Did you land in a good place with brand investment activity from last week?

🗣️ We have been asked a few times recently if you can write for Marketing Unfiltered, of course if you have something unfiltered or helpful for marketing leaders please submit your idea here.

Update: There has been a new set of job scams targeting senior and marketing execs, I have updated our job scams post to ensure you are kept across them, one includes answering questions as part of an “interview” to train and personalise AI tools. Be aware!

Onto this week, I am diving into the world of Substack and how brands can build a richer hub. I break down the features you can explore and why some brands have found their new canonical home, whereas others have been DOA by just replicating their boring SEO and AEO blogs on a platform that rewards being way more.

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

Is Substack The Next Home For Your Brand?

Should we put our brand on Substack? Is a question I’m asked regularly.

When I ask why and what the benefit is, I am pushed to the social media manager or the content lead, who’s struggling to gain influence with those around them.

In a few more recent conversations, Substack has been brought up; here are some of the questions:

• Should we replace some of our social channels with Substack?

• What would I do in a CMO seat with Substack?

• Shall we remove our CRM and move to Substack?

• Would I let Substack become a home and hub for many brands who want to leverage the platform?

So, Why Substack?

Substack has arguably become a verb; it’s what people write on, it’s more than just an email and perceived more than a blog. It reminds me of the traction Blogger (remember it before Google left it die) got in the early days.

It’s a platform that wanted to be a simple and free-to-low-cost ESP for writers, journalists and podcasters; it evolved to become a platform with different mechanisms, from first-party ownership concerns with subscriptions to a follow graph which you do not own.

Substack is trying to become a social platform, and it’s arguably done that for a small subsection of app users.

Just A Blog? No!

For most, Substack is just a blog that sends out their email for others who’ve understood the sub-culture of the platform, especially inside of the app.

Substack became a place for “authentic voices”, a place to send emails, become creative and feel like a space where brands could engage, be safer to experiment and allow customers to hit reply.

Although this isn’t a new feature it has built out a new wave of companies wanting to engage and build relationships.

Substack does hold a small grasp on culture in the US and in very specific niches so it’s worth researching this a little further.

Substack More Than Email, But Is It Guiding Behaviour Change?

Substack wants to influence and shape culture by what its users say and do and it might have just done that but it’s taken brave and bold writers, podcasters and specific maverick brands who want to challenge culture, write in safer spaces and say what they mean without the fear of being filtered by Gmail and Outlook or by broader algorithmic updates.

It’s become more than email for many as it enabled people to connect more thoughtfully to writers, to consultants and to brands who wanted to act more editorially and write more authentically.

One important factor, Substack is now more similar to Patreon they have their own follow (their social graph) graph, if someone chooses to follow you but not to subscribe, you will not own that relationship and cannot contact them directly (or export if you decide to leave Substack).

I had one of many fascinating conversations with friend of MU Chris (Hutchings) and one conversation has stuck in my mind and I constantly ask, as brands should we build an audience to convert into customers?
Is this a different way to think as we all operate as media brands? And is Substack a channel for that?

What Smart Brands Are Doing

Within the brand editorial landscape on Substack, several companies look to stand out by moving completely away from blogs, newsletters and more traditional product promotions emails they send. This approach falls flat on its face!

Many fell into the SEO trap of writing blogs to rank for keywords, not to add value to readers or your customers. Although this approach still happens on Substack it’s not tolerated and in some cases it’s rejected loudly.

Instead, they are treating the platform as a genuine publishing house, using proprietary data, literary commissions, unapologetic cultural commentary, and radical operational transparency to build real audience affinity.

I always remember being told never to go near the 3P’s (never be seen near poker (gambling), pills (pharma or non-vitamins), p— (anything related to sex would cause problems) in any marketing, however, many of these categories are thriving on Substack and that reflects recent cultural changes and societies openness to discuss these topics.

I created a list of great examples, and here are the brands doing the most unique and interesting things, grouped by their editorial strategy:

The Standout Substack Brands

The Proprietary Data Playbook: Ramp

The Publication: Ramp Economics Lab

Why it’s unique: Rather than offering generic financial advice, the corporate card and spend-management platform uses its vast, aggregate transactional data to deliver uniquely grounded economic dispatches. Led by their economist Ara Kharazian, the publication tracks real-time SaaS market vendor rankings, corporate AI adoption, and employment shifts.

Why it works: It balances high-integrity data with a witty, casual, internet-native voice. Memorable essays like “Claude didn’t kill design apps,” “We can finally say AI isn’t killing jobs,” and “My application to the infamous OpenAI Influencer Summer Camp” show that B2B writing doesn’t have to be boring.

The High-Concept Literary Project: Hinge

The Publication: No Ordinary Love

Why it’s unique: Hinge has elevated dating app success stories into a fully produced literary collection and audiobook. They commissioned prominent contemporary writers (including Rufi Thorpe, Nicola Dinan, Curtis Garner, and Raven Smith) to write and read deeply personal, real-life love stories of couples who met on the app.

Why it works: It shifts the conversation from app mechanics to the emotional reality of modern dating. Essays like Rufi Thorpe’s “This Is How To Touch Me” and Curtis Garner’s “The Sound It Leaves” explore the vulnerability, clumsy texts, and risks involved in building connection.

The Uncensored Youth Culture Dispatches: Julie & Dame

The Publications: Sex Happens (Brand: Julie) & No Bad Sex (Brand: Dame Products)

Why they are unique: In the sexual health space, these brands have built highly candid, unfiltered publications that read like indie zines rather than corporate blogs.

Why they work:

Emergency contraception brand Julie publishes Sex Happens, which leans into raw, unapologetic youth culture with titles like “She came, she saw, she pegged” and “Chucklefcker seeks reply-guy”*.

Sexual wellness brand Dame curates No Bad Sex, a highly thoughtful space featuring series like “Nightstand Sessions” (pleasure profiles of creatives), monthly astrologically-focused horoscopes (“Damescopes”), and “No Sex in the City” (an ongoing series examining celibacy and dating boundaries).

The Gritty Operations Diary: Island Creek Oysters

The Publication: Up the Creek

Why it’s unique: The Massachusetts-based oyster farm and cannery uses Substack to offer a deeply authentic, salt-of-the-earth look into the food supply chain.

Why it works: They brilliantly demystify food systems through deep dives like “Why We Made This: Tinned Razor Clams” and an on-the-ground report from North America’s largest lobster processing plant. They balance this heavy industry reporting with charming, human-centric team profiles under their “Odd Jobs” series—introducing readers to customer service reps (who double as World of Warcraft players) and property directors with excellent hair.

The Cultural Trend Forecasters: ShopMy

The Publication: Signals: A Publication by ShopMy

Why it’s unique: ShopMy (a creator commerce platform) bypasses product pitches in favour of deep, analytical cultural reporting on consumer behaviour and retail design.

Why it works: It acts as an industry-standard trend forecaster, analysing shifts in modern life. Standout essays investigate the broader sociological context behind shopping habits, such as “Why Does Every Brand Want a Book Club?”, “In the New Era of Body Care, the Shower Is a Stage”, and “Why Fashion Wants to Move In With You” (exploring why clothes shoppers now care about interior design and vacation destinations).

Other brands using Substack to be inspired by: Prof G Media (membership with exclusive content and livestreams), Concept Bureau, Ottolenghi (charging for premium subscription), and if you’d like to be founders led take inspiration from the likes of Bobbi Brown and Sophia Amoruso.

Education, Inspiration and Entertainment Works Again

As you have seen from these examples, there is a mix of value-add, showing off deep expertise (compelling niches are incredibly powerful in rich formats) and in some cases, blending both education and inspiration.

Many of the brands included are breaking the cultural norm and going that step further than blog posts. They offer richer media, often using images, short-form video and going deeper with the writing.

Beware Subscription Fatigue

What a lot of us have seen is subscription fatigue and what I call ask fatigue: we are subscribed to numerous emails, to numerous services and do we need more asks from brands? Even if they have repackaged and added huge amounts of value in a free email, and others have moved towards a premium newsletter model, charging a monthly subscription.

Be aware that it’s another channel, another ask and another subscription that many just don’t want.

How To Get The Most Out Of Substack

Audio

I recommended this in one of the original content ideas, many people are used to voice notes and dislike emails, one thing you can do is share audio, so a voice note to your audience, a song or something unique, something others won’t do. I love this approach and gives your audience something unique away from a forced branded WhatsApp community (I know some work, but 90% just don’t).

Video

Substack has evolved into a rich and multi media set up, adding native video that you have deliberately selected for Substack is a way to bring a different personality or style to your email. Jamie Oliver went deep into core subjects, something he wouldn’t have shared on his YouTube or TV channel but tested out concepts and went deep on unusual topics (like vinegar and spices), unfortunately Jamie stopped these but I encourage you to check these out.

You will notice I embed from other sources typically YouTube, many brands are using this methodology to hit their goals and KRs.

Chat

This is where the smart creators leverage chat, I know a few subscribers who subscribe to MKT1 (aka Emily Kramer) and Emily has used it really well.

Brands use it to have exclusive chats with subscribers, they leverage one-to-one and one-to-few conversations and can discuss elements of the newsletter, this is something they will happily pay for connection and pay for direct access. Many will run monthly office hours and equivalents and I suspect this might unlock some ideas for you and your brand.

Example: You can hit join chat to chat with us

Podcast

This is something I believe many brands can do better, leverage podcasts with direct email distribution. You can include podcasts in newsletters or send as a dedicated

You can also record podcasts within Substack admin area, just be mindful you will need to edit the audio for quality purposes, otherwise they often sound like a zoom call.

Livestream

Great for interviews and going live to discuss specific topics, products or releases. The interface is super simple and many previous contributors and many I have interviewed use the livestream feature.

Notes

This is their version of X or Threads, a way to send out teasers, updates and snippets of what’s coming up. I personally don’t see many traditional brands use notes other than copy paste of their other social media content but for the right brand notes could be a good corner of the internet for you.

Here is an example from Jamie Oliver

Importantly, you can self host on a domain (like we do on www.marketingunfiltered.co) or have a subdomain like many do (brandexample.substack.com)

If you want to be a media brand and offer a different and more modern experience, Substack can be for you, if you don’t get under the many layers of skin and the sub-cultures on Substack it might be a quiet place for you.

If you want to leverage a platform with a lot of community features and go beyond just emails and simple blogs then Substack could be the right platform for your brand or founder.

The 3 Actions To Take:

1. Decide if Substack could even be a home. Be brutally honest: are you ready to act like a media brand (editorial voice, opinion, depth, community) or are you just looking for another channel to paste SEO blogs into? If it’s the latter, don’t do it!

2. Design a distinctive editorial play, not a newsletter. Pick one lane where you can be genuinely uncopyable: proprietary data (like Ramp), literary storytelling (like Hinge), gritty operational diaries (like Island Creek Oysters), uncensored culture (Julie/Dame), or cultural trend forecasting (ShopMy). Agree on who and what you are & write an editorial manifesto before you touch settings.

3. Layer in the right formats and protect your ownership. Use Substack’s audio, video, chat, podcasts, and livestreams intentionally to deepen community while staying realistic about subscription and “ask” fatigue. In parallel, stay clear-eyed on the follow graph vs email subscribers, and make deliberate choices about what you own (domain, list, data) and what you’re “renting” from the platform.

My Honest Verdict

Most brands won’t find their new or canonical home on Substack but many non mainstream brands could find a brilliant home and their community on Substack.

Thanks for reading and have a great week next week and we have an existing new contributor with their first MU take.

Danny Denhard

Here are 3 marketing examples to borrow from this week:

1. Canadian MilkUP influencing local culture 🇨🇦

2. Why going back in the archive can power your next campaign 🗂️

3. Why Chanel is sponsoring the Oxford x Cambridge boat race 🚣

1. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) & Earned Media Dominance

• Headline: Third-Party Validation Has Replaced Blue Links in AI Search

• Via MU 99 by Harry Lang

• Explainer: Generative AI search models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini synthesise brand answers from authoritative third-party media rather than crawling client websites or relying on traditional SEO backlink tactics. Muck Rack data reveals that earned media accounts for 84% of links cited by AI models, while paid/advertorial content manages just 0.3%. Furthermore, unlinked brand mentions across reputable media correlate with AI visibility roughly three times more than traditional backlinks.

• Key Action: Redirect PR and comms teams to target the specific high-authority publications, wire services, and newsletters LLMs actively crawl. Implement routine audits to prompt major LLMs on your brand, executives, and products to correct hallucinated data or information voids before synthetic agents amplify them.

2. Eliminating “Doc Diarrhoea” & Performative AI Slop

• Headline: Prioritise Quality and Human Curation Over AI-Driven Volume

• Via MU88 By Harry Lang

• Explainer: The influx of cheap AI tools has created a phenomenon termed “Doc Diarrhoea” where teams churn out endless unread GTM drafts, white papers, research documents, and low-quality blog posts simply because technology makes generation easy. Scaling mediocre content to chase vague top-of-funnel keywords produces “AI slop” that dilutes brand authority, wastes token budgets, and creates organizational friction without driving commercial impact.

• Key Action: Implement strict RACI protocols and content quality gates. Shift team focus from volume-based publishing cadences to fewer, higher-conviction “better bets” that emphasise human narrative, proprietary insights, and emotional resonance that AI models cannot replicate.

3. “Problem-State” Marketing & Conversational Search Ads

• Headline: Intercept Customer Confessions, Not Just Category Keywords

• Via MU89 by Danny Denhard

• Explainer: AI search environments like ChatGPT represent “problem-state” marketing. When prospective buyers type complex natural-language queries (e.g., “our sales reps keep losing deals at the proposal stage”), they are expressing explicit operational pain points rather than searching for generic product keywords. Emerging ad formats inside conversational AI enable brands to deliver solution-oriented assets directly inside problem-solving workflows.

• Key Action: Gather authentic customer complaint phrasing from sales call recordings, support logs, and community forums. Convert these problem states into diagnostic tools, playbooks, or templates, and run small, time-bound ChatGPT ad experiments tracked against CFO-level metrics like cost-per-qualified-visit and pipeline influence.

4. Authentic Personal Branding & LinkedIn’s Exposure Effect

• Headline: Ditch Corporate Polish to Leverage Executive Trust and Repetition

• Via MU92 by Danny Denhard with

• Explainer: In an era of AI content saturation, overly polished corporate messaging gets ignored. Building buyer trust relies on the psychological “exposure effect”—the principle that repeated, authentic encounters increase perceived competence and likeability. High-converting LinkedIn profiles balance professional expertise with human transparency rather than remaining in a “safe,” sanitised corporate zone.

• Key Action: Adopt a balanced 3-Pillar Content Framework: 33% Business (behind-the-scenes / building in public), 33% Thought Leadership (unique industry insights), and 33% Personal (hobbies, lessons, human stories). Audit executive profiles to align headline keywords, post topics, and engagement habits with target industry “persona bubbles”.

5. Human-Centric Web Design vs. Automated Bot Builds

• Headline: Protect Brand Identity and Accessibility from Automated Web Builders

• Via MU97 by Stevie Roberts

• Explainer: Relying on AI tools to build full websites yields “digital doppelgangers” with generic messaging, redundant CSS code, sluggish loading speeds, and fractured mobile navigation. Crucially, automated builders frequently fail WCAG accessibility standards—a digital friction point that costs businesses billions annually in lost revenue and damages search engine rankings.

• Key Action: Treat AI web tools purely as a co-pilot for rapid wireframing, brainstorming, or temporary campaign landing pages. Require human designers and developers to engineer final brand touchpoints, ensuring clean code, search engine performance, authentic visual assets, and full digital accessibility.

6. Outside-In Perspective & Rejecting Dogmatic “Best Practice”

• Headline: Break Out of Industry Groupthink to Drive Commercial Innovation

• Via MU100 by Danny Denhard, Harry Lang and multiple contributors

• Explainer: Marketing teams frequently suffer from an originality crisis by hiding behind industry “best practice,” internal groupthink, and performative metrics like MQLs. True differentiation comes from “outside-in thinking”—stepping outside your immediate category, examining cross-industry supply chains, and borrowing proven principles from vastly different sectors.

• Key Action: Conduct an end-to-end audit of your customer and revenue journey. Ask your leadership team four strategic questions:
  (1) How would our product look as a cover version in another industry?
  (2) Who outside our sector is world-class at a skill we need?
  (3) Who will challenge our arrangements rather than applaud the status quo?
  (4) Which legacy internal belief should we stop accepting?

Watch the full pod run down of what we would banish:

7. Executive Cyber-Surveillance & Guarding Against AI Job Scams

• Headline: Implement Strict Verification Guardrails for C-Suite Recruitment

• Via MU95 by Danny Denhard

• Explainer: Cybercriminals are deploying AI automation to execute sophisticated job scams targeting senior executives. Common playbooks include “phantom” executive search firms with cloned websites, extortionate mandatory CV/branding review fees, and AI-generated screening interviews designed to harvest candidate data or train synthetic models.

• Key Action: Establish strict executive security protocols: perform character-by-character domain checks, verify search partners through official corporate channels, enforce an absolute zero-pay rule for candidates during placement processes, and use Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) to protect custom interview presentations from unauthorised deployment.

This is a resource I am keeping up to date with all recent and reported scams by C-Suite industry friends:

8. Overcoming Marketing Myopia in Stagnant Sectors

• Headline: Exploit Low Industry Marketing Spend with Bold Brand Differentiation

• Via MU96 by Harry Lang

• Explainer: Traditional professional services (such as law firms) suffer from severe marketing myopia, spending a median of just 1.7% of revenue on marketing and producing generic, indistinguishable brand identities. While legacy firms rely on billable hours and resist technological change, early adopters embedding AI tools (e.g., Harvey, Legora) and adopting distinct visual/narrative positioning are capturing significant market share.

• Key Action: Identify legacy category tropes (e.g., stoic stock imagery, formal jargon, uninspired visual design) and intentionally break rank. Invest in modern visual branding, human-centric copy, and operational AI tools to deliver faster, highly differentiated client experiences.

9. Navigating Unfiltered Community Platforms (Reddit)

• Headline: Trade Strict Brand Control for Unfiltered Human Insights

• Via MU89 by Danny Denhard

• Explainer: Reddit has become a critical human-centric discovery and review platform across the full funnel. However, its moderator-led structure makes it hostile to overt marketing. Brands attempting static broadcast campaigns risk severe community pushback, whereas brands engaging transparently gain deep consumer insight and long-term search visibility.

• Key Action: Treat Reddit as a participation and listening channel rather than a basic media buy. Establish clear brand safety whitelists, train community managers to respond to public feedback with empathy, and feed unfiltered platform discussions back into product and creative development.

10. Developing Executive Career Edge, EQ, and Organisational Design

• Headline: Modernise Organisational Structure and Lead with Emotional Intelligence

• Via MU100 by Danny Denhard, Harry Lang and many brilliant contributors

• Explainer: In a workplace defined by flatter organisations, non-linear “squiggly” career paths, and AI integration, job titles alone no longer guarantee security. Long-term executive value relies on Emotional Intelligence (EQ), visible problem-solving capabilities (”a company of one mindset”), and sound org design. Poor org design such as misalignment between goal, skill, and title structures creates internal silos and performative meeting clutter.

• Key Action: Align your marketing organisational design so decision rights, project ownership, and accountability paths are transparent across cross-functional teams. Invest in building your personal “edge” through mentoring, publishing, and cross-departmental collaboration, prioritising EQ to navigate team transformation.

Thanks to the brilliant writers and contributors this quarter.

Danny Denhard

The Full Q3 Articles

A big thank you for your feedback and kind words on Harry and me hitting MU 100.
I took on some of the feedback and collated the 10 tactics to stop at the bottom of this week’s newsletter so you can move forward with the great recommendations.

This week I share two coaching exercises, one of which has become a beloved game that will help you with the brand investment problem everyone is battling right now.

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

The Simple Brand Game

Almost every company has a brand investment problem.

This year I have heard many versions of the following:

• My c-suite/leadership team doesn’t understand the power of brand

• I can’t seem to land brand investment to my CEO/my boss/board

• I’m constantly fighting my COO/CRO/CFO about brand spend, ROI…

• They are only interested in performance ads - I fight weekly for brand spend

One of my favourite ways of helping marketing departments is running workshops and CMOs in coaching sessions and diving into problem solving mode, one of the most enjoyable ways to help them to address the brand investment problem.

Go Higher For Impact!

One of the activities I run is a brand game I created, it is designed to have a lot of discussion:

Here is a UK/US version of one of the exercises we run through:

• Drinks? / Soda?

• Phone? / Cell?

• Search Engine?

• Supermarket?

• Headphones?

• News/Newspaper?

• Steaming service?

• Social media?

• Car?

• Bank?

• Coffee?

• High Street Store? / Mall Brands?

• AI/LLM?

One of the most interesting takeaways from the first session is how many are often aligned.

The formula is usually:

• Large well known brands

• Brands that are global (in the US it does lean more towards American specific or in some cases coast specific with food and drink brands)

• They have been used in the last few days

• They advertise a lot, many are in the top 10 brands who advertise

• Proximity to the office (Coffee)

• Use within their job (Copilot vs ChatGPT vs Claude)

• The younger the C-Suite the more startups are included

Explore More

When I push for smaller, lesser known brands, this is where local and personal preference comes through in answers and discussion.

These are important to explore and break down. In a room full of peers you will often not hear personal thoughts and insights but with marketing and brand you will hear unfiltered versions of their brands and why they are important or best known.

If I ever ask for examples of ads they will be able to reference a tagline, a sound or jingle or have a nostalgic moment about the brand.

Many people remember TV ads, they remember their first bank account or their first iPhone.

Oddly, many won’t be able to tell you ad copy in performance based ads. This can be a key for you to bring up and demonstrate. Performance of course has real impact in what we do, however, in 95% of these examples discussed brands are seen, felt and used from more than a paid advert.

There are always 2 to 3 through lines:

1. Many say a big brand and actually dislike them. Starbucks is often the coffee brand that is called out but they dislike their coffee product.

2. Apple is often referred to in tech products, frequently said to be “the best” (including their headphones) and when pushed because it is aspirational (Android is often made fun of especially by non-technical leaders) not technically the best.
   This is important - without telling you how to suck eggs many do not think about how these brands position their product in the good, better, best model and how they’ll leverage this.

3. Mercedes has come up in every single session. Tesla is often referenced when a group in the c-suite drives them.

There is a load more we explore including colour, brand age, if these brands are a touch to trust brand, understanding the competitive landscape, where they sit vs competition on the my axis of unknown, known, like, disliked, trusted, hated and loved but this shortened down exercise will propel you forward.

If you prefer video, here is a good video walk through by Gemini

Reverse Engineer A Well Known Brand Or Well-Respected Campaign

I will then ask the leadership team and CMOs to go the step further and reserve engineer the brands they called out.

Why? I want them to break down the tangible and intangibles. I want them to feel the brand, I want them to see the foundational layer of the work and decide what was critical.

Hint: to engage the operational leaders (COO, CRO, CFO etc), map these to OKRs and goals and suggest they map from the ground up, not top down (reverse the way they think to see how you have to fit all the tactics and activities into the annual plan you all created).

In 1:2:1 coaching, I will often push marketing leaders to reverse engineer a brand that has recently bubbled to the surface or to reverse engineer a well respected campaign.

Here are a few recent examples that have come up in conversation you could reverse engineer:

• The Rhode Phone Case & The Meta x Kylie Glasses

• Splitting The G (Guinness) - I might well share my version in coming weeks

• On Running, Hoka & Asics - the increased influence in running and wear as a lifestyle trainer/sneaker

• ChatGPT or Claude - the first mover vs incumbent is often a good choice to create and run through together

• Ninja Creami - Shark and Ninja have thrived through TikTok videos and shop

• The rise and importantly the fall of Labubu (this is a good supporting resource by TikTok)

And yes SaaS and so called boring B2B can be included in this.

GO & SHARE YOUR WORK! Some use slides, others Miro, if you prefer pen & paper use it, if you have a whiteboard go use it, but the key is to share your reverse engineering with others. I use a blend of Apple’s freeform and then transform into docs/decks depending on the audience.

Read My Previous Takes On Marketing Reverse Engineered

• Ferrari Luce Marketing Reverse Engineered

• The New Balance Marketing Playbook Reverse Engineered

Why Reverse Engineering?

Reverse engineering is an exercise that forces you to think, go into the weeds and understand what were the decisions made, the true drivers and how much luck was at play.

I like to push on:

• The 4c’s: Consumer, Cost, Convenience, Communication and repackage or compare against the 4p’s: Product, Price, Place, Promotion

• Distribution, Amplification, Operations - this is critically important to package up and break down, especially if you would want to run a follow up session with your department (I always recommend this is an important case)

• Timelines - timelines are essential to show you how long (or short in some cases) the process was. The large brands have brand cache and status

The Hard Calls Over Digital

The digital side is a lot easier to go through, open ad libraries, reviewing emails, ease of purchases, social listening etc, the important leadership side is why were calls made, why the pricing, why the distribution and how much impact did culture, social or search have.

Hint: This can lead to some really interesting conversations with your team leads and team members.

It’s About The Decisions, Not Being Right Or Wrong

This isn’t about what was exactly right or what was exactly the cause for success, it is the process of understanding what was critical, what the internal decisions were, if it was the product that drove success or a combination of product and marketing and an essential part we often overlook in reporting - how much luck was involved.

Following on from these sessions, I always receive feedback on WhatsApp/email about how much they enjoyed it and the level of engagement from the team it triggered.

In a world where we have to constantly re-forecast, being pressured to reduce headcount and a pressure on constant output, this is a great opportunity to step back and give yourself and/or your department a refresher.

For 2-3 hours this exercise will help to reshape how you, your team and executive peers think.

Run It Yourself? If you feel like you are not in the position to run such a workshop or session in your ELT/SLT or XCO meetings, I will happily help to facilitate and unlock/force the lightbulb moment with your colleagues. Just get in touch by hitting reply or email coach@dannydenhard.com

I recommend this as a quarterly activity for your marketing team, I’d highly recommend 1x session with your leadership team and a reverse engineering session with your CPO, these sessions become invaluable especially if you have competitors whose brand is always raised and referenced.

Good luck and if you have any you’d like to run through let me know.

Danny Denhard

PS: Here are 3 marketing examples I hand selected for you can borrow from this week:

1. McDonald’s Plan For Their Zombie App Users

2. The Beauty Meme Wars

3. The Walmart Smart AI Transparency Play

The 10 Marketing Tactics To Stop Using But Why Some People Will Still Cling To Them

From MU100

1. MQLs/SQLs as the north star

Stop: Treating MQL/SQL volume as proof that marketing is working.

Why people defend it: Simple, comparable, board‑friendly numbers that “show progress” quarter to quarter.

2. Performative marketing & content cadences

Stop: Posting on LinkedIn/Blog/TikTok just to “keep the cadence” and hit weekly volume targets.

Why people defend it: Feels like consistency, keeps brand “visible”, and is easy to brief, track and outsource.

3. AI content factories

Stop: Churning endless mediocre blog posts and ads to rank for vague TOFU keywords.

Why people defend it: It is cheap, scalable and can produce surface‑level SEO gains that look good on a dashboard.

4. Trend‑chasing brands

Stop: Jumping on every meme, political moment and TikTok format just to feel current.

Why people defend it: Occasional viral hits, short spikes in engagement, and FOMO: they fear looking out of touch.

5. Context‑free dashboards & quant‑only decisions

Stop: Reporting pretty charts with no story, no customer reality, and no qualitative insight.

Why people defend it: Numbers feel objective, safe, and “serious”; they make stakeholders feel in control.

6. Inflated titles, big‑logo CV hires, and “guru/rockstar/ninja” personas

Stop: Using job titles, past employers or personal branding to stand in for real capability.

Why people defend it: Signalling, these labels impress boards, investors, clients and sometimes teams, at least on paper.

7. Broken org design and fuzzy ownership

Stop: Structures that confuse who owns what, spawn constant re‑orgs, and ship your org chart instead of your strategy.

Why people defend it: Re‑orgs and fancy structures look like decisive leadership and satisfy internal politics in the short term.

8. “X is dead” takes

Stop: Declaring channels, tactics or roles “dead” for clicks and hot takes.

Why people defend it: It is a fast way to sound provocative, get engagement, and position themselves as ahead of the curve.

9. Conference Tourism

Stop: Treating conferences as paid holidays with deals “already done” and sessions ignored.

Why people defend it: Relationship maintenance, status, and a rare break from day‑to‑day grind disguised as “business development”.

10. Dehumanising & lazy customer thinking (users, NPS worship, contempt from the top)

Stop: Calling people “users”, spamming across channels at once, gaming NPS and quietly resenting customers.

Why people defend it: Old habits, simple metrics, and a belief that efficiency > empathy.

FIRSTLY THANK YOU! We would like to thank the 2500+ who support us from an idea we had over email and then started to send out in October 2024, we started Marketing Unfiltered from our own frustrations with how marketing was being reported and articles and comments were becoming overly edited → to a newsletter and interview series we are incredibly proud of sending each and every week. Now around 2 years later we have hit 100.

So thank you for joining us on the rollercoaster of Marketing, Growth and Business world for the last 100 newsletters.

We would also like to thank our contributors, the people who gave up their time and expertise to share with you for free (connect with them on LinkedIn/Substack below)

Writers: John Lyons, Simon Swan, Paul Thomas, Radmila Blazheska, Jessie Allen, Sarah Aird-Mash, Faisal Laljee, Emma Clayton

Interviews: , Andy Barr, Katie McPhee, , Chris Hutchings , Carl Hendy, , Oren Greenberg, Rick Guttridge, Lottie Unwin, Joe Glover, James Hamlin & Nicola Anderson.

Commentators: , Xavier Vallee, Kathryn E. Strachan, Amita Fearon, Leilah King-Gotlib, Nicola Vidal, Neil Campbell, Helen Forsyth, Sophie Collins & Jonathan Wagstaffe.

ENTER ROOM 101 For today’s celebration of MU100, Harry and I celebrated with a room 101 edition, we broke it down into 3 categories, Unfiltered, Controversial and Confession, while asking our brilliant contributors what they’d banish in room 101.

Over the last few weeks you will have seen my ask for what you would want to banish into room 101. Harry and I created ours but I also reached out to our great contributors to see theirs:

The Hot Takes & Recommendations For Room 101

John Lyons

• I’d kill MQLs and SQLs, and I’d enjoy it.

• Untrained so-called marketers with a huge platform miseducating their followers with self-serving BS. <Names Redacted>

• Calling marketing a profession when no accreditation or basic standards exist and any **** (see above) can call themselves a marketer.

• SWOT analysis.

• Gurus, Rock Stars and f—king Ninjas
  Read John’s Articles On Marketing Unfiltered

Simon Swan

• Dashboards with no context

• Decisions made with quant but no qual data

• Recruiting based on IQ and not EQ
  Read Simon’s Articles On Marketing Unfiltered

Nicola Anderson

• Is the tendency for everyone to say xxxx is dead! SDRs are dead, Direct Mail is dead, MQLs are dead, outbound email is dead. So dramatic and never quite true.
  Read Nicola’s Takes On Marketing Unfiltered

Oren Greenberg

• What I would banish is performative marketing. The obsession with activity that presents in multiple nefarious forms, such as a weekly social media cadence or blog content cadence. It becomes a hyper focus trying to grab attention using a volume approach. This is a mistake because it’s devoid of commercial impact or changing buyer behaviour. It’s become in many companies an exercise in practicing shallowness. The ultimate example is posting on a LinkedIn company page. So many companies are doing it, posting two or three times a week, and they’re evaluating and comparing these metrics, like likes and comments, without any clarity on how it’s impacting the business if at all
  Read Oren’s Take On Marketing Unfiltered

Beth Gladstone

• Brands that leave comments on civilian Instagram & TikTok posts (Happy Socks & Aldi as the worst offenders) - it worked when it was new and novel, but now it’s just giving weird uncle

• Marketing job ads right now - not only does “marketing” seem to require fluency across strategy, growth, organic, paid, data, AI/tech and leadership, but I read one job ad yesterday that gave 20 bullet points of requirements for the role (including being able to speak fluent Portuguese) then listed “a laptop” as the first benefit…

• AI content factories - using AI to scale mediocre marketing, whether that’s hundreds of ads which aren’t actually giving results, or publishing tons of blog content just to show up for vague, TOFU keywords which aren’t linked to leads or customers. Even with AI I’ll still be out here advising fewer, better bets…

• Managers who ask ChatGPT “who is the best company for X” during meetings then get annoyed when their brand doesn’t show up
  Read Beth Take’s On Marketing Unfiltered

THE PODCAST 😮

Because of how unfiltered our chat gets (well mostly Harry 😉) I had to edit slightly more than I’d like for YouTube and enjoy below

• On Spotify

• Apple Podcast

• On YouTube

• Or click play at the top of this post

Harry & My Submissions To Room 101

Unfiltered 📢

Harry’s: Danny Tommo’s Far-Right Patriots/Activist Movement.

• It’s spearheaded by a bunch of “pig s—t thick, racist, misogynistic, job-avoiding turds” marching around in balaclavas and Stone Island gear.

• It cynically exploits the economic frustrations of disenfranchised people on the fringes of society to build a toxic, grievance-driven counterculture.

• They’re running a vile race-to-the-bottom playbook, targeting respected institutions like the RNLI purely to stir up hate and grab cheap headlines.

• Although it’s an example of rapid brand and community building, it’s built through it’s toxic messaging. The group effectively utilises digital tools like email CRMs and anonymised messaging groups (WhatsApp and Snap) to organise and engage its “followers”.

• Ignoring such groups is dangerous because they successfully appeal to disenfranchised people on the peripheries of society.

• Ultimately, the group’s mobilisation tactics act as a sobering lesson in understanding community building, even though the movement itself belongs in Room 101.

• Even though they’ve somehow cracked rapid community mobilisation, what they’re peddling is so aggressively awful that it belongs locked away at the bottom of Room 101.

Danny’s: Brands Who Are Constant Trend Chasers.

Why? It’s lazy, uninspiring and almost always misses the mark. So many have fallen into the trap to stand for something or have a say on everything and rarely does this help. The question I ask many Marketing leaders is: Does a “trend” last for more than a few days now, does it help your brand? Does it stick in potential customers mind for good reasons? Did they come and buy from you or use your service from this?

Don’t just jump on or copy any social trend or copy any subject line that competitors send out:

1. Going after politics and playing with political updates - doesn’t do you any favours and alienates you to customers (not everyone can be Ben & Jerry’s and stomach it for decades)

2. Especially those who fall for the random gifting on TikTok - random reward culture isn’t having the effect they think it is the best brands

Controversial 😱

Harry’s: Novig x Sydney Sweeney Ad

Why he is banishing them into Room 101:

• Cynical Value-Pumping: The brand (Novig) is a prediction market set up by heavily funded tech grads who needed quick visibility and customer acquisition to validate their massive valuation, falling market share and had to use the campaign as a shortcut.

• The “Grimy” Playbook: The reliance on an overtly sexualized “sex sells” angle to manufacture global visibility and clicks.

• Intentional “Sex Sells” Controversy: The campaign intentionally uses suggestive imagery to spark public debate and outrage, successfully driving millions of views, free PR, SEO, and clicks for the brand.

• Regressive Optics: The overall dynamic makes it feel like “women’s empowerment goes backwards a few years”

• Strategic Equity Partnership: Novig granted Sydney Sweeney an equity stake and creative control as director to leverage her star power and secure global visibility.

Above is the ad no-one saw but is the safer version that Sydney was also the creative director on alongside the more controversial ad below.

Harry banishes everyone except Sydney Sweeney into the bin.
He doesn’t fault Sweeney because she played the business game brilliantly, securing a lucrative equity deal and creative control, essentially pulling off a clever monetisation move. Instead, he is banishing the creators, the cynical mechanics behind the prediction market brand, and the predictable, regressive execution designed solely to buy artificial salience and hype.

Danny’s: Many Leaders Don’t Understand The Importance Of Org Design

Your org design is likely killing you by a thousand cuts and the ripples it causes is hindering your departments performance.

I thought I would share a coachable moment below:

Teams are usually set up in 3 types of ways
(1) Goal structure - goal 1-5 teams underneath
(2) Skill structure skills and team associated and
(3) High performer structure - higher performer and then teams around it

These often do not connect and creates negative second and third order effects on how you work, how you are viewed and how your team choose to operate, often you will hear you ship your org chart, often in Marketing its true and its how it works team to team and cross functionally.

Bad Org Design Ripples:

1. Your colleagues don’t know who is working on what or who to go to updates or insights

2. In your department and cross-functionally no-one is sure who owns anything or who is leading important projects - they default by going to the team lead and often that’s inaccurate

3. You start creating job titles that make no sense to the team or the business, this impacts you more than you realise. The “lead” role appears, the head of or director of role makes less sense, you create confusion internally and it starts bleeding into the work and output from that team and the department

4. You start to try to rebalance things frequently, leading to constant re-orgs and strategic shifts, these are strong signals the C-Suite leader didn’t plan and design their department well enough

5. Your teams have their own “strategies” SEO strategy, social media strategy etc, these often never connect to your Department plan and then go against the company strategy and struggle to connect to the goals

Good Org Design

• Aligns structure, scope and decision rights with strategy, it’s a clear signal to your business, this means decisions and flow of information do not get stuck in slios.

• There are clear ownership paths and people who are accountable for decisions, for outcomes and metrics are clear. Team members and cross-functional colleagues know what people own, co-own and collaborate on.

• This comes from how you design your org to how it communicates (your teams connect to your department and as a leader the confusion and misunderstanding shows up in subtle and non subtle ways) and shows up.

• Structure and strategy tend to align well and rewarded well in good org design and kills the performative angle to meetings and the constant need to have meetings. Good org design also should reduce political games as remove ambiguity and shadow structures show themselves quickly.

Titles And Roles Misalignment

I also included freedom around titles like Founding CMO (no one knows what this means or if you have someone smart in the role) and the Fractional CMO title, which is often misleading, regularly used to inflate the size of a business (by the owners or founders) and is constantly overused and misused, which causes numerous ripples, especially when specialists (for example, SEOs) use the title of fractional CMO and it has a negative impact on Marketing’s abilities.

There are some brilliant fractional CMOs who can deliver incredible work, however, it is being undone by misuse and over-use of the title!
And when the CMO is removed and replaced by a fractional CMO the same problem often stays as they do not plan out the org and do not have the time, energy or resources to reshape effectively.

Confession 🔓

Harry’s: Attending Conferences For Deals Not To Attend Talks

• Harry confesses that during his time in the gambling industry, he spent a period of about 5 years attending the Amsterdam Affiliate Conference primarily as a perk.

• Includes hosting a dinner for his major affiliate partners at a swanky canal-side restaurant or penthouse steak bar, he used the rest of the trip as a break from day to day work.

• Harry admits that for the last 4 years of attending, he didn’t actually step foot inside the actual conference once but did justify the trip by noting that all the real business deals had already been finalised in the weeks leading up to the event, making the conference itself unnecessary for closing contracts.

• Instead of attending conference sessions, he spent his time enjoying three days off in Amsterdam doing tourist activities like visiting Anne Frank’s house, going to the Van Gogh Museum, taking canal boat trips, and riding bikes.

Danny’s: Big Logo Hires/Resume & CV Hires Rarely Ever Work Out.

Why? Culturally too different, apply their old way of working vs trying to implement the best ways of working.

• Often will only refer back to the old way and not the way that works for your business and how to incorporate it.

• Frequently used as a tactic within in large businesses, in those large businesses like Google, Meta etc there were 3-10 versions of the new hire on different product lines

• These big logo hires have rarely ever had any exposure or influence over the C-Suite and it then shows in meetings at their new company and they don’t work out or ever ask how to be successful in the new workplace - they default to a muscle memory

• I have hired from large logos and they struggled to work out, I have worked in and with businesses who use this and it frequently backfires quickly.

My Other Items That Didn’t Make The Cut But You Might Agree With:

• Marketing to what your team members see, not what or who your customers are and what they see (so obsessing over TikTok and the sub culture and language used there, for an audience who just don’t use it) 🚮

• Jargon and Buzzword Bingo - Get back to speaking customer language, make it simple! 🚮

• Senior marketers who say “Too old to learn a new channel” or too old for TikTok - quickest way to discredit yourself 🚮

• Sending SMS, email and push notifications at the same time - never works 🚮

• Kill the word Users - customers, people, why dehumanise it? 🚮

• NPS is disposable, noisy, gamed and low-diagnostic - going out to random customers once to understand how you’re doing. Often misleads and brings attention to the wrong parts of the business. It does force a conversation about loyalty and advocacy, not just “satisfaction”. I have used it and hated every time (it does like we say in the pod, have a political play) 🚮

• The C-suites who have contempt for their customer. Customers can be only seen as wallets and purses and often it’s then consumed by the most senior marketer who should reflect both business and customer. 🚮

The 6 Minute Summary Video

Thanks again for being a part of the journey and if you’d like to write or contribute yourself please do get in touch, we are also taking on sponsorship applications, so hit reply and get in touch or email mu@dannydenhard.com

Have a great weekend!

Danny & Harry

You can scroll through our previous posts, our full back catalogue is open and unlocked

Thanks for the replies and feedback on Simon’s mastering your edge newsletter last week.

This week Harry is back with a hot take on PR and why so many PR agencies are losing the game they should be dominating and the ripples it is having for marketing and business leaders.

Overlooked Tactics & Ideas You Would Have Missed

1. Why Sydney Sweeney Getting Equity & Being Creative Director On That Ad Is So Important 🧠

2. How QSR Is Going Anti Digital & Bring Back Human First Connection 👏

3. Bring Back Old School Games On Social Media 🥅

PR Agencies Should Be The GEO Pathfinders - So Why Aren’t They?

Harry Lang - Connect On LinkedIn - Teaching Business Leaders AI Through The Oxford AI School

There’s a particular brand of tragedy where a marketing professional is handed a winning lottery ticket and uses it like a coaster. That, as far as I can tell, is the PR industry’s current relationship with generative engine optimisation (GEO).

Before PR agency owners across the UK soil their collective pants in a fit of pique, allow me to back up a few incendiary paces and drop some evidence to support my click baity hypothesis:-

For over twenty years, the marketing world has cautiously worshipped at the altar of SEO - Jesus to Google’s algorithmic God (sorry Bing - at best, you’re Simon the Zealot in this analogy). We learned to stuff keywords, chase backlinks and grovel to an algo that ranked blue links with the sway of a Colosseum-thumbing Caesar.

‘Above the fold on P1 or nowhere’ was our mantra.

Then the machines learned to talk, and SEO started to look like the dad at the disco.

Now, a third of people asking “which is the best X” never see a blue link at all. They get a paragraph, a confident, oddly authoritative paragraph, written by an LLM that has decided, on your behalf, which brands deserve a mention and which should be cast to oblivion.

Yes, if you’re a pure SEO professional, it sucks to be you right now, but for PR agencies, your time to shine in realms beyond brand-building column inches.

Here’s the part that should make every PR agency owner spit out your oat Mochachino and dust off your Filofax with a fervour you haven’t felt since the early 2000’s:-

The machines aren’t reading client websites like the SEO days of yore.

They’re reading newspapers (how very old school).

Muck Rack has run its ‘What Is AI Reading?’ analysis three times over the past twelve months, and the number’s barely moved. Earned media accounts for a frankly absurd 84% of the links cited by AI.
Paid and advertorial content only manages a paltry 0.3%. Journalism makes up around 27% of everything the models quote, and the humble press release (the format everyone loves to hate) saw its citation rate climb roughly five times during the back end of 2025.

The single most valuable currency in the AI economy is credible third-party coverage, and unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s the stock in trade for you PR folks.

PR agencies have been selling (badly) measuring and quietly undercharging this stuff since the invention of the fax machine, so now it has real, attributable value.
Why the hell is the industry sitting on its thumbs like a petrified monk?

The Uncomfortable Truth

Three things are now unequivocal, and PR agencies should have noticed them first:-

LLMs are trained to distrust the open sewer of the web and lean on credible outlets, wire services and notable experts instead.

There, I’ve said it. LLMs are content snobs.

They want the FT, The Telegraph, LinkedIn and (recently to a much lesser extent) Reddit, not some content farm churning out “10 Best Instagram Noodle recipe” listicles by the boatload. (Big brands win)

The second is ‘language over links’. As the team at Proper Propaganda put it rather cutely:-

The machine wants to describe your client’s company in a sentence, and that sentence is assembled from how the wider world already talks about them. Narrative consistency and third-party validation stop being soft PR fluff and instead become the building blocks of the answer.

The third is expert positioning. AI models frickin’ LOVE a quotable human. A named chief executive, a subject matter expert, a spokesperson with a credible view. Building those people’s profiles within your client’s business and getting them cited in the right places is not some new competency PR must scramble to acquire, is it? It just hasn’t been a priority. Until now.

So we have a discipline in PR whose entire craft maps, almost comically, onto the mechanics of our new AI overlords. And what have you done with this golden goose? Inexpertly shoved a metaphorical plunger down its throat in an ill-conceived effort to make Foie Gras, rather than build it a comfy palace and waited for the eggs to drop.

Execution, or the lack of it

Doing GEO well through PR means targeting earned media with surgical intent, going after the specific high-authority publications and newsletters the models actually crawl rather than the ones that make a nice screenshot for the client’s next status report. Muck Rack found only a 2% overlap between the journalists’ PR teams pitch and the journalists AI actually cites.

Two per cent.
Just 2%!

Like the same percentage of those reading this article in The Drum who earn over £200k base per year. You may as well spend your time shitting out a thousand social handles and praying you get followed by Zendaya.

You’re firing the bazooka towards the wrong postcode - no, scrap that:- the wrong continent and if you don’t adjust your aim, somebody else will win the war instead.

Getting it right means structuring content, releases, data and digital assets so the LLMs can lift and cite them cleanly, instead of burying one useful statistic under nine paragraphs of “We’re delighted to announce this loathsome twaddle”.

It means measuring your ‘share of model’, tracking why and when Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and the rest mention your clients, and how they describe them. Better that than counting AVEs like it’s 2001 and you were all super stoked to get Simon from Blue wearing your client’s branded T-shirt at Cafe de Paris.

SEO now turn AEO tool Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that unlinked brand mentions correlate with AI visibility roughly 3x more than backlinks do, meaning the thing PR generates as a by-product is now the thing that moves the dial. If an agency can’t turn that into a sellable product, a retainer and a dashboard, it deserves everything coming to it in the next few months.

The Bloodbath, And Who Survives It

Here’s where I stop being so gosh darned cheerful.

The World Economic Forum reckons AI and automation will displace 92 million jobs by 2030 while creating 170 million new ones, with 59 in every 100 workers needing to reskill along the way. The churn is - and will continue to be - savage, and traditional PR, Creative, Integrated, Network, Performance, and SEO agencies that do the thing the machine now does for free won’t be invited to the party.

Agencies pitching manual effort priced by the day rather than AI augmented, high quality, output measured work are selling combs to a world of bald men.

If you look at the top of the tree:

• There’s WPP, once worth £24bn, which dropped out of the FTSE 100 in December 2025 with a market cap of £3.1bn, its shares having fallen 62% in a single year, shedding Coca-Cola and a $1.7bn Mars account on the way down.

• Publicis is gasping for air

• Omnicom is busy swallowing IPG,

• And the whole Holdco model now looks less like a fleet of Gigayachts and more like a dump of scuttled oil tankers with submerged captains arguing about who owns the last roll of Duck Tape.

Winners & Losers Or Just Losers?

My bet is that the big networks will start to drown in a soup of compromise. Too slow, too overweight and too myopic to pivot at the speed the AI era demands, they will be hoovered up by the richest of their ilk or defenestrated by a new breed of disruptive agency.

Smaller, more nimble agency models that deploy global campaigns using an output-rewarded fee structure, using AI to augment scrappy human teams who produce tier-one work in higher volume, with higher ROI in a fraction of the time. They might even get paid in rev share on results, so cheap will their campaigns be to run, and so confident they’ll ultimately become in their expected deliverables…

I expect the first of these to scale pretty soon, quietly winning newsworthy creative, PR and media pitches the big networks assumed were theirs by birthright.

PR Agencies Fight Back Today

It doesn’t have to be this way. PR agencies could lead the fightback, owning the raw material the machines are begging to be fed, plus the relationships, creativity and craft to sell the outputs to an expanding and increasingly desperate array of shit scared clients. The only thing missing is the will to stop lambasting GEO on conference panels and start selling it as a core competency next Monday morning.

So, to every PR and SEO agency owner reading this, wondering whether the LLMs are hunting down your business:- they are, and they’re not.

The robots are flirting with your clients, and they’re increasingly owning their customers’ eyeballs, but you’re the only ones holding the true map.

You can own this field, but RIGHT NOW is the only time to shit or get off the pot.

The pathfinders who move now will own the bays the Holdco tankers are too heavy to moor in.
Everyone else will carry on using their winning Lotto tickets as coasters, right up until last orders.

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

» If you enjoyed today’s article, enjoy 3 of Harry’s other recent unfiltered takes:

1. Every Story Needs A Villain

2. It Is Possible To Have Too Much Of A Good Thing – Just Ask AI About Content Diarrhoea…

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

Thanks for reading this week, we have a special 100th newsletter next week, where Harry and I banish marketing channels, poor tactics and maybe throw a few curveballs into room 101. Have any you would banish? Please hit reply today and let us.

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

Other important related reads to keep you ahead of your competitors

• Winning AI: With Chat To Citation To Sales

• How To Win PR & Comms For The Next 12 Months With

• When Bots Builds Will Hurt You & Your Brand

Article Sources:

• Muck Rack – What Is AI Reading (May 2026),

• Muck Rack – Where LLMs Pull From,

• Omnibound GEO Statistics 2026,

• Proper Propaganda – Agencies that understand GEO,

• eMarketer – WPP’s FTSE 100 removal,

• WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025,

• PRNews – Generative Pulse Summit takeaways.

• This week: Simon (Swan) returns with his take on what will help many of us stand the test of time and move away from being remembered as our last title and as the corporate world is being reshaped its time to engineer our edge to stand out and stand the test of time.

• Last week: We were reminded of the importance of knowing if and when to use AI in our campaigns and projects. If you missed it, you can read it here

• If you are new here or the email was forward to you and want to receive the newsletter straight to your inbox you can subscribe for free, here.

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This Week’s Marketing Swipe Files To Be Inspired By

1. London City Lionesses smashing YouTube ⚽️

2. How John Lewis Changed Their Flagship Store Into Commerce Studio 🎙️

3. Instagram Testing New Topical Feed Suggestions ⁉️

By Simon Swan - Connect On Linkedin - Read Simon’s Other Marketing Unfiltered Articles

Master the Core

There’s no shortage of marketing courses, frameworks and textbooks.

Having a solid understanding of the fundamentals matter even more, and I’d suggest that mastering them is a non-negotiable. But mastering the theory is just the ticket to the game in my opinion. Thankfully those barriers to entry in putting yourself on a course have but been eliminated

But what has changed significantly are a number of external factors impacting our working life.

Corporate life offers that safe and secure scaffolding: a title that answers “what do you do,” a team that reflects status, a budget that creates attention, a promotion cycle that gives ambition somewhere to point. But take the scaffolding away, and even highly capable marketers can struggle to describe their value without reaching for the company name or job title.

The executive career is changing outside of just having the qualifications to get you through the door. But longer working lives, flatter organisations and AI uncertainty will mean that the next decade can’t be managed as business as usual

My view is the advantage will belong to marketers at any level who can retain their skill-set and at the same time build outside of your core skills but also your e.g. reputation, human judgement and the ability to make change happen.. Key factors that are not found through a manual.

It’s going to be getting more comfortable with your career that doesn’t follow a straight line but trusting your own judgment to navigate your next steps as what got you through the door, keeps you relevant, and makes you genuinely valuable across your career is something will be something else entirely.

What’s Your Edge?

The old bargain was straightforward: build expertise, take on bigger teams, manage bigger budgets, keep climbing the ladder (if you wanted to).

But those “rules” have changed.

Lynda Gratton’s recent Harvard Business Review article names the tension precisely:

Building an edge for your career over the long term shouldn’t be seen “as a vanity project” but rather a way to invest in yourself to add “career insurance”.

Building your edge is the visible, portable evidence of how you think and the problems you can solve as well as developing your own capabilities and ways of working that offers something different

What’s Your Impact

Your “Edge” could show up in a lot of places such as if you write to develop your opinions, if you mentor, speak, guest lecture…or simply becoming known as the person who brings clarity to a difficult situation. But it’s also that added extra you can bring into a business outside of your job description

Rishad Tobaccowala calls this a “company of one” mindset - it’s owning your own network, your own learning and your own reputation and applying it in your own unique way into a business.Organisations that call on you in future won’t do it because of your job title. They’ll do it because of what you’re known for.

Start Right: A Practical Guide To Building Your Own Method

Whatever organisation you walk into a startup, government, a global FMCG business a handful of practical questions have set me up every single time:

• Understand the category first.

  • Is it growing?

  • Is there innovation happening?

  • Who’s the audience, and who are the real competitors?

  • A proper situation analysis before you touch a channel plan is what earns you buy-in later.

• Connect marketing to how the business operates, it’s objectives or expectations of its owners…The P&L is always a good entry point to data but also have the conversation with your CFO and his/her team e.g. where do they see savings, growth or efficiency coming from, and where could marketing actually support that? Is the role of marketing understood?

• Interrogate the culture. Is it flat or command-and-control? Does it reward collaboration, test and learn and cross-silo working? Some of this you can and should ask directly in the interview process, not discover six months in.

• Spend your first 90 days listening, not presenting. Book time with customer service, finance, warehousing, dispatch whoever sits closest to the friction. Ask what their KPIs are and where they think things break down. You’ll learn more here than from any onboarding deck.

Michael Watkins’ book The First 90 Days is worth reading as a practical map for starting somewhere new, which almost nobody talks about enough.

My time at Kitbag whilst a start-up, we had limited marketing budget and zero agency support. So we’d ask our customers.

• How did you find us?

• Why did you buy?

• If you’ve bought elsewhere before, who from?

That habit taught me more about the business than any dashboard has since and it’s something anyone, in any role, at any company, can start doing this week.

The Squiggly Career Is Now The Normal Career

Careers today are what authors Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis call squiggly: they move sideways, diagonally, sometimes even backwards, before they leap forward which is a refreshing and alternative take to a traditional career plan mapped as a sequence of roles for example.

The shape of work itself is moving the same way. Estimates suggest that within the next decade, more people in the US could be working freelance or as entrepreneurs than in full-time employment the future of work is increasingly project-based, gig-shaped and reputation-driven.

My Squiggly Career

My own path has looked squiggly on paper, retail, sports ecommerce, government, FMCG and each move looked unusual at the time! Building social capital from zero, in a new category, every time. What travelled was the core: the customer-first thinking, the discipline of connecting marketing to business goals, regardless of channel or sector

Your core travels, (what you’ve learnt, the courses you completed); the edge is what stretches it and provides a wider point of view

The modern career question isn’t “what job comes next?” It’s what body of work are you building, what problems do you want to be known for solving, and which options are you creating before you need them?

Why EQ Is Becoming Marketing’s Most Valuable Skill

For decades, the professional world ran on IQ: how much you know, how quickly you can process information but what it can’t easily replicate is emotional intelligence, the ability to read a room, build trust across departments, collaborate across silos, mentor junior colleagues, and bring people along with you..something to consider when building your edge

The organisational evidence backs this up. Marketing Week career and salary survey identified nine key trends currently shaping marketing teams burnout, team turmoil, pay gaps and recruitment failures among them and none of those are solved by a better channel mix.

They’re solved by people who lead with empathy, listen and build genuine relationships inside their organisations.

That’s an edge to build your business capability, helping to reduce hidden friction, improve the quality of information reaching the top, and gives any transformation a far better chance of developing.

Your title may change or the organisation may change. The ladder may disappear. But the combination of marketing craft, visible usefulness, trusted relationships, AI fluency and emotional intelligence stays valuable across every context you take it into.
- Simon Swan (read Simon’s top 3 posts for Marketing Unfiltered 👇)

1 →Why EQ Is The Missing Operating System For Transformation

2 → Why EQ & ‘Change Agents’ Are The Future of Talent Strategy

3 → An Alternative Approach To Content Hype - If Your Content Disappeared Tomorrow, Would Anyone Notice?

Thanks for reading again today. Go and have a great weekend!

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

Last Week: Harry’s take on disrupting the legal industry with branding rocked the boat, you can you enjoy it below:

Thanks for those who emailed and DMed this week on my investigation into job and hiring scams - I will be adding to the post as a continued resource, please hit reply or drop me a line with anything you have seen or been approached with.

This Week: We have tackling why bots are hindering many businesses they just haven’t thought through the use case

On to why you likely need to re-think use of AI and bot sites and microsites.

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Why Letting Bots Build Your Website Could Cost You Customers & Clients

By Stevie Roberts, Connect On LinkedIn Or Through Kaydee Web

We’ve all seen the adverts: AI tools that promise to build you a shiny new website faster than you can make a cup of coffee. When you’re already juggling a dozen priorities to keep your business running smoothly, AI taking website design off your plate feels like a godsend.

However, your website should be a human-centric touchpoint designed to connect with real people, build trust, and drive sustainable growth.

AI is great for research, brainstorming, testing layout ideas, and getting a quick prototype off the ground. But letting an algorithm loose on your entire digital experience? That’s where things get risky.

Imagine an independent consultant uses an AI builder to launch their website. A prospect tries to view the website on their mobile, but the AI-generated layout has hidden the ‘Contact’ button behind a menu glitch, or listed services the consultant doesn’t actually offer. The prospect loses trust and closes the tab.

There’s a reason it’s called co-pilot, not captain; you still need to be the one flying the plane.

Share

Fast vs Faceless

You can’t deny the pitch is intriguing. In an on-demand era, instant setup sounds brilliant, until you realise that “quick to build” usually translates to “quick to bounce” for your visitors.

You have roughly 6 seconds to grab a user’s attention. If your website looks like countless other digital doppelgangers, people won’t stick around long enough to learn what makes you special.

Sure, AI-generated copy is clean and grammatically correct, but it’s also devoid of humour, warmth, and humanity. People buy with emotion and justify with logic later. Relying on algorithms and buzzwords strips away the emotional spark required to convert a customer.

In a fiercely competitive market, blending into the background is the fastest way to dilute your brand authority.

To ensure your brand is anything but bland, lean into the things that simply can’t be synthesised:

• Your Origin Story: AI doesn’t know your backstory or the lessons you learned from failure. Tell your story to create authentic connection.

• Your Real Voice: Ditch the jargon. If you use humour, passion, or specific phrasing in your client meetings, put it on your pages.

• Real Faces, Real Mess: Swap out AI-generated and stock imagery for photos of you, your team, and your workspace. Perfection isn’t real; authenticity builds trust.

Messy Mechanics

AI-generated websites might look polished on the surface, but behind the scenes, they’re often a structural mess. It’s the digital equivalent of tidying up for unexpected guests by shoving all your clutter into a cupboard.

AI tools generate code to satisfy a prompt, not to run efficiently. Look under the hood of a typical AI build, and you’ll often find pages loading painfully slowly because the tool generated thousands of lines of redundant CSS to format a single page, resulting in bloated back-end files, sluggish load times, and fractured mobile views.

Search engines ruthlessly prioritise smooth, fast user experiences. When your website is weighed down by heavy code and weak metadata, it quietly crushes your organic search visibility.

Untangling a web of buggy AI code almost always eats up more time and budget than building a solid technical foundation from scratch.

Here are 5 SEO principles to make sure your digital groundwork is airtight.

The Other ‘AI’: Accessibility and Inclusivity

True web accessibility, like hitting vital WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards, demands intentional, human care.

We’re talking about proper colour contrast, logical keyboard navigation, and meaningful alt-text that helps users navigate.

AI toolkits frequently gloss over these critical nuances. Recent economic research shows that inaccessible websites cost businesses approximately £17.1 billion annually in lost revenue, with up to 75% of users with disabilities abandoning purchases due to digital friction.

Search engines pay close attention to accessibility; if your website doesn’t meet their standards, Google’s algorithm flags your site as a poor user experience, which tanks your rankings.

When you let an algorithm guess its way through accessibility, you aren’t just accidentally shutting out a massive segment of your audience; you’re sabotaging your optimisation and leaving your brand wide open to entirely avoidable (and expensive) compliance issues.

Delegate, Don’t Abdicate

There is a balance. By all means, use AI to streamline processes such as:

• Drafting wireframes: Map out initial layouts and streamline user journeys.

• Exploring creative angles: Generate placeholder text or brainstorm messaging variations.

• Organising raw research: Process data and competitor analysis to inform your strategy.

We’re not categorically saying don’t use AI to build websites. There are circumstances where it is appropriate and useful, for example:

• Startups: When you just need to get online, now.

• 1-page websites: AI can easily handle a basic, single-page layout.

• When ranking isn’t a concern: AI-built websites may be entirely sufficient if your goal isn’t to climb up the Google ladder.

• Short-term Campaign Landing Pages: If you need to set up a quick landing page and have all the content ready, AI can get it live fast. However, true marketing is like investing in the stock market; it relies on trust. Successful content builds relationships between your website, search crawlers, and people. You can drive paid traffic to an AI landing page, but if you aren’t backing it up with a strong website and blog, it’s less likely those visitors will actually bite.

It’s the digital equivalent of handing a junior a template and saying, ‘just get us online.’ It checks a box, which is perfectly fine when you’re starting out, but it doesn’t craft a standout digital presence.

Long-term commercial success isn’t built on automated shortcuts; it’s rooted in trust, credibility, and digital experiences designed by, and for, real human beings.

Use your CMS as a tool to genuinely help your audience.

Answer their real questions with multimodal content, such as pairing blog posts with supporting videos.

It sounds like extra work, but this process acts as training for your internal team. Content can also be repurposed off-page, for LinkedIn articles, Substack posts, or to answer questions on Reddit. All of this boosts brand recognition and cements your business as an industry authority.

Pair your expert content with highly valuable lead magnets, and you’ll have prospects tripping over themselves to join your mailing list.

Be careful with your calls to action (CTAs). Multiple requests can overwhelm your audience; decide on one clear goal per piece of content: is the ideal outcome for them to contact you directly, or should you point them toward a sign-up form?

Technology should support you, not replace you.

If you want a digital space that converts, ranks, and builds authority, don’t outsource your originality; build something real, human, and uniquely you.

— Stevie

» If this article will help your team, please copy and paste https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/97 into your Teams or Slack channel.

3 marketing ideas to be inspired by:

1. Apple maps ads are now live with + 200m users 🗺️

2. How to leverage the new YouTube stations feature 🕣

3. Why Holly was right to platform Lily 😱

Or Swipe 73 other ideas

Thanks for reading again this week and we will see you next Friday

Danny & Harry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blands Not Brands

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

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

1.7%

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

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

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

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

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

You’d be wrong.

Blending In

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

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

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

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

No - I’m not.

Ripe For Disruption?

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

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

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

“Or maybe a new suit?”

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

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

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

• A slightly more uplifting colour swatch?

• A brand personality that has some actual personality?

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

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

• Imagery not stolen from the 2003 Moss Bros catalogue?

• Copy that made me feel anything but sleepily morose?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billions

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

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

Enter AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovate & Market To Win The Legal Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Why Cocktails Are So Important In Tennis 🎾

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

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

Article Sources

• The Law Society/ Hazlewoods Financial Benchmarking Survey 2026

• Clifford Chance revenue hits £2.4bn - Legal Business

• Kirkland reaches $10.5bn revenue - The American Lawyer

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

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

• Slaughter and May adopts Harvey firmwide - Artificial Lawyer

• Linklaters rolls out Legora - Artificial Lawyer

• Freshfields’ partnership with Anthropic - Law.com

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

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

• Harvey AI security & data privacy — AI Vortex

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

• 2026 marketing budget benchmarks for professional service firms — Align

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

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

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Now onto How To Protect Yourself Against Bad Actors & Job Scammers:

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

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

There are 4 ongoing scams to keep an eye out for, I have updated in this newsletter, click the link to jump to the scam you may be experiencing or being targeted for:

1. Scams Suggesting They Are Representing Major Businesses Like Airbnb, Adobe And Google

2. Phantom Executive Search Firm Scams

3. Unsuccessful Interview Work

4. Newest: AI Training Data From Screening Calls

Part I: Inside Look At A Very Realistic Scam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, you go for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I dive into how we can protect ourselves below.

🆕 If you are new here, you can subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter every Friday morning.

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

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

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

1. The “Phantom” Executive Search Firm

Here, scammers impersonate or invent a retained search firm.

They will often:

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

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

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

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

The process is structured and familiar:

• A discovery call

• A “culture fit” conversation

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

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

2. The Extortionate Resume And Branding Review

Once trust is built, the conversation shifts and quick.

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

They may:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. The High Profile Job Ads And Application Racket

A newest variant is the fake high profile job ad.

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

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

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

• Posting ads across platforms

• Running short, automated interviews

• Sending follow up and rejection emails

The tells:

• Poor grammar or slightly off language

• Basic automation errors

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

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

In all cases, check:

• The site, including domain age and registration

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

• The names and email addresses

• The actual companies behind the job ads

Practical Guardrails To Protect Yourself

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

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

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

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

Use cross channel verification as standard.

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

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

Genuine search partners respect careful candidates.

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

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

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

Please watch out for the platform shifts.

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

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

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

Here are two other approaches being leveraged:

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

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

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

Be Warned: Unfortunately do not expect the hiring managers to come back to you when you flag to internal exec headhunters and their teams.

Beware: Unsuccessful Interview Work & Presentations Are Being Implemented

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New: Training Data & Interviews

As of September: a new trend with AI is quick interviews to become trainers for AI systems, there have been a number of companies who arrange a 15 minute call, an AI bot interviews you on the phone and leverages what you say while answering questions to train its model and then goes to pitch work and solutions based on several senior leaders insights and nuance.

Reputable and well known agencies and consultancy firms are being cloned with the same tactic, be careful with calls and screening interviews with brands who’s domains do not match or suggest they are new spin outs of these companies.

Beware of job ads that are for fractional leaders within AI companies who promise large day rates and promise flexible contracts.

Ambition, Curiosity And Caution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3x hand selected marketing inspirations from this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same happens within specialisms.

Paradigms emerge.

Laws of gravity set in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A rising market can make ordinary decisions look inspired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My previous world gave me a different clock.

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

That might sound contradictory. It isn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It means asking better questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   And why have I stopped questioning it now?

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

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

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

Here are 3 refreshing doses of marketing from this week:

1. 👜 What’s in my bag with Vagisil

2. 📲 Hinge x Substack short stories with famous authors

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

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

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

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

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

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

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This week I sat down with Andy Barr.

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

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

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

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

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

Listen To The Podcast

Listen on Spotify

Or On Apple Podcast

Watch On YouTube

Important Timestamps:

• 1:30 - What Works In PR Right Now?

• 3:21 - How To Run Reactive Newsjacking

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

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

• 13:49 - When To Leverage Founder Led Channels

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

• 18:19 - The Crisis Comms Playbook

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

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

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

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

The Current State of PR & Media Tactics

Q: What tactics are you seeing working today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media Relations & Direct Communications

Q: When should people use the press?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: When should brands actually say nothing?

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

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

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

The Future of AI & Reputation Management

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

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

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

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

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

My 3 recommended actions following my prediction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Hidden Gems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ⚽️ Arsenal x Cadburys champions chocolate

• 🥪 Greggs reframing of lunch/picnic as quicknic

• 💉 Ozempic sponsorship in WTA tour

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

Have a good weekend,

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE HYPE CHALLENGE

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

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

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

» Connect with Alicia on LinkedIn and on her Substack

Corporate Background vs. Entrepreneurship

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leverage The Exposure Effect

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

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

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

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

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

Cut Through the Algorithm

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

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

• What are your interests?

• What are your hobbies?

• Connect with people on a human, emotional level.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Biggest Mistake on LinkedIn

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

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

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

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

Mastering the Persona Bubble

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

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

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

2. The actual content you are sharing.

3. Who you are engaging with on LinkedIn.

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

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

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

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

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

Create A 3-Pillar Content Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

High-Value Content Beats Likes

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

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

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

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

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

Become A News Distributor

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

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

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

You Can Transfer Success to Substack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 5 Key Takeaways (and what to do)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Content pillars split:

  • ~33% Business (behind the scenes)

  • 33% Thought leadership

  • 33% Personal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danny & Harry

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

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

Onto this week and your daily dose of marketing inspiration:

By Danny Denhard - Helping Companies Through Exec Coaching & Consulting

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

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

Daily Dose Download

11.5MB ∙ PDF file

Download

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

Download

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

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

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

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

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

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

What A Daily Swipe File Does For Teams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Process?

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

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

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

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

The Key Themes

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

1. Athlete‑Led and Creator‑Owned Brands

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Conversational and Agentic AI in Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

3. Human‑Centric and Inclusive Design

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

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

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

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

4. Ecosystems and Unusual Collaborations

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

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

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

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

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

5. Quality Over Quantity: The Counter‑Trend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now onto Harry’s unfiltered take….

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

By Harry Lang - Connect On LinkedIn

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

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

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

Getinfantino

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

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

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

Sinfantino

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

Adminfantino

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

Winfantino

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

Assassinfantino

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

Mannequinfantino

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

Toxinfantino

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

Chagrinfantino

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

Ginfantino

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

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

Major sponsor Budweiser was understandably a little miffed.

Alladinfantino

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

Zeppelinfantino

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

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

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

• The New Balance Playbook Reverse Engineered

• Ferrari’s Modern Day Marketing Masterclass Reverse Engineered

• Storytellers Are The New Commercial Weapon

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

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

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

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

Inspire Me Some More

Let’s dive in to today’s newsletter

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

Is Reddit Worth the Risk for Marketers/Brands?

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

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

The Case Against Reddit

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

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

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

The Case For Reddit

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Marketing Leaders Should Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helpful So Far? Hit Share ↙️

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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

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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

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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