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The traditional categories of creative, media, social, and experiential were built for legacy campaign models, but modern audiences experience brands as one fluid ecosystem. As artificial intelligence commoditises persuasion and accelerates execution, the real differentiator for brands is shifting toward human participation, community, and co-creation.

The conversation explores why persuasion is becoming automated, how live and experiential activations provide proof of humanity in a synthetic world, and why the agency of the future must operate like a flywheel rather than a leaky funnel. They also discuss why exceptional creative judgment and taste matter more than ever when technology makes “average” dramatically easier to achieve. 

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud, Podbean, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Amazon Podcasts.

A campaign is finite, it’s got one message, it’s going in one direction.

And it’s expensive.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing podcast, please like, review, or share this episode to help spread the wisdom from our guests each week. 

Traditional agency structures were built around distinct department silos: creative, media, social, and experiential. But modern consumers don’t experience brands through internal agency department lines. They experience ideas, entertainment products, and communities as one fluid ecosystem. At the same time, as artificial intelligence rapidly commoditizes persuasion and automates execution, the true differentiator for brands is shifting towards human participation, belonging, and co-creation. In a world where machines will win persuasion, how must agencies and brands evolve to build around how culture actually works? 

To explore why participation trumps persuasion and how to build ideas around active human engagement, please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, the founder and managing partner of Agency The Many, Christian Jacobsen. Welcome, Christian. 

Christian Jacobsen

Thank you. It is a pleasure to be with you today. 

Darren Woolley

And the founder and chief creative officer, Damien Eley. Hi Damien. 

Damien Eley

G’day Darren. Thank you for having us. 

Darren Woolley

So, the first thing is I’ve introduced The Many as an agency. How does it feel to immediately get pigeonholed into one of those silos as an agency? 

Christian Jacobsen

Well, I think there are many faces of agencies these days; it’s a pretty broad-spanning title. People have been asking us since we founded our company a long time ago—when it was called Mistress—are you an agency? We’ve always said yes. We do a lot of the traditional work that you might see, but we’ve always lived a little bit outside of that and pushed into new media and new spaces. It’s still agency work, but sometimes it might be seen as outside the traditional norms. 

Damien Eley

We’ve got a page in our creds deck that says we are named after the people who decide whether any of it worked, which I think is a great way to describe The Many. 

Darren Woolley

It also infers this idea that there are many different ways to engage with people. When we were initially introduced, Damien, I thought the name had a simplicity, but if you thought about it even for a few seconds, it seemed to allude to something more. 

It’s interesting because marketers find a real convenience with pigeonholes and silos, being able to say, “This is my media agency, and this is my creative, and this group does social”. But there’s also this desire to collapse them all into one, and yet even when that happens, we still end up with silos within the agency. How do you guys actually overcome that? Is it radical collaboration? 

Christian Jacobsen

Internally, first let me just address that it’s only natural for human beings to want to put things in silos. When the brain tries to handle complex situations, we usually break them down and compartmentalize. When you think about all the myriad ways to go to market these days and the different tactics deployed in our industry, you can understand why it’s easier for a CMO to say, “Okay, this is my brand agency, or my social agency”. It just seems to simplify the process. 

However, as you noted before, it’s not how culture works. It’s not how humans interact with content and experiences. We’ve always believed that the responsibility of companies like ours is to help clients navigate into these new spaces and get closer to how humans actually use media and engage with ideas. That starts to blur the lines. 

It’s never easy because so many of the internal silos you’re referring to are from an older era—an era with a slower media-oriented space and very specific roles. But we’re working at a very different tempo these days, and clients are expecting many more deliverables. It is a challenge internally, but people can wear many hats. With new tools out there, people are becoming more empowered to do things. We see a lot of multi-talented people who can do many things, and that’s of great value these days because it expedites the entire process instead of acting like an old car assembly line. 

Darren Woolley

Damien, do you think it’s also because as an industry, whenever new opportunities or channels come along—like digital or experiential—we just bolt them onto the core advertising offering? It never seems to start from asking, “Where is the human being in this?”. 

Damien Eley

I think we’ve always just tried to start with the problem before deciding how we should answer it. When we started the business in LA, it gave us the opportunity to pull from so many people around us. Coming back and starting the company in Australia, there are still a number of amazing specialist agencies here. Every agency says it can do a bit of everything, but what gave us confidence very early on was explicitly not having that complete, rigid structure. It was really about assembling the right team for the right project, and that carried on to the philosophy of The Many. 

Darren Woolley

Because it’s not just capability; the business model is often built around selling a particular solution. If you’ve got a media capability, you’re going to push paid media. How much of these silos are actually driven by the underlying business model of how to make money out of it? 

Damien Eley

Probably way too many. I think these days clients are really looking for somebody who can confidently show them the right path to take. 

Christian Jacobsen

I would just add that the traditional business model is really well known. Companies become very efficient at it, and therefore it becomes the preferable approach. That efficiency is highly incentivized in an industry like advertising, where timetables, margins, and client budgets have all compressed while deliverables have increased. 

The reality is so much of that institutional knowledge is from an older era. Exploring new models—like tapping into creator networks or co-creation—is a challenge because it’s a totally different approach and you’re constantly pioneering it. We’re going through an era right now where even time-based compensation is going to be severely challenged because holding companies are deploying so much technology that it makes no more sense. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this develops over the next few years. 

The Shift from Persuasion to Participation

Darren Woolley

There are different types of marketers: those that have a very clear idea of what they want an agency to do, and break it down into component parts, and those that come with a well-defined problem and are open to solutions. I imagine you guys are much more aligned to the latter? 

Christian Jacobsen

We prefer it. Anybody in this industry loves to think creatively beyond just the idea, but even how to get to that solution. When it’s more open, it enables the agency to innovate and experiment. 

However, we do both. Sometimes you’ve got to manage both sides. For instance, we work with a large QSR client. That paradigm of how we go to market and measure the funnel works, so there’s something really reliable about it. But alongside that, they’re looking to engage younger consumers and tap into new media. This is where they open things up and ask us to connect with people in totally different ways. 

Damien Eley

A client may want to go in a certain direction because they’re comfortable or because the business feels it’s too risky to think differently. Our philosophy is that we’ll always answer the client brief, but there’s always a lot of work going on in the background on how we can introduce something they haven’t expected. 

Darren Woolley

As technologies become a bigger part of the marketing process, consumers are becoming less human and more digital—just numbers and impressions on a page. How do we move from just trying to get someone’s attention by interrupting what they really want, and move them into participation? 

Damien Eley

As an industry, we’ve probably spent sixty or seventy years pouring everything into persuasion. But as a human, would you prefer to be persuaded, or would you prefer to participate in something you enjoy doing? It seems simple to say, but it’s a fundamental shift in how you have to think. Because persuasion is becoming automated and completely out of our hands, the pressure to find ways to actively participate on a human level has become more important than ever before. 

Darren Woolley

I can’t believe how good LLMs are at writing the call to action. They are shameless. In English and Australian culture, we’re inclined to dampen it down, but an LLM will write, “Sign up now, or we’re coming around to beat your door down”. 

Christian Jacobsen

They’ve been trained on all of this history and all of these past campaigns. Marketing is becoming hyper-personalized, and eventually, it will go agent-to-agent and become completely dehumanized. My personal AI agent is going to negotiate with a brand’s AI agent to buy my shirts for me. 

When we think about participation, we realize it’s true to human origins. For 99% of our existence, we lived in tribes where everybody had to participate to be a part of the group. This gave us our sense of purpose, identity, and belonging. The algorithms have been pushing toward deeper engagement, and younger generations have grown up with this. Gen Z consumers see themselves as co-creative directors who expect to impact brands. 

When the machines become more hyper-personalized, we have to ask: how do we maintain that human engagement? Let’s invite them in. If they are doing something with that brand, they’re going to have a deeper connection. 

Damien Eley

We actually include a provocation in our creative briefs: consider the participatory nature of the idea. It forces you out of thinking in a formulaic way to deliver something persuasive, and instead makes you think about how to actually participate with the audience. It’s a fundamental shift. 

Navigating the AI Era and the Value of Human Connection

Darren Woolley

As a father of twin Gen Alphas, I see how they’re the first generation born with screens. Their cerebral cortex gets overloaded, but what they ultimately crave is human connection. They want authenticity and interaction. Technology hasn’t replaced that primal need for connection; it’s actually driving a growing need for it. 

Christian Jacobsen

One hundred percent. With any major macro trend, there’s always going to be a counter-trend. Nothing is going to stop the advancements in technology globally right now, but human interaction—a genuine one-to-one connection—is going to become more important. 

We have a creative mantra in the office: If we wouldn’t share it, we don’t want to make it. We have to put aside our advertising selves, embrace our humanity, and look at how we personally consume media. What annoys us? What do we share? If we make the work we want to engage with, it’s going to work. 

Darren Woolley

Damien, we’ve seen this backlash to AI content because of its synthetic, lazy nature. From a creative point of view, how do you distinguish between AI enhancing participation and it just being a lazy way to get the job done? 

Damien Eley

It all depends on the outcome. You have to use the tools and move with the pace of the industry, but if what you’re doing is causing a reaction for someone to turn up, contribute, play, or join a community, that proves you can have a real relationship between a person and a brand. If you’re eliciting a participatory response, the work transcends the tools used to make it. 

Darren Woolley

Since Cannes this year, everyone is talking about how “taste” is the new required skill for a creative. But I asked ChatGPT what my taste as an aging creative hipster should be, and it told me exactly what books to read and music to listen to. Isn’t keeping yourself grounded in authenticity more important? 

Damien Eley I

read that trend as taste being a uniquely human thing. If you’re provoking yourself to work out what your taste is, that’s something no machine can generate on your behalf. The backlash is going to come from the recognition that to be human, you have to have proof of humanity—the version of you that AI cannot create. 

Evolving the Creative Process and Relinquishing Brand Control

Darren Woolley

Does this participatory approach change the structure of a campaign? Many marketers say they want to break the old pattern of starting with a TV ad and then building the rest of the campaign around it. 

Christian Jacobsen

Sometimes there is a role to start with TV, simply because the average age of a CMO is 52. Gen X grew up in a different era, and sometimes the fastest way for them to wrap their head around an idea is through a script because that’s what they’re trained for. However, they are also very aware that younger generations are communicating and interacting with media in totally different ways. 

Regarding AI, we see it as the ability to get closer to your ideas faster. Instead of a creative director wasting time while a studio comps things up and changes the original vision, people are now empowered to build out their own vision immediately. Instead of disappearing for a month and creating anxiety for the client, we can have a much more iterative process, bringing them in early and getting to solutions faster. I’m an optimist in this space; I think it’s an incredible creative era. 

Darren Woolley

It raises interesting unforeseen issues, though. Some agencies are virtually presenting AI-generated work that looks finished, only to realize later they don’t have the copyright to run it, and the final result looks totally different. 

But Damien, what do you mean by finding opportunities for participation? Is it just running a sales promotion with a coupon? 

Damien Eley

It means talking to the human on the other side. The younger the audience, the more they expect a level of participation with the creators they follow. Our process asks you to step out of traditional formats and figure out how to genuinely participate with them. 

Darren Woolley

What’s the difference between user-generated content (UGC), content creators, and influencers? 

Christian Jacobsen

We started with UGC years ago, moved into the influencer space, and then influencers became content creators. They’re all degrees of tapping into a third party on behalf of the brand. The difference is that creators and UGC are much more active and participant-driven than a pure influencer just doing an ad mention. The brand is intentionally giving up some of its control to get extra reach and authenticity. People trust creators more than they trust brands and advertising because creators have nurtured that audience and have their best interests at heart. 

Darren Woolley

As a creative person, coming to terms with giving up that control can be tough. Too often, “brand management” acts like brand dictatorship. But the best we can do is try to influence and shape the brand in people’s minds. 

Christian Jacobsen

If you’re inviting somebody in and you want to give them a sense of agency, you have to have some open loops and opportunities for them to do something. In the past, brand books were strict and prescriptive because a small group of people controlled a one-way message. Today, people are taking things, remixing them, and making their own versions. I believe you need to be open in your brand guidelines because people are willing to help you build the brand right now. If everything is too controlled and defined, it’s closed off—they can’t enter your brand. 

The Power of the Participatory Flywheel

Darren Woolley

This reminds me of the difference between word-of-mouth and influencer marketing. We’re seeing a trend toward using micro-creators to spark brand participation rather than relying on one massive celebrity endorsement. 

Christian Jacobsen

That’s exactly how the algorithms work now. They’ve been tuned to respond to participatory actions. If someone shares or remixes content, the algorithm promotes it. The industry is embracing micro-creators because they have a real sense of community, leading to a lot more authentic interaction than a broad post from someone like Kim Kardashian. 

Darren Woolley

This fundamentally shifts the traditional linear sales funnel into what you guys call the flywheel. 

Christian Jacobsen

Correct. Flywheels compound over time. A funnel is like a giant sieve where you just dump money into the top to get a transaction at the bottom, often using a rented audience. A flywheel works differently—because people are doing something on your behalf, it perpetuates on its own. It takes longer to get going, but it’s much more durable and efficient. 

A simple way to think about it is a campaign versus a conversation. A campaign is finite with one direction and one message. A conversation starts with a provocation, people join in, and it compounds and expands beyond what you imagined, picking up momentum. 

Darren Woolley

I love the metaphor of momentum. We often undervalue how much harder it is to get something stationary moving again compared to nurturing existing momentum. 

Looking Ahead

Darren Woolley

We have unfortunately run out of time, but I really want to thank you both for joining me. I wish you the best with the expansion into Australia, Damien, and Christian, this has been a terrific conversation that gave me a very different view on the true interpretation of participation. 

Damien Eley

Christian’s book is about to come out, so we’ll get you the definitive guide to participation soon. 

Darren Woolley

What is the title so we can look out for it?

Christian Jacobsen

It’s called Wired to Participate. It starts with the neuroscience, traces the history of advertising, and looks into the future. 

Damien Eley

Thank you so much for the opportunity to chat, Darren. 

Darren Woolley

My pleasure. Now a question before we go. what’s your favorite thing to participate in?

The post Managing Marketing: Why Participation Trumps Persuasion In An AI World appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

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While cost-of-living pressures are frequently blamed for declining donations, Chelsea explains why most charities don’t have an effort problem – they have a clarity problem. They explore how NFPs can define their “Zone of Unique Value” to stand out in a noisy, click-bait-driven digital landscape, navigate rising competition, and manage an aging supporter base. 

The conversation also delves into the dangers of internal team silos, determining who the true hero of the narrative is (the charity, the beneficiaries, or the donors), and the four core questions every NFP marketing message must answer.

A resilient, purpose-driven brand needs to be Clear, Compelling, Consistent, and Confident. For charity leaders, fundraisers, and marketers looking to break through the noise, align their teams, and build enduring donor engagement, this is an essential conversation to eavesdrop on.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud, Podbean, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Amazon Podcasts.

It’s a bit like dating, I guess, isn’t it? It’s like you want to be confident, but don’t be desperate.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley:

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy. Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. 

In today’s noisy, clickbait-driven world, capturing attention and building genuine engagement is an uphill battle, especially for not-for-profits and charities. While cost-of-living pressures are frequently blamed for declining donations, the core issue for many NFPs isn’t a lack of effort, but a lack of clarity. 

Faced with rising competition, an ageing supporter base, and internal team silos that erode brand strength, charities can no longer rely on traditional playbooks. To attract, maintain, and deepen donor relationships, not-for-profits must define their unique value, rethink who the true hero of their story is, and build a brand that is clear, compelling, consistent, and confident. 

To explore how not-for-profits can transform their marketing strategy to drive real impact, please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, founder of the Beech Agency, Chelsea Beech. Welcome, Chelsea. Now, donations are often reported as falling, but overall, there is still growth in Australian giving, isn’t there? 

Chelsea Beech:

Thank you so much for having me. 

Overall giving has gone up slightly, depending on how you split the data. Big foundations skew the numbers, but we aren’t seeing an actual decline in the total value of donations from the everyday Australian at the moment. However, giving is diversifying. People are spreading their support, and competition has shifted. In the NFP space, people don’t like talking about competition because we want everyone to win and do great work. But as organisations, we still need to raise funds to keep our doors open. The sheer number of charities has increased competition, while peer-to-peer platforms like GoFundMe have drastically changed how people give. People are still giving, just not in the traditional ways. 

Digital Noise and Donor Fatigue

Darren Woolley:

There are so many not-for-profits asking for support. On a weekly basis, people receive phone calls, emails, and encounter street fundraisers asking for subscription-style donations. When household budgets are under pressure, it must be getting harder for charities to compete. 

Chelsea Beech:

Absolutely. Digital channels and platforms over the last 10 to 20 years haven’t made it easier. Platforms make it harder to reach people organically, and everyone is blasting the same channels to reach the same audience. Fundraising is becoming more expensive, and the likelihood of capturing attention is decreasing because people are overwhelmed by messaging—especially around key periods like the end of the financial year. The needs represented by charities are real, but donors simply reach a point where they realise they cannot support everyone. 

Proliferation of Charities & Government Funding Shifts

Darren Woolley:

Donors naturally start selecting and narrowing their choices. In the NFP category, you have large, established brands with substantial infrastructure, but also a long tail of smaller charities working towards similar causes, effectively splitting the market’s voice. 

Chelsea Beech:

The barriers to starting a charity are lower today. People travel overseas or spot a specific need and decide to launch their own charity rather than support an existing one. While getting tax-deductible status takes work, starting out isn’t difficult. Having so many small charities duplicate administrative costs and eliminates economies of scale. When multiple organisations broadcast nearly identical messages, it makes it very hard for a donor to decide who to support. 

Darren Woolley:

We also see trends overseas, like in the US, where wealthy individuals set up private charitable trusts. How does that impact the sector? 

Chelsea Beech:

In sectors like international aid and global health, major philanthropic entities like the Gates Foundation fill massive gaps left by government aid cuts. Australia, the UK, and the US have stagnated or cut foreign aid budgets. While foreign aid remains low in real terms, international organisations rely heavily on major foundations to step in where government funding no longer exists. 

Overcoming the Clarity Problem and Internal Silos

Darren Woolley:

NFP teams are deeply passionate, but often severely under-resourced. How do you translate that passion into commercial success and correct where they might be going wrong? 

Chelsea Beech:

People work in NFPs because they care deeply about the cause—not for corporate salaries. But passion can lead to internal silos where teams lose sight of the bigger picture. Another issue is that because marketing teams write and review content daily, they assume the audience is bored of it and change their campaign messaging too quickly. I’ve seen organisations running 12 distinct creative campaigns a year. That creates immense internal work without improving effectiveness. 

To channel passion effectively, organisations need a clear strategic framework—what I call defining their “Zone of Unique Value”. This clarifies your market positioning, your target audiences, and your core brand promise. It ensures your fundraising, marketing, and partnerships teams are all aligned and singing from the same song sheet. 

Darren Woolley:

That sounds like proper business and marketing planning. Because an organisation is a ‘not-for-profit’, some people mistakenly believe they shouldn’t operate like a business or talk about profit. 

Chelsea Beech:

Exactly. Not-for-profit simply means profits aren’t distributed to external shareholders; any surplus goes back into the mission. Every organisation must articulate its value proposition clearly so supporters understand why it exists and what it delivers. 

Experiential Fundraising and Active Participation

Darren Woolley:

We have seen a surge in participation and experiential fundraising—events like Movember, the Bloody Long Walk, or the 7 Bridges Walk. These events encourage active involvement, turning participants into media channels on social media. 

Chelsea Beech:

Experiential campaigns have become very popular. When a campaign like Movember succeeds, other charities try to replicate it, which can sometimes dilute the concept. However, supporters today don’t just want to be treated as a transaction or an arms-length donor; they want to be a companion in the work. Participatory events give people a tangible way to advocate, share their journey, and feel personally connected to the outcome. 

Darren Woolley:

For an event like that to succeed, it must stem directly from the brand’s core value proposition and feel authentic. 

Chelsea Beech:

Yes, it must be relevant and authentic. Movember works because it gives men a fun, socially acceptable reason to grow a moustache while highlighting men’s health. It taps into audience understanding rather than forcing people to do something unnatural. When 1,000 supporters post photos and link back to your cause, that user-generated reach far outperforms standard organic brand posts. 

Defining Competitive White Space & Target Audiences

Darren Woolley:

In crowded categories like cancer research, how do you help a charity identify its competitive position against broader discretionary spending and peer-to-peer options? 

Chelsea Beech:

I start by asking: “If your organisation shut its doors today, what gap would be left behind? What would people miss most?” That question immediately uncovers your unique value or reveals where strategic work is needed. 

From there, we map out value propositions visually to identify open “white space” in the market. We also look closely at target demographics. Many charities with an older supporter base (70+) say they want to target “younger” donors. But “younger” could mean 50-year-olds, not necessarily 20-year-olds. Defining that audience specifically changes the entire communication strategy. 

Who is the True Hero of the Story?

Darren Woolley:

Storytelling frameworks often position the donor as the hero. How do you handle narrative positioning in NFP marketing, particularly when avoiding “white saviour” tropes in international aid? 

Chelsea Beech:

In international development, messaging has rightly shifted away from positioning Western donors as “white saviours”. But fundraisers still struggle with narrative positioning. 

My approach moves away from having a single “hero”. Instead, we present an ecosystem where everyone plays a role. Communities in developing nations don’t need outsiders to save them; they need barriers removed—such as access to education or medicine—so they can thrive independently. The Australian donor acts as a partner who helps remove those barriers. It is a collective effort to solve global challenges rather than heroing the donor over the beneficiary. 

Darren Woolley:

That also protects against donor fatigue when massive global problems cannot be solved overnight by an individual. 

Chelsea Beech:

Exactly. When donors ask, “How can my $50 make a difference to a billion people in poverty?”, framing giving as a collective effort demonstrates real impact. 

Engaging Younger Supporters Through Authentic Impact

Darren Woolley:

Research shows younger cohorts like Gen Z want to contribute, but they expect transparency and a sense of connection rather than a simple financial transaction. 

Chelsea Beech:

Gen Z expects authenticity and directness. Having grown up with social media, they value unpolished, behind-the-scenes insights over distant corporate messaging. They want to feel connected to the people they support. 

Charities often fail at impact reporting. They ask for money during an appeal, but fail to close the loop on what was accomplished. Sharing specific outcomes—combining human storytelling with clear metrics—builds long-term trust and donor loyalty. 

Breaking Down Silos and B2B Engagement

Darren Woolley:

Internal team silos seem to be a major obstacle to maintaining brand strength. 

Chelsea Beech:

Silos are one of the biggest killers of brand strength. When fundraising, comms, advocacy, and corporate partnership teams operate in isolation with separate targets, the donor receives disjointed messages. A single supporter might receive a direct mail piece, see a social post, and manage corporate giving—yet experience three conflicting brand voices. 

Darren Woolley:

This applies to B2B corporate partnerships as well, doesn’t it? 

Chelsea Beech:

Absolutely. Corporate partnerships require the same unified brand message. While corporate campaigns may include secondary messaging around social responsibility objectives, the core emotional message must remain consistent. To win corporate support, you need an internal champion whose heart is engaged. Wallets follow hearts. 

The 4 Cs of Purpose-Driven Branding & Podcast Wrap-up

Darren Woolley:

You outline the “4 Cs” of purpose-driven branding as core pillars. The first one is ‘Clear’—is that about clarity of purpose? 

Chelsea Beech:

Yes, clear in purpose, clear about your market positioning, and clear on the value you bring. Many organisations know their purpose and have a well-written mission statement, but when it comes to articulating that to a broader audience, they overcomplicate the messaging and lose people. 

Darren Woolley:

You’ve lost me! What about ‘Compelling’? 

Chelsea Beech:

Compelling is about articulating a powerful, inspiring reason for people to get involved in a cause that may not directly benefit them. 

Darren Woolley:

‘Consistent’ is my favourite, because I call it discipline—being consistent even when you’re bored. 

Chelsea Beech:

Exactly—don’t change your message simply because you are internally bored of it. Maintaining brand discipline across all internal teams and channels ensures everyone is building the brand together rather than competing internally for attention. 

Darren Woolley:

And finally, ‘Confident’—which I like to call swagger. 

Chelsea Beech:

It’s about confidence. When you are clear, compelling, and consistent, it builds internal confidence and instils confidence in your audience. NFPs often backpedal or sound hesitant, which makes donors second-guess their decision. You don’t need to be arrogant, but you do need to confidently state the need, your solution, how people can join in, and the difference everyone can make together. 

Darren Woolley:

Clear, Compelling, Consistent, and Confident. Well, look, Chelsea, thank you very much for having this conversation around not-for-profit marketing. It’s been terrific. 

I’ve got a question for you before we finish, and that is: do you have a charity or not-for-profit that you personally support? 

The post Managing Marketing: How Not-For-Profits Can Solve Their Marketing Clarity Problem appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

Historically, marketing and corporate affairs were separated for sensible reasons. Marketing focused on reach and commercial outcomes, while corporate affairs managed risk, reputation, and stakeholder relationships. 

But today, with sustainability, regulation, politics, and brand all colliding in real-time, that separation is costing organisations real outcomes. In a world where campaigns can trigger regulatory scrutiny overnight and reputation is shaped at the speed marketing operates, the question isn’t why these functions don’t work together. It’s whether organisations, agencies, and leaders can still afford not to.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud, Podbean, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Amazon Podcasts.

Obviously you can’t have 100 technical experts within your organisation, but I think the lack of access to academics, to scientists, to key people will hold us back in the complexity of the environment that we’re working in.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley: Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.

Historically, marketing and corporate affairs were separate for sensible reasons. Marketing focused on reach and commercial outcomes, while corporate affairs managed risk, reputation, and stakeholder relationships. But today, with sustainability, regulation, politics, and brand all colliding in real time, that separation is costing organisations real outcomes.

In a world where campaigns can trigger regulatory scrutiny overnight and reputation is shaped at the speed that marketing operates, the question isn’t why these functions don’t work together, it’s whether organisations, agencies, and leaders can still afford not to. To discuss why bridging this divide is a critical leadership issue, please welcome partner at boutique corporate advisory Horizontis, Vanessa Liell. Welcome, Vanessa.

Vanessa Liell: Hi Darren, it’s great to be here.

Darren Woolley: I’d like to start if you don’t mind by asking how you define corporate or strategic communications versus brand and marketing.

Vanessa Liell: That’s a really good question, and starting with those definitions is fundamental to this conversation. I am a public relations and strategic communications professional who has been practising for nearly 30 years. In my world, the definition of public relations hasn’t changed: it’s about building a relationship between an organisation and its stakeholders. Regardless of global disruption, building that relationship remains foundational.

In contrast, marketing is about connecting products and services to customers to drive growth. It focuses on reach, conversion, preference, and commercial outcomes. Typically, these two functions have run separate, side-by-side operations with different mandates and disciplines, intersecting only at sequential points.

The Blurring Lines of Media Channels

Darren Woolley: It would be fair to say that technology has significantly changed the channels both functions use. Traditionally, media relations meant corporate communications focused on journalists as primary stakeholders to get a story reported. Now, technology has expanded that landscape, allowing consumer journalists to emerge and widening the audience. Agencies are now actively using influencers, and even governments invite these influencers into budget lockups ahead of time. From my perspective, those traditional lines are clearly blurring.

Vanessa Liell: Yes, that’s exactly right. This changing environment has fundamentally affected how both marketing and corporate affairs practice. The real issue we face isn’t merely a marketing and communication challenge; it is a structured systems and leadership challenge. Unfortunately, marketing and communications functions are frequently structured for the way the world used to be, rather than evolving for how the world is today.

Three major environmental factors have shifted over time. First, speed has changed significantly because marketing has always operated at a very fast pace to get campaigns to market, whereas corporate affairs traditionally ran at a much slower pace where there was ample time to analyse corporate risks and evaluate stakeholder positions. Second, there has been a major shift in control over channels because pre-digital media had distinct timelines that allowed corporate affairs time to engage, brief, and control distribution, whereas today we operate with real-time speed, immense transparency, and heightened scrutiny. Finally, increased regulation impacting communications means that marketing campaigns can very quickly cross the line into becoming a corporate reputational risk.

Where corporate affairs used to act as the final review step at the very end of a timeline, successful organisations and agencies are now baking reputation management right into the beginning of the creative process. This ensures potential issues are thoroughly considered before a campaign launches, leaving everyone prepared for both proactive and reactive scenarios. The days when marketing was immune to reputational fallout, or when corporate affairs acted strictly like the police rather than creators, are completely over.

Shifting from Control to Responsiveness

Darren Woolley: It’s interesting you say that. An old-school corporate communications professional once told me that it wasn’t possible for them to work with marketing because marketing is all about pushing the envelope and creating risk, while corporate affairs is focused on keeping things steady and minimising risk. That reflects the legacy belief that organisations can maintain absolute control. Today, while a degree of control still exists, the primary requirement is knowing how to respond effectively to the marketplace in real time, rather than always assuming you can dictate terms from the front foot strategically.

Vanessa Liell: That’s exactly right. The reality is that sustainability, trust, and reputation now live directly inside marketing channels. For example, if a company makes sustainability claims, those claims will face immediate review and reaction from both regulators and the market. We see plenty of examples where price claims made in tightly regulated markets face instant scrutiny from regulatory bodies and consumer groups.

Historically, these claims could be made with minimal consequences, but today there is intense scrutiny at every level. Organisations frequently operate with marketing driving creative momentum and corporate affairs managing the resulting consequences. The underlying risk is that no single leader is held accountable for the holistic outcome, and legacy structures continue to hold businesses back.

The Risk of “No Comment” and the Information Vacuum

Darren Woolley: I can share an example from our own experience. We are frequently engaged to manage agency tender processes where a high-profile brand is choosing a new partner, which naturally generates significant interest in the marketplace. Our advice to marketers is to always be on the front foot with a pre-agreed position explaining why the change is occurring. However, corporate affairs often steps in and insists on maintaining a strict stance of “no comment” to minimise risk.

Invariably, we see this backfire. By saying nothing, they create an information vacuum that is immediately filled by external opinions across the internet or the wider industry. We continuously advise clients that while they don’t need to shout about the process from the rooftops, they must have a prepared statement ready so that if the media reports on it, they fill that vacuum with their own planned narrative.

Vanessa Liell: You are exactly right, Darren. That situation highlights traditional corporate affairs thinking where leaders assumed they could fully control the message. That is no longer the case; today, everyone is a stakeholder with a voice, a platform, and a channel. It is vital that your message comes directly from you so you can clearly articulate your perspective.

There was a time when corporate affairs was expected to deliver only carefully crafted, definitive statements, and companies would wait until they had every answer finalised. In today’s landscape, no one has all the answers upfront. It is perfectly acceptable to share an interim pathway where you communicate what you currently know, what you don’t know, and what steps you are taking next.

Consumers and stakeholders have very little tolerance for “no comment” or the withholding of information. We live in an information-hungry environment that is plagued by misinformation and disinformation. People want to go straight to the primary, authoritative source. If that source is you, it is entirely in your commercial interest to openly communicate your position and point of view, even if you are still working through the details.

Darren Woolley: Absolutely. When an organisation says “no comment,” the market automatically assumes something sinister has occurred or is being actively covered up. The public has been trained to suspect the worst when a brand is unwilling to share information. Admitting that you don’t know everything yet feels human and carries a powerful sense of authenticity.

Humanising Crisis Management

Vanessa Liell: It is highly reasonable. I frequently counsel companies navigating cyber security challenges and active cyber-attacks. High-profile corporate data breaches are no longer a matter of “if,” but “when”. In my view, targeted brands often just happen to be the brand of that particular day; these sophisticated global security risks are rarely a reflection of a single company’s defence mechanisms failing.

Where companies succeed or fail dramatically is in how they choose to respond. Those that try to withhold information perform poorly, whereas those that show their humanity by letting people know what they know, what they don’t know, and what they are actively working on navigate the crisis well.

What is incredible is that consumers are generally very forgiving if they feel they are being treated respectfully and honestly. While there are always sensitive security parameters that cannot be legally shared, there is always enough data you can say to help people understand your mitigation plan. The public understands that these modern situations are far more complex than a simple yes or no answer.

Information versus Communication

Darren Woolley: To your point about organisational structures, is this old-school behaviour driven by the fact that corporate communications often sits in the C-suite right alongside legal counsel or compliance departments? Lawyers are naturally inclined to view the world through highly defined parameters where control is possible, so their default stance is often to say nothing.

I recall a situation where I was asked for advice, and a room full of lawyers was trying to draft an apology that avoided actually apologising. The resulting statement looked like an obvious cover-up. The issue is that lawyers draft for the courts, completely ignoring how ordinary people consume and perceive communication in the real world.

Vanessa Liell: You’ve raised two distinct issues there: the difference between information and communication, and the leadership and structural challenges that sit at the board and CEO level.

First, let’s define the clear difference between information and communication, which can be difficult for non-experts to distinguish. Information is typically what an organisation wants to say, which usually stems from internal functions like legal counsel or marketing teams. Communication is what the audience actually engages with. I see many organisations focusing entirely on what they feel they need to tell the market, without checking where that message will actually land.

Effective communication requires an audience-first perspective where you must look at exactly who your audiences are, analyse what drives them, identify their barriers, and clarify exactly what action you want them to take, crafting the message to relate directly to those parameters. This is where sophisticated communication leadership is required. It is critical that communicators respect the legal and compliance advice provided by other functions, but they must find a middle ground to ensure that advice is translated into messages that the audience can understand, engage with, and respect.

Overcoming Legacy Structures and Silos

Darren Woolley: This leads directly to the leadership and structural issues embedded at the board and CEO level. Most organisations are still designed for a simpler world, and those legacy structures continue to exist. Functions like marketing, communications, legal, and HR all operate with separate reporting lines, separate budgets, different timeframes, and entirely different scorecards.

Vanessa Liell: This structure drives highly predictable, counterproductive behaviour where marketing moves exceptionally fast to build creative momentum, corporate affairs is brought in far too late, forcing them to manage a purely reactive scenario, and frustration mounts on both sides until true risk and reputation are owned by nobody.

Significant structural shifts must happen if we are going to grow our organisations ambitiously while successfully managing increased risk, reputation management, and public scrutiny. First, CEOs and boards must stop treating marketing and communications as sequential functions and ensure they work together right from the inception of a campaign. Second, leadership must expect challenge early, rather than seeking reassurance late, which means embracing difficult conversations at the very beginning of the creative process regarding the truth of product claims, sustainability parameters, and how the message will land with regulators and diverse audiences. Finally, boards must hold leaders collectively accountable for overarching business outcomes rather than isolated functional performance, because rigid reporting lines and constrained individual budgets discourage people from thinking about the big picture and collaborating across functions.

Navigating Conflicting Corporate Messages

Darren Woolley: A perfect example of this functional conflict is playing out in the market right now. In an environment where the cost of living is high, marketing teams focus heavily on great service and heavily discounted pricing to drive consumer impact. At the exact same time, corporate leaders are announcing major staff layoffs on the basis of AI and technology adoption, while talking up record corporate profits to satisfy shareholders. These two corporate messages feel entirely uncoordinated and in direct conflict with one another.

Vanessa Liell: Absolutely. This highlights the shift in our environment, because there was a day when corporations could tightly control the flow of information. No one easily knew what a CEO was paid, and the public didn’t have real-time visibility into internal downsizing. If a company didn’t explicitly announce layoffs, employees weren’t all over mainstream media explaining that they had lost their jobs.

Today, we live in a completely transparent environment where corporate downsizing is visible instantly on platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit, highlighting the human impact in real time. Therefore, navigating structural change without communicating holistically to all stakeholders is a major risk, and it is exactly where marketing and communications must work hand in hand.

Corporate affairs must communicate business strategy to the market, and businesses legitimately exist to deliver long-term profit to their shareholders. However, the impact a company has on its employees, its customers, and the community must be part of that strategic consideration. If marketing is preparing to launch a national value campaign addressing the cost-of-living crisis, it must be carefully contextualised within the broader public perception of how that organisation is operating as a whole. If you choose not to openly discuss what your company is doing, the internet will happily fill that communication gap for you. The good, the bad, and the honesty of your operations will be judged in real time by consumers, and “no comment” is never an acceptable answer.

Darren Woolley: This dynamic underpins a broader trend we’ve observed for a number of years: the widespread loss of public trust in traditional institutions like the political system, religious organisations, and big business. This loss of trust makes it more critical than ever for businesses to open up and remain transparent within legal boundaries.

Vanessa Liell: That’s correct, because trust is built through long-term relationships, and you cannot successfully build a relationship during a crisis when you suddenly need it. We often say that trust takes decades to build and can be lost in a single moment; today, that cycle has accelerated dramatically. The speed at which an organisation can gain or lose trust is shorter than ever, meaning businesses must continuously think about how they are actively building relationships with all stakeholders on an ongoing basis. You build those bonds by taking a genuine interest in your customers, your investors, and the media, and by communicating openly, honestly, and humanly.

Interestingly, while people have lost trust in macro institutions, they are increasingly seeking out traditional reference points for verified facts. We see an ongoing reliance on mainstream editorial media, government portals, and authoritative corporate voices to cut through the noise of misinformation. This makes it more critical than ever for corporate institutions to be proactive and transparent.

Darren Woolley: The scope of issues has also expanded beyond simple financial performance into complex areas like sustainability, environmental impact, and Indigenous rights. Managing and tracking these issues is incredibly complex because you are dealing with a broad spectrum of highly passionate stakeholder groups across social media.

Vanessa Liell: It is, and it points to a fundamental shift in how modern businesses must operate. Historically, companies could deliver short-term profit for shareholders with very few resource limitations or societal obligations. Today, true sustainability means evaluating how an organisation can deliver profit not just in the next quarter, but far into the future.

In previous generations, companies relied on tactical initiatives like launching a corporate foundation, donating to charity, or sponsoring a local sports team to build community trust. Today, they must think long-term about their direct systemic impact on their workforce, society, and the environment. If a business fails to contribute positively, it will be judged harshly by consumers and investors alike, directly impacting sales and viability. Forward-thinking organisations cannot just look at quarterly bottom lines; they must embed long-term societal contribution right into their core strategies and daily operations.

The Horizontis Model: Breaking Agency P&L Barriers

Darren Woolley: Looking at PR agencies in the current marketplace, we see immense fragmentation in how public relations is applied. Some agencies focus strictly on events, others look exclusively at managing social media influencers and content creators, and another tier specialises purely in crisis management. Horizontis was set up with a fundamentally different operating model to solve these challenges, wasn’t it? Can you explain the strategic thinking behind it?

Vanessa Liell: Yes, we constructed Horizontis to directly solve the operational silos we observed in both client organisations and traditional agencies. Horizontis was founded to work directly with boards and CEOs on climate, political, and reputational risk. Our services deliberately span issues and crisis management, corporate affairs, public relations, and high-level advisory on government relations, policy, and regulatory affairs. Recognising the critical role that creative execution plays in shifting public reputation and influencing regulatory outcomes in a cluttered market, we also launched an internal creative agency within our group called “Rethink Everything”.

What makes our model unique is the composition of our round table. My business partners include a former politician and a former political advisor who bring bipartisan expertise from both sides of politics. They sit alongside myself as a corporate affairs and strategic communications expert, and our Chief Creative Officer, Mike Spakowski. From the very beginning of any client brief, all of those distinct heads sit around the table together.

This fixes the systemic problems seen in traditional holding groups, where these essential disciplines are separated by rigid P&L structures, separate client scopes, and conflicting financial incentives. In the old model, if corporate affairs and creative teams worked together at all, it was strictly at the very beginning or the tail end of a project—never step-by-step and side-by-side.

Darren Woolley: So the exact operational gap that exists inside most corporate businesses is what you’ve integrated within your own advisory and consultancy to ensure complete strategic alignment.

Driving Behavioural Change Across Disciplines

Vanessa Liell: We have, but achieving this required us to deeply challenge our own behavioural habits and rethink how integrated campaigns are executed. First, it required our creative team to stop viewing corporate affairs as a “brake” that slows down momentum or complicates ideas. They have had to learn to involve us early whenever product claims, corporate purpose, or social content matter.

As communication professionals, we are experts in messaging, but we are not experts in everything else. The real benefit of our model is that I work day-to-day with technical experts in policy, regulation, climate change, and sustainability. That provides incredible confidence as a communicator, knowing our campaigns are built on a sound, verifiable footing. It genuinely concerns me when I see branding or marketing professionals posturing as sustainability experts without any deep technical backing or respect for academics, scientists, and policy parameters.

Our creative team now understands that speed without credibility creates immense commercial risk. There is distinct value in being thorough and taking the necessary time upfront. On the flip side, I’ve had to adapt my behaviour as a corporate affairs leader. I must engage early with the commercial and creative ambition by listening first, understanding what we are trying to achieve, and figuring out how to contribute constructively without blockading the idea. My role is to help build the strategy at the inception phase, rather than merely shaping the perimeter as a late reviewer or acting as a clean-up crew at the end of a botched campaign.

It requires a lot of hard work, continuous learning, and deep respect for each other’s disciplines. I’ll be honest, Darren, it was initially awkward because I had never worked hand-in-hand with a Chief Creative Officer or embedded policy specialists directly into a creative team like this before.

The Power of Inclusivity at the Round Table

Darren Woolley: You’ve created an authentic round table where everyone sits as an equal partner. Part of driving true collaboration is being inclusive and open to multiple distinct perspectives from the start. How do senior leaders and external experts respond to this setup, and what do you need to focus on to make it work?

Vanessa Liell: Making it work is entirely a matter of leadership and structural economics. The immediate issue within traditional agencies is that separate P&Ls and isolated scopes incentivise siloed behaviour. To fix this, you must build a structure that creates an open space for senior leaders from different disciplines to collaborate without immediate output pressure. We are living in a time of tumultuous change, and if we want to address it ambitiously, the commercial incentives must reward collaboration.

The other side of the equation is purely human leadership. It requires stepping back, changing behaviours, and recognising that we all have a lot to learn from other disciplines. We established Horizontis on that exact premise, ensuring all necessary skills are in the room at every single stage of a campaign. It certainly comes with hiccups, challenges, and occasional conflicts, but it has been entirely worth the investment. The speed, quality, and overall cost-effectiveness of the campaigns we deliver as an integrated group are incredibly exciting.

Case Study: Achieving Regulatory Reform through Creative Campaigns

Darren Woolley: I’d love it if you could share a practical example of how this integrated model has delivered results for a client.

Vanessa Liell: I can share a case study from this past year where we worked extensively with a major peak body and industry association seeking regulatory policy alignment between state and federal governments regarding sustainability.

Due to a highly fragmented policy environment, existing regulations were actively conflicting with their intended goals. Subsidies and structural incentives were working directly against the government’s own stated agendas of localised manufacturing and reducing residential carbon footprints. It wasn’t an explosive or highly visible crisis; it was simply a low-priority issue on a packed political schedule. Traditional lobbying and standard government relations pathways had been entirely exhausted over a long period without any effect. The client needed to significantly amplify the impact of their message, and that is where our integrated round table stepped in.

My political business partners and I thoroughly diagnosed the regulatory landscape and briefed our creative team on the exact barriers, stakeholder mindsets, and policy nuances. This insight allowed the creative team to distill a highly complex technical issue into an exceptionally simple, impactful national campaign.

We executed a fast, highly targeted eight-week campaign that integrated several key elements. We ran national integrated advertising alongside hyper-targeted digital and social media campaigns aimed specifically at key electorates. We complemented the paid media by placing authoritative opinion pieces in tier-one mainstream editorial media, and we deployed comprehensive stakeholder relations information packs directly to key decision-makers.

By simplifying the narrative and actively engaging consumers to show a clear shift in voter sentiment, the campaign successfully established a political imperative. We achieved the desired regulatory and policy changes at both the state and federal levels in just eight weeks.

Darren Woolley: What I love about that example is that it highlights how government policies are often drafted without fully understanding the unintended consequences on the ground. Because a government’s legislative schedule is always packed, going back to fix a legacy error remains a very low priority unless you build an undeniable imperative to act.

Your campaign successfully drove that imperative and forced the issue higher up the political agenda. It is a fascinating demonstration of using an advertising campaign to achieve regulatory change, which simply could not happen without both sides of the fence working together. On one hand, you had a deep understanding of the political agenda, and on the other, you used marketing communications to show how shifting voter sentiment makes fixing the policy a worthwhile win for the government.

Treating Politicians as a Consumer Audience

Vanessa Liell: Exactly. The modern environment is far more politicised, regulated, and scrutinised than ever before. A factor that agencies often overlook is that politicians have an immense volume of competing issues to manage. When you want to drive change for a single issue, you have to treat Members of Parliament almost like a consumer audience. You cannot automatically assume they understand the technical nuances or the long-term significance of your specific sector’s problem.

That is where the beauty of combining creativity and communication comes in: distilling information into simple, highly impactful messaging is just as critical for political audiences as it is for everyday consumers. In this case study, the client had previously relied entirely on traditional, isolated corporate affairs and government relations pathways, which kept them stuck.

Conversely, if a creative agency tries to launch a commercial or sustainability campaign without embedding regulatory and corporate affairs expertise at the absolute beginning of the strategy, they take on massive risks. Our model allows us to shape ideas and identify pitfalls early in a collaborative, constructive way. It ensures the creative output is right on the money commercially, while completely mitigating regulatory scrutiny or public backlash before it happens. Running a campaign that triggers a negative regulatory reaction after the fact is an incredibly expensive mistake for a brand.

Darren Woolley: I can imagine that working on these complex briefs is incredibly motivating for your creative teams and creative leadership. Creative professionals love nothing more than sinking their teeth into solving massive, multi-layered problems. Distilling commercial, political, and industrial complexity into a single, elegant piece of creative that shifts national policy is an extraordinary achievement.

Investing in Technical Capability within Agencies

Vanessa Liell: It is a fantastic learning experience for all of us, and that is the real challenge for our industry moving forward: throwing open the doors to what we can learn by actively working together. When you bring together capable people with deep expertise, things can move exceptionally fast. Our creative team feels this setup has significantly benefited their output. It adds a few more steps and a lot more reading to their process, but it gives them immense confidence because they can test their creative directions against real-time feedback from our internal policy experts before the work ever reaches the client.

What I would really like to see moving forward is a serious, proper investment in true technical capability within creative and communication agencies. Modern corporations already do this well; their internal communication and marketing teams work daily side-by-side with sustainability and technical experts. Agencies need to increase their seriousness about the level of technical expertise they hold or can readily access, particularly around critical macro areas like the energy transition, consumer rights, and First Nations affairs.

While an agency obviously cannot employ a hundred different technical specialists full-time, a total lack of structured access to academics, scientists, and industry experts will hold us back in a complex environment. This comes back to a fundamental respect for discipline. In the sustainability space, for example, it genuinely concerns me when marketing and branding professionals position themselves as sustainability experts without any deep technical background. We cannot responsibly advise clients in this modern landscape without constructing our teams to ensure technical accuracy is embedded at the very beginning of our campaigns.

Darren Woolley: I completely agree with you. Thank you so much, Vanessa, for coming in. This conversation has been fabulous, fascinating, and highly illuminating, and I want to thank you for taking the time and joining us on Managing Marketing.

Vanessa Liell: It’s been great to be here. Thanks so much, Darren.

Darren Woolley: Just one question before you go: what would you say, looking back on the work that you’re doing now, would be the one thing that’s given you the greatest sense of achievement?

The post Managing Marketing: How Marketing And Corporate Comms Must Collaborate In A Digital Age appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

We often discuss how the agency pitch process is, in many ways, where strategy goes to die. Too often, the process is reduced to a “beauty parade” or a race to the bottom on price, leaving little room for the deep, evidence-based strategic thinking that actually drives business growth. 

But what if the pitch could be the place where strategy is actually born? By integrating real-time, longitudinal brand tracking into the process, we can move away from subjective debates and toward a shared understanding of market reality. 

You can listen to the podcast here:

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What gets measured gets managed. You know, it’s become almost a cliche.
But the more important part of that is measuring the right things.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley: Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing podcast, please like, review, or share this episode to help spread the wisdom from our guests each week.

We often discuss how the agency pitch process is, in many ways, where strategy goes to die. Too often, the process is reduced to a beauty parade or a race to the bottom on price, leaving little room for the deep, evidence-based strategic thinking that actually drives business growth. When agencies are forced to guess at brand health or rely on an outdated snapshot of consumer sentiment, the resulting strategy is often little more than a creative leap of faith.

But what if the pitch could be the place where strategy is actually born? By integrating real-time, longitudinal brand tracking into the process, we can move away from subjective debates and towards a shared understanding of market reality. Today, we’re exploring how consistent brand tracking research doesn’t just measure the past; it enables and empowers agencies to build strategies that are anchored in truth, allowing for smarter experimentation and a much clearer path to providing ROI. To help us understand the role of brand health data in the agency-client relationship, please welcome to the podcast the strategic agency lead at brand tracking company Tracksuit, Joe Carter. Welcome, Joe.

Joe Carter: Hi Darren. Great to be here. How’s things?

Darren Woolley: Very good. Now look, let’s get this out of the way. When we talk about Tracksuit, we’re not talking Adidas and Nike here, are we? Tracksuit is a brand tracking company, but what does that actually mean for marketers and their agencies?

Joe Carter: Yeah, good question. We do have an array of beautiful retro tracksuits as well, but that is purely merch. Tracksuit is always-on, radically affordable, and beautiful brand tracking for marketers and agencies to demonstrate the impact of brand investment over time. Typically, market research has been done at a point in time, delivered in a PDF report, and accessible only to the Unilevers and the P&Gs of the world. We wanted to lower the barrier to standardise it and make it accessible to everyone, deliver it in a dashboard so that everyone can access it at a price point and in an always-on fashion that makes sense for everyone. The company’s been going for about five years, I’ve been here for about a year and a half, and I love nerding out on all things brand every day.

Democratising Access to Shared Truth

Darren Woolley: What I was really interested in is the fact that often when you talk about brand tracking, you then immediately go to the marketer side. That’s where the brand manager and the brand reside. But of course, agencies have an important role in this, and I love that Tracksuit is very proactive in helping to make that accessible to both the agency and the marketer.

We run a lot of pitches, and when we run them, clients will always say to us that strategic thinking is so important, and yet so little time is often spent testing it or looking at strategy. When it is done, it’s often in quite a haphazard way because of this lack of shared knowledge or shared truth. That’s why I felt like pitching is where strategy goes to die. What’s your experience talking to agencies? What do they see as the empowerment that having access to this brand tracking data gives them?

Joe Carter: It’s been super interesting over the last 18 months. We’ve gone from a team of three or four in our agency partnerships team to a team of 12, which gives you an indication of how rapidly agencies are adopting Tracksuit and always-on brand tracking. We’ve been involved in the last 18 months—across the US, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia—in around seven or eight hundred pitches where we’ve delivered funnel metrics and brand perception.

Essentially, we just create a bit of a baseline and level the playing field for any strategist in the room to either create or evidence a narrative, or to approve or disprove a hypothesis. Ultimately, the premium that we’re paying for is the strategy; it is the very humanness behind the pitch. It’s been really enjoyable creating that more accessible layer of data because it shines a light on the strategist responding. I’ve experienced this on every side of the fence previously—client side, agency side, and publisher side—so it’s interesting being at a technology company that partners with media, comms, and digital strategists to inform their work.

Darren Woolley: Back in 2007, I went overseas after running Trinity P3 for seven years. I kept thinking that almost every pitch we were running was either creatively or media driven, and strategy was almost like the bit done in the background to present the work. In Amsterdam, I met a pitch consultant who said strategy workshops are much more valuable because you get the marketing team and agencies together to actually talk about strategy.

There’s not necessarily a “right” strategy; there’s good strategy and bad strategy, but there’s not “right” strategy. It’s solving a problem that doesn’t necessarily have only one solution. With creative or media recommendations, it very quickly becomes right or wrong based on subjective opinion—”I like that idea, so I like the agency that came up with it”. That’s incredibly subjective and doesn’t really go to the heart of a long-term relationship.

Joe Carter: Totally. It’s definitely not binary when it comes to strategy. I’ve always seen actual strategy as reducing things to their most simple. That’s why strategists are CMO whisperers; they take what’s often complex or fueled by bias and turn it into something rational and simple for the rest of the team to collaborate on.

I still think strategy is treated as expendable. WARC confirmed that towards the end of last year with their future strategy report, saying that 62% of strategists feel it’s expendable or baked in as a “gift with purchase”. My question is why? If that’s where the value is, why is that the case? Far too often we’re chasing outputs rather than outcomes, which is where strategy becomes a commodity because it’s a billable hour. We place such high value on clear strategic guidance, but we decide to whack it in as a line item.

Strategy and the “Black Box” Problem

Darren Woolley: It’s interesting because a long time ago, I did an analysis of agency fees and found that less than 1% of a marketer’s overall expenditure actually went to creativity and strategy. Agencies are comfortable charging on an hourly basis because it was something measurable. But while the technique for producing ideas can look linear, the actual execution of strategy and creativity is never linear.

Joe Carter: No, absolutely not. The solution becomes obvious once we’ve designed the right problem. I was reading about “Enshittification”—the decay of online platforms—and I wonder if that race to sameness could be said for strategy too. I don’t want to lose the craft of it. When you think about the tools we use today to shape strategy, does that lead to an over-reliance versus leaning into what makes great strategies great?

Darren Woolley: People struggle with strategy; some get strategy and planning mixed up. I asked a client once what their strategy was, and they said, “To be number one in category”. I had to explain that’s the objective; strategy is the way you’re going to get there. The strategic process allows you to work out what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do.

I love the fact that you’ve made Tracksuit available to agencies. We ran a tender last year where the client set a strategic brief. Two of the agencies presented terrific insights, and it wasn’t until afterward I realised they had both accessed Tracksuit data for that category. One problem for a marketer judging strategic capability is that agencies often sell it as a “black box”. Large network agencies have these proprietary solutions that exist in a box, and you’re not sure what data went in or how they got to the solution.

Joe Carter: I’m always curious about what’s in the black box. In school, my teachers would not let me mark my own homework, but we do it all the time in this industry. We define what success looks like and use in-platform reporting from the media platforms eating our lunch to say, “Here’s what these guys are saying”.

Democratising access to ingredients like brand health data levels the playing field. It places a premium on actual insights. Some of the smartest agencies and brand marketers are using brand tracking in diagnosis—to inform segmentation and positioning—rather than just as an evaluation tool to retrofit success afterward. Traditionally, it’s been used so far downstream that the pitch becomes all about comms. We use brand trackers as campaign trackers to justify impact, but the brand is influenced by a lot more than just campaigns.

Always-On Metrics and CFO Alignment

Darren Woolley: So much measurement in marketing is “rear-view mirror,” which is fine for justifying the past, but the real value is in projecting towards the future.

Joe Carter: Totally. I’m seeing the two most hired roles within agencies at the moment are “Head of Product” and “Head of Intelligence”. One to build the infrastructure and make sense of it, and the other to take disparate data points and turn them into something useful for the client. Agencies need to evolve, and the service offering is changing.

Darren Woolley: 15 years ago, brand tracking was only for the biggest companies and they paid a fortune. Now, challenger brands and startups can access that same technology, which helps them be more competitive. It also means indies can access the same data, which helps diversification of thinking.

Joe Carter: Democratising it means it isn’t gate-kept. Having that shared language for what success looks like from day dot is super useful. It allows brands to not just measure the things that are easy to measure.

Darren Woolley: There was always a gap inside organisations between marketers’ metrics and the business’s metrics. But on the financial side, there’s a growing recognition that there are correlations between brand equity and growth.

Joe Carter: “What gets measured gets managed”. For too long, we’ve easily been able to measure clicks, impressions, and ROAS—short-term indicators that are addictive. But does that excite a CFO? Probably not. We want to prove that great brands build great businesses. Every year for 20 years, Kantar’s BrandZ global brands have consistently outperformed the S&P 500. Brand outcomes translate into commercial outcomes.

We need a common language for growth. Are we talking profit margins? A decrease in customer acquisition costs? Marketers need that seat at the board table, and common language gives them a much louder voice.

Darren Woolley: Most brand tracking was traditionally done six-monthly or quarterly. But the idea of “always-on” data is important, because a CFO would struggle with having only one data point a year for the brand.

Joe Carter: Can you imagine having one commercial data point a year? You’d find out just before the end of the financial year how much money you made, but during the year—nothing. We have always-on indicators for everything else; we’ve just never really had it for brand. The market moves faster than that.

I’m working on a pitch in Australia right now where the category data is from 2023. Would you use sales data from three years ago to brief a sizable pitch? Always-on data just makes more sense.

Skin in the Game and Long-Term Investment

Darren Woolley: For years, agencies went from commission to hourly rates, and we’ve been advocates of performance or output-based pricing. But performance was often measured once a year. If you have a continuum of brand tracking data, you can do incremental performance payments.

Joe Carter: Some of the best agencies I work with make strategy hours “over the top” with brand tracking as a service. Success is being measured on outcomes rather than outputs. I’d love to see more agencies putting skin in the game. One indie partner said Tracksuit gives them the opportunity to pitch performance-based incentives based on awareness growth or shifts in perception. You’re putting income on the line to back the work and validating it through a platform.

Darren Woolley: The trouble is many deals were set up based on immediate revenue, which drives short-termism. Brand growth today impacts revenue in six months or even three years in some categories. Having something you can measure as regularly as sales makes it easier to build a financial model that rewards agencies for the value they contribute.

Joe Carter: The first thing you’re going to see is a movement in brand health; sales come off the back of growing brand. For those that don’t adopt this, it’s still a race to the bottom. The dollars we invest in brand actually enhance performance too—it makes conversion more effective.

Darren Woolley: The Bellwether report in the UK recently showed that despite a tightening economy, marketers are predicting budget growth next year. Finally, the message may have got through that investing when everything else is tightening pays off big when the market returns.

Joe Carter: Invest more in brand and you’ll gain more extra share of voice.

Darren Woolley: But you have to measure the right things. Vanity metrics don’t stack up at the board level. You need trend lines showing the relationship between revenue and investment. Short-termism often looks at revenue but ignores profit because the campaign often involves discounting. Growth can also be making more money out of every dollar earned.

Joe Carter: We are too far up the P&L often. Look at Ferrari; it took Enzo Ferrari 40 years to sell a car to Everyday Joes. He just made supercars for racing. That is the strategy of sacrifice. Today they sell 14,000 cars a year and 80% are repeat buyers.

Darren Woolley: Ferrari’s strategy was clear: perform well in Formula One, reinforce the mythology of hand-built cars, and drive margin. Clarity of strategic focus is often missing in marketing, comms, or media strategies.

Joe Carter: An agency needs to be oriented around creating a return on investment. In today’s world, that looks like senior advisory consultancy and good judgment. Executional elements might be automated, but the role of a strategist is innately human. We looked at every statement driver across 1,000 categories in Tracksuit, and the top driver for moving people from awareness to consideration was the statement: “It’s for people like me”. That is so human.

Darren Woolley: AI tools are fine for productivity. But making things faster and cheaper without making them more effective is still a race to the bottom.

Joe Carter, thank you so much for taking the time to having this chat today. I’ve really enjoyed it.

I do have a question for you before we finish up, and that is, you know, what’s your favourite brand, and do you regularly check out how it’s performing on Tracksuit?

The post Managing Marketing: Bringing Strategy Back Into Agency Pitches appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

While many brands still treat creator marketing as an experimental line item or a subset of social media, the reality is that the creator economy has outgrown the traditional organisational silos of brand, PR, and media. We are moving away from a campaign-by-campaign mindset toward a world where creator-led activity functions as critical business infrastructure – combining production, media, and distribution into a single, unified force. 

However, as this discipline scales, so does the potential for “organisational chaos.” Marketers often find themselves buried in fragmented workflows and vanity metrics, struggling to prove true business value while navigating the minefields of brand safety and governance. 

You can listen to the podcast here:

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They love it. But 99 % of our clients don’t have the internal resources to manage it.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley: Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy. Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. While many brands still treat creator marketing as an experimental line item or a subset of social media, the reality is that the creator economy has outgrown the traditional organisational silos of brand, PR, and media.

We’re moving away from a campaign-by-campaign mindset towards a world where creator-led activity functions as critical business infrastructure—combining production, media, and distribution into a single unified force. However, as this discipline scales, so does the potential for organisational chaos. Marketers often find themselves buried in fragmented workflows and vanity metrics, struggling to prove true business value while navigating the minefields of brand safety and governance.

To help us understand how to scale creator marketing without scaling the chaos, please welcome a co-founder of Fabulate, Ben Gunn, and Director of Client Partnerships, Eliza Lewis.

Ben Gunn: Thanks, Darren. Great to be on the podcast. Excited to be here.

Eliza Lewis: Thanks so much, Darren. Happy to be here.

Darren Woolley: It’s interesting from my perspective because we have seen a real shift. Traditionally, marketers would come to us needing a social media agency. Yet, many of those agencies feel like an extension of the traditional creative agency, where they think of social media simply as creating content to fill up channels. There is a real shift towards asking a bigger question: how do we go beyond that? How do we move into a world where the creators themselves are part of the story and the message? Ben, I imagine the whole idea for starting Fabulate was seeing this shift a long time ago.

Ben Gunn: Yeah, absolutely. That is the part that makes these social platforms so exciting for us and for the brands we work with. My background is in traditional media, but we saw the writing on the wall in terms of just how effective it is when creators talk about your brands. It just made sense to help brands do this in a way that can be scalable and drive results that you just don’t see with your standard brand ads.

Creators as the New Content and Distribution Engine

Darren Woolley: Eliza Lewis, you must also see marketers struggle with this. When they come to us, they’re talking about choosing a supplier, a vendor, or an agency, but you must see that struggle even before they get to that point.

Eliza Lewis: Yeah, absolutely. We’re seeing more and more marketers talk about the creator being their content engine, but also their media and distribution engine as well. Traditionally, creator work was always social media first, and it still is, but we’re seeing creators now across digital content marketing, email marketing, events, traditional podcasts, audio, and affiliate marketing. They are becoming that revenue-generating engine. A lot more of those conversations are now creator-led, focusing on how to use them in best practice across all these different channels to get the best revenue outcomes.

Darren Woolley: And that must create conflict internally because many of those things are often outside of the marketing department. Although marketing has a broad remit, many departments are more about internal promotion rather than areas like sales.

Eliza Lewis: It’s definitely changed. Even a couple of years ago, we were just talking to the brand teams. Then it became the brand paid, earned, and owned teams. Now, e-commerce teams are joining the conversation.

Ben Gunn: It’s the events teams, the PR teams, and even technology teams in terms of how you track it all. It feels like it’s outgrown the org chart. It isn’t a single person’s responsibility anymore; it touches multiple parts of a business that need to have some type of feedback regarding what they should be doing with creators.

Navigating Organisational Chaos and Silos

Darren Woolley: But how do you recognise or solve that problem? Organisations, particularly the larger they are, are built in silos. Suddenly you’re asking them to unify when they start to work with creators.

Eliza Lewis: It’s so funny. Sometimes I talk to big enterprise clients in Australia and I’ve literally talked to seven parts of their business, and they don’t know that they’re all talking different aspects of the same language. I’m like, “Okay, we need to all get into a room and talk about this.” We’re definitely talking about the creator operating model more and more and bringing the right stakeholders in on that, typically CMOs and Sales.

Ben Gunn: It starts with having a central place where all of these communications and all of this reporting can sit. I’m still surprised how many are using spreadsheets and emails. One department goes off and does one thing, then another department contracts the same creator a week later and pays five times the price because they didn’t have a central place where they could see that they’ve already worked with this creator. There has to be a willingness at the top and a recognition across all different departments of the role creators play in the marketing ecosystem.

Darren Woolley: So Ben Gunn, are you recommending that they actually rethink the structure, or at least the reporting lines, so there is a central point of coordination?

Ben Gunn: Well, I think it’s first acknowledging the varied ways in which creators are now being used across the marketing ecosystem. Then, the next step is ensuring the work we’re doing across these areas is consistent and repeatable. Everyone is looking for cost efficiencies and ways of streamlining. If you get bought in on that, the next question is: what systems do we need to embed into our business to scale this properly?

The reality is, it’s not going to sit across just one department. We’ve seen brands appoint a Chief Creator Officer, which is great practice because they think across the business. They are the subject matter expert who can bed in these systems and ensure each division working with creators is doing it in what is considered best practice.

Eliza Lewis: Best practice is when you have the assets to be a big enough business to have a Chief Creator Officer. Other examples I’ve seen are roles like a Performance and Creator Marketing Lead. Those roles are starting to pop up more, and they own the operating system and understand the performance metrics.

Moving from Cost Centres to Revenue Functions

Darren Woolley: My worry is the natural inclination within organisations to build silos within silos—like we saw with digital technology teams and social media teams.

Ben Gunn: I don’t think there are many businesses today that aren’t using some type of matrix structure. That’s the reality of how complicated businesses are. You still need your subject matter expert to have 10 out of 10 knowledge about creators. Their job is to ensure the different business units that touch creator have seven out of 10 knowledge, and know when to pull in the experts for specific parts of the job.

Darren Woolley: Eliza Lewis, as a pitch consultant, I see that marketing departments often come to us about appointing an agency because it’s seen as a marketing function. But what you are suggesting is that you need a cross-functional team in choosing and setting up that relationship.

Eliza Lewis: Yeah, absolutely. Bridging the gap from being a cost marketing function to a revenue-driving operation is where we’re seeing the best results. We’re building these creator operating systems where once you tie the talent into business outcomes and measure them with fast results and quick feedback, we’re able to deliver that as a revenue growth function. That’s the kind of pitch we’re responding to at the moment.

Expanding Categories and the Power of Micros

Darren Woolley: There are some categories that are well advanced—fashion, makeup, food, and travel seem well established. But where are the other opportunities?

Ben Gunn: Even those advanced categories are changing constantly because technology is moving at warp speed. In the past, they were hamstrung by data or measurement from the platforms, based on social metrics like likes and shares. It hasn’t easily been able to tie back to search volume, brand awareness, or product purchases. What’s exciting now is the ability to tie those activities not just to a creator, but down to the specific piece of content.

Eliza Lewis: I’m seeing it work best now for anything with a subscription model, entertainment clients, and tech SaaS. Those results are huge. Anything B2B is also interesting—people are still watching the same platforms and are influenced by the same people. Another one I love is health insurance, because you can really speak to pain points from a creator’s perspective that are true, and that parasocial relationship is strong.

Darren Woolley: When I hear about the creator economy, people often first reference the top echelon, like Mr. Beast or the Kardashians. But they aren’t typical creators anymore; they’ve become celebrities.

Eliza Lewis: We did a campaign last year where Kendall Jenner was the ambassador, and we added 50 micros to the mix. On every metric—brand, conversion, business outcomes—those micro-influencers outperformed her. It’s wild considering how much they would have paid to have Kendall Jenner front the campaign.

Ben Gunn: It’s like Salesforce for the creator economy. Most successful businesses using Salesforce capture thousands of records to make informed decisions. We’re doing the same for creators. In a Fabulate operating system, you have all the details: who the creator is, who their audience is, what brands they’ve worked with, and what categories they and their audiences are interested in.

Eliza Lewis: It goes beyond individual data. We have tools where you can put in a bunch of micros and compare them to having two ambassadors to see what the unduplicated reach is. We’re now at the point of predictive analysis and benchmarking based on a group of creators.

Managing the “Messy Middle” and Brand Safety

Ben Gunn: The best brands have an “always-on” approach. They have creators constantly talking about the brand. Our system has real-time data feeding in; if creators fall below benchmarks, they fall out of the always-on strategy and you fill the funnel with new creators. It’s a constant feedback loop where performance is always improving.

Eliza Lewis: While we have all the fancy tools, we also take care of the really boring stuff—contracts, outreach, having contact details in one place, and having a transparent model where there aren’t hidden fees everywhere.

Ben Gunn: Marketers shouldn’t be expected to have the same level of knowledge as a specialist who lives and breathes creator marketing. Most of our clients don’t have the internal resources to manage the technology day-to-day. They want to approve the creator list and content and know it’s working, but the “messy middle” is what our system and managed service solve for.

Darren Woolley: What about the risks? Brand safety and compliance are big concerns, especially in regulated industries like health insurance.

Eliza Lewis: Brand safety is my favourite part. Our platform reviews content audio, visual captions, and comments in over 150 languages and dialects. It ensures the talent is brand safe. Because we have boots on the ground in 14 markets, we found out things like how the watermelon emoticon can be offensive in Malaysia.

For compliance, like with a pharma client, we feed the market regulations, brand dos and don’ts, and the red thread into the tech. Every piece of content filters through those before a manager even reviews it. It takes away the worry of things like a shot of alcohol in the background or a child’s seatbelt being on incorrectly in an auto ad.

Ben Gunn: Governments still think through a geographical lens, so our job is to give them reassurance that the creators they are choosing fit the brand safety and compliance guidelines for that specific market. What is compliant in Australia—like swimwear for a sun cancer program—might be offensive in more modest countries. We’ve trained the AI to think through the lens of the specific brand and market.

Eliza Lewis: It’s a mistake to think of Southeast Asia as one thing. You have to think of each market individually. They are socially minded and do so much commerce through creators, so getting it right in each market is important.

Beyond Vanity Metrics to Real Engagement

Darren Woolley: People look at follower counts, but you need to go beyond that to who they are engaging with and the level of engagement.

Ben Gunn: Platforms now prioritise content that is engaging, irrespective of follower count. TikTok pioneered it. Stephen Bartlett, a very sophisticated creator, talked about how the quality of the show has a greater influence over video views than his actual follower count.

Eliza Lewis: We obsess over metrics like video through rate and six-second video through rate, because only 10% of TikTok videos get to six seconds. The longer someone watches, the more influence you have.

Darren Woolley: I’ve seen content creators share their frustration with algorithms. They hit a million followers and then plateau because they start creating for the algorithm and not the consumer.

Eliza Lewis: You’ve got to get the algorithm to like the content and the consumer. If you don’t get the algorithm to like it, you don’t get the advantage. But the relationship with the audience is based on authenticity; if you ruin that, you’re screwed too.

Ben Gunn: Likes, shares, and saves feed the algorithm. These days, sharing content in DMs is something the algorithm really feeds off. But creators also need a dialogue with their audience to understand what’s really resonating.

Best Practice for Brands and Agencies

Darren Woolley: How do agencies and in-house teams need to change to understand how to work with creators? I’ve heard of creative directors trying to give direction to creators, and it doesn’t end well.

Ben Gunn: There’s a role for them as brand custodians, but they have to let the creator deliver the core message in their own words. Nothing looks worse than trying to shove a line into a video that doesn’t belong. Creative directors should create the guardrails, then let the creator be creative. Think of it like the old magazine editor; you wouldn’t tell the editor at Vogue exactly how to talk about your brand in a spread.

If brands are uncomfortable with brand control, we suggest starting with UGC (User Generated Content). We can script and storyboard that so it is signed off before it goes live. But as you move up into higher follower counts, it is very hard to dictate what is said.

Eliza Lewis: Good creators say no to 70% of offers because they know their power is in the relationship with their audience. If it isn’t authentic, it performs badly.

Ben Gunn: This is why ambassadorships are so effective. One-and-done campaigns don’t work as well because audiences want to know the creator really believes in it. Doing multiple pieces of content over an extended period is more effective for everyone.

Darren Woolley: If a marketer is sitting there going, “We’re wasting our time,” what do they need to be clear about before starting this conversation?

Ben Gunn: We generally engage with clients who are doing decent volume but lack the system to do it at scale. If you want to book your first creator, you can just reach out on Instagram. But when CFOs start asking questions because this line item is growing into the millions and needs to deliver an ROI, that’s where Fabulate fits.

Eliza Lewis: Understand your KPIs and objectives. Is it conversion? That’s a different ball game. And please don’t just come to me for an organic campaign. If you don’t put paid behind it, it’s like creating a TVC and not putting it anywhere. What’s the point?

Darren Woolley: Ben Gunn and Eliza Lewis, thank you for sharing the state of play for creator marketing.

And look, a question for both of you, I’m wondering, when you’re doom-scrolling late at night, which platforms do you go to?

The post Managing Marketing: Maximising Creator Marketing Impact appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

Creator marketing has officially grown up. What was once an ad-hoc tactical experiment has matured into a multi-million-dollar media channel. Brands are pouring massive investments into influencer and creator strategies, expecting the same commercial governance, procurement rigor, and ROI transparency they demand from traditional media.

However, as creator budgets have scaled, a familiar holding company playbook has re-emerged.

If you feel like your creator marketing dollars aren’t delivering the scale or creative output they used to, you aren’t imagining it. You’re likely paying an invisible middleman tax.

History Repeats: The Agency Toll Booth

Over successive marketing innovations—from media commissions and digital production to programmatic trading desks—holding companies have perfected the art of inserting themselves as a mandatory toll booth between marketers and service providers.

Creator marketing is simply the latest frontier for this strategy.

Instead of briefs going into the open market to find the best talent and specialist partners, briefs are increasingly aggregated and routed into internal creator divisions within agency holding companies.

These internal creator businesses operate as profit centers designed to maximize internal margins and group utilization. The issue isn’t that agency services lack value; it’s that non-transparent, bundled billing obscures where your money is actually going.

The $100,000 Budget Breakdown: 35% vs. 60% Working Spend

When agencies present creator costs as a single bundled line item—merging talent fees, technology gateways, compliance, analytics, and management—marketers lose all visibility.

When we analyze how a $100,000 creator investment flows through different billing models, the results are startling:

• In an Aggregated (Non-Transparent) Model: As little as $35,000 (35%) actually reaches the creators. Up to 65% of the budget is absorbed by strategy fees, internal agency service margins, technology markups, and unitemized fees.
• In a Transparent (Itemized) Model: Up to $60,000 (60%) directly funds creator output and superannuation, effectively nearly doubling your working budget without increasing your total spend.

Why Working Spend Matters: Higher working budget means more creators, higher-tier talent, greater creative diversity, localized content variants, and significantly better campaign performance.

Take Back Control of Your Creator Spend

Performance guarantees and commercial visibility can and must coexist. You don’t have to accept bundled, opaque line items as the price of doing business in creator marketing.

TrinityP3 has published an exclusive Industry Bulletin: Unmasking the Invisible Margin in Creator Marketing. Designed specifically for CMOs, Heads of Media, and Procurement leaders, this guide provides the exact contractual guardrails and audit frameworks required to eliminate hidden margins.

Download the Industry Bulletin

Unmasking the Invisible Margin in Creator Marketing

Get instant access to our practical guide, complete with budget breakdown benchmarks, contractual unbundling clauses, and our 7-point procurement checklist.

Inside the Bulletin:

• The $100k Benchmark Table: Complete breakdown of non-transparent vs. transparent fee structures.
• Contractual Guardrails: 4 mandatory principles to protect your working spend.
• The Monday Morning Checklist: 7 direct questions every marketer must ask their agency.

What Should You Do Next?

If your agency tells you that creator costs “cannot be unbundled” or that technology efficiencies belong to the agency rather than the campaign, it’s time to re-evaluate your commercial terms.

Download the bulletin, run your current creator campaigns through our 7-point checklist, and start ensuring that every dollar of your marketing budget is working as hard as it possibly can.

If your agency tells you that creator costs “cannot be unbundled” or that technology efficiencies belong to the agency rather than the campaign, it’s time to re-evaluate your commercial terms.

Read more on how we can assist you managing your agency commercial arrangements and contractural terms or contact us to confidentially discuss your specific situation and requirements.

Download the bulletin above, run your current creator campaigns through our 7-point checklist, and start ensuring that every dollar of your marketing budget is working as hard as it possibly can.

Fill out the form below to download your complimentary copy:

The post Where Does Your $100,000 Creator Budget Really Go? appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

They explore why AI acts as a “stochastic parrot,” predicting patterns based on past human content and biases, which ultimately regresses output toward the average rather than generating true ideas. 

The conversation delves into the cognitive science behind this phenomenon, referencing Wharton’s System Three model and the dangerous rise of “cognitive surrender,” where high trust in AI leads creatives to adopt faulty outputs with minimal scrutiny. To combat this, they discuss how the best use of AI requires systems thinking, taste, and introducing deliberate productive friction instead of simply offloading the effort of thinking.

Finally, they offer an optimistic reframing of creativity as a wild, divergent problem-solving practice. Instead of asking how to make campaigns slightly faster and cheaper, Cat urges the industry to ask what problems can now be solved that couldn’t before.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud, Podbean, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Amazon Podcasts.

I feel like LinkedIn has become for me just a place to go and slightly despair about humanity.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley:

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy. Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.

While artificial intelligence promises creative abundance, it is in truth delivering creative convergence. This slide towards homogeneity happens because AI acts as a “stochastic parrot,” predicting patterns based on past human content and regressing output towards an average.

Today, we’re exploring structural problems with how the advertising industry is using AI and discussing the rise of “cognitive surrender,” where high trust in AI leads to adopting faulty outputs with minimal scrutiny. Please welcome the founder of Liminal & Co and industry commentator, Cat McGinn. Welcome, Cat.

Cat McGinn:

Thank you very much; it’s good to be here.

Observations on Creative Disruption

Darren Woolley:

You are in a position to provide informed commentary on this topic because you have been observing it for a number of years. From very early on, I remember you bringing a specific perspective to the issue of AI in the creative industries. What captured your interest and motivated you to take that role? You brought a balanced view that was both positive and wary.

Cat McGinn:

I’ve always been interested in technology and how it shapes culture, society, and behaviour. Watching even nascent forms of generative AI back in 2022, it seemed clear it would pose both a real threat and a massive opportunity for the creative industries. I am inherently an optimist, but I think we need to be wary and enter this huge disruption with our eyes open.

Darren Woolley:

On one side, we have technology companies investing billions—maybe even trillions—in the promise of this technology changing society. They are clearly going to over-promise to sell it. On the other side, some have taken a victim-like perspective, fearing the death of careers. It’s playing into the dichotomies we see in the post-social media world, where two sides are battling it out.

Cat McGinn:

That is always the case with new technology; it shines a bright light on cracks that already existed. These issues have come to the fore because the pressure is on. It is revealing structural problems in how we deliver marketing campaigns, how we pay for professional services, and how we interact with one another. All of it falls under scrutiny with this new technology.

The Paradox of Abundance: Quantity vs. Ideas

Darren Woolley:

Someone said to me recently that technology succeeds when it either takes over work you don’t like doing or allows you to do something you could never do before. Does AI fulfil both of those?

Cat McGinn:

Yes and no; it’s a real paradox. The industry has focused for years on wanting to “do more with less,” and AI offers that promise. However, an abundance of output is not the same as an abundance of ideas. That is a tension point we must be cognisant of. I call this “McGinn’s Law”: technology doesn’t necessarily drive us forward. In truth, a new technology often solves a problem directly created by the previous technology.

Darren Woolley:

It’s interesting that you talk about “doing more with less” because when we struggle to measure performance, we default to measurable things like quantity. It’s as if we think, “I’m not sure if this makes a difference, but surely doing more of it will help”.

Cat McGinn:

We get seduced by the speed of output and fail to engage our full critical faculties. We are mistaking quantity for effectiveness, cut-through, and creative originality.

The Risks of Rapid Adoption and “Cognitive Surrender”

Darren Woolley:

This category is evolving quickly; it feels like there is a new breakthrough every week. Where are we currently on the adoption curve?

Cat McGinn:

Twelve months ago, OpenAI was the unquestioned leader, and now we see the rise of Anthropic. Who knows what the world will look like in another year? This level of upheaval is unprecedented. What concerns me is that we are adopting AI wholesale without thinking through the implications, guardrails, regulation, or ethics.

Darren Woolley:

One of my disappointments is how quickly OpenAI turned to advertising as a revenue source. If you position AI as an adviser, having paid advertising corrupts that trust because it may advise based on whoever pays the most.

Cat McGinn:

Trust is a critical problem. We are blindly trusting machines that are riddled with hallucinations. Large Language Models (LLMs) are probabilistic systems; they give the statistically likely next outcome to a prompt. Sometimes they just make things up with such confidence that we forget to check.

Darren Woolley:

Human beings are cognitively lazy. If a tool seems efficient at advising us, it’s easy to just go with it. This is why AI recommendations have surpassed traditional search; it provides one solution, so you don’t have to read through links and make up your own mind.

Cat McGinn:

It was advertising that “poisoned the well” of search, truthfully. Search became unmanageable because the ecosystem was destroyed by SEO and paid outcomes. Now, we see people outsourcing their thinking, taste, and judgement to AI. The risk is a deluge of “slop” and homogenous outputs.

Originality vs. Statistical Convergence

Darren Woolley:

Some argue AI has democratised content creation, but that isn’t necessarily good if people stop judging the outputs. It is just copying patterns from the past.

Cat McGinn:

A large language model is structurally biased towards what is familiar and culturally dominant. Originality doesn’t live in the mean; it lives at the edges, in nuance and cultural specificity. Using them for creativity is where we start to fall down.

Darren Woolley:

We expect it to come up with something new, but human creativity isn’t created in a vacuum either. It is built on past experiences, but humans have the ability to make a “quantum leap”. I find very few marketers have a working model of what human creativity actually is.

Cat McGinn:

When we trust creative outputs to a model that drives us towards statistical convergence, how do you differentiate your brand? Every agency and marketing team has access to the same tools and thinking. How can we connect with customers in a unique way?

Advertising at its best is more than just executing communication in a “professional” way. Outstanding pieces of effective creative have always involved “zigging while others zag”. We can use AI to get to interesting places, but there is a greater need for discernment and craft. There is also a pipeline crisis:

if junior staff aren’t doing the work, where are the future tastemakers going to be trained?

Systems Thinking and Efficiency

Darren Woolley:

Generative AI allows a single human to be more productive if they use it as a researcher to provide options, rather than as a problem solver.

Cat McGinn:

We will see the rise of “systems thinkers” who understand how to hold the whole ecosystem in their head and create constraint and direction. This might be a massive opportunity for neurodivergent people who naturally think in systems and connections.

Currently, agencies are using AI primarily to “do more with less”. Some claim they can do work for 70% less. This focuses on productivity rather than performance.

Darren Woolley:

It’s hard to measure the value or performance being created, so we go for more “widgets”.

Cat McGinn:

We are falling into the trap of efficiency over effectiveness. This isn’t a new challenge; it highlights structural fissures in the industry. We haven’t been paying for great thinking; we’ve been paying for volume. If our only connection with customers is spamming them at volume, it just comes down to media budget size and how much you can interrupt people. I believe there is still value in creating experiences that change how people think and feel about a brand.

Darren Woolley:

Flooding social media with messaging clearly isn’t working. The key is to stand out and get attention. The Campaign Palace used to say on their letterhead:

“No one buys anything while they’re asleep”. Their philosophy was that advertising must wake people up. Now, platforms like LinkedIn are full of programmatically generated “slop”. If you’re struggling to articulate a point of view, maybe don’t make a post if you need an AI to do it for you.

The Danger of Outsourcing Thought

Cat McGinn:

A new research paper from the Wharton School, Thinking Fast, Slow and Artificial, identifies a third mode of thinking. When you outsource your thinking to AI, you stop being able to distinguish whether it was your idea or the machine’s. We start trusting the AI for the perfect outcome and surrender that “sparky” imaginative process.

The study found that the higher the time pressure and stress, the more likely people are to outsource their brains to AI. This leads to significant mistakes in reasoning and analysis and erodes our ability to think.

Darren Woolley:

It reminds me of the Honda “Cog” ad. The agency took months to develop the idea. They finally turned up at the client’s office with the game Mousetrap to explain the concept of engineering excellence through a chain reaction. You can have an idea in an instant, but is it the best idea for a million-dollar investment? AI comes up with the most likely conclusion, whereas creativity uses cognitive load to create fresh, unexpected views.

Cat McGinn:

Like all great ideas, as soon as you hear them, you wonder why they haven’t always existed. We no longer have the time to “mull and process” thoughts because of constant pressure. The promise of automation should be that we outsource the boring stuff—like timesheets—and claw back time for wild, divergent ideas.

AGI and the Future of Human Agency

Darren Woolley:

Companies are researching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and super-intelligence. Will that be a game-changer where human beings are taken out of the loop?

Cat McGinn:

I have a degree of scepticism about AGI. It’s interesting that AI companies claim world-ending technology is within grasp just as they go for an IPO. The founder of Anthropic predicted AGI by 2027, yet until recently, ChatGPT couldn’t spell “strawberry” accurately.

This is the moment for us to focus on human agency. What world do we want to live in? Do we want to just feed the machine, or should the machine serve humanity? These conversations are urgent and necessary.

Darren Woolley:

When the creator no longer has a say over the creation, we have lost control and relevance. However, there are great opportunities. In Hollywood, they are shooting in studios and using AI for backdrops, similar to how Gone with the Wind used hand-painted glass, but still using human actors. People rebel against fully AI-generated performances because they don’t feel human. Using it for backdrops can reduce the cost of a high-quality film by two-thirds, which could expand the amount of work available.

The Need for Authentic Connection

Cat McGinn:

The craft of storytelling and human connection will become more vital than ever. This is a crossroads: do we lean into “more of the same for less,” or do we look for horizon-expanding possibilities?

Darren Woolley:

Technology in the 21st century seems to be having a negative impact on connection. Teenagers feel more alone than previous generations. Social media is not fulfilling the need for human connection.

Cat McGinn:

The rise of AI companions shows a human desire for connection, but people don’t know how to make those connections in the real world. However, I see a movement among Gen Z and Gen Alpha to go outside, “touch grass,” and seek messy, real-world experiences rather than social media perfection.

Darren Woolley:

If tools work against the human condition, there will be a rebellion. Sales emails that are clearly AI-generated feel “stalkerish” and lack authenticity.

Cat McGinn:

This makes the need to be face-to-face all the more important; it becomes the only reliable way to interact. Real-life connection in “meat space” is a positive trajectory to be on.

Advice for Staying Curious

Darren Woolley:

Optimistically, where do you see the opportunities for the industry?

Cat McGinn:

If we stop trying to do what we’ve already done but faster and start using AI to deliver visions we haven’t been able to execute, it takes away constraint. It gives us an incredible chance to do new, innovative things that move the needle. Let’s stop doing 10,000 Facebook updates for the same price and find ways to be creatively distinct.

Darren Woolley:

If you were giving advice, what sources of information would you recommend to avoid feeling deluged?

Cat McGinn:

I love several writers on Substack. Empire of AI by Karen Hao should be required reading. Stay curious and look at creators like Phantom X who are building film and TV work using AI. Try to step out of the anxiety of staying on top of every update. Come back to what is irreducibly human: what makes you feel something and what makes you connect?

Darren Woolley:

Cat McGinn, it’s been great catching up. I’m looking forward to the project you’re working on. Thank you for sharing your perspective.

Cat McGinn:

Thank you so much for having me; it’s been great to talk.

The post Managing Marketing: The Paradox Of AI And The Slide Toward Creative Homogeneity appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

The traditional response to underperformance is usually a structural “pivot”: we pitch the agency, we restructure the department, or we hire a new CMO. But these are often cosmetic fixes for a systemic disease.

At TrinityP3, we have identified that true marketing excellence—whether delivered by an external agency or an internal resource—is built on three interdependent pillars: The Operational Review (The Diagnostic), The Engagement Agreement (The Framework), and Evalu8ing (The Measurement).

When balanced correctly, this trinity eliminates the “friction costs” that drain up to 20% of marketing productivity and replaces them with a culture of mutual accountability.

1. The Operational Review: Auditing the “Why” and the “How”

The first pillar is the Agency Operational Review. This is the deep-dive diagnostic designed to uncover the structural truths of the relationship. Most organizations wait until a relationship is in crisis to perform a review, but high-performing teams use them as a proactive “health check.”

Beyond the Output

Traditional audits look at the “What”—the quality of the TVC or the ROI of the media spend. An Operational Review looks at the “How.” We examine the mechanics of the collaboration:

• The Briefing Flow: Is work starting with a clear strategy, or is the agency “briefing themselves” through trial and error?

• Approval Hierarchies: How many layers of “Maybe” must a project pass through before it reaches a “Yes”?

• Resource Mapping: Are the right seniority levels being applied to the right tasks?

The In-House Parallel

For in-house agencies, the Operational Review is often a wake-up call. Internal clients often treat in-house resources as “free” or “unlimited,” leading to a chaotic intake process that prioritises urgency over importance. The review identifies these systemic leaks, providing the data needed to move from a “production shop” to a “strategic hub.”

2. The Engagement Agreement: Defining the “Ways of Working” (WoW)

If the Operational Review identifies the gaps, the Engagement Agreement (EA) is the bridge built to close them.

For too long, the industry has relied on the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The problem with an SLA is that it is a legal document designed for “compliance.” It tells the agency what happens if they fail. An Engagement Agreement, conversely, is an operational document designed for “success.” It tells both parties how to win.

The Multi-Directional Contract

The EA is built on the realisation that the client’s behaviour directly impacts the agency’s performance. It formalises the “Ways of Working” (WoW) for both external partners and internal teams:

• Mutual Commitments: The agency commits to strategic leadership; the client commits to consolidated, actionable feedback within 48 hours.

• Process Standardisation: Explicitly defining the “Definition of Ready”, the minimum information required for a brief to be accepted.

• Conflict Resolution: Setting the protocols for “respectful challenge,” ensuring that creative friction leads to better ideas rather than fractured relationships.

For an in-house team, the EA acts as an Internal Charter. It gives the internal agency the mandate to push back on poor briefs and establishes a “contractual” relationship with business units, ensuring the internal team is respected as a professional partner.

3. Evalu8ing: The Measurement of Collaborative Health

The final pillar is Evalu8ing, TrinityP3’s proprietary relationship diagnostic platform. Without measurement, the Engagement Agreement is merely a “wish list.” Evalu8ing turns the “soft skills” of collaboration into hard data.

Measuring the “White Space”

Evalu8ing moves beyond the one-way “report card” where a client marks their agency. It is a 360-degree, multi-directional assessment.

• Agency-to-Client: Allows the agency to provide honest, anonymous feedback on the quality of the client’s briefing and leadership.

• Agency-to-Agency: In a multi-agency roster, it measures how well the Creative, Media, and Digital partners are collaborating.

• Internal Stakeholder Alignment: Measures how well different internal divisions (Marketing vs. Sales vs. IT) are aligned on the brand’s goals.

Continuous Improvement

By running Evalu8ing as a quarterly pulse check, organizations can see if the “Ways of Working” established in the Engagement Agreement are actually being followed. It identifies “micro-frictions” before they turn into relationship-ending crises. It provides the C-suite with a “Health Score” for their marketing investments, proving that the team is becoming more efficient over time.

The Velocity Dividend: Balancing the Trinity

Why does this balance matter? Because speed requires structure. When you undertake an Operational Review, you identify where you are losing time. When you implement an Engagement Agreement, you set the rules that recover that time. When you use Evalu8ing, you ensure that those rules are being respected.

The result is what we call the Velocity Dividend.

1. Externally: You stop the “Pitch Cycle.” You fix the relationship you have, saving the massive cost and disruption of going to market.

2. Internally: You empower your in-house teams. You give them the structure they need to produce high-quality work without the burnout.

3. Commercially: You ensure that every dollar of fee—whether paid to a global network or an internal headcount, is focused on outputs and outcomes, not on navigating internal bureaucracy.

Engineering the “Dream Team”

High-performing teams are not an accident of chemistry; they are an achievement of architecture.

By balancing these three elements, you move your marketing department from a state of “reactive chaos” to “proactive excellence.” You stop policing your partners and start enabling them. Whether you are managing a roster of ten global agencies or an internal team of fifty, the path to performance is the same: Audit the process, Agree on the behaviour, and Measure the collaboration.

Is your marketing ecosystem suffering from the “Friction Tax”? Contact us today to discuss how our Operational Reviews, Engagement Agreements, and Evalu8ing platform can reset your team for high performance.

The post The High-Performance Trinity: How Operational Reviews, Engagement Agreements, and Evalu8ing Reset Marketing Excellence appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.