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

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

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

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

Inspire Me Some More

Let’s dive in to today’s newsletter

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

Is Reddit Worth the Risk for Marketers/Brands?

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

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

The Case Against Reddit

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

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

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

The Case For Reddit

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Marketing Leaders Should Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helpful So Far? Hit Share ↙️

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How Should We Think About ChatGPT Ads?

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

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

Why ChatGPT Ads Feel Different

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Measurement Tension: Content vs Ads

Most marketing teams are stuck between two imperfect bets:

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

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

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

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

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

• Being cited is unpredictable and hard to reverse engineer.

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

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

Key Watch‑Outs Before You Spend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When ChatGPT Ads Belong On Your Roadmap

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

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

• Competing with incumbents who dominate brand and category terms.

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

Think of it as a balance:

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

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

What To Do Next:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Takeaways In Bullets:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks,

Danny Denhard

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

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

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

Now, onto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Value/Cost of AI Adoption

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

Looking For Goldilocks

So where the hell Is the sweet spot?

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

The 2035 Scorecard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody ever read them.
Nobody had the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Danny Denhard - Exec Coach / Consultant / Advisor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agentic Commerce

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pressure On More Full Funnel Activity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use Of Agents & Claws

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

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

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

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

Being informed might just be your competitive advantage…

Citation To Sales ~ Chat → Citation → Sale

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

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

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

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

Shift to Hyper Personalisation

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

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

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

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

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

Native Ad Platforms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So in H2/2H, expect to

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

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

• Improve the use of data + privacy/trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danny Denhard

Part 1 - Death of a Job

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It turns out, I couldn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2 / Birth of a Purpose

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

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

However one idea just refused to die.

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

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

• What I love (work edition)

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

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

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

• What the world needs (commercially leaning)

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

• What people will pay for (pragmatically leaning)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I like to be responsible for my own destiny.

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

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

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

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

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

Good Morning Leaders!

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

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

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

Share

MUST READS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MUST WATCH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MUST LISTEN

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

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

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

➕ Two Tools For You To Try

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

   https://search.audits.com/

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

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

Some of our recent must reads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter The Ferrari EV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came the genius stroke of audience deselection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Marketing Timeline

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

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

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

Ferrari deliberately stepped away from engaging them.

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

External Storytelling

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

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

Then Ferrari’s Storytelling

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

3. Viral Domination Through Clipping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Executive Framing and Institutional Shielding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What If Growth Isn’t Consensus?

Let’s challenge conventional marketing thinking.

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

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

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

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

Have a great end to your week.

Danny Denhard

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

Good Morning Leaders. Good week?

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

Recommended Steps To Protect You:

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

» Here is the free Google Doc guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking Up With The (Traffic) Dealer

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

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

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

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

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

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

650KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

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

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

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

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

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

Where will our value exchange be?

The AI IO

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

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

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

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

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

Google’s Big Bet For Alphabet

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

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

AI engines have

• search (human led and hybrid agentic),

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

• completed commerce.

Often blurring these lines to reduce friction.

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

Iteration Beats Innovation At Large Companies

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

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

A few factors we have to call out:

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

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

Bigger Paying Picture?

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

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

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

READ THE RECOMMENDATIONS

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

Danny

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

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

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

Thanks for reading today and enjoy your long weekends,

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give it two, and it might sound normal.

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

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

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

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

Yep, I Got It Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

That the establishment was perceived to be mocking ordinary people.

The Economics of Anger (Which Are Actually Quite Simple)

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

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

For many British people, things are a bit shit.

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

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

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

Immigration.

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

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

The Pipeline Nobody Wants to Talk About

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Marketing Approach

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

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

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

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

‘Illegal immigrants’ replaced ‘asylum seekers’ - not by design, not by accident, but because one phrase invokes sympathy whilst the other demands punishment.

‘Two-tier policing’ became a rallying cry overnight, seeded through social and trad media and amplified through the mainstream press until it felt like accepted wisdom.

‘Free speech’ was rebranded as a right-wing cause, so any attempt to moderate hate speech (no matter how backhandedly delivered) could be painted as censorship.

This is all textbook power comms, in which those who control the story control the debate – and the outcome.

Then there’s the high volume/ low quality (sorry ‘authentic’) video content machine the Far Right deploys with aplomb.

Short, emotionally charged video clip such as: -

A confrontation on a high street, a court ruling, a crime involving a person of colour - allstripped of context and distributed across X, TikTok, Telegram, Truth Social and FB simultaneously with a legion of loyalists and bot farmers ready and waiting to pour meths of outrage on the ensuing flames.

The influencer layer is where it gets really interesting. A new generation of political commentators, some unashamedly partisan, building audiences of Millions on socials and a new crop of pseudo political, socially sympathetic podcasts.

These commentators act as a highly functional bridge between the aggressive fringe and the more acceptable middle. Someone who would never watch a ‘Britain First’ snippet will happily listen to an hour-long pod debate that claims to independently interrogate the immigration issue from both sides.

Giving credit where it’s due, they’re extremely good at this bit, and it’s scarily effective.

Marketing Effectively On All Fronts

Of course, social algorithms don’t care either way. They care about your eyeballs, attention and wallets. Anger, outrage, confrontation and disgust are some of the most attention-amplifying emotions going.

The mainstream media needs to be credited, too. Front pages of all colours have treated small boat crossings as an existential threat to British civilisation, like they’re an Armada threatening to eviscerate our national plums and surgically orphan us from everything we hold dear.

Like the drip drip drip of soft social news feeding, newspapers serve as a daily conditioner that makes the language and logic of the hard Right feel less like hate induced nonsense, and more like a brand of common sense shared by everyone except you.

As with the social algos, outrage sells papers, and papers sell ads, whilst FOMO and fear retain subscribers. The economics of attention and the economics of radicalisation are as interconnected as twins in the womb.

Now Just Add A Pinch Of AI to That…

Political parties theoretically operate under a set of quite stringent rules around what they can say and how they can say it, guided by spending caps, advertising standards and Electoral Commission oversight.

The Parties themselves are, supposedly, accountable while their social media output can be traced, challenged and reported on. ‘Follow the rules or be damned’ is the message, which has been heard and ignored by pretty much every party across the British political spectrum. The Right is just better at this ignorance.

AI has driven into this lazy domain like a Deliveroo driver at a Weightwatchers party, causing unstoppable and immeasurable havoc. Deepfake videos of politicians saying things they never said, AI-generated voters posting believable but bullshit testimony about made up data linking immigration to crime and fabricated local news site networks optimised for AI SEO reporting on communities that don’t have a functioning local paper anymore.

They all push a consistent and effective ideological line while looking indistinguishable from legitimate journalism.

Thanks to AI, all of this is cheap to produce and immediate to distribute, meaning the first snippet of a story many will hear (and the key sentiment they’ll trust) will be owned by the originator.

Beyond the Right-Wing minions, influencers, Podcasters and comms professionals, the political parties themselves are learning too, using AI to micro-target and A/B test political messaging at scale.

They can identify the emotional triggers of specific voter segments at a postcode level of granularity in near real time and serve them content calibrated to move them into favourable directions, both emotionally and politically.

Welcome to Digital Marcoms – The Dystopian Version.

The real skill in is how effortless it all looks and feels to us liberal cynics and the middle ground target audiences alike.

We feel safe in our mockery bubbles, whilst the moderate voters feel like they’re being listened to, for once, rather than coerced or worse - ignored.

Instead, they feel like they’re being educated – let in on some secret knowledge vault, the combination being their own research, asking the right questions and discovering the truths that mainstream media can’t or won’t give them.

This is what I meant in my LinkedIn comment, and what the reply illustrated so succinctly: -

It’s The Hope That Destroys You

Ten years ago, Nigel Farage was nothing more than a pinstripe-wearing pub bore - a pint swilling, chain smoking, grandstanding fartbox spewing Capitalist idealism and sniggering racist suggestion and dressing it up like the acceptable Pret sandwich of politics.

People like me dismissed him as a joke – another nail in the Right side of the coffin.

People like the everyman voter felt the winds were changing and, in secret, they finally had an oracle - a Pied Piper of Pragmatism who honed his craft (i.e. not letting the truth get in the way of a powerful message) from the king of the method, Donald Trump.

I was wrong – and they were right.

Today, Farage leads a British political party which supersedes the Conservatives and is causing Labour serious headaches. Meanwhile, parties to his right act as his political pathfinders, shielding by his public persona whilst gaining real traction through more underground means.

How did these outliers get their social and political profile? Casual racism is a content genre with millions of followers, whilst misogyny, rebranded as ‘masculinity’, is being force-fed to teenage boys via Manosphere accounts on YouTube and TikTok like a daily intravenous Red Bull shot of hope.

Give it two more years on the current trajectory, and what looks like edgy and unpleasant ‘fringe’ behaviour today will feel like the warm cozy glow of the centre tomorrow.

Trust me – this is how it works, and why they’re doing it.

So What the Hell Do We Do?

See, here’s the problem – my problem. I’m doing it again. I’m sliding into a one-sided litany, looking down from my high horse, sneering at the behaviours and beliefs of others and the motives behind them. I can’t fix the problem because…

I AM THE PROBLEM.

…or at least part of it. It’s a me problem before it’s a they problem. And that, in itself, is a problem.

They don’t think what I think. But what they believe and what I believe is a totally different - and much more salient - question.

I need to understand what the moderate middle believes before they stroll towards the warmer, more accepting voting booth of the Right and, crucially, I need to understand why they believe it.

Maybe, with patience, understanding and a significant ego extraction on my part, the divide that I (and others like me) have manifested will pull together towards a more pragmatic and functional distance.

Get closer, and there’s a chance we may engage in a more progressive and positive discussion that could (and those italics are doing some serious heavy lifting here) improve the direction Great Britain is moving in.

Genuinely. Not as an exercise in tolerance or intellectual hubris, but as a necessity for our country.
Our friends.
Our neighbours.
Our children.
Us.

That challenge starts with me.

This week we have Harry back tackling how you are dealing with LLMs and AI vs running away from it.

Last week I shared my time travelling experience and brought you ways to plan for H2 and this time next year:

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend and we will see you again towards the end of next week.

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

In the AI Arms Race, Are You A Bazooka Or A BB Gun? As LLMs and AI tools improve daily, burying your head is not an option

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You Wouldn’t Hit Yourself Over The Head With A Hammer. Nor would you leave it on the table and expect it to build an Ikea chest of draws while you sip a Latte on the sofa. LLMs are tools, and as with any tool, they’re useless without human intervention.

This is true for now - General AI might have a word to say about the premise when it arrives like an alien species and decides, rightfully, that the solution to all Earth’s woes is to exterminate its most pervasive parasite, namely us.

Earlier this week I ran a poll on LinkedIn with a simple question: -

What’s your competency level using AI for work?

The scoring criteria were relatively straightforward:-

0-2 - I’ve tried AI tools a handful of times but don’t use them as part of my regular workflow.

3-5 - I use AI tools regularly for specific tasks but still rely heavily on trial and error to get useful outputs.

6-8 - I prompt deliberately, iterate efficiently, have used agents with purpose and AI meaningfully accelerates my output quality or speed.

9-10 - AI and agents are deeply embedded in how I work and my results would be noticeably worse without it.

The results from 70 responses were interesting - 51% scored themselves 6-8 and only 8% claimed they’d yet to hop on the AI party bus.

However the survey results come with a couple of significant caveats:-

First, my network leans towards my own contemporaries, namely vintage (OK, older) marketing, iGaming, Web3 and technology professionals.

Second, I shared the survey with my friends in the CMO Circle Community which comprises 563 senior marketing professionals.

Just take a glance at the current state of the marketing industry and it’s no surprise that this community has been upskilling like a Victorian blacksmith the day after the first train chugged past his yard.

The results were kind of what I expected, with most senior professionals using it daily, intentionally, and with something to show for it but with a relatively significant 33% cohort either starting their journey or only dipping in occasionally. I regularly come across peers who treat AI at work with the same energy as a kid being forced to try broccoli ‘because it’s good for you’.

There’s a gap forming, and it’s widening daily.

The Illusion of Adoption

Here is what ‘learning AI’ from the ground up tends to look like in practice. Someone asks ChatGPT to write them an email. They get something that sounds like a BS corporate press release from 2011, so they tweak it heavily, and conclude that AI is either useful but limited, or significantly overhyped. They’ve used AI in the literal sense, but they haven’t even begun to understand what it’s capable of. This is surface-level adoption, and it’s commonplace (33% according to my straw poll)

McKinsey’s 2024 Global Survey found that while 65% of organisations now report using generative AI in at least one business function, the overwhelming majority are using it for narrow, low-complexity tasks. Drafting copy, summarising documents, basic Q&A that might be better achieved through Google. In some respects this low voltage level of AI use is like buying a Ferrari and only using it to drive to Lidl.

On the other hand, a 2023 MIT study found that workers who used AI effectively completed tasks 40% faster and produced outputs rated significantly higher in quality by independent evaluators. The only difference between the two groups being their understanding of tool usage and capability, and that capability is stretching every single month.

As Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, put it in what’s now known as a cliche of the species:-

“AI is not going to take your job. Someone using AI is going to take your job.”

Personally, I would take a more nuanced view - someone using AI better than you will ALWAYS beat you in an interview process.

Who’s racing ahead, and who’s burying their head?

The finance sector is one of the most advanced adopters, though the gains seem to be more concentrated among upper tier employees. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs have built proprietary AI models for data analysis, compliance and portfolio management. At the analyst level, many are still using AI the way a student uses it the night before a deadline. PwC’s 2024 AI Jobs Barometer found that tasks equivalent to 28% of the working week in financial services are now theoretically automatable.

Marketing has perhaps the highest volume of casual AI usage and despite what my survey suggests, marketers have some of the lowest scores in quality of application. Few have built any kind of structured workflow. As someone who has spent 25 years in this industry, I find it genuinely frightening how complacent our industry is. Content that once took a day now takes an hour. I built a credible website and GTM plan on a one hour train journey.

The marketers who do not adapt might not be fired, but they will become visibly, quantifiably less valuable and employable than the ones who do.

Legal is a fascinating case study in institutional resistance meeting an unstoppable force. The legal profession has always been conservative about new tools, and understandably so, but the dam is breaking. AI-powered platforms like Harvey and Luminance are now used by some of the world’s largest law firms. Research suggests AI can review contracts in minutes that would take junior lawyers hours, with comparable accuracy.

The concern about AI hallucinating case law is legitimate and worth taking seriously, but it’s a training problem - there’s a day coming not very far into the future when it will be human-level in quality and accuracy, so pretending imprecision protects against redundancy is simple, old fashioned apathy and is a high risk, low reward strategy.

HR has perhaps the highest untapped opportunity and the lowest meaningful adoption. Recruitment, onboarding, performance documentation, compliance training, policy drafting: virtually every high-volume HR task is a natural AI application and just look at Jack & Jill, the AI recruitment platform:- one day one in early 2025 it was clever but a bit shit and now, having raised $20 mil at a $600m valuation it has a serious (and seriously impressed) client roster.

Operations is where the real money is. Process optimisation, logistics, predictive maintenance, supply chain analysis: high-complexity, high-reward applications that go far beyond what a single prompt can achieve. However at the team leader and project coordinator level, AI literacy is often non-existent, especially in older, more traditional organisations.

Product sits at an interesting intersection. Product managers are broadly more tech-adjacent and quicker to experiment (validated by my recent experiences with a Product Director who is clearly level 10+ with an army of agents pulling all his workflows together seamlessly). Using AI to synthesise customer research, identify customer needs in qualitative data and stress-test hypotheses is an awesome product strategy, yet many product teams are lagging behind.

Sales is where the divide is starkest. Salesforce’s 2024 ‘State of Sales’ report found that high-performing sales reps are 3.5 times more likely to use AI tools than their underperforming counterparts. Not marginally more likely - three and a half times more likely. If you’re in sales and are not building your AI skills daily, you may as well explore a career selling encyclopedias door to door.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 85 million roles may be displaced by AI and automation by 2030, while 97 million new roles will emerge better suited to a world where humans and machines divide the labour rationally.

What Using AI Well Looks Like

It’s absolutely not about being an expert in every tool - that would be a frickin’ nightmare, not to mention absurdly time consuming. New ones appear every 11 minutes or so, so instead of getting lost in that minefield of malevolent tech, you’re better off understanding base theory and learning what you need to know to excel in your specific role:-.

• Learn how to structure a problem so that AI augments your judgement rather than replaces it.

• Learn how to prompt effectively - get it to question you back (this works brilliantly).

• Learn how to build systems rather than one-off queries.

• Learn how to interrogate answers rather than picking the first result off the shelf like a discount packet of Hobnobs.

What’s Next?

If this is starting to feel like a reflection of you in the ‘casual user’ mirror, someone who’s dabbled but not built anything structured nor significantly useful, that’s excellent - you have foundations and enthusiasm and just need to turn your AI learning volume up a couple of notches. I’d suggest speaking to the likes of Oren Greenberg (who joined us on MU last year) to expand your skills and stay up to date with the latest AI tools capabilities.

If you’ve not started at all, I want to tell you something plainly so there’s no equivocation: the gap between ‘you’ and ‘useful’ is smaller than you think, and the cost of waiting is bigger than you can imagine. If you want to take your AI skills from zero to one, I’ve heard good things about The Oxford AI School.

Whether you think you’re level 1 or level 8, your competitor businesses (as well as those pesky 500+ candidates vying for that job you want so much) are not sitting on their hands, hoping this will all blow over like some weird dystopian dream.

Harry Lang is the CMO at Somnia, a leading Blockchain and author of the 5 Star rated marketing guidebook ‘Brands, Bandwagons & Bullshit,’ available on Amazon. You can connect with Harry on LinkedIn

We had a great response to John’s AI take last week. If you missed it, enjoy it below.

This week I picked up my crystal ball and offer a journal entry from a CMO and the challenges we are going to face.

» You can always let us know what you think by hitting reply (or emailing mu@dannydenhard.com) to lets us know directly or leaving a comment

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The CMO’s 2027 Nightmare:
When Agentic Teams Break and No One Cares

By Danny Denhard - Connect With Me On LinkedIn

27th April 2027

Today was a rough day.

Paul handed in his notice, his agentic team can’t keep up.

His team and their agents can’t do it anymore.

The site keeps going down and the Product team won’t help.

The API stays up. So everyone seems ok??

The rushed TikTok video with 20% discount code went viral (thanks Reddit).

We’ve had record API calls and TikTok shop sales.

We would have had record traffic but the bots took us down again. No-one seems to care.

The agent team went rogue and replied to numerous comments and caused another huge s-storm with legal. Our General Counsel wants heads or bots to roll but again the rest of leadership team just don’t care and happily point the finger to the revenue dashboard in green.

I asked the HR agents about what to do and how to handle all of this - to protect the team and it said there wasn’t a plan and needed to book into the remote HR company and it would be 5 days for an appointment.

It then reminded me of the company goals and I had to deliver on 2.5:1 ROI and we missed our revenue target by 12% last quarter.

Not to mention, it also reminded me of the headcount replacement policy - every headcount replacement needed a business case to be submitted. I’m all for HR agents to have performance in mind but this just ignores our people first value we all agreed on 2 weeks ago!

The CPO and CTO both refused my quick call request and SOS message on slack. I received automated agents saying when they’re available, in 3 days time!
3 DAYS!

My EA agent automatically booked the meeting and without waiting outside their next meeting together they’re not going to prioritise. Are they ever going to take this seriously? Or they are too high on their own supply.

The CEO told me to cheer up on our 1-2-1, “be happy I’m near target already”, but he never gets why the API being up but the site being down is an issue in 2027 and why the site downtime is causing long term brand issues.

Brand will be a massive issue if the APIs go down and performance drops after customers realise our product is just about good enough.

The COO and CRO are demanding performance, they don’t see the website as important since the recent agentic wins, but we are a consumer brand and our website is our home and hub.

When I asked my peer group on WhatsApp, they all said they’re experiencing the same sort of thing, how has it come to this?
LinkedIn is equally a negative read.

My exec coach told me this is where you need to step out and create critical distance, not step up or step in like I always do, I can’t save the day or the week when i’m too close to the action. Create critical distance!
He is right, I should do this.

Action? I need to revisit these 3 things:

1. My mental health, this isn’t helping me, my apple watch is telling me i’m at a dangerous stress level again

2. Time for me - a walk, a long lunch, a weekend without hundreds of slack pings and emails about the issues I raised and no-one else would fix

3. My org design and how AI is helping or hindering it, for everything the agents and claws have done well it’s done much badly or made my team so stressed and unhappy they’re all looking for an exit.

I can do this can’t I?

For the rest of this year and next, we are going to be full of challenging events, from new issues like agentic commerce, new agent and claw team members, humans battling with agreed company values and leadership teams fighting on if websites and social are important etc.

The truth is without working through the issues, mapping out scenario planning and creating plans (with backup plans) it could feel like an accelerated nightmare. If you don’t have a planning session booked in - I strongly recommend you create a session and lead from the front.

Help Is At Hand

I previously created an org design newsletter back in June and October last year, here are the slides with exercises you can move forward with - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1013vJLFdMg_qRyfJwprVnTfo1wQ6Rfa4t7bMphptIOk/edit?_bhlid=2eb0c6559ad174e72f28908b52356f7e8671fcb1&slide=id.p1#slide=id.p1

Here are a few ways you can be inspired and run an exercise to plan and re-shape your department moving forward:

Long Form Interview To Help

I interviewed Dr Kelly Monahan on preparing and building AI & helping to shape strong and flexible culture (watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Pocketcasts)

If you would like more future planning assistance, we have a 79 other posts full of helpful resources, here are 4 I hand selected to help you prepare for the above issues and build for the future:

1. The next era of Marketing Teams and org design

2. The modern day CMO and what it’s going to take

3. The resilience guide

4. Brand mini masterclass

Thanks for reading again today and have a great end to your week!

Danny Denhard

If you missed last week’s article, here is my flexible framework for how to guide your brand forward.

This week we have the Mr John Lyons returning to MU, breaking down why AI is your research partner not a content machine.

Have a great weekend and we will see you this time next week.

The Wrong Starting Point

By John Lyons, Fractional CMO

Most marketers are using AI to generate output.

Blog posts, social copy, email sequences, ad creative. The tool does the work, you do the publishing, everybody looks busy.

The problem isn’t the tool. It’s the brief. Or more to the point, the complete lack of a brief.

Why? Because LLMs are predictive.

They don’t know what good looks like - in your category, for your brand, for your market. And based on the mediocre chocolate box art and video clips the tech bros swoon over, it doesn’t know what good creative looks like in any way.

They know, solely based on everything they’ve ever been fed, what’s most likely to be the case.

And here’s the bit that should make you uncomfortable as a marketer. They’ve been fed a lot of marketing content, and most of it’s total shit.

Gary Vee. Simon Sinek. Neil Patel. Scott Galloway.

All of them have been scraped, indexed, and weighted by the same models you’re relying on to do your marketing thinking for you. And of course those big, but completely misguided, voices have been echoed by their acolytes to give them and their thoughts undue authority so they’re going to be picked up as fodder by your LLM over marketers whose success has been based on knowledge and training rather than their ability to self-promote.

So, if you don’t tell your LLM what good looks like before you ask it to do anything, it’ll average everything it knows. Which means it might hand you survivorship bias dressed up as strategy.

Shit in, Shit out. Just faster. If you’re cool with diarrhoea, sweet.

The Underlying Principle

Marketing is about the market.

Not the marketer, not the brand team, not the founder who built the product and knows it inside out.

The market. The people who will or won’t give you their money, depending on whether they can see their problem being solved by whatever you are selling.

This is where AI can actually be useful, if you use it properly. Not to generate content you couldn’t be bothered to write, but to get closer to how real people think about a category, a problem, a purchase.

That’s a research job. And it turns out LLMs are bloody good at it, provided you set them up correctly and treat their output with a degree of scepticism.

The distinction matters. AI as a content vending machine is commercially dubious. AI as a research tool with a trained eye over the output is genuinely valuable.

Start With Principles, Not Prompts

Before I built HatGPT, my custom research tool, I did something most people skip entirely. I sat down and wrote out my principles of marketing. What good looks like. How I actually think about product market fit, category entry points, ICP definition, messaging. Not a list of tactics. A set of instructions about how marketing really works.

Then I used AI to help me stress-test and structure it. I asked it to tell me its assumptions, its priorities, where it had gaps. I asked it to interview me, essentially, so I could respond to questions rather than build from scratch. That process surfaces the biases the model has picked up, and gives you the chance to correct them before they contaminate everything downstream.

My first prompt in building HatGPT.

This step is the one people too often skip. They open ChatGPT, type a prompt, and wonder why the output feels generic. It’s generic because you haven’t told it anything about how you think. You’re getting the average of the internet instead of a tool trained on your actual approach.

If you want it to think like a trained marketer, you have to tell it what that means.

Where To Get The Truth From

Once you’ve got the principles in place, the next question is where the tool goes for its information. This is the bit that makes the biggest practical difference.

The instinct is to point the AI at the brand’s website and ask it to work out who the customer is. Don’t do that. The website tells you what the brand thinks about itself and who their customer is.

That’s not the same thing as what the market actually needs.

Instead, move away from the category label and look at the problems that drive people into the category in the first place.

If you’re working with a B2B print supplier, nobody wakes up thinking “I need B2B print services.” They think “we need a brochure for the trade show” or “our letterheads look embarrassing.”

Those are the category entry points. That’s where you find the real language.

Step 1 from the ICP voice research framework knowledge file, identify relevant conversations.

HatGPT is set up to go to Reddit, Quora, trade forums, and industry discussion boards, and find the most repeated questions and topics around the problem the product solves. Not what the brand says it solves. What real people are actually talking about and asking about, in their own words.

That gives you something useful, a basis for synthetic research grounded in real data, not in what the AI guesses the customer might be like.

What people are really asking about Zoho CRM’s category.

Synthetic Research, Done Properly

From that foundation, you can build synthetic ICP characters trained on what real people are saying. You can use those characters to interrogate messaging alignment, test pricing assumptions, assess product market fit, and review how a brand is positioned against the needs it claims to solve.

The ICP profile created by HatGPT to interrogate.

There are tools being built specifically for this.

Evidenza, founded by the people behind the LinkedIn B2B Institute, is set up as a synthetic way of doing brand tracking surveys and category buyer surveys. It’s a serious attempt to solve a real problem, and the underlying thinking is sound.

For me though, the limitation is inherent to how LLMs work.

They run to the middle. They pull out the average, the most likely, the statistically representative response.

For quantitative brand tracking, that might be directionally useful, and of course it’s a fraction of the cost of a proper panel. But if you want the scruffy edges, the outlier behaviour, the thing that doesn’t fit the pattern and turns out to be your most interesting insight, synthetic research won’t reliably give you that.

That said, the margins are closing. The speed is incomparable, and the cost is minimal.

Depending on budget and timeline, there’s a strong case for using synthetic research as a first pass, or as a directional check before committing to full research spend.

But I use it for qual.

I use it to ask questions, review messaging, test pricing structures, and assess product market fit. For quant, with statistical confidence at the edges, you still need the real thing.

The HAHAH Model

The other thing that changed how I work with AI was learning about what John Bennett calls the HAHAH model in his book Don’t Surrender Your Thinking. It sounds like something a motivational speaker would put on a slide, and John is certainly a motivator, but the underlying logic is right.

Human input. AI output. Human review. AI revision. Human Acceptance.

My first input is always to tell it in as much detail as possible what I want to achieve and why, and ask it to tell me how it would go about creating an instruction block for a custom GPT, what assumptions it would make, what priorities it would work to, what external data or knowledge it needs and to ask me any questions which would help improve the process.

That way, you are not only getting the best out of the AI, you are getting it to tell you how it intends to work. Which means you know in advance the areas where you need to top-load correct thinking.

The Human review and AI revision part iterates as many times as you need until the output is genuinely acceptable.

It’s collaboration, not instruction. You’re not typing a prompt and publishing whatever comes back. You’re running a feedback loop, correcting the model’s assumptions each time, pushing it closer to what you actually want.

The HAHAH method, as created by AI. And yes, it took several iterations to be not shit.

HatGPT went through that iteration process many times when I first built it, and it still does.

The instructions get refined. The knowledge base gets updated. The output gets better. That’s not a bug in how AI works, it’s the feature. If you treat it as a one-shot tool, you’ll get one-shot results.

What You Actually Get At The End

HatGPT takes a URL. It summarises what the business does, identifies the apparent ICP from the site, trains itself on what that ICP’s needs actually are based on real forum and community data, builds one or two synthetic characters, and interrogates them to assess product market fit. Then it produces a score, with a clear steer on where the gaps are.

HatGPT ready to be put to work.

The reason product market fit is the output, rather than a content calendar or a brand audit, is deliberate.

It’s a concept that founders and tech businesses connect with immediately. They know their product. They’re usually far less clear on whether the market can actually see their problems being solved. The answer, most of the time, is that it can’t. Not clearly enough, anyway.

That gap is what good marketing closes. Not with more content. With clearer thinking about what the market needs and whether the brand is positioned to meet it.

The TL,DR Version

AI is incredibly useful when you treat it as a junior researcher who needs a proper brief, a clear set of principles to work from, and a trained eye over the output before anything goes anywhere near a client or a channel.

It’s commercially useless when you treat it as a content vending machine. Which, unfortunately, is how most people are using it right now.

Give it better instructions. Point it at better sources. Use it for research, not production. Iterate properly. Then decide what to do with what it finds.

That’s it. The rest is just prompting.

If you want to take HatGPT for a run, you can find it at www.hatgpt.co.uk

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Harry’s Vegas revelation last week caused as much surprise as his recommendation to explore prediction markets as a customer feedback and forecasting tool. Thanks to everyone who hit reply and commented over on our LinkedIn.

This week I’m tackling the reshaping of “Brand’ after the over influence of channels and platforms over the last ten years. I offer flexibility within a framework (my favourite way of approaching any problem), with a new brand quadrant x chess board to shape where you place yourself, how your Brand can move and offer some flexibility.

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Stop Playing Brand Checkers: Use the Brand Chessboard To Regain Control

I have been part of a number of conversations where companies felt like they had lost their Brand… and there isn’t a system or framework that helps them.

I believe this debate is not happening enough, and we have to ask how we actively reshape brand. The recent era shifts include (i) SEO (ii) Social Media (iii) COVID (iv) short form video and then for the current era… AI.

The problem is often: how do we guide the team on where brand starts and stops, where it ends, and where it does not play?

The shape of brand has changed; it’s ballooned for most, shape-shifting constantly and becoming deformed from the different external influences, from social media channels, to platform dominance, to how new forces in brand like:

• Events - including connecting Marketing activities to new calendar events and news events and trend chasing

• Politics - commenting and marketing around political decisions, new presidents, and laws that have been passed
  and

• Culture - where cultural changes and subcultures have come to the forefront

These have become ‘zones’ many companies have ventured into to gain relevance and brand resonance with potential customers, and it has led many to lose their identity

You (Likely) Think You Are Bigger And More Flexible Than You Are

Here (gif below) is how and where many brands believe they operate: big, wide-reaching and important. This is often misleading and dangerous internally.

I have been working on ways to rethink and centralise how we bring it back to help guide business leaders and colleagues.

Introducing The New Brand Quadrant → The Brand Chess Board Approach To Reshaping Brand

The chess board is a way to demonstrate simply the important factors at play and how to think about where your home square is and if/how you can move squares.

The Colour System: The chess board has a simple colour scheme:
- Red for extreme positions (not squares many companies would want to place in without specific purposes or positioning, or would choose to move to),
- Orange squares are hot or hard to play in
- Yellow for squares that can lead to issues,
- Green are traditionally safer squares.
- Blue is often seen as a positive or safe square, depending on how you are dragged into specific debates.

The brand chess board is a way to place yourself across the 4 axis that impact and attract customers and opinion on our Brand(s).

Guardrails: You can then say where you can naturally play and the moves you can make - helping to guide the company and the customers while building out the right guardrails.

Examples:

• If you are tech-forward or a truly innovative company pushing the limits, you will want to be high in C

• If you are a brand that connects to culture and drive culture you will see yourself in C4 and C5

• If you are a brand that has allowed politics to overly influence where you play, you could move from B3 towards C3.

Where Do You Place Your Brand?

The first question would be where do you place your own brand today?

I stress tested the chess board, Gemini and I created a list of brands and placed them across the board in the relevant square.

There are some patterns:

• The large and listed businesses will place into the middle zone (C2 & C3), where they are seen and operate as visionaries and have some flex to move squares from time to time - time to time they are dragged into other squares by their decisions or content

• Content platforms are shaped by the content and its perceived meaning, often dragging them into the politics zone and influencing how they market and promote their services to different creators and audiences.

• The “anti” brands lean heavily into politics, from Rumble (the video platform for conservative and far-right leaning creators and audience) and the rebellious brand that is Brewdog (lets see what happens to their square post sale). This is not right or wrong, it is where you have selected to operate in and likely helping you to win albeit with constant questions and charged conversations for your placement and product decisions

• Culture shifting and culture influencing brands like OF are on their own square, the way they have reimagined their industry and became a platform for what their CFO smartly calls “small business owners” is powerful and unique - OF is likely the only brand that could easily move towards events and politics and not be harmed.. (their creators can expand and shift away from their adult core, and as a platform they will be uniquely safe)

• Visionary companies like Chinese company BYD, NVIDIA’s with their thoughtful and industry leading investments in chips and AI and Space X have placed them into the highest vision square. These brands MO is to stay there and drive the industry forward, slipping back or trying to move towards events or culture will likely negatively impact them.
  These brands are often brought into political debate because of their tech and the connected power but aren’t placing themselves there.

• Red Bull is another stand out, their brand is connected to their own big events but also shaped by how they show up in sports, particularly in their ownership & sponsorship of sports teams: 7 football teams ownership (or majority ownership), 5 motorsports teams, 2 ice hockey teams, and investments and deep sponsorship in cycling, Paris FC, Leeds United FC, sailing, skate and surf teams.

The New Moves In Brand Reshaping

If you have moved to be shaped too heavily by events and trending topics you can move from D3 and move to C3 in a fairly flexible way.

If you are a brand that has allowed politics to overly influence where you place you could move from B3 and move towards C3.

Brands Disjointed By Their Marketing Efforts

Many brands allowed channels and platforms to confuse where their brands moved to, one move is (usually) fairly trivial and has flex in it for most but moving two moves on the board can be a real challenge or feel like a huge leap often going against brand momentum.

Move On Up? If you are in C3 and feel like you need to move to C1 that is a difficult move but an aspirational move. This will often be a long deliberate process.

Shift To Political Leaning? Moving from C3 and wanting to become politically driven that is a really hard move and something you will likely struggle to come back from if there are any issues.

Caution: Brands shouldn’t try to move more than two moves in any direction, those that do struggle with their identity and can hinder how customers think and feel about you, while internal team members will question motives and confuse future campaigns and projects.

This week Duolingo’s CMO said they are stepping away from unhinged marketing and going back to creator army’s and concentrating on “Reddit, WhatsApp, and good-old-fashioned blogging” - lets see which square they land themselves in…

External Warnings

It is important to note that outside influences can be truly impactful, with customer sentiment and now non customer videos causing huge backlash and moving you into squares you will not want to be seen as operating in. This is where your leadership and guidance makes all the difference.

Comms Issues & Challenges: YouTube, Disney, Amazon and Starbucks have all been pulled into political issues with how their content is being framed, CEOs miscommunicating their perspectives, managing internal incentives via press interviews and using politically charged statements all influence how your brand is shaped and placed.

Always Be Testing: Something you will want to push is testing, on where you sit and where you want to play - guided by how many squares away you are from where you want to test and play. Pushing out political statements can alienate, leaning into cultural debates will put you in the crosshairs and connecting to large events you have never been connected to before will create questions.

Test away but know too many square shifts will have a knock on effect.

I CHALLENGE YOU!

The real challenge I want you to undertake is asking your exec team, your social team, brand team, agencies and if you are brave enough customers on where do they place your brand on the chess board?

I have run this a few of times recently and it is truly enlightening.

I bet the answers do not align and very often it will enrage & then engage many important colleagues into a good structured debate.

So which square do you place your brand in?

Where do you think your colleagues will place you?
And how will you bring everyone back to the same squares and the moves you can make?

Still struggling with this and want to chat through? Drop me a email here or just hit reply.

↗ Share: You can hit forward to share with your team or copy and paste https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/78 and share in Teams or Slack for the team to complete the challenge.

FYI: This was part of a much larger deep dive into brand shaping and the evolution of brand, including how CEOs act as brand extensions and new storytelling brands are constantly reshaping how their brand shows up - often not in a good or positive way.

If you would like a run through of this deck, hit reply or the ❤️ button and I will record as a presentation run through.

Thanks for reading again today. Go well and have a great end to your week. We will land in your inbox again next Friday!

Danny Denhard

Have you seen the explosion of interest in the Prediction Markets the last six months or so? Some suggesting its just betting rebranded, some suggesting its just insider trading and others suggesting its the sanest way to gain true insights from interested parties.

Harry delivers another brilliant post on why his trip to Sin City to the Prediction Markets conference will be the start of how Marketers could leverage the platforms and gain real customer insights.

If you missed any of the last two week’s posts definitely check out Simon’s piece on change agents and my New Balance marketing playbook reverse engineered.

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

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What Happens In Vegas Affects You All…Why Sin City Will Help Predict The Future Of Everything

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Next week, I’m flying to Las Vegas for the first time and those who know me might find that a little surprising.

“But Harry, didn’t you spend seventeen years working in online gambling? And didn’t you used to love a late-night party before your need for a decent night’s sleep overtook your desire to see every sunrise? How on earth did you never go to Vegas?!”

Fair points both of them but the fact is, Vegas never appealed to me.

I always viewed it as an artificial sandbox, a skin-deep pretence at fun that had the cultural depth of Pot Noodle and was actually a repository for the worst of human behaviours (see also the new cultural vacuum champion: - Dubai).

Added to that I worked in gambling, so if I ever did go, I wanted my Vegas story to be 10X the crazy/ hilarious/ unusual that everyone else came back with.

I’ll tell you how little I wanted to go to Vegas: -

In around 2010, I went to L.A. to do some skydiving. I popped down to San Diego for a night to stay with some friends, one of whom, Brad, is a photographer. While he left the next day for an assignment in Vegas, I went surfing, only to get a call from Brad late afternoon: -

“You wanna come and be my assistant tonight?”

“Who are you shooting?”

“I’m backstage, At Alice Cooper”.

I still didn’t go and yes, I still regret that myopic decision.

So now, over fifteen years later, I’m off to Vegas for a prediction market conference, flying via Denver for reasons I can only assume relate to jet fuel prices and the Strait of Hormuz.

For those of you of a non-gambling disposition, prediction markets are on-chain betting markets in which people back the outcomes of binary events. Any binary event, in fact, and it’s popular stuff.

Between them, The Wall Street Journal estimates the two market leaders, Polymarket and Kalshi, are worth around $40 billion.

The thing is, this eye watering amount isn’t the most interesting thing about prediction markets – it’s their ability to read the future.

The sheer volume of data they’re able to accrue across geo-politics, sports, financial trading and crypto means their output is a scarily accurate reflection of what’s most likely to happen next.

As a result, Prediction Markets are making financial analysts obsolete.

Prediction markets are often seen by those outside Web3 as just another medium for gambling.

A new technology monetising the second oldest pastime on earth, but that view ignores a significantly more impactful use case.

Kalshi (the second biggest PM after PolyMarket) recently signed a deal with Fox News to share its ​prediction data which is now incorporated into numerous ​FOX News channels. According to Reuters, it will “...provide forecasts linked to ​political, economic, weather and cultural events”.

Kalshi said ​around ⁠70% of its visitors use the platform to view forecasts rather ⁠than ​for trading (betting), flagging a growing ​demand for crowd-sourced probability data as a reliable information medium.

In January, PolyMarket signed a similar deal with Dow Jones having received a $2 Billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) that valued it at over $9 billion. Data feeds from Polymarket are now being used to create the algorithms that influence trading in the global Brent crude futures market (the very same market that has me detouring via middle America next week).

The most important exchange for trading of Brent crude futures? Yep, that’ll be ICE, which rapidly launched a trading tool. According to a report in The Guardian this week, the tool provides a data feed of PolyMarket’s prediction markets to help traders “...consume crowdsourced probability assessments” as “market signals”.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, UBS et al charge millions for expert analyst forecasts. ICE is now feeding its traders crowd-sourced probability data from an anonymous blockchain platform. When you realise which one performed better in predicting the last election, the last oil spike, the last rate decision, the last weather system, you’ll know this isn’t an anomaly.

None of this works without the infrastructure underneath it. The next era of prediction markets will need blockchains with enhanced AI resolution that can handle the volume and speed that global financial signals demand.

Prediciton Markets As A Crystal Ball For Marketers

This crystal ball opportunity matters more than most people in marketing have realised.

Marketers spend billions every year trying to predict human behaviour. Focus groups, brand trackers, sentiment analysis, social listening tools, quarterly brand health studies. The entire research industry exists because the future is opaque and decisions need to be made in advance. What if the future was already being priced in real time, by millions of people with skin in the game?

That is exactly what prediction markets do. And the signal quality is extraordinarily accurate.

When Kanye West announced his presidential run in 2020, PolyMarket traders had assigned it a 3% probability of going anywhere within 48 hours. Brand teams were still briefing agencies. When the Federal Reserve held rates in March 2024 against widespread analyst expectation of a cut, Kalshi had been pricing a hold at over 70% for two weeks.

While the Oscars shortlist leaked cultural momentum leaning towards Oppenheimer, prediction markets had priced it as the frontrunner months before the ceremony. This isn’t because market makers had inside information, it was because they aggregated what millions of people actually believed, rather than what a panel of twelve said in an air conditioned Hollywood broom closet.

This is the part that should unsettle and excite every marketer and business leader reading this.

Your brand strategy is built on data that looks backwards. Sales figures, campaign post-mortems, attribution models, NPS scores. Even the most sophisticated real-time social listening tools tell you what’s already happened. Prediction markets tell you what people currently believe will happen and that distinction is not subtle.

It’s the difference between a rear-view mirror and a windscreen.

Prediction markets have already demonstrated their accuracy in domains that matter to marketers. Category momentum questions on platforms like Kalshi, tracking whether a specific product category would outperform its sector within a defined timeframe, have consistently outperformed analyst consensus.

Political prediction markets called Brexit, Trump 2016 and Trump 2024 correctly when polling and punditry failed spectacularly.

Sports prediction markets priced team-sponsor sentiment shifts faster than any brand tracker on earth. And these are not outliers – they’re now the norm.

Now consider the marketing applications that are already within your reach.

A prediction market run on your category could tell you, in real time, what informed participants believe the probability is that your next product launch will resonate. Not what a sample of 400 recruited respondents says in a focus group but what people who have thought about it, and are willing to stake something on it, actually believe.

The difference in signal quality is not marginal.

Brand safety and cultural risk assessment through prediction markets could replace the current haphazard methodology. When prediction markets are applied to cultural flashpoints, sponsorship decisions and talent associations, they surface crowd-assessed risk probabilities before a campaign goes live rather than after it tanks.

Campaign outcome markets are already being piloted internally by a small number of agency groups. Before a major campaign launches, internal and external participants predict measurable outcomes against defined benchmarks and the resulting probability distribution tells them more about genuine confidence in the creative than any focus group debrief ever will.

Competitor intelligence is perhaps the most immediate application. Prediction markets on product launches, leadership changes, pricing moves and category disruptions are already running on public platforms.

That data is available. Most marketing teams are not looking at it.

The broader implication is this: - Marketing has always claimed to be the discipline closest to the customer – we’re meant to represent the customer and speak for the customer – that much is unequivocal.

Prediction markets, when applied to brand and category questions, are the first mechanism that actually delivers on that claim at scale and in real time. They’re not a replacement for strategy – they’re the most honest knowledge feed you’ve ever had access to.

The marketers who recognise this early will have an advantage over every competitor still commissioning quarterly trackers and waiting six weeks for a blended soup of a report.

Prediction Markets aren’t just a platform that let people to bet on the News - they’re anonymised databases that allow the masses to highlight what happens next.

It’s now a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’ the likes of Kalshi and Polymarket will shake off their ‘grimy gambling platform’ label and become elevated in the public perception as the most accurate information medium available.

The bigger question is when prediction markets are recognised to be the most valid forecasting medium, who will own the crystal ball?

Harry Lang - Follow on X or Connect on LinkedIn

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...

Join Harry On LinkedIn

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.

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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