AI only looks good when you don't know better

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so i it was by accident, if the truth's told. So I was I was working as a copywriter in central London. I was getting paid a pittance for it because it was my first job, so I started as an intern and then I just took more and more responsibility on. But my train fare to get there was basically a third of my weekly salary. So I was, you know looking around, trying to find another job. and the what kept happening was I kept winning bits of freelance work. So I was doing bits of copywriting for for other businesses. I also landed a few gigs at different magazines and started working as a freelance journalist. And what actually happened was with one of my freelance clients, we won a UK blog award. And so we started talking about let's turn it turn it into a service. And obviously by this point, I was earning way more from freelance than my full time job. So with that award win under our belt and these clients I'd cultivated while working full time, we decided to set up an agency. And that's basically how twenty one twelve was born. So it was quite nice because we were able to start it with A few clients already under our belt. We had a bit of social proof around the award win. So yeah, that's how we started.

Yeah, I think I think the main challenge, there there are a few. That the one that sticks in my mind was that I was quite young. So I was still only twenty four. So obviously walking in and trying to pitch to people, there was maybe a bit of kind of reticence on their part because they were thinking, Who who's this kid who's coming in and telling us, you know, we we need to change what we're doing from a digital marketing perspective or you know, does he have enough experience to write for our brand? so so that was a challenge. we're quite fortunate because through the magazine we won pieces of work with some household names like Belvedere and Mo Hennessy. So we had to leverage that social proof to go out and and win new clients. I think the the other problem which most businesses face early on is is cash flow. So Although we started with paying clients, still wasn't, you know, you you're still kind of fighting against your payment terms, people not paying you, people not paying on time, all of those issues that young businesses quite quite often face. So that was also kind of a steep learning curve for me in in the beginning. and and caused some issues early on, for sure.

Yeah, for sure. So the I I think it's super important to have a niche and and the way we niche ourselves down is actually by by indust industry. So we tend to only work with companies in what we call complex sectors. So we work with a lot of regulated markets. A lot of our clients are financial services and life sciences. So there there are two main sectors we work in. Now, what we've found over the last decade of working and trying to reach hard to reach audiences, because most of our clients are going coming to us with briefs around reaching enterprise level companies, reaching senior leaders, and we've always positioned ourselves as growth marketing. But what we found was to truly drive growth for these businesses and to drive sustainable pipeline. We needed more than just say outreach. You have to go right back to the fundamentals. So you need to look at brands. You need to look at how they're positioned in the market, their messaging. You need to look at the fundamentals around are are they actually set up to drive growth? And what I mean by that is kind of things like their CRM, how is their audience segmented? right through into how how are they using their exec presence. So the we we now have a methodology we call the growth engine that takes businesses from brand through to fundamentals like CRM and data into fault leadership content and events. And we use bits of paid ads within that kind of structure, but it's very much about how do we build trust For our climate businesses.

Yeah, sure. Let me Yeah. Okay. The problem is I think if I go like that and then bring the other one back, it might actually. be a bit better. That's better. Shall I answer that again?

What services we provide? Yeah, sorry. So yeah, in in general we we're niched down by sectors. So most of our clients are operating in regulated markets. we do a lot of work within financial services and life sciences. Most of the briefs we get are B2B targeting senior leaders at enterprise level companies. So we we see them as Kind of these hard to reach audiences, we're often tasked with trying to get into. The end goal for our clients is nearly always how do you sustainably grow our pipeline? So over the past decade, we've developed a methodology called Growth Engine, which looks at every aspect of their go-to-market to try and build out a really sustainable way to to drive that growth. So we look at everything from their brand, how are they positioned? Is their messaging strong enough? Are they differentiated enough within the market? We look at the fundamentals to their marketing. How are things being tracked and attributed? You know, is their CRM set up correctly? is are the lists well segmented? So we're communicating to the right people at the right time. And then we move into things like thought leadership content, events, LinkedIn marketing. and we also a fundamental part of what we do is around partnerships. So if you're trying to reach a really hard to reach audience, and we have briefs where within financial services we're tasked with reaching ultra high net worth individuals. And with that kind of audience, you you don't try and go direct, you go through partners. So a lot of what we do is partnerships who already has the no like trust of the businesses you're trying to reach. And we establish those partnerships and then we enable those partners to help us resell our client services or refer into our clients.

think the first would be brand, what makes you distinctive. So so many businesses are are really, really poor at communicating what makes them different to their competitors, what makes them distinctive. And I think it comes back to this idea that most of us don't need to sell to everyone. We need to kind of find our tribe, find the people who you know can relate to us and need need specifically what we offer. The fastest way to find that is by speaking to your current customers. Why do you use us? Why do you stay with us? Why did you choose us over our competitors? They they will give you the answer. Then you need to bottle that up and make it consistent across all your channels. The second thing I'd look at is how you're communicating. So you take that brand message. You know, simple things like a monthly newsletter is incredibly impactful. Because what most people take for granted is the fact that most of your market isn't in market for your services at any one time. So if you take studies from professional services, it's about five percent of your market is ready to buy at any one time. So you need to be communicating with them consistently. So when they do come into that window, you are you are front of mind. So the things I'd look at there are your newsletter. I'd look at your LinkedIn presence. How can how can we be consistent? Both personal brand and and company brand. I think company brand is still important, despite what a lot of people would would tell you. So so look at those aspects. I think the third thing I look at is trust and social proof. So who are we aligning ourselves with? from it might be complementary, non-competitive suppliers into your ideal clients. How do we partner with them? Can we do co-marketing activities, host events together? from a social proof perspective, how are we communicating our our case studies to the market? You know, a a setup like this, simple riverside interview with your clients, clipped up, social media is is incredibly powerful. Turning it into a written case study. those those proof points may lead you into PR, for example, getting your which establishes a lot of authority and a lot of trust as well, if you can appear in the right publications. And everyone's super obsessed with AEO at the moment or GEO or whatever you want to call it, AI visibility. Those are the sort of aspects, especially the last point around PR, that have a a fundamental impact on how you're showing up and how visible you are. So so they're probably the three things I I parcel together, brand communications, into social proof and and trust that I would I would fixate on.

Yeah, in all honesty, I haven't really seen it work either. and and actually some of the contracts that people brought into to begin with in in that space were were horrendous and and they were tied in. I think AI is is become pre pre-fundamental to to everything we do. So the difficulty is orchestrating it across the company so that everyone's using it in their in a similar vein and a in a similar way. And also being aware of things like data privacy and security when you're opening yourself up to something like claw claw cowork or claw code or or something like that. So they you know pretty early on we established kind of our AI principles that we expected employees and suppliers to to stick to when working with the agency. But I always I I see AI as one of these things that's dangerous in the right hands. So if you want great copies still, then a copywriter using AI is is phenomenal. Because they can they can definitely work a bit faster. same goes with design. But I think it's still a fundamental truth that you don't know what you don't know. So what I find is as a former copywriter and journalist. When I use AI for for my writing, I end up arguing with it. And I end up kind of really reshaping it and and kind of thinking, I could have probably done this a bit quicker if I'd just done it the old way. Whereas when I use it for something outside my core competency, I often look at the first answer and go, wow, that's that's really good. But that just shows the kind of the the problem there, right? Is that I don't know what good looks like. in in things outside my core competency. So I'm always cautious when I'm using it for things that aren't my core competency. And I say the same to my team. We've got to we've got to be wary of of that. So we what we've done is we've kind of restructured we we had a very solid way of working in terms of our systems and processes as an agency. Now what we've done is we've kind of amalgamated AI into those systems and processes. We've always used automation. Things like Zapier have been around for as long as our agency has, right? I reckon probably a decade, if not longer. So we've always used bits of automation. Then we've brought AI and agents into the mix. But it's always about keeping a human in the loop and an expert human to ensure that the output is is correct and it it's really solid. So yeah, that's kind of where we've got to with AI. I still see it as the baggage handler, not the pilot of the plane, if that makes sense.

That's cool. Yeah. That that sounds good, yeah, definitely check that out. Yeah, I think we're probably y marketing teams of the future are gonna look smaller and more elite. The the the worry for me is how entry level jobs are being impacted right now. So who who's gonna become kind of those those senior individuals in in the future if people aren't given the opportunity to cut their teeth in organisations, if AI's kind of gonna replace that base and and we're definitely seeing that in in the UK job market in terms of youth unemployment. So I think that's a concern that that needs to be addressed. but because yeah, I think what you can do with a small team of very experienced marketers now is is quite scary. and and I think that's the way it's going is that agencies will will reshape They'll have more fluid structures. you'll probably get more freelancers because people can do more as a as a single entity than than they ever have been able to before. I think the tools that I'm seeing are test a lot of tools, and we've spun out our own AI product out out of the out of the agency. and the the tools I'm seeing are They're they're good, but again, it comes back to that point. How how good is the human utilizing them? It keep keeps being the case, right? So you take lead scoring, you take anything that helps you with content or events or anything like that. Again, fundamentally, how creative is your thinking? How original is your thinking? How good is that idea behind your campaign? Bringing all of those variables together, I think, is still very human and maybe it will change, but I can't see it changing anytime soon, in all honesty. So that true creativity that comes from taste, judgment, lived experience, I think is is gonna be the kind of last bastion of human human marketing, as it as it as it were. So yeah, I Look, it's it's tough to know, right? And it it's really hard to know with all the debate around regulation for AI. I think there's an element of that scaremongering which is probably true, that is probably what you know, it's dangerous to have such a level of superintelligence. But also they want to regulate to keep competitors out of the market, I think is also probably true. So I think we're in this weird situation where you've also got a lot of the you know, people are building it into their infrastructure, but how much longer is it gonna be that affordable for? Because as soon as Anthropic IPO, all of this stuff. So we're in this weird world right now, I think, where we're all baking it into everything we do. But I think those costs are gonna change and the shape of things is gonna change. And then does human labor become cheaper again? I

You know? So there's so many things at play at the moment that we kind of are still figuring out.

yeah, reach out to me via LinkedIn. Always happy to chat, connect with me. drop me a line. Always happy to give give people half an hour of my time.

Thanks, family.