Sports (Discovery+) coverage of the Premier League and Champions League. RTE in Ireland are trialling these styles ads too.

Why This Is Different To Social Media

On platforms like YouTube or TikTok, advertising is the accepted currency for free content, but users retain control: skip a pre‑roll after five seconds or swipe past a sponsored post.

By contrast, the rugby broadcast created a completely captive environment. Viewers couldn’t skip the 20‑second split‑screen ads for Samsung or Virgin Atlantic, which hijacked half the screen and overwrote the live experience.

Ultimately, both models rely on the same premise: if you are not paying for the product, your attention is the product. But many viewers already pay for ad‑free or reduced‑ad experiences through subscription services.

Just as social media users have slowly adapted to heavily monetised, algorithm‑driven feeds, UK television viewers are now being pushed to accept “mid‑match incursions” as the price for avoiding full sports paywalls.

In the long term, broadcasters will keep testing how much they can disrupt live games before backlash outweighs revenue.

I asked our regular contributors what their thoughts were:

I’d love to first see the analysis of audience feedback on the intro of such ads…something bland and boring, I can understand the drawback and interruption to the user but could there be an opportunity to take a more creative angle that for example connects to the 6 nations game taking place? Eg Oreo “you can still dunk in the dark” or 2018 football World Cup with Specsavers running “should’ve gone to Specsavers” - Simon Swan

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There were times when I was watching England play ‘rugby’ over the last two weekends when I dearly wished a multi national brand would takeover the screen with a fifteen minute long brand ad. Hell, just a bopping QR code bouncing across the screen would’ve been more entertaining than some of our defense, attack, kicking, passing and tackling.

The thing is, for all of ITV’s delight in ‘creating a new ad format’, the end result is just clunky interruption. Yes, they try to slip them into breaks in the game but it’s those breaks when commentators tend to catch up on the in game analysis. Or you chat to your mates in the pub about Henry Arrundell’s apparent vertigo...

What I’m not doing is considering my next phone or TV purchase via Samsung or holiday flight on Virgin Atlantic, so when their (presumably very expensive) ad spots pop up, they’re not greeted with joy - they’re blockers, the corporate equivalent to a seven foot tall, Guinness-guffing man in a Puffa jacket standing in front of me at Twickenham. - Harry Lang

ITV Or Advertiser Impact?

From ITV’s official statement: Mark Trinder, ITV’s director of commercial sales and partnerships, said: “At ITV throughout 2026 we’re bringing the most exciting advertising opportunities of the year to brands – live, free-to-air sport on a scale we’ve never seen before”.

For CMOs and Marketing leaders, the question is:
If we’re first to try these major ad slots, what are the risks and benefits, and what are the second‑ and third‑order effects?

Will early outrage be outweighed by orders and flights booked, or will British rugby fans quietly decide not to buy the latest Samsung Android phone or not to fly with Virgin Atlantic?

My suspicion: fans are more frustrated with ITV’s decision than with the brands who took the punt on an expensive new slot.

But the irritation still rubs off.

Upcoming Football Fever

With the football World Cup coming up in the summer and ITV’s significant investment into showing 51 games and having huge former players as experts, this rugby trial could resurface in the world cup games via on‑field treatments or VAR replays. Imagine VAR decisions brought to you Coca Cola or Aramco.

The reaction in this situation would be very different.

The Failure In Ads Leading To Fatigue

This aggressive expansion of advertising creates significant strategic risks and sets up difficult conversations for CMOs not just with customers but with their bosses...

1. Trading Brand Affinity for Brand Resentment 🤔

When advertising forces its way into the middle of a live event, it disrupts the experience. Viewers heavily criticised the Six Nations ads as “intrusive” and “disruptive to the flow of the game”. Even the Six Nations chief executive admitted the experience was “uncomfortable for viewers”.

Placing a brand where it actively annoys the target audience is dangerous, particularly with the high‑value viewers who watch their national team play for 80 minutes. If a fan’s primary association with your brand is that you interrupted a crucial match, you’re generating resentment, not equity.

Some brave CMOs will accept short‑term pain for a long‑term frequency play in the middle of major events.

Others will see this as a line not to cross.

2. Destroying the “Theatre” of the Product 🏉

Effective marketing relies on context. Hyper‑aggressive advertising often ignores the nuances of what it interrupts.

England’s hooker (this is a rugby position) Jamie George highlighted the specific “theatre” of scrums in rugby: the tension, the build‑up, the referee’s microphone. That atmosphere is the product.

When advertisers overwrite the very content audiences tuned in to see, they position themselves as antagonists and erode the ecosystem their advertising depends on.

3. The Fallacy of “Sponsored Moments” 👀

Just because technology and rights deals allow a space to be monetised doesn’t mean it’s a wise investment.

In‑game ads are normal in American sports, but forcing that format onto sports with different rhythms creates a jarring, “Americanised” feel that alienates UK audiences.

CMOs must recognise that forced exposure does not equal effective engagement. Networks may justify these ads as financially necessary, but it’s the advertiser’s brand that takes the reputational hit when the public lashes out against the intrusion.

Boss Pressure?

Founders and CEOs often love the status of big TV moments and talk about them with friends and peers. This creates pressure for CMOs to follow through on these formats now they know they exist and can make waves internally.

As platforms and media owners attempt to colonise every spare micro‑moment of our attention, Marketing leaders risk crossing the line from being visible to being actively hostile.

Guilty by association may be enough to trigger a new kind of backlash many just don’t plan for.

Bold CMOs will see this as an opportunity to stand out and get buzz around the brand. It’s an expensive pay to play but one many will be enquiring about.

Others, in more delicate positions, might feel compelled to keep buying into these formats for the cachet they bring, even as the audience grows more fatigued.

So over to you, what would YOU do? Please vote below

Thanks for reading today and let me know what you think of these ads by hitting reply!

Danny, Harry and Simon

This week I’m answering a subscriber’s question on how to move your reporting from vanity metrics to commercial impact, plus giving you a simple exercise to run with your team.

(You can ask your own anonymous question through our Google Form)

If you find this useful, hit the heart, leave a comment, or pass it on to one person who’d benefit.

Last week: Don’t forget to read my deepdive (below) on how to build your commercial storytelling engine.

Executive Metric Communication

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Metrics and impact communication stumps everyone at every level. You are never really taught how to communicate and its a critical skill you have to work on and never stop improving.

Once you hit the top tier of the C-Suite you should be conditioned in translating your department metrics into business metrics, this often is the difference between great and good C-Suite leaders, Marketing leads can struggle (more than most) to get out of the engagement metrics, volumes of activity & the why, which misses the mark and doesn’t communicate the business impact.

The Known Issues

I have spoken to a number of founders, CEO, CMOs, CGOs in recent months and other than the explosion of channels and uncertainty, the main theme is the disconnect in communicating Marketing success and the impact it is having on the business.

Earlier this week, I received an anonymous question from a Marketing leader who is struggling to make their leadership team understand the impact that their team is having and removing the famous corporate leadership glaze over when you are discussing Marketing activities and connecting to Marketing and then business results.

In the rule of 3, I break down metrics into 3 core categories:

• Level 1: Business Metrics

• Level 2: Department Metrics

• Level 3: Team Metrics

Let’s dive into the levels and how to shape communications to those around you at Leadership team level and how to shape reporting and analysis for your team leads to help you communicate your business impact.

The Metrics Hierarchy: From Vanity To Strategic

→ THE “C-SUITE” ZONE

1. Business Metrics

These are the numbers the founders, CEO, COO, CFO, and Board truly care about.
If it doesn’t eventually impact these metrics, the C-suite considers it “noise” or “Marketing fluff”.

I have used as standardised examples as possible, please replace with what your business metrics.

Examples:

• Total Revenue / Net Sales: The top-line growth.

• EBITDA: Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation. This measures operational profitability.

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Total sales and Marketing spend divided by new customers acquired.

• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): The total revenue a business can expect from a single customer account.

• LTV:CAC Ratio: A measure of efficiency. (A 3:1 ratio is still considered the “Gold Standard“).

• Churn Rate / Retention Rate: The percentage of customers leaving vs. staying.

→ 🧠 THE INFORMED CMO ZONE

2. Department Metrics - The “Director/VP” Level

These metrics show how the Marketing department, as a whole, contributes to the business metrics above. These are what you work on, optimise constantly and drive efficiencies towards.

These metrics guide the Department leaders, Teams leads and teams on how successful they are and connecting into the company strategy and the most important metrics.

Examples:

• Marketing Originated Revenue: Revenue that started from a Marketing touchpoint.

• Marketing Pipeline Contribution: The pound/dollar value of deals in the sales funnel generated by Marketing.

• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Revenue generated for every pound/dollar spent on advertising.

• Cost Per Lead (CPL): How much it costs to get a potential customer into the system.

• Marketing Share of Voice (SOV): How much of the “market conversation” your brand owns compared to competitors.

→ ⚠️ THE CORPORATE DANGER ZONE

3. Team Metrics - The “Manager/Execution” Level

These metrics are diagnostic. They help the Marketing team understand why the department metrics are up or down. These metrics help to connect to Team and Department goals and ladder up to Department Metrics, these are often seen as vanity metrics, but, without these it is hard to understand what is happening on the ground. It’s the sense check Marketers care about that others suggest is noise not signal.

These metrics give the team the feel of the market and how customers are reacting to Marketing activities.

Examples:

• Conversion Rate (CVR): The % of visitors who take a desired action (e.g., signing up for a demo).

• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Effectiveness of ad creative or email copy.

• MQL to SQL Conversion: The speed and quality of leads moving from Marketing to Sales.

• SEO Keyword Rankings: Visibility for high-intent search terms.

• Social Media Engagement: Engagement metrics like views, reactions, likes and replies

• Email Open/Click Rates: Engagement levels of your existing database.

FWIW your CPO has vanity metrics too including total registered users, app downloads, feature clicks, and your Sales lead/CRO has vanity metrics like activity count, calls made, leads generated, lead count, outreach numbers etc.

Ways To Diagnose Performance Issues Through Vanity Metrics → Business Metrics 💡

Here is a key example of why vanity metrics are still important and how you can help improve your leadership teams knowledge by connecting the vanity metrics up through to known business issues through diagnosis of performance drops or revenue drops.

Diagnosis & Steps Taken:
(1) Channels & Conversion: Check revenue and traffic by channel – what’s up, down, or flat?
(2) Product & Tech: Confirm any outages, releases, or bugs that could have hit performance.
(3) Search & Algorithmic Updates: Review SEO rankings, ranking URLs, AI overviews, and recent Google updates for any major changes.

This will work both in excel as a checklist or fits nicely on a slide/image.

Coach The Team On The Difference 📈

When Marketing leaders first join exec meetings, they often fall into “over‑explaining and over‑defending” drowning the room in tactics and vanity metrics instead of leading with business impact.

Part of your job is to coach them on this shift before they walk into the room.

Complete This Internal Department Exercise ☑️

Run this as a working session with your Heads of / Team leads:

List every metric you report today and put each one into Level 1 (Business), Level 2 (Department), or Level 3 (Team). Then map your Level 1–2 metrics directly to your OKRs or equivalent. If a key objective doesn’t have a clear metric, or your metrics are all Level 3, you have a focus problem.

This is always well received with my coaching and consulting clients.

Hint: Understand in your specific business where K-Factor and NPS (or CSAT) sits, some boards still consider NPS as their key metric to positively push on.

Remove These Words ❌

There are certain words that quietly weaken Marketing leaders in exec rooms: a bit, a little, extremely, just, kind of, pretty, quite, really, slightly, so, sort of, stuff, very.

Audit your next deck and and speaker notes/script – remove them and see how much more decisive you sound.

Go ahead with confidence anonymous, map this out and treat it as a team exercise, you can choose if its you and your Heads of / Team leads or a whole team exercise. This should provide you confidence to drive your Department and business forward.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend,

Danny

PS You can always recommend the MU newsletter to an industry friend or your team you think would benefit from our weekly newsletter - copy and paste https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/metrics into your WhatsApp group, Teams or Slack on share and tag me on LinkedIn or hit the share button below

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What a wet week!

Paul’s first MU struck a note, this week I tackle storytelling and how it’s becoming a commercial weapon for many who build out their engine.

Storytellers Are Your New Commercial Weapon

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Many founders think they are Steve Jobs.

They think they can go on the biggest stages and be entertaining, charismatic and wow a crowd in person and on the event video. But they don’t…

Old PR Is Not Modern Storytelling

To a point, founders have been conditioned to think this by other founders, podcasts, and industry press.

Many comms and PR teams follow two strict rules:

1. They are official spokespeople and only they do the talking

2. Only the CEO and hand-selected spokespeople can speak formally. Podcast appearances, speaking gigs and interviews all need approvals.

New Media New Evolving Landscape

Neither of these is ready for new media; very few would last more than 15 minutes on a top-tier podcast, this world was built for 2-3 minute interviews segments on radio and TV stations; their status would be removed with one prying question, and the strict company guidelines would restrict any leeway.

With all this said, Brands are actually more elastic than ever before. Brands can dip into the news and leverage, they can refuse to comment, they can push hundreds of messages out about their latest product launch, they can come back from manufactured “viral” clips and Brands can now engineer popularity by understanding their market and always have the chance to pivot away.

Cultural Impact

There is no monoculture; it has become thousands of subcultures. The bifurcation of feeds and content is both an opportunity and a threat.

This is why the movement to Storytelling Teams is happening.

We saw a push for storytelling teams just before Christmas, with well-known PLG companies pushing the trend forward, as Notion did, basically rebranding their Marketing teams
“We merged our internal comms, external comms, social, and influencer teams into one: the Storytelling Team”

I love Notion but is a narrative in rebranding Marketing, again ;-)

Let’s Play Storytelling Out

Recently, I broke down the different ways and formats you can storytell on:

• The product

• The SKUs

• The service

• The packages

• The impacts

  • Cultural impact

  • Economic impact

• Customer stories

  • External customers

  • Internal customers, i.e employee stories

  • Scratching your own itch

• Founder stories

• Company leaders stories

• Leaked screenshots

• Highlighting the nuance

• Leverage data

  • Most often, internal data

  • Integrating external or survey data

• A commissioned documentary (on Channel4, Netfix, YouTube)

• Screenshots and allowing stories to come from screenshots (underutilised)

As you can tell there is huge opportunities in creating, curating and remixing content and Product information. A storytelling company will have a field day and be inspired for these options, not be intimidated by the list.

Corporate storytelling is not about more video content, copying competitors, prettier decks and more social content; it is about creating momentum that moves revenue, reputation and relationships.

Why Storytellers Now Matter Commercially

Most firms still look to the CEO, founder or official spokesperson to “do the storytelling” then wonder why company stories stalls and brand salience flatlines.

Scaling your founder, CEO or spokesperson is hugely limited, and the things they say or even hint at have real underlying implications, so what companies are questioning now:

How do we scale this?

Dedicated storytellers change that because their job is to turn products, services, customer experiences and data into narratives that buyers remember and act on. The outcome is sharper demand, higher conversion and internal alignment around what really makes you distinct.

Storytelling should sit inside the commercial engine, not on the edges in “comms.”

When storytellers are close to product, sales, customer success and finance, they can show how your work actually lands in the real world, from cultural impact to economic value.
Done well, your stories start to pre-handle objections, compress sales cycles and make you easier to buy.

Designing A Storytelling Engine, Not Another Campaign Or Interview

The real miss in most corporate storytelling is operational.

Leaders talk about “being a media company” and then starve storytellers of context, access and support.
If you have worked in a company on the stock market, you’ll know how much you are and are not allowed to say… and how much you are restricted to say and narratives are built for quarterly earnings and Product launches.

The result is flooding social media with trend based fluff, sporadic content that looks fine in isolation but never compounds into the pipeline or share of voice.

A storytelling engine takes one moment and turns it into multiple assets tuned to channels and audiences.

Marketing’s problems often comes from our approach to channels and messages:

• Over saturating channels

• Concentrating on an ill informed ICP or persona

• Creating ask fatigue (asking our customers for more, buy more, do more, download more) not solving problems

• And important how we have engineered comms to be one-to-many and not smaller more relevant messaging

The engine should include:

• A killer interview with the founder

• A customer win and quick snapshot of why, not huge long case studies and long videos

• A product release that answered really specific problems

• A strong internal point of view or the the anti view, these can be sliced into clips, posts, emails, podcast segments, internal narratives and talk tracks for sales.

The commercial outcome is simple: more high-quality touchpoints from the smaller chunks of effort (with hybrid AI (this is human + AI) help), with stories reaching customers wherever and whenever they already pay attention.

Let Others Drive The Story

Some of the most effective stories about your brand come from people who do not have “Marketing” in their title.

Let’s be inspired by the waves of AI companies spreading their message far and wide.
Developers showing their work on a podcast, Product Managers sharing a screenshare of a cool trick or feature enhancement, specialists speaking at events, customers interviewed by journalists, industry bloggers covering your hackathon or using your live data, these stories often outperform classic campaigns.

Storytelling comes from Product usage, it’s engineered and built into the Product build ethos, it comes from the customers and users who find great prompts and share across social, newsletters, and YouTube videos and huge numbers try them, edit them and share again.

This engine has been critical to Google Gemini’s success, not just a stronger more integrated product and worksuite.

This shift is from “how do we talk about ourselves” to “how do we design moments other people want to talk about.”

When you connect customers with media, open up data, invite creators behind the scenes and equip internal experts to speak, you create a mesh of independent voices reinforcing your positioning.

Your CEO can add top level and top line revenue by adding tactical perspectives, appearing on core key interviews and industry podcasts and discussing core areas within the earnings reports or on that leaked pitch deck or internal email…

That network effect shows up as lower paid media dependency, higher credibility and a brand that feels alive in the market conversation.

These engines have to be built - they are rarely earned!

Outcomes-First Decision Making When Stories Break

In a feed-led world, stories about you will surface with or without your involvement.

A niche TikTok creator, a respected researcher, a well respect sports person, a reality TV star or a fan account might create a moment you could never plan for but help to drive commercial growth.

A quick personal story: The beloved Scottish comedian Kevin Bridges shared his dislike for our pages being everywhere, thanks to the meticulous work we engineered with sharing functionality front and centre of the Product, paired with our Press efforts and putting our customer success first throughout the business (thanks Kevin, for one of my highlights of my career when you covered this in your BBC standup special), I have never received as many WhatsApp and DMs about the product we built and many have borrowed the mechanics over the years.

The question for leaders is not “do we like this” but “what outcome do we want from this.” Unfortunately we were not in a place to truly capitalise like anyone would be today.

You have a serious set of levers you can pull: amplify, ignore, comment, reward, repurpose.

Each comes with trade-offs for trust, reach and long-term narrative but creating an engine and newsroom to be proactive will drive the right Marketing goals to be set and drive business change.

A loyal customer might not care if you stay quiet on a clip, but future customers and partners will often be watching how you handle it.

The way AI is surfacing brands and answering prompts means you’re response might just be the difference.

Treat these choices as strategic, not reactive, and you turn random mentions into deliberate connection and reputation building.

Acting Like A Modern Media Company

Sports are the clearest illustration.

Clubs never rely on one press release or one interview (although I bet many wish they could); they create continuous waves of highlights, behind-the-scenes content, fan channels, remix culture and, at times, manufacture leaks to keep their story moving or moving another narrative along.
They use internal creators, staff, players, legends, pundits, fans and even critics to keep attention and emotion high.

The UFC have been front and centre of this over the years, (just look at their YouTube) they have made every channel work for them, they have made the fighters tell their stories, their coaches become a part of the fight narrative, the media and media personalities have their say, they incorporate sponsors into the build up and they overly invest in their own staff’s part from fight picks, to the way they interact with the fighters to who sits front row close enough to the octagon to be hit with the blood of the fighters mid fight.

2 Examples: UFC have former world champions now interviewing sporting royalty to build deeper content libraries and fan connection, they run a week long fight build up series called Embedded to feature the main fighters, their camps and offer exclusive behind the scenes access.

Media Business Leaders

One company that has accelerated this in recent months is a16z, the VC leader, they have designed the use of channels, from sharing opinion pieces, promoting chart of the week on their blog and Substack, to podcasting with their founders, their internal arms of the business they repurpose their content across every relevant medium, to republishing any a16z partner or analyst guesting on other podcasts on their own podcast feeds, to each team member being active across social media not to flood the zone but to offer real value to their customers (even their competitors) and fans.

Loving ❤️ Storytelling: Lovable have fully embraced company-wide storytelling, from the founder’s prolific social media shares, to developers sharing their vibe coded projects and talking deeply about their releases, to their Growth team members (check out Elena’s substack - it’s packed full) embracing storytelling to advance their startup.

Any ambitious company could adopt the same mindset.

Put an internal creator or storytelling lead at the centre, wire them into leadership and teams, and task them with turning everyday operations into story assets that support growth.

When you judge storytelling by its impact on pipeline, pricing power, hiring, retention and partnership opportunities, it stops being a nice-to-have narrative exercise and becomes a core lever of business performance.

Founders and leaders love to say they’re a storytelling business but then leave storytelling buried in comms decks, the comms team to red pen most interesting and compelling stories and be hidden in campaign calendars and social media spray and prays. ​

The next era will belong to companies that wire storytellers into the commercial engine, let customers, builders and experts carry the narrative, and build systems that turn one smart moment into a hundred meaningful touchpoints. ​

In this market you’re going to be targeted, clipped, screenshotted and remixed it would be smart to be the driver of this bus.

If you’re serious about this, make one decision today: who is your internal storytelling team, and what’s the first story you’re going to engineer around them in the next two weeks? ​

This single decision is how you stop admiring other people’s stories in your feed and inboxes and start owning the one the market tells about you.

If you need help with storytelling engines drop me an email (mu@dannydenhard.com) or hit reply and lets chat

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

Danny Denhard

This week we have Paul Thomas’ first serving of Marketing Unfiltered, offering lyrics, nostalgia with a main of smart guidance.

Remember to hit share to help inform other Marketing & Growth Leaders

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You’re So Vain: Why Most Brand Stories Fail Before They Start

Listen, I get it.

You work for massive Brand X, zeitgeist start-up Y, or you have built Tool Z that is going to change your sector.

You might be proud, quietly battling imposter syndrome, or under pressure from the CEO to “mention the latest fundraise”.

Your product may well be brilliant.

Your business model might be revolutionary.

Your AI genuinely next level.

Your pricing extremely competitive.

All of that may be true, but until I understand the problem you solve for me, I don’t really want to hear any of it.

I have seen, and made, this mistake more times than I care to admit.

One extreme example came when I was a music buyer for Tesco and I almost inadvertently got an EMI account manager sacked. His label boss was furious because I dared to read a newspaper during a retailer playback of Radiohead’s Kid A.

“But this is art, why isn’t he paying full attention to their genius?”

Brilliantly, the account manager replied, “I think Paul can read and listen at the same time.”

Oh, and by the way, he is the customer.

I have also staked my own credibility getting Samsung HQ’s accessories team in front of EE’s top brass, only for them to burn 80 per cent of the meeting showing SKUs that were only relevant to the Korean market.

And don’t get me started on Apple keynotes.

Which begs the question. Why, when we get the chance to tell our story, do we so often make it about us?

To try to kill this particular disease, I am on a mission to make the lyric

“You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you”

stick permanently in the part of your brain that lives on Spotify.

Because it is the fastest way I know to avoid the five most common mistakes in brand and marketing storytelling.

Roll the Top of the Pops theme.

5. Putting the “what” before the “why?”

“We use the latest AI tools to drive our CRM platform.”

“Snack brand X is sourced from sustainable ingredients.”

Those things might be impressive, but I don’t need to know how you do something until I have decided what you’re for. Start with the problem you solve, not the machinery you have built.

4. Being boringly predictable

This is a particular danger at the “we’ve cracked it” stage.

Rinse and repeat marketing, meeting agendas and opening lines creep in.

Reliable can be reassuring. Predictable is dull.

When audiences feel they know what is coming next, they stop paying attention, especially when what is coming is still mostly about you.

Ironically, this is the moment when even successful brands need to think like challengers again. Call out the problem, highlight where the status quo has drifted, and remind people why you exist. If you are the incumbent, even better. You get to fix it before someone else does.

3. Completely forgetting the customer

“Look how much money we have raised.”

“Look how clever our CTO is.”

“Here is our new brand campaign.”

Sigh.

Even Apple, to be fair, usually tries to anchor this in “our customers tell us…”, but better still is “in the last 12 months our customers have saved money, time and stress because of what we do”.

Or the timeless “You said. We did.”

Which KFC lovingly parodies each Christmas by refusing to sell turkey.

2. Too much content for the attention span

Whether it is cramming extra copy into an OOH ad or turning up with 30 slides for a one hour meeting, forgetting the context your message lands in is a classic error.

It is not about what you feel you need to say.

It is about what the other person is likely to take away.

Less is more, especially when attention is scarce.

1. Supplanting the customer as the hero in their story

I heard a great analogy recently. If companies told the story of George and the Dragon the way they go to market, the hero would not be George, or even the dragon. It would be the Dragonslay 3000, milled from space grade titanium to slice more smoothly through troublesome reptilian scales.

That is peak You’re So Vain behaviour.

Brands are not George.

They are not the dragon either.

They just sell the swords.

When you make yourself the hero, you push the customer into the role of spectator, and spectators don’t buy.

So there you have it. Let’s all be less You’re So Vain and more It’s All About You.

Paul Thomas

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn
» 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.

Thanks for reading again this week, if you have something unfiltered to say or share, hit reply or email mu@dannydenhard.com and we’d love for you to feature here.

Danny & Harry

On Friday I shared my 65 leadership and leadership team tips and today Harry and I thought let’s tackle the world’s biggest stage, the Super Bowl ads…

Will AI Make The Superb Owl’s Ads Fly?

Typos aside, the Superbowl is, well, like the Superbowl of advertising.

An absurd, egregious pinnacle of rampant consumerism twinned with rabid tribalism and a healthy smattering of old school American fanfare.

It’s the Guinness Surfer of the sporting calendar (in the US, at least) and a focal point for big brands (well, those with a reported $8 million per ad slot burning a hole in their pocket) who want to embed themselves in popular perception.

For 30 seconds.

On the 8th of February, the New England Patriots will try to dislodge the Seattle Seahawks in Superbowl LX (60) to claim their seventh title.

The Seahawks (from the home of Starbucks), meanwhile, want to double their tally, having only won it once in 2013, when rookie Quarterback Russell Wilson and star running back Marshawn Lynch made mincemeat of Denver’s MVP, Peyton Manning.

As a Brit who became briefly enamoured with College football during a visit to LA back in the mid 2000’s, I won’t be staying up to watch three and a half hours of standing around interspersed with brief glimmers of sporting action. However as a marketer, I watch the Superbowl ad highlights on YouTube religiously every year, partly out of professional curiosity, a little from rubber-necked morbid fascination but mostly to witness peak creative extravagance from a nation for whom excessive grandiosity may as well be a constitutional right.

Year 2 Of AI Ads

Last year, the culmination of the NFL season became known as ‘The AI Super Bowl’ due to the excessive use of artificial intelligence in the ads, and because there were an abundance of cash rich, land grabbing AI tools and platforms advertising.

Sector darling OpenAI opened the bidding with a 60-second black and white arthouse ad about ‘The Intelligence Age’ whilst Google’s Gemini pushed its chatbot, alongside 50+ geo-targeted ads showing how it was effectively the second coming of Christ for small US businesses (ironically, it was busted having edited one of Gemini’s answers about Gouda cheese. Artificial? Definitely. Intelligent? The jury was still out).

Meta’s Ray-Ban AI Glasses had the Tier 1 Hemsworth, Salesforce pulled out whistlin’ Matthew McConaughey, the ever present GoDaddy (surely Go Grandaddy by now?) showed up, the world’s most profligate advertiser Booking dot com did what they always do - all the big names featured with their AI augmented wares. Over the course of the night they wowed global audiences with soft-humoured, ‘amuse everybody/ exclude nobody’ slots designed to demonstrate just how bloody clever and necessary their AI technology was (or just how foolish the audience would be to not leap on their AI party bus as a matter of life and death).

As the volume turns up towards 11 and beyond at this year’s Superbowl, with enough hyperbole, fakery and bullshit to make Karoline Leavitt worry about job security, what can we expect from the AI ad crowd?

The TL;DR is:- LOADS more of the same.

$2.7 Trillion

According to data from CB Insights there are around five hundred privately owned AI unicorns globally, cumulatively valued at a combined $2.7 trillion. Despite their largesse, they’re in a bun fight - an old school, dot Com era Klondike Gold Rush. The simple truth is the world doesn’t need 500 AI behemoths. Some will be ingested into the hungry mouths of their bigger rivals, some will amalgamate with competitors to protect themselves whilst the remainder will go full Icarus, flying too close to the sun before running out of money, ideas and customers before falling to earth in a ball of Dollar-burning flames.

Besides the advertisers, sports fans can expect a creative Scheiße-storm as both AI platforms and traditional brand advertisers whip their agencies into creating ever more outlandish masterpieces which move the needle away from astute, creative advertising insight towards an absurd, brash Hollywoodesque apocalypse. How many creative teams have been held at their laptops at gunpoint, forcibly plugged into the unlimited realms of AI, unimpeded by such wasteful fripperies such as physics, nuance or quality?

My guess is we’ll see more abstract, rainbow coloured assaults on the senses - think a million butterflies for healthcare brands or a billion indulgent burger munchers for fast food. They’ll look impressive, they’ll sound brain numbing but they’ll smell of the desperation seeping from the pores of CMOs who know they need to squeeze eight million Dollars worth of value into a tiny thirty second box, trying desperately to use an AI butter knife as an ineffectual crowbar.

The new kids on the block this year could well be Web3 Prediction Markets.
In a statement, Tim Schlittner, Director of Communications at the NFL, said that

“...six total [betting] ads are permitted from the period leading up to kickoff through the game’s conclusion.”

According to a recent report by Gambling Insider “CFTC-licensed platforms have enjoyed significant activity so far this season. The biggest Prediction Market platform in the US, Kalshi, recorded almost $450 million in trading volume during the NFL playoffs”. These platforms are cash rich, perfectly positioned for the Superbowl audience and technologically expert - so if they are allowed to feature on the NFL ad roster, expect big name sports stars riding AI-powered rollercoasters around dollar-dripping, futuristic worlds.

Look out for the upcoming ad teasers so far includes: Pepsi Vs Coke (a cheeky inclusion of the Coke polar bear combining with a classic throw back to the brilliant pepsi challenge 80s campaign), Bud, Matthew McConaughey, Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Ben Stiller, Emma Stone & The Duolingo Owl. Here is a great read of the super bowl economics by advertiser Ro

Apple Of The (Ads) Eye

I’m still looking forward to the Superbowl and the ads that surround it, but I’m fairly certain the most relevant ad foreshadowing the potential perils of the AI epoch will be this warning shot - fired exactly forty two years earlier in 1984.

Harry Lang → the CMO of 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

What’s your take? Vote below

Thanks for reading and have a great few days and see you Friday.

Danny & Harry

This week: I offer 65 (yes 65!) hints and tips to improve your leadership skills and improve how you and your leadership operate and work together.

These tips and hints are from my experiences, coaching and consulting, so if you are experiencing any and want to chat in more detail hit reply or email me mu@dannydenhard.com

SHARING’S CARING ❤️:

Please forward to your colleagues & hit share on LinkedIn to help friends and industry colleagues (or copy and paste → https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/65 into your favourite leadership WhatsApp group)

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The 65 Tips To Improve Your Leadership & Leadership Team Connection & Performance

I have broken down the 65 tips into 3 categories, (i) operations, (ii) executive leadership team (ELT) and (iii) communications. These are ideal for those in the C-Suite, in SLT and ELTs or ExCo’s and if you are about to join these levels this will be an operational way to onboard & hit the ground running & lead from the front.

Operations 🔧

1. Create a high operational skills level between the C-Suite, set the bar high - it will create the right standards, it will be noticed in the business and when partnering externally it will be accepted as the norm.

2. Roll out a Decision doc - highlight and identify what, how, why and when you made a decision as a leadership team. This is to be shared across the business

3. Have a “Sit Down” each week as a leadership team - debrief is critical when the business is doing well or doing badly (like a stand up but more debrief and more relaxed - this brought one of the leadership teams I sat on closer than any other team building or bonding)

4. Walk and talks always beats in office chats - remove the barriers of the office and remove the status updates

5. Remove status update requests (especially in 1-2-1s or department meetings) - async is best for status updates

6. Rehearse QBRs - QBRs are more than just numbers and commentary, they often are a performance needs practise and performing

7. Reduce down the number of unofficial apps and channels. The side WhatsApp groups, the numerous slack and team channels

8. Build collective scar tissue - leadership teams often don’t build muscle memory together, help to build tolerance and muscle together, togetherness and team spirit is critical at the top

9. MRS (meeting recovery syndrome) is real and can impact your day and week, reduce the meeting load and audit your calendar. Only by auditing and owning your time can you control MRS

10. Run management performance updates - allow Q&A, be the exec sponsors, allow department leads to own this and back up where required. Be engaged!

11. Team and department plans not strategies - strategies removes the importance of the company strategy - words matter especially between tactics and strategy

12. When goal setting and frameworks start to fail, look to centre everyone back to simple goals. Think big act small by when for simplicity works

13. Run 1-2-1s and check-ins away from the office - office environments often create low trust environments

14. Complete the 9 box exercise (you choose if you involve HR) - this is a hard point for many to control however identifying and sharing your high standards sends a signal to your leadership peers - expect questions and push for head count removal or reduction. You have to manage this

15. Have grievances with an executive colleague? Air it out in person first, not on chat apps or email - if you need to protect yourself move to email or chat apps

16. Embrace HR

    1. Into the leadership team meetings

    2. In regular updates and 1-2-1 style catch ups with them

    3. Reduce the fear of HR as a leadership team (and if you cannot embrace the fear factor)

17. Give interview practise internally - especially if you are not hiring, interview each other and allow those more junior to be the interviewer

18. Create a cross functional pairing will help you and your colleagues to collaborate and drive performance improvements. Review the pairing and match well, poor pairings lead to cross-functional issues

19. Coaching, training & reverse mentorship

    1. Pilot reverse mentorship - connecting you with cross-functional colleagues who can provide updates, insights and connect you to the pulse of the company is invaluable

    2. Actively coach and mentor management layers - you should be coaching each other and those layers below you. This doesn’t have to be weekly but regular mentoring and coaching will set standards and indicate how important development is

    3. Find an executive trainer away from the business who can facilitate and hold the room - this is a high trust role that needs the other fit

20. Bring in experts and specialists into ELTs - ensure there is a “exec translator” to help bring clarity (someone in the team who can explain between departments and department heads)

21. Remove vanity metrics when reporting up into the C-Suite, this is always overlooked and causes confusion and distrust

22. High potential & high performer

    1. Identify “high potential” and help to shape their development. Who you see in your team others might see others

    2. Identify “high performers” and connect with management and leadership levels - studies show high performers raise those up around them

23. Identify internal influencers - they will be great at sharing messages and insights, they also have outsized influence on decision making with their peers

24. Phase re-onboarding back to the business - people operate in 3 stages,
    (i) what the company used to,
    (ii) what it is today and
    (iii) what it’s going to be - most operate in phase 1, you should be operating in phase 3 and pushing the business into phase 3 at every given moment

25. Get around the camp fire - eat together, the connection and trust increases

26. Always align on cross functional requests - no alignment = no performance

27. Ensure your number 2s have a strong relationship together and with your leadership peers

28. Specific working relationships are closer than others - call these out and agree on these being normal

29. Call out the boundaries you have individually and collectively and have created (inside and outside of work)

30. Agree to onboard new leaders onto the leadership team - must be able to understand your relationships (most important), your rhythm, your flow & your comms cadences

31. Have a collective impact (like a hype file) Slack/Teams channel - share great feedback, great campaign and results

32. Culture means many different things to different people, some are happy to come in and do their job, some would like everything to change and others want a perfect environment - your job as a leader is to drive performance and create a safe environment, allow people to thrive in where they can. Always manage expectations

33. Have members of the leadership team who are Customer obsessed & those who are competitor obsessed (for their strengths and weakness) - but they have to meet in the middle, this has to be connected and cannot blindly copy competitors and ignore customer/consumer feedback

ELT 👩‍💼👨‍💼

34. Share your executive lessons - this can be small or large but sharing exec lessons help you all learn and develop together

35. Allow critical distance - allow others to step away and think through issues, critical distance is the difference between good and bad decisions especially when the stakes are high

36. Optimise meetings, optimise agenda’s, feedback loops, communication styles etc. Do not settle for a style - they stagnate and frustrate many and only comes out when someone has had enough or blows their top at a peer

37. Decide if you are a writing and document leadership team, a meeting team or something else. Writing is deliberate and challenges your thinking, without this rigorous approach many will talk and talk and become a low action organisation

38. Tiering happens in leadership in C-Suite team, be prepared to be tiered and if unhappy address head on - don’t let it bubble under the surface. This is one of the most unspoken areas

39. Set deadlines for feedback loops. Call it out and set reminders, this also ripples through the business, hold accountability

40. Agree to disagree - disagreement is healthy as long as action is taken

41. Leave the dispute in the board room, don’t take onto the floor and don’t burden this on your leadership peers or your own management team, this causes huge behavioural problems

42. Disagree and commit only works if all members of the leadership can actually disagree and commit - this approach takes a long time to mature

43. Remove I told you so and every variation of I told you so - and if it rears its ugly head, kill it as soon as it happens

44. Allow AMAs to happen in public - if you are confident in the C-Suite AMAs drive performance and create a deeper level of connection and high trust. If you or colleagues are not as good on your feet, expect this to be a work in progress and hard work to begin with. Be wary of the problematic employees attending

45. Set colleagues up for success - ask pre approved questions to set them up for success

46. Declare what type of meeting you’re going to host (a brainstorm, a decision making session, a performance review, problem solving etc)

47. No agenda no meeting rule at senior levels - and that goes with the CEO too

48. Create management pods - pods that can support each other and rotate if you have a large ELT

49. Have designated roles within the C-Suite - the approachable one, the direct one, the one who speaks in front of the business etc. The clearer the roles the easier it is for your company to have the right people at leadership levels

50. Reduce drinking cultures away from C-Suite but go for food or drinks together, drinking can be a real benefit but often leads to problems and causes distrust

51. Increase / decrease volume and presence of the leadership team in the business - too much volume = noise, lower volume = trust

52. There will be a time you have to remove a C-Suite peer when their and or their department’s performance isn’t good enough. Have the criteria set - often this won’t be completely agreed upon but then reduces any surprises

53. Combat vs conflict - understand there is a difference and call it out once becomes conflict

54. Play to your strengths as executives and work out if your weakness needing fixing or can hire / invite others in to address these

55. Have your executive roles - the ones who are approachable, the ones who are front facing, the others who are happy to be behind the scenes

56. Embrace cultural differences - this improves how you work together and removes exec group think and biases

57. Enable skip meetings - especially with number 2s with founders and CEOs. Increases bonds and trust levels throughout the business

58. Politics is going to be played. Either agree to play as a team or prepare to be played and manipulated - and even when its agreed political players play the game (PQ = political intelligence is a critical part of work)

Communications 🗣️

59. Agree on the leadership sub-culture you have and what is in and what is out of culture. Your leadership sub-culture leaks into the business and sets the tone and behaviours others mimic and copy

60. Kill jargon and your discipline buzzwords in important meetings - remove the need for translation and too much cognitive load

61. Remove over communication - you are short on time and energy, if people are over communicating it is taking time from everyone

62. Remove long emails and long threads. Have a rule of x length & if hits it arrange a call or call for clarity

63. Remove long docs - leverage tech with BLUF (bottom line upfront), use deliberate updates on the front page. Long docs are powerful providing there is a style and agreed working style with them

64. Create exec work with me docs - this is a way to understand how to communicate, collaborate and work with each other at a deeper level

65. Understand that everyone has their audience size they thrive with, whether that’s 1-2-1, 1-2-few, 1-2-group, 1-2-many - help colleagues to thrive and own where there are confident and comfortable

If there any you are struggling with and need some support, remember you can hit reply or drop me an email by hitting the button below

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Thanks for reading again today and have a great day and we will see you on Monday with a special edition

Danny Denhard

PS if you missed last weeks newsletter take a read below

Simon’s article last week really struck a chord, thanks for the kind words and feedback.

Today I am offering a different perspective on and for the Modern CMO and you need a plan to show you are an executive not just another Department lead.

The Modern Day CMO

Dear Leaders,

By now you’ve felt it: the CMO role is no longer a “nice-to-have creative voice.” It’s a high‑stakes leadership seat at the intersection of growth, transformation, and risk.

It’s hard f-ing work! I have the scar tissue, I bet you do too.

You’re expected to behave like a Chief Growth Officer, think like a Chief Transformation Officer, and still carry the brand (yes capital B Brand) – all under sharper scrutiny and shorter timeframes than ever.

At the same time, your customer has more choice, less friction, and more tech helping them than they’ve ever had. You’re effectively presenting to your boardroom and then presenting products, SKUs and the brand to the customer board.

Any plan you bring forward has to stand up to both boards.

Most CMOs I speak to and work with are fighting on these 5 fronts simultaneously:

1. Boardroom & Financial Pressure - Proving incremental ROI, closing the CFO credibility gap, balancing short‑term performance and long‑term brand, doing more with flat budgets – all while holding the shortest tenure in the C‑suite.

2. AI & Technology Paradox - Avoiding AI‑driven brand sameness, moving from simple prompting to agentic AI, taming martech bloat, turning “do AI” hype into value, and managing governance, risk.

3. Data Privacy & Measurement - Navigating signal loss, building first‑party data infrastructure, staying ahead of regulation, making sense of omnichannel attribution, and breaking down data silos across Marketing, Product, Sales, and IT.

4. Talent & Org Design - Managing burnout, hiring and upskilling for creative + data‑literate + AI‑native skills, reducing friction with Sales and Product, maintaining culture in hybrid teams, and supporting employer branding.

5. Market Dynamics & Consumer Behaviour - Staying culturally relevant without tipping into “cringe” (or falling into the completely unhinged trap) reaching fragmented audiences while distribution channels are dying, rebuilding trust in an age of AI content, managing volatility, and standing out in crowded categories. While, watching out for those random popular TikTok’s about and abusing your brand.

None of these arrive one at a time and often all at once.
And yet, your job is to prioritise, simplify, and keep the business moving forward.

That’s Why I’m Writing to You

I’m not listing these to add weight to your shoulders.

You already feel it, on both shoulders.

I’m writing this because there is a way to move through the next 6 months that is structured, honest, and commercially grounded.
And that gives you space to lead, not just react.

My work with CMOs is typically coaching first, consulting second. Everyone needs help especially at the exec table, its challenging, lonely and every day feels like an episode of the Traitors…

I’m not here with another generic playbook you could download. I’m beside you, as you:

• Decide what genuinely matters in the next 90 days

• Shape the narrative for your board and CFO

• Protect your team while you change the engine
  

Today’s framework is super simple:

• Phase 1: Triage (Days 1–30) → stabilisation & alignment

• Phase 2: Efficiency (Days 31–90) → optimisation & integration

• Phase 3: Scale (Month 6)→ transformation & future‑proofing
  

Underneath that is one question:
Q: How do we stop the bleeding, earn credibility, and make room for real transformation – without burning you or your team out?

So here is a viable option to move forward with:

→Phase 1: Days 1–30: Triage, Trust, Guardrails

Focus: stop revenue leaks, secure the boardroom, and set AI guardrails.

• Quick Wins & Credibility - Cut or fix the bottom 20% of spend, reallocate, and walk into the next board meeting with a cleaner, simpler story. Trust comes from impact aka relationship building, results and becoming a force to reckon with.

• CFO Alignment - Agree a shared, simple definition of “Marketing success” this quarter in a joint and agreed language.

• Cultural & Capacity Check - Audit scheduled/automated content for risk, and run a quick capacity review to free your team from low‑value “busy work”. Kill the long slack and team threads - help drive deliberate focus and remove chat seen as doing work.

• AI Governance - Put a practical internal AI policy in place – enough to protect, not enough to paralyse. Then go and teach the org how you did it, how you use it and how they collaborate with it. (Here are 5 executive prompts to help you with AI)
  

→Phase 2: Days 31–90: Efficiency & Integration

Focus: fix the engine and align the org.

• Data & Tooling (to Day 60) - Understand your exposure to third‑party data loss, rebalance toward first‑party, simplify martech, and introduce a realistic attribution approach (you’re likely being pushed towards MMM or equivalent - do the deep research to understand the pros and cons - MMM looks great but rarely provides real insights for better work vs knowing what you already knew).

• Cross‑Functional Alignment (to Day 90) - Run a focused Sales + Marketing (or with Product) session to fix definitions, handoffs, and SLAs.

• AI Value Story - Deliver 1–2 AI pilots with real outcomes (time saved, cost down, revenue up) and a clear narrative the board can follow.

• AI Hackathon - Go that step further and co-create with your department and your peers. AI hackathons are as much about the working process and creating shared language and creating opportunities the business couldn’t sign off in an effort vs reward matrix and start to deliver with AI not just individuals using tools. Be the leader who shows progress and owns transformation

• Agentic Commerce - Not to push the AI train too hard but get across how you will work with agents and with agentic commerce.
  UCP is the new offering that will be changing your landscape.

• Brand & Performance Balance - Add a simple brand health measure alongside performance dashboards to change the conversation.
  Hint: Have analysis driven dashboard not just metrics - enable the business to understand and feel you understand and are addressing issues.
  

→Phase 3 – Month 6: Scale & Future‑Proofing

Focus: move from fixing to leading. By Month 6, we’re working on:

• Agentic AI Workflows – governed, repeatable AI processes that will become a collaborator and in some take routine work off your team’s plate

• First‑Party Data Activation – using your data to create more relevant, human experiences tied to revenue.

• Brand Soul in an AI World – create and practise a practical “Brand Soul” guide for humans and machines, so you don’t sound like everyone else and people connect deeply with your brand - here are a few more of my tips. Brand is a moat in 2026, but if you don’t have a brand customers know, like or love your competitors will win

• Talent & Skills Strategy – mapping the roles and capabilities you actually need next, and how to build or buy them.

• Sharper Category Positioning – answering “Why us, why now?” with six months of better insight behind you.
  

This is where the work shifts from crisis navigation to leadership development: how you show up, what you choose to say NO to (always be prepared to and confidently say NO), and how you build a team that can sustain the pace.

I Invite You!

If you recognise yourself in any of this, you don’t need more noise, decks, or unpersonalised templates.

You need:

• A clearer way to prioritise the next 90 days (as offered above)

• A sharper, calmer narrative for your leadership peers and board - clear, concise and critical communication wins the executive battle, don’t fall into the over explain, over communicate under deliver trap many CMOs fall into!

• A confidential place to test the decisions you already know you need to make

If one area feels most acute right now
(i) Boardroom, (ii) AI, (iii) Data, (iv)Talent, or (v) Market – reply with which one and I’ll happily chat (my email is danny @dannydenhard.com or DM me on LinkedIn) or point you to the most relevant previous newsletter or we will cover in upcoming issue of the newsletter.

Go grab that bull by the horns and drive your business forward! Your team, business and career will thank you!

» If you would like a doc to take away download the supporting deck here

Free Deck

Thank you for reading again today and have a great weekend!

Danny Denhard
⇒ I help coach, I work as a consultant & as a company advisor