Shaping Company Identity

The rise of AI doesn’t make agencies irrelevant. It makes them indispensable—if they evolve. I’ve heard the speculation: “With AI doing so much, will we need agencies anymore?” The truth is, AI isn’t eliminating the need for agencies—it’s exposing which ones are ready for the future. The partners embracing AI aren’t being replaced. They’re leading. They’re building smarter workflows, unlocking new insights, and evolving from executional support to strategic acceleration. After last week’s post on the 20-60-20 rule, many of you shared how you're balancing AI automation with human oversight. Today, let’s take that one step further—into how this balance is driving real operational excellence and unlocking new doors in advertising. Here’s a simple framework I’ve observed among the most successful AI adopters: Enhance → Automate → Innovate Enhance: Use AI to improve existing processes—make them faster, smarter, more scalable. Automate: Remove repetitive tasks. Free your teams to focus on strategy, not spreadsheets. Innovate: Use AI to unlock new capabilities that weren’t feasible before. Let’s bring this to life with a real-world partner example: A tech partner began by enhancing keyword research. What used to take hours, AI now does in minutes—suggesting keywords based on vast data signals. Next, they automated reporting. AI now builds reports with insights and recommendations pulled from multiple sources. Their analysts? They’re back to focusing on strategy. Then came innovation. By combining AI-driven audience insights with creative optimization, they built a system that dynamically adjusts ad content based on real-time performance. That level of personalization? Simply wasn’t possible before. Here’s the kicker: human expertise remained essential at every step. Keyword research still needed a strategist to align with brand goals. AI-generated reports required interpretation to guide decisions. And the personalization engine? It’s tuned and refined by creatives and planners every day. This brings me back to a core belief: AI is a collaborator—not a replacement. The partners winning in this space aren’t just using AI—they’re working with it to amplify their teams and build smarter solutions. Looking ahead? I see AI evolving from optimization to orchestration. Predicting trends. Adjusting strategies in real time. Maybe even composing full-funnel campaigns with inputs from multiple signals and channels. But we’re not there yet—and that’s exciting. Because it means there’s still time to build, test, and shape what this future looks like. So let me ask you: How has AI helped you enhance, automate, or innovate your operations? What new possibilities are you starting to explore? #AmazonAds #AI #FutureOfAdvertising

Let’s face it - current headlines spell a recipe for employee stress. Raging inflation, recession worries, international strife, social justice issues, and overall uncertainty pile onto already full work plates. As business leaders, keeping teams motivated despite swirling fears matters more than ever. Here are 5 strategies I lean into to curb burnout and boost morale during turbulent times: 1. Overcommunicate Context and Vision: Proactively address concerns through radical transparency and big picture framing. Our SOP is to hold quarterly all hands and monthly meetings grouped by level cohort and ramp up fireside chats and written memos when there are big changes happening. 2. Enable Flexibility and Choice: Where Possible Empower work-life balance and self-care priorities based on individuals’ needs. This includes our remote work policy and implementing employee engagement tools like Lattice to track feedback loops. 3. Spotlight Impact Through Community Stories: Connect employees to end customers and purpose beyond daily tasks. We leveled up on this over the past 2 years. We provide paid volunteer days to our employees and our People Operations team actively connects our employees with opportunities in their region or remotely to get involved monthly. Recently we added highlighting the social impact by our employees into our internal communications plan. 4. Incentivize Cross-Collaboration: Reduce silos by rewarding team-wide contributions outside core roles. We’ve increased cross team retreats and trainings to spark fresh connections as our employee base grows. 5. Celebrate the Humanity: Profile your employee’s talents beyond work through content spotlight segments. We can’t control the market we operate in, but as leaders we can make an impact on how we foster better collaboration to tackle the headwinds. Keeping spirits and productivity intact requires acknowledging modern anxieties directly while sustaining focus on goals ahead. Reminding your teams why the work matters and that they are valued beyond output unlocks loyalty despite swirling worries. What tactics succeeded at boosting team morale and preventing burnout spikes within your company amidst current volatility?

I’ve been working with some of the world’s biggest brands on their AI transformations. Here’s the biggest mistake everyone is making 👇 It’s not the models. It’s not hallucinations. It’s not the prompts. It’s the brand. As AI adoption accelerates, I keep seeing the same pattern: Every tool needs brand grounding. Every agency uploads their own version. Every team creates their own rules. Before long, there isn’t one brand. There are dozens of fragmented versions of it. And the brand doesn’t control any of them, nor is it learning and being feed real time data to do what AI can do best. Learn! This creates serious problems: Loss of control: Sensitive brand positioning and IP are scattered across third-party tools. Loss of consistency: What’s approved in one workflow is wrong in another. Updating becomes impossible. Loss of ownership: Whoever owns the brand data owns the power. And too often, that’s the agency or the platform—not the brand. Here’s the deeper issue most teams miss: In an agentic world, brand isn’t static. It should learn. Campaign wins and losses should continuously feed back into the system. That only works if there is a single source of brand truth. If there isn’t, the brand belongs to whoever configured the tool. This should worry every CMO. Because brand is no longer a PDF. In the agentic world it’s an agent. That’s why the next critical layer in the #martech stack is the Brand Agent. A Brand Agent is a centralized, owned agent that serves as the single source of truth for brand voice, guardrails, do’s and don’ts, and campaign learnings. Every other agent—creative, media, CRM, commerce—references it for grounding. No duplication. No drift. No agency-owned brand logic. The implementation will vary. The principle won’t. Own the Brand Agent. Govern it. Feed it real-time learning. Let everything else integrate to you. That’s how brands scale AI without losing themselves. How are you thinking about brand governance in an agent-first world?

I attracted 53% of my old employer’s apprenticeship talent, with 1 simple tool and £0 budget. . I’ll be completely transparent… I LOVED my old job at Heathrow . In fact, I loved the airport so much, it poured out of me and overflowed onto the internet. . For over 5 years, I would pick up my phone and make daily videos about: . Things I was getting upto Things I was learning, and Advise I wish I knew earlier . The result? . A walking talking job description in the form of short, sharp and educational videos across instagram and TikTok… . “A Digital Twin” of my experience, so to speak . Now here’s the interesting part: . These videos were made with £0 budget and just my phone… as a result they were NOT: . Silky smooth shots Highly edited Scripted or planned . Instead they were: . Authentic Raw REAL! . They built trust and connection… . This resulted in THOUSANDS of messages with questions about the role I was doing… . And most importantly, how could they get this role too? Yeah… I answered all of them . Before I knew it, this online community had grown so rapidly it overtook the number of followers that Heathrow Airport had across its own social media channels 😅 . This is something every organisation can learn from… . Your best talent attraction strategy…is your own talent! . Allow them to have a voice! Allow them to use it! . This authenticity is the only thing that will stand out on social media and cut through the noise. . Anything else will just look and feel like an advert… . And we all know what happens when we see an Ad.. . *Skip* . . . Some organisations penalise their staff for speaking about their job on social media… . Those days are over. . The organisation that will attract the best talent of the future are the ones that encourage, empower and, dare i say it, TEACH their staff how to use social media! . Yes, thats right! Invest in building your own internal “influencers” . Give them a social media master class, teach them where the red lines are and encourage them to share their day to day experiences at work . Then sit back, and watch the magic happen. . Ps - If you like the idea of getting ahead of the curve and developing your own internal team of “influencers”, let’s talk. . #TheAirportGuy . #TalentAttraction #Aviation

Over the years, I've discovered the truth: Game-changing products won't succeed unless they have a unified vision across sales, marketing, and product teams. When these key functions pull in different directions, it's a death knell for go-to-market execution. Without alignment on positioning and buyer messaging, we fail to communicate value and create disjointed experiences. So, how do I foster collaboration across these functions? 1) Set shared goals and incentivize unity towards that North Star metric, be it revenue, activations, or retention. 2) Encourage team members to work closely together, building empathy rather than skepticism of other groups' intentions and contributions. 3) Regularly conduct cross-functional roadmapping sessions to cascade priorities across departments and highlight dependencies. 4) Create an environment where teams can constructively debate assumptions and strategies without politics or blame. 5) Provide clarity for sales on target personas and value propositions to equip them for deal conversations. 6) Involve all functions early in establishing positioning and messaging frameworks. Co-create when possible. By rallying together around customers’ needs, we block and tackle as one team towards product-market fit. The magic truly happens when teams unite towards a shared mission to delight users!

In so many organisations, so many people have so many ideas, skills and knowledge sets that could be of incredible value but their voices so often go unheard, because they work in a team or department that isn’t leading on the challenge, or their job description is only accessing 10% of their experience, expertise and interest. It is why it is so important to get people to work across teams and to broker and to catalyse that. The U.S. military have liaison officers who facilitate communication between elements of the organisation to ensure mutual understanding and unity of purpose and action. Liaison is the most commonly employed technique for establishing and maintaining close, continuous, physical communication between commands. It ensures that leaders and teams have a real time awareness of talent and expertise, wherever it may be, so that it can be deployed quickly and with immediate impact. Maybe, create a centralised information centre, where people can see what is going on where in the organisation, and can contribute through online portals to offer support and ideas. Increasingly, organisations are holding hackathons, during working hours for people to meet in open spaces, shares ideas and challenges, in order to form working groups and focused teams. I often advise clients to build work exchanges into their professional development cycles, so that people get the chance to experience other roles and responsibilities within the organisation, not only to build empathy but to foster new relationships and opportunities for information and idea exchanges. Start to see roles as missions rather than fixed job descriptions, so that colleagues can move when appropriate but always have a home base to return to.   Make sure that leaders at all levels are not only held to account for planning, strategy, vision, culture and performance but for cross-team collaboration. It is too easy for leaders to role model the silo-ing and cross departmental blame shifting that can so easily poison an organisation’s collegiate potential.  

If you are a founder who has a decent personal brand but your employees are silent on LinkedIn, your culture is still a theory, not proof. You are showing up, sharing your stories, building your personal brand, and I love that. But if you really want to 10x your visibility, credibility, and influence, you need your team to show up too. Your strongest marketing asset is sitting inside your office right now. Your team. If you want to attract top talent, let your current talent speak. You can build a great business, but your team will build the reputation. If your culture is real, it should reflect outside your office too. Employer branding is no longer HR's job. It is your employees talking online. You talk about culture, leadership, values, and teamwork, but no one else from your company speaks about their experience, then it all just stays in theory. But when your employees also share their stories, talk about their learnings, mention your company, tag you, speak about their growth journey, that is when the brand becomes real. Just genuine voices from inside the company. So if you are a founder reading this, having a personal brand on LinkedIn is the bare minimum now, especially for you and your CXOs, and your top performers. Encourage your employees to also build their personal brands. Let them share what working with you feels like. And I get it. Not everyone knows how to write, create content, or build a voice online. You can hire strategists and ghostwriters, but your employees usually cannot. Which is why the best thing you can do is to host a LinkedIn personal branding workshop for your team. Call in someone who can guide them on profile optimization, writing posts, sharing experiences, and building their presence online. PS- If you want to explore this, either virtually or in person, and you want someone to help your team get started the right way, Happy to discuss it over the DMs :) #shambhavi_writes

While analyzing dozens of social media trend reports, I noticed something fascinating: EGC is becoming the secret weapon for B2B brands looking to cut through the noise. 🌟 Here's what makes EGC so powerful: 1. Expertise Showcase - Your engineers explaining complex tech? That's gold. - Subject matter experts sharing insights? Pure value. - Real people = real credibility 2. Human Connection - Behind-the-scenes content outperforms corporate messaging - Interns sharing conference experiences - CEOs celebrating product launches - Culture becomes content 🚀 3. Cost-Efficiency Win - Reduce external content creation costs - Scale with internal "employee influencers" - Redirect influencer budgets to empowering your team Companies are now boosting employee posts more instead of running traditional ads. Why? Because authenticity sells. Brand examples? I got you. Currys, NitroBar, and John Deuce are on it providing this is not just a trend, but the future. 🌟 Prediction: 2025 will be the year of the employee creator. Those not leveraging LinkedIn's "golden age" through their team will fall behind. Pro Tip: Don't aim for perfection. The magic of EGC is in its authenticity – let your team's real personality shine through! ✨ What's your take on employee-generated content? Are you empowering your team to create? Share below! 👇 Also, I am opening my books on LinkedIn for more clients interested in improving their personal (or employee) brand. Feel free to DM. #B2BMarketing #ContentStrategy #EmployeeAdvocacy #LinkedInMarketing #FutureOfWork #MarketingTrends2025

Last year I worked with an agency that builds brands using code - not designers in Figma, engineers working with generative parameters. Around the same time, I was doing market research with a firm that maps real social circles instead of running focus groups. Both of those experiences changed how I think about how a brand operates. Most brands are still built like documents. A logo, a tone of voice guide, a set of guidelines that live in a shared drive. Teams reference them when they remember to, apply them with varying degrees of interpretation, and the brand drifts a little further from the original intent with every brief. I've been working on a framework I'm calling Programmable Brands. The idea is that instead of describing a brand in a PDF and hoping people interpret it consistently, you build it as a system with actual logic inside it. Three layers: Signal is what the brand responds to - cultural inputs, data, context. Logic is the encoded rules that determine how the brand behaves, whether that's code, a trained model, or an onchain protocol. Surface is what people actually see and experience. Where this gets practical is in how platforms are evolving. As more marketing surfaces become agent-based, a brand's logic layer could sit in a model or a smart contract. An agent reads the brand logic and adapts a single piece of creative for LinkedIn versus X versus email - not from a template and not from a brief to an agency, but from encoded rules that produce coherent expression across every context. This isn't theoretical. Generative design studios are already building visual identities from code. Brand schema tools are encoding voice and values into machine-readable formats. The pieces exist - they just haven't been assembled into a full operating model yet. That's what I'm working on.

Communication is not about saying what we think. Communication is about ensuring others hear what we mean. Internal communications is about making employees feel good, engaged, informed, & connected. 🚙 It’s the engine behind culture, alignment, & business success. 🔗 It’s the bond that holds the teams together. 🩵 It’s about influence, not control. 📘 It turns corporate strategy into something real for the people. 💪 Internal communications is imperative. However, if everything is hyped to the max, then what is truly important? If all things are A+#1, then which one is truly first among equals? Thanks to technology, we can reach pretty much all employees all the time with everything that ever needs to be communicated. ❌ Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. ✔ We should limit broadcasting & embrace narrowcasting. Segment messages based on employee roles & locations. Defining clear segments & working groups for communication allows you to quickly send a message to the right individuals at any time. ✔ Make communication asynchronous. One example would be a post made on an employee App that others can respond to at any time. Asynchronous communication can be particularly effective for remote teams & those working across multiple time zones or languages (‘inline translations’ is a must). ✔ Move from broadcasting to conversation (interactive channels, Q&As, polls, surveys, feedback loops). ✔ Include your frontline workers. They hardly complain about too much communication. They miss it & too often miss out. ✔ Put in meaningful efforts to truly understand what your employees want. There is no bottom-up communication fatigue … as long as people don’t feel that their voices fall on deaf ears. ✔ Adopt an internal communications platform to connect with your employees at the right time, with the right information, & where they want to receive it. A platform that allows employees to opt in or out of certain information & updates.  ➡️ What has worked for you to reduce internal comms fatigue? Share your tips 👇👇👇 🍯