Your firm is already the expert. Let’s make the market see it.

Why now

AI has made competent content free and infinite. Which means content itself no longer sets you apart; it’s a commodity your competitors generate as fast as you do.

The one thing that can’t be generated is a credible, named human who was the origin of an insight, not a repackager of one. Search knows it: E-E-A-T rewards first-hand experience and demonstrable expertise. People feel it: nobody wants an internet of chatbots talking to chatbots; they want to feel connected to a source. A firm with no human face is, functionally, indistinguishable from one. And your buyers can tell.

Here’s the good news: you’re already the expert. That was never the bottleneck. The bottleneck is knowing what the market wants to hear, and getting your people visibly in front of it before your competitors get theirs.

I don’t start from a channel. I start from the problem.

Plenty of marketers are a person with a hammer: the paid specialist whose answer is always more spend, the content team whose answer is always more content. I care about the outcome, and I’ll build whatever gets you there, including the parts that don’t exist yet.

That habit didn’t come from marketing. My band needed a website, so I built one; we wanted to play shows we had no business playing, so I worked out the logistics. I wanted to hear a credible podcast about app creators and Kickstarter founders, so I made one, and took it to the top of the iTunes charts. I wanted to know how far I could push my endurance, so I swam 20 miles, and ran a marathon through the Sahara.

I wanted to prove I was every bit as academically capable as the peers who’d gone to university, so I home-studied to Master’s level, had it certified by the University of Salford, and became a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. And I wanted more credible routes into the industry for junior professionals, so as a founding member of the School of Marketing I helped take it from a start-up to a multinational training provider working with PwC, EY, Unilever, and Sky, scaling to 6,000 learners across 20 countries and building the UK’s largest marketing mentoring programme along the way.

Spend enough of your life making things happen across domains you’ve no formal business being good at, and two things follow. You stop being afraid of the unfamiliar; you just figure it out. And you get to know people, all sorts, with all sorts of interests and reasons. That second one turns out to be the whole job. Marketing is professional empathy: knowing, in your gut, that type of person and what actually moves them. The more of the real world you’ve lived in, the better you understand whoever’s on the other end of the message. I’ve spent my life collecting that, on purpose.