B2B Marketing in the Age of AI with Kate Ross

Mike (00:46.186)
Kate, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast.

Kate (00:48.192)
this.

Kate (00:55.566)
Okay, fine. So I don't have to worry about what I do. Fine. Hey, Greg.

Kate (01:02.446)
This is it.

Kate (01:12.622)
Fantastic to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Mac.

Mike (01:14.826)
I'm thoroughly enjoying looking forward to this. So we had some great conversations over the last kind of month or so, all about AI agencies, consultancy models. And that's what we're going to focus on today really, which is fantastic. So first of all, who are you? What do you do? And something unusual about yourself.

Kate (01:31.086)
Sure. And so I'm Kate Ross. I'm co -founder and co -MD of 8 &4. We're a social content agency set up back in 2008 when myself and my business partner were 24. So I have spent my entire career running, building and running an agency for better or for worse. And in terms of something unusual, apart from that, a bit unusual about me, probably starting a business at 24.

You asked me about this before and I was trying to think of something unusual because I'm one of those people that is extraordinarily mainstream. However, I think the thing that stands out for me, I'm probably on the only MDs in the country that personally runs a wine club for their agency. So I run that. Wine tasting, yeah. Once a quarter. The entire company gets together and I run through six different wines from across the world. Often we've been to as far from places as China, Georgia, again.

Mike (02:11.018)
So I'm joining your agency. That sounds great.

Mike (02:23.21)
Wow.

Kate (02:24.398)
up and down some of the quality but I'm an absolute massive wine fan, absolutely passionate about it. So I've spent a lot of my time learning about wine and trying different ones and sharing that passion with other people.

Mike (02:35.338)
And what would you recommend? So what's your kind of go -to wine?

Kate (02:38.894)
Yeah, sure. Again, having drank a lot of wine, probably too much, and across a lot of different price scales, where I come back to is I genuinely don't think you should spend more than about £10 on a bottle of wine. For example, you can go and spend about minimum £30 on a bottle of champagne. You go to Spain and you can get a phenomenal bottle of Carver for £10. And by virtue of the branding, which is relevant, so this part is what we're talking about,

Mike (02:52.042)
Mike (03:03.786)
Of course, definitely.

Kate (03:05.966)
You know, you've got to always put champagne that doesn't exist for cover. So, if I'm going to take like a table wine, I'd go France, Cinque Ritles, Sauvignon Blanc. Does the job every single time. The French know how to do it. They don't spend silly money on their wine like we often do in the UK. And they know good local wine is the way forward. It's why I drink a lot of English wine as well and try to keep local with it because it's fantastic to drink locally and support local vineyards, which obviously continuing to blow up across the UK at the moment.

Mike (03:34.25)
Agreed. And also, although we will talk about agency stuff listeners in a second, so I live in the Cotswolds. So we were just talking about actually some of the Cotswolds wines are fantastic. Really, really good.

Kate (03:39.178)
Yes.

Kate (03:44.43)
Yeah, and I'm going to the Woodchester Valley tomorrow to sample their wines. Very near you. I'm your sample. I will.

Mike (03:48.81)
So you're gonna have to tell me what they're like. I need a recommendation when you get back. So let's start the questions. So the kind of the first question that we talked about was how can agencies differentiate themselves in a market that's starting to look, I think scarily quite samey, specifically in relation to kind of enterprise ready AI tools as a kind of a lens. What are your thoughts?

Kate (04:03.63)
Yes. Yes.

Kate (04:12.158)
Absolutely. I think this is immensely challenging and something that sort of, you know, I've thought about daily really for the last 18 months, is this sort of kicked up. I was reflecting just this week how interesting it is. If you took Credstex from across the major marketing agencies in this country, two years ago, can you imagine what the number one thing they're trying to show you would be? And the number one thing would be, look how creative we are. And in only two years, you now go look at Credstex,

And it's look how technical we are. It must be on the shortest of terms in the advertising industry landscape, furthest it's ever occurred. I can't think of another example. Every single major...

Mike (04:46.57)
Wow. Yep.

Mike (04:54.57)
And you've been in it for 25 years, haven't you? 16 years, sorry, not 25 years, 16 years. You'd be very young if you started at 25 years exactly, yes.

Kate (04:57.454)
16 years. Nowadays, you know, you can start an agency at 14, can't you? With the tools to hand. But yeah, so I, yeah, I think that's absolutely fascinating. Because if you look at all the major noises from WPP, publicist, even Brand Tech, yeah, Brand Tech Group, this small, but you know, himself, David Jones, founder and CEO of Brand Tech Group saying that,

Mike (05:05.77)
You can.

Mike (05:17.098)
Yep. Publicist. Omni -com. Yep.

Kate (05:27.054)
He agrees with Sam Altman that 95 % of all marketing tasks are going to be replaced by a... That's exactly why he said that the brand tech group, I caught it. He agrees, which I thought was a very big thing to be coming from the leaders of our ecosystem. Anyway, all the noise they make right now in marketing is about, look at our J &I technology. Now this has agencies, look at my size. I run eight in four group, we're about 130 people. It's extraordinarily challenging, absolutely, because...

Mike (05:31.914)
Wow.

He agrees. Wow.

Mike (05:51.772)
Yep. Absolutely. Is it challenging or terrifying?

Kate (05:55.022)
what you're seeing is a completely... A bit of both. I've never personally, in this moment, this reminds me of startup days where you have the heady sense of opportunity, but also that head between the knees, like sort of terror of like, is this all about to collapse? Like, what? I've never known it. Yeah, unbelievable. Yeah. But you're completely... Or can you?

Mike (06:10.922)
Yeah, exactly. Yep. Is it real? And can't I just do it all with chat GPT? No, you can't.

Kate (06:24.046)
Don't you mean like some of them? I would say, you really can't. And I personally, and I've spent 18 months in this building running my stuff, and I don't think you can, and I don't agree with a lot of these big networks and the way they're playing things. No, they continue to hold the line on it's tech and talent, as we do. And they keep saying that. But, yeah.

Mike (06:24.618)
Or can you? I don't know! It's scary!

Mike (06:42.986)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (06:46.41)
And can I add quality? It's tech talent and quality of output. Any fall, I think, can generate generative AI outputs using the open source tools or the paid for tools, even in a private area. However, the quality of the output is completely different.

Kate (06:54.318)
Yeah. Okay.

Kate (07:06.51)
And I totally agree with that. And I think people that use agencies, they are people who are already buying at a premium because they understand the premium output. So like I'm good because it's extraordinary premium you're paying for an agency, right? I mean, in -house, you know, is expect, you know, doing it on Fiverr versus in -housing a decent marketing professional versus paying a London agency, you are right up there already. And so you believe in the value. So,

Mike (07:28.17)
Absolutely.

Kate (07:31.374)
To your question, absolutely. It is becoming very samey because everyone is going, look at my Gen .ai product, look at my Gen .ai platform. And it's sort of samey. And the problem that the SME agencies like myself have is that we don't have 300 million euros that WBP and publicist professors be investing. So how do you operate within that? Now, concurrently, another challenge alongside this one, and we've spoken about it before, is that I've spoken to a huge amount of...

Mike (07:36.97)
Yes.

Mike (07:45.258)
No, precisely.

Kate (07:57.966)
well connected, obviously naturally 16 years in the business, the SME level, a lot of SME agency owners. And every single one of them is saying exactly what we're seeing on pitch lists. And we're talking pitch lists sometimes of sub 1 million annual income accounts. Networks have appeared out of nowhere. And this is petty cash stuff for these guys normally. What are they doing on this pitch list? Now what basically...

Mike (08:12.777)
Correct. Out of nowhere.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's down, Kate, it's down at 300, 200K. I've got US agencies that are big mid -market indies and they're going, whoa, we've got networks coming into play that we never would have seen before. Exactly, yeah, get out of my pond.

Kate (08:22.67)
It's unbelievable.

Kate (08:29.486)
What are you saying?

Why are you fishing here? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, either one, sadly, either one they're desperate or two more likely sadly, is that what's happening is that they see the future of basically a much more automated marketing process, end -to -end marketing system based on these Gen .ai platforms. And so what they're seeing as an opportunity is that what we can do is we can take this technology we built, we can customize it to a brand, we can stick an account manager on the top of it.

The data delivery is delivered by the technology and suddenly, as you say, 200, 300 grand in annual income is now viable as a margin. Whereas it wasn't before with 14 person account teams, which is we know how the networks work. So.

Mike (09:06.474)
Exactly. And profitable.

Mike (09:12.394)
Correct. And you can now call this team virtual AI employees. On the log chart, we're gonna start to see virtual employees that are doing very particular repeatable tasks because agencies have built those models that allow clients to go, wow, this is great. I get a blend of people experience creativity with efficiency. It's a fascinating landscape.

Kate (09:26.254)
Absolutely.

Kate (09:34.062)
Yeah. Yeah. 100%. It's absolutely barmy. When you sit and look at how quickly they're moving. And so, and as you say, how does you differentiate yourself? Because if you're not at work, and you can't basically try and out compete each other with how much, you know, serious seed funding you've just received last week, then it's very, very difficult. And it's, it's, it's ultra, you know, it's even more competitive than it than it was. And

Mike (09:41.514)
Hahaha!

Kate (10:03.534)
So in terms of how you do that, like, and from our perspective,

Mike (10:08.426)
So give me some examples, Kate, exactly. So what are you doing that you think is giving some market differentiation?

Kate (10:11.246)
show.

Kate (10:15.31)
Yeah, of course. I think the one thing you hold on to as an SME agency is that we are always going to be more nimble, right? So we're always going to be more agile, irregardless of what they say. And I think that we are more networked, and I'm happy to have networks argue against this with me, but I feel like much more network relationship -wise into our clients by virtue of our size. They are bigger to us comparatively, you know? You can wrap your arms around a client and agency relationship of our size. You can't as much when it's...

Mike (10:30.346)
Yeah.

Mike (10:37.898)
Exactly.

Kate (10:44.814)
Coke and WPP, they are enormous behemoths, trying to execute personal relationships at that level is challenging. So I think we have an ability to very specifically target our client problems and work very, very closely with them to customize specific tools to answer those problems. So customization, I think, is probably, WPP and Pubasis have 300 million to make a...

all singing, all dancing platform for everything. I think where an SME comes in is, okay, we actually solve less problems than networks do or propose to do because of course we do, because we're a smaller outsourced outfit. We can hone in on those very specific problems for our various specific sectors we work in and customize very specifically for that issue. Like we've done with, so platform to us, platform and Coach is our image generation tool and we built that for Hyundai.

Mike (11:19.082)
Yeah, exactly.

Mike (11:29.514)
Exactly.

Kate (11:35.118)
for the problems of content creation with an automotive, which is logistically a nightmare. Anyone who's worked in automotive will know trying to get cars around the world to be photographed in the right place, et cetera, is difficult. So we built that tool very specifically for that and have had phenomenal results of it. So that is the strategy, I think, and it pushes into consultancy, which I think is imperative. Yeah.

Mike (11:54.41)
And that's the quality thing, Kate, I think we talked about was that the reason that you've been successful doing that and you showed me some of the images are that the images are stunning and you've got 3D models of the cars placed in environments you'd expect to see them in and some you wouldn't expect to see them in, but you can't tell the difference that is it real or not.

Kate (12:13.07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely. It's phenomenally exciting. And that, when you take Gen .ai and you really zone in on a very specific use case like that, and it's like, my, that's phenomenal. That solved a problem we could not solve two years ago. And that's where Gen .ai gets really exciting for me. Because I think if you think about all singing or kicking or dancing platforms, my prediction is if we fast forward two, three years, I bet.

Mike (12:30.506)
Right.

Kate (12:43.662)
15 % or an appropriated law, 20 % of that tool will actually be used and 80 % will be sat there not being used. It didn't work and synthetically it wasn't pragmatic to rely upon it.

Mike (12:49.962)
Yes.

Yes.

Mike (12:57.098)
So talk about the consultancy bit, because I think this is fascinating about why you need consultancy and strategic skills combined with these Gen .ai tools to get what the client needs. Why is that a direction of travel, do you think?

Kate (13:07.382)
Yeah.

Kate (13:13.39)
Because I think in any major sort of disruptive moments, the number one issue that's going on is overwhelm. And what's consultancy? Consultancy is dealing with overwhelm. Consultancy, if there's no overwhelm, there are no management consultancies, right? You know, problem is that big check, you know, doesn't get paid. So overwhelm is the central factor of general. I am in this every single day and I feel overwhelmed. I'm sure, you know, you as well, we've talked about it every single day. I mean, last week with...

Mike (13:37.778)
Right. Yeah, correct. We have.

Kate (13:42.541)
chat at GPT -40 and Google I .D. in 24 hours. I'm like,

Mike (13:44.65)
4 .0. and then Meta said llama 3. yeah, that's free now. And it's really good. It's open sourced. Whoa. OK.

Kate (13:52.212)
yeah, you just believe it. Unbelievable. So I think I and I think we're well positioned this because we're a senior sort of team, you know, we've been around long enough and we're consulted. We have business problems. We understand that business problems are complex. They're not even even building coach for Hyundai. That tool was complex to build. We built it. But my goodness, getting pushing that through a stakeholder journey through a massive.

Mike (14:18.41)
Exactly.

Kate (14:19.502)
is extraordinarily difficult and needs a lot of handholding to support our app in turn inside the organization. So consultancy is absolutely imperative by virtue of the overwhelm on what's going on and people need support. Conversely, it's terrifying what's going on, but it's also the most extraordinary opportunity I've personally seen in 16 years to engage in a renewed way with clients, with trust, you know, through...

Mike (14:22.858)
It does.

Kate (14:43.054)
innovation, like I've never seen, like my team, my team is so motivated because they're like, this is amazing. Like I'm having business transformation right now with our clients. That's exciting stuff. We show off the, you know, these tools we work on with our clients and they're being sent to presidents and CEOs within 24 hours. And I'm going, I never had a deck. Again, you've been in this industry long enough to do that marketing often with the bowl, isn't it? Please choose us.

Mike (14:58.538)
Wow. Wow.

Mike (15:06.602)
Yeah!

Mike (15:10.378)
Exactly. Correct.

Kate (15:11.95)
So it's a phenomenal opportunity.

Mike (15:13.834)
So it's giving you access to senior stakeholders that potentially you wouldn't have access to before because they're seeing these unbelievable rapid turnaround, high quality, creative images, campaigns, things they couldn't have dreamed of doing before.

Kate (15:19.662)
Thank you.

Absolutely.

Kate (15:29.55)
Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. This directly impacts the business in a more meaningful way than we've probably been able to in 16 years. So I'm very, very excited about that. And I think, yeah, if you can be in that position where you're, you know, consulted by nature as an organization and you have that technical value. And again, we came out, the reason myself and my business partner started our agency was because we saw where digital was going and how it was about to transform marketing. So we started in digital marketing, we started in technology and the sort of the

Mike (15:53.674)
Yes.

Kate (15:58.542)
rip wave that was about to come through the industry. So we sort of, we start to benefit from that because most of our team are technical anyway. So we've been able to pivot relatively quickly to bring some of this technology on board, bring this consultancy on board and sort of talk this language appropriately.

Mike (16:15.882)
and advise your clients on how to adopt Gen .ai appropriately for specific use cases. I mean, I think the market, what do I know, but from what I've experienced in its case, she sounds very similar. I think the direction of travel is find very specific problems that have a meaningful impact on your clients, that are difficult to solve by humans at scale and solve that using Gen .ai and consultancy. And then I think there's something, there's value to be created.

Kate (16:21.038)
Absolutely.

Kate (16:35.758)
Absolutely.

Kate (16:41.55)
up soon.

Absolutely. No, absolutely. Rather than the look at this massive platform and everything it can do. Because the CMO is going, does it do my job too? We're dealing with human beings here. I think what's really interesting is this is also a total echo chamber within the agency industry, which I'm fascinated by. When you think about clients, my goodness, it has not been clients aren't putting the pressure on this. Agencies are sort of are...

Mike (16:54.09)
Exactly. Yeah.

Kate (17:12.27)
whipping themselves up into a frenzy. I guess because we're so closely connected to the technology industry, we spend our lives walking and running alongside the technology industry and its innovations trying to keep up with the latest formats, with the latest channel launches, et cetera. So we're almost like sometimes two in that world because you actually get into a client organization and there's an enormous amount of interpretation. There's enormous amount of legal barriers going on. There's lots and lots of big questions being asked. And yeah,

Mike (17:39.754)
copyright? Who owns the copyright?

Kate (17:42.158)
Absolutely. Again, I've, you know, talking to lots of people and talking to people at the sort of, you know, the network level as well. And they're like, we can get pilots off the ground, but we can't get this rolled out company wide, because it's a Pandora's box. And people are thinking, what chain of events am I starting if I give this the get go? So yeah, it's, it's, it's proper stuff.

Mike (17:52.554)
Yes.

Mike (18:01.514)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (18:07.178)
So let's go to Altman's statement about in the next few years, 95 % of agency activities will be performed by GEN .AI. What does that mean, do you think, for agencies in terms of, so where's the white space, the blue ocean, whatever you want to call it, that agencies can add value, will consistently remain to add value, so that you don't get wiped out?

Kate (18:12.59)
Thank you.

Kate (18:24.782)
Hmm.

Kate (18:31.758)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. So number one, I disagree with Sam Altman. He said he hates advertising. We have to be careful because he said it will get all 95 % of all marketing tasks will be eradicated by AGI, which he believes coming in five years. Now, if AGI does happen, which is a massive question mark, as we know.

Mike (18:38.474)
Right? What does he know?

Mike (18:55.082)
It is big question mark, correct?

Kate (18:57.678)
Well, then all jobs will be wiped out. So this isn't a marketing issue. I think he just likes kicking advertisers. I don't know why he came for us. But anyway, I guess everybody's advertising. What can we say? But yeah, so, you know, AGI would wipe all of us out anyway. I think it's interesting, actually, automation is not new when you think about marketing. And if you think about the sort of often the digital hellscape of advertising we currently live in, which is the majority of kicks you're getting are from bots.

Mike (19:02.826)
Ha ha ha!

Mike (19:16.202)
No, it's not.

Kate (19:23.374)
50 % of your online audiences are now invisible due to cookie eradication. Across the board, we have machines predicting, optimizing, sending new concepts, et cetera, A -B testing, performance testing, and it's mania. And it's just barfing asset production across it. And actually, advertising impact has never been in the poorest state than it has ever been. Do you know what I mean? I think that just.

Mike (19:39.658)
Yeah.

Kate (19:50.574)
fuel to the fire of yet more automation, I think will just make advertising worse. So I think you automate a lot of the stuff that advertising does, but I don't think it will create better advertising. And at some point people will start to clock on. And I think people will say, absolutely, exactly. We'll be like, well, what's I'm just being synthetically served. What, how is that connecting me? I mean, I wrote about this recently, Mad Men, I'm a massive Mad Men fan, of course I am a working advertising.

Mike (20:01.738)
and consumers will start to reject it.

Mike (20:07.306)
Exactly.

Mike (20:16.458)
Right. Yeah.

Kate (20:18.478)
And Don Draper, the famous carousel pitch he does for Kodak. He is not, and I wrote about how in this pitch for Kodak, for carousel, he does not say, and now let's move to the slide where we talk about the social lay down or how does this work on tour? He doesn't do that. He tells a human story about nostalgia and childhood. One of his colleagues wipes away a tear. That's what advertising is supposed to be. It's supposed to be emotional resonance and storytelling.

Mike (20:37.098)
Yes.

Mike (20:44.81)
Yes.

Kate (20:47.854)
creating an emotional itch that you can scratch by buying the product. That is the basis of our industry.

Mike (20:54.218)
As is filmmaking. Filmmaking is designed to be the same. Did you ever see Lamond 66, the film?

Kate (21:00.366)
Yes, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay,

Mike (21:01.738)
That amazing scene with Henry Ford Jr. when he takes him around the track and he's crying. And those moments, you really tune into the characters and what it really means in that moment.

Kate (21:05.934)
Yeah. Unbelievable. Yeah.

Kate (21:12.814)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. A minute analogy in a day. Imagine if I told you a story and there's an emotive story about something, about my childhood or something, and you're really moved. And then I went later, I made that up. You would be like, that didn't happen. my God. All emotional resonance has now gone. Now, AI is gone. It has human experience. If you take human experience out of storytelling, like,

Mike (21:29.418)
Exactly.

Correct. All the trust is gone. I'd be like, whoa, I can't trust you.

Kate (21:40.526)
It's simply void. Like, who cares? There's nothing left. So yeah, so I disagree with Sam Altman. What I am worried about though is that the narrative that Sam Altman propagates and that all of the major networks have now fallen in line with, which is yes, we are about to automate this entire thing, and they're now playing survival against each other. My nervousness is that people will believe this or will stop spending because when you're not sure, you do nothing, right? And they'll just watch. And in that 12 to 18, 24 month period when that happens,

Mike (21:59.402)
Yes.

Mike (22:05.93)
Correct.

Kate (22:10.254)
an enormous part of the agency ecosystem will go to the wall. And so that's my nervousness is that this is a bit more of a parable for the agency ecosystem, for the jobs that it creates, for Britain as a, do you know what I mean? As a kind of industry and one to be proud of. There's multiple problems with that. So that's what I'm nervous about.

Mike (22:15.946)
Point, very well made, Kate, really well made, yeah.

Mike (22:30.474)
No, I think that's a brilliant point actually, is that, and I've got very similar fears. If you look at what I did some very simple research earlier on last week, week before about why are, if you look at some data points, so all the independent agencies I speak to are really struggling. They're either flat, some of them are massively down, very, very few are growing. And then you go, okay, so advertising spend must be down. No, it's not true. It's up about 8%.

Kate (22:45.806)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike (22:58.57)
And we know advertising spend drags through the other marketing service spend as well. So the market's up, but in Indies are down. The network agencies, their revenue growth between one and 6 % year on year. So you start going right and then course Gen .i with the ability to use that for in the creative industry. And you start seeing a picture of, I think the network agencies going, we can now move down market. We can move into territories we could never move into before.

Kate (23:02.798)
Absolutely.

Kate (23:15.758)
Yeah.

Kate (23:28.462)
Mm -hmm.

Mike (23:28.49)
They could, I don't know, be buying market share ready for when the market comes back, independents are wiped out and they pick up more than 6 % growth, they pick up 10, 20 % growth. That wouldn't surprise me.

Kate (23:36.174)
Yep. Yep.

Kate (23:42.926)
Yep, absolutely. Yep, no, absolutely. And you then have a much less diverse and varied ecosystem and you've got a monotonous effect and everyone suffers. Apart from the sharing of the networks, it's really frustrating.

Mike (23:49.546)
Exactly.

Yeah, correct.

It is. So I think we have to watch this space and see where that goes. So we're at 24 minutes. So why don't we close on? Brilliant. I love this conversation. We should do a mini conference seminar, something I think in person, because there's a few other agency leaders that I think are also fascinated by this topic. So just overall, just in summary, we'll forget the other two questions. This was far more interesting. Overall.

Kate (23:58.702)
Yeah, no, absolutely.

Mm.

Kate (24:12.622)
the state.

Kate (24:17.262)
Great.

Kate (24:22.99)
Thank you.

Mike (24:24.938)
What do your kind of, if you were an agency leader that was 30 people, not 130 people, and you were getting asked by clients, what are you doing with Gen .ai? How are you building safeguards? Should we be using it? Shouldn't we be using it? Please advise me. What would you be saying to those agency leaders, your top two or three things to start to really think through?

Kate (24:27.63)
Hmm. Yes. Yeah.

Kate (24:39.118)
Mm -hmm. Yep.

Kate (24:45.27)
Sure. Well, number one, you should always goes out saying sell authentically. So I think you need to look at yourself and look at the organization and reflect on are we in a position where we can consult effectively on this issue? Now it is a live real issue, irregardless of where it's going for clients. And if you cannot currently service that, you need to move as rapidly as possible to work out how you do, you know, that's a life, that's survival, you know, you have to adapt. So that would be.

Mike (25:13.61)
And that's because, Kate, just so I'm clear, that number one issue, that's because it's not gonna go away.

Kate (25:20.014)
No, absolutely not. I mean, they are plowing. This is brilliant and unthinking. Isn't it crazy? Like OpenAI, ChatDB 4 .0, they just gave obviously all away for free to so paid. And this is again, this goes back into that whole ecosystem thing we just have you heard of IdeaApe? It's brilliant. It's this Reddit sort of data sort of extractor. It goes into Reddit and it pulls out loads of fascinating insights.

Mike (25:21.514)
There's too much investment going in across the industry. It's not going away. Trillions of dollars.

Mike (25:34.186)
That's right.

Kate (25:49.294)
great little tool, fantastic team that built that. Now, Chucktubety40 have just signed a publishing deal with Reddit and have then given it away for free. Now, worked out. And they can give it away for free because money is just being pumped into them without recourse, without questions. And you just, it's like Deliveroo, same thing, isn't it? Just pumped in money, Deliveroo, I mean...

Mike (25:54.858)
They have. Yep, so they've wiped out that business. Gone.

Kate (26:12.11)
continuously as I, for what I understand, can't make a profit, but because it's just held up by VC money. And then you are on a cable, these takeaway businesses, and then by the time delivery collapses, because actually can't pay a pound to get a meal delivered to your door. Do you know what I mean? Like that's economically viable, unless we're living in a serfdom. Then, and this is the continuing issues with VC money and how it splashes around. And then.

Mike (26:27.786)
No, you can't, can you? Correct.

Mike (26:33.706)
Exactly.

Kate (26:41.326)
So yeah, it is not going anywhere for that reason. You do, you do. You have to navigate it and you have to help your clients navigate it.

Mike (26:44.586)
So you've got to get your head around it, number one.

Mike (26:50.698)
Yeah. And what else would you say? So one, they've got to get their head around it. And then when you've got your head around it, then what?

Kate (26:55.214)
Yeah, and yeah, for that point is also because I think a lot of what I come across is a lot of people just feel really overwhelmed. So a lot of agency owners out there like I can't keep up and I'm like, really, you need to be just open your eyes because there's actually not a lot going. There's lots going on. But a lot of it is being repeated and a lot of it is hype. And you need to if you go read for long enough that it will start to come down in front of your eyes and you'll start to say, I can actually see the clear themes here that are important and that a lot of it is just bluster. So I think.

get past that overwhelmed stage and you'll get to a better place. It's not as bad once you've sort of like stared in the eyes for a bit longer, do you know what I mean? And you've gone out there and all this information is everywhere. It's on LinkedIn, it's on X. This is all present and correct. So if you're not choosing to interface with, there are no excuses, I'd say. And then with the overwhelm training, bringing your team with you is absolutely critical. You can't stand up and advocate for AI and not remember that maybe you were as far overwhelmed.

Mike (27:32.138)
Yes.

Kate (27:54.958)
just as I did. And you have to remember that as you're talking to your team, they feel overwhelmed. Now, when people feel overwhelmed, they go defensive, they shrink into themselves. Fear is the most unproductive state we have as a human being. So you have to work out a way to positively take your team with you. And that's critical. I did see the reports this week, bring your own AI, a new bloody term from the management consultants. But apparently 60 % of people are bringing their own AI to work. So not being stated, yeah, it's not being put in corporate.

Mike (28:15.818)
Really?

Mike (28:20.73)
my god.

Kate (28:24.846)
Because of the lack of AI strategy in the organization, people are picking up tools themselves, not talking to their leadership about what tools they're using. I mean, the legal team already knows what the agencies are doing. And like, legal team, have you even looked at what your team are doing and where they're putting your company information? So that really clear, transparent sort of like narrative and culture across the organization is imperative. And another thing that I learned early on was really encourage debate.

Mike (28:28.266)
How scary is that?

Mike (28:53.258)
Yes.

Kate (28:53.326)
People don't, it's not all positive. You have to talk about all of it. You have to talk about it can be scary that you might lose your job. You have to be open. A lot of the tools are rubbish. I mean, just a fancy tool, which do you have for, like have that cultural debate. Don't get swept up in the hype cycle, but it's everywhere at the moment. You have to check out of that. And I recommend, I've mentioned this to you, Gary Marcus, I started following him on about LinkedIn about six months ago. He is phenomenal. He is one of those voices, Yanla Kernett -Matter as well.

Mike (29:03.338)
Yeah, they are. Correct.

Mike (29:11.37)
Yes.

Kate (29:22.478)
They're great voices within the space, which are going, everybody calm down. You know, like, because Altman and Co, they would have you believe that, you know, we'll be bionic next Tuesday. Nothing will remain of human experience. So try and find pragmatic voices so that you can, you can walk that really important debating consultative, you know, we can do different discourses line, which I think is imperative in a moment like this, when everyone's losing their heads, just try and keep yours.

Mike (29:22.602)
Yeah, absolutely.

Mike (29:34.41)
Exactly. Correct. Yeah.

Mike (29:51.658)
And brands we know, I mean, having been a procurement director inside, you know, these were big companies, we are relatively risk averse. You know, the whole governance thing, if we're a PLC, we can't just randomly try out stuff that may be an infringement on copyright or IP or have damaging effects from a PR perspective. So we look to agencies.

Kate (29:59.854)
Mmm.

Mike (30:20.106)
experts to help us to provide support and advice and guidance and how we can take a step and then another step. So it's not going to be a wholesale all, all agencies are dead, we don't need it. That's not going to happen.

Kate (30:22.318)
100%. Yeah.

Kate (30:29.582)
Yeah, absolutely.

Kate (30:35.598)
No, no, no, completely agree. And as you say, you need someone who's thought about the good bits, the bad bits and the ugly bits, all of it. Not just look at this Shining Legion AI tool. That's not cool to anyone. That's just, go be an ex AI personality. Do you know what I mean? Like that's what that's for. It's not for proper business consultancy.

Mike (30:43.018)
Exactly.

Yeah! No.

Mike (30:56.138)
And also what you've made me think is, as an agency, you probably need to start recruiting a few quite different people that are AI engineers, machine learning engineers. Don't need many, but you need a few to help you think this through and build prototypes and products.

Kate (31:04.238)
Mmm, that's...

Kate (31:08.334)
Yep. Yep.

Kate (31:14.61)
All agencies will have this in house as well. It's the user experience. As we know, never underestimate how much poor tech and poor UX will constrain user behavior. Most of the fancy demo videos, as we've just laughed about, of AI tools, is just someone put a call of UX on top of a call to, an API call to chat DVT. And that's as simple as it is. Make it, that's what we built, platform 12 internally. That was our number one thing.

Mike (31:20.106)
The UX. Yeah, absolutely.

Mike (31:36.682)
Yeah.

Kate (31:41.71)
was centralizing all of this information and these tools and making them easy to use, like as simple as I have them, I log in and it's all there. In an overwhelmed world, that's exactly what people need.

Mike (31:50.794)
Exactly.

Yep. So I've just focused on the same thing on my tool is the navigation, even on the prototype is like, just make the navigation simple.

Kate (32:02.862)
100%.

Mike (32:04.554)
Great, Kate, it's been amazing. It's been really amazing. It's been brilliant. I love this conversation. Exactly, as always. So where can people find out more about you?

Kate (32:08.27)
pleasure as always. Sure, best place probably head over to LinkedIn, Kate Ross over on LinkedIn. I chat a lot about my thoughts about Gen .ai and where I think the marketing industry is going alongside all these developments. And please get in touch, talk to me, show your opinions. I love a debate as I hope has come across.

Mike (32:29.61)
Brilliant, Kate, it's been amazing. What a great debate. Excellent. Fantastic. I will talk to you and see you soon, hopefully.

Kate (32:35.15)
Thanks so much, Mike. Take care.

Mike (32:36.874)
And you, right, let me just stop recording.