Coaching or coasting
AI should be your thought-partner and coach, not your copywriter.
Read on to learn why:
① AI is an accelerant and amplifier, not a creator.
② Humans should create while robots research, experiment and personalise.
③ A crash is coming. But no one knows when.
④ Standard Chartered is all in on digital assets.
⑤ AI will disrupt display ads but don’t bet on them disappearing.
⑥ Your face reveals your probable performance at work.
⑦ UK bank bashing must stop.
📸 But first, flashback to a year ago when I told you it was time to move to Bluesky. Well, for those of you still undecided, maybe this week will be a tipping point: as Bluesky hit 40 million users, Sky News published an investigative piece on how the X algorithm is feeding users right wing material and Reuters reported that Meta is earning a fortune from fraudulent ads. Your call but I don’t want to be associated with either.
What's new
Faith Liversedge wrote a great op-ed for Citywire this week on why words like ‘client-centric’ won’t cut it in adviser rebrands.
In short:
“A growing number of larger firms invest heavily in rebranding exercises - new logos, updated websites, refreshed messaging frameworks - launched with optimism, only to discover six months later that nothing has fundamentally changed. New business hasn’t increased. Advisers still struggle to differentiate the firm in client meetings. Clients are confused. The CEO questions what the marketing budget has actually achieved.”
“As more firms accelerate their acquisition strategies, the temptation is to bolt on new practices while assuming brand coherence will naturally follow. It doesn’t. This is where generic messaging emphasising ‘client-centric service’ or ‘technology’ is likely to fail because everyone else is making these identical claims. So what’s needed?”
“What’s missing is the translation work: identifying what’s genuinely different about the new entity and creating messaging that staff can articulate and clients can understand. This isn’t about inventing differentiation that doesn’t exist - it’s about finding and communicating the differentiation that’s already there. The most useful question for those wrestling with this is ‘What can’t your competitors copy in 24 hours?’”
Why it matters
I won’t steal Faith’s thunder by regurgitating all her advice here. I agree with it and throughly recommend you read her article. Instead - and I hope you’ll forgive the tenuous bridge - I’m showcasing it because it triggered a memory of an experience I had this week: Having carefully polished my CV, having applied my decades of hard-earned marketing and communications nous, I submitted it for review by my favourite AI assistant and sat back, waiting for the glowing praise to come flowing back. I had mere seconds to feel smug before the critical onslaught began. It began by mocking me for how redundant and cliché it was to describe myself as ‘client-centric’. I was aghast. Honestly, I was hurt.
Stupid robot. It clearly didn’t understand how fundamental it was for great marketers to put the client at the heart of everything they do. It didn’t appreciate the subtle message I was sending to potential employers about how I understood the commercial drivers of modern communications strategies. I pushed back, safe in the knowledge that the moronic machine would back down once I’d explained my insightful human reasoning. It didn’t. Instead the stubborn droid stood its ground, told me there was nothing differentiating about the term and suggested other ways to achieve my goal that relied on showing rather than telling.
As I was considering my next move in the game of chess that had become my obsessive needy desire to prove myself intellectually superior to Claude, it dawned on me: the machine was doing exactly what I’d trained it to do. It was coaching me: questioning my assumptions, offering me new perspectives, challenging me to improve in ways that - at first glance - felt unnecessary but were actually transformational.
So, I took emotion out of the equation and went through its extensive critique point by point, not blindly implementing all of its suggestions but applying my own judgement to each piece of advice and executing those that I agreed with in my own style. The result is a revised CV that is quantifiably better than anything I would have produced on my own. But every word on it is my own.
① That last point feels pertinent because, later in the week, self-appointed AI master Ruben Hassid published a list of all the words AI uses that he “hates”. His argument was that it’s too easy to spot content that has been written by AI and so he offers prompts that can avoid that. I’ve got a simpler one for you: don’t let AI do your writing - that’s one of the things humans will always be better at - instead let it be your thought-partner. Let it digest and analyse data faster than you ever could. Let it put facts you weren’t aware of in front of you. Let it work at scale. Let it coldly and unemotionally challenge you and send you down new lines of thinking. In short, let AI do what it does best: be an accelerant and amplifier, not a creator.
What to do about it
Take action
② As a daily user of AI, I’m starting to clarify some rules about how to get the best out of these tools. And the most important rule is that they are exactly that: tools. Not magic, not divine intervention, but tools. And, like any tool, the results they can produce depend entirely on how you use them.
Research, synthesis and competitive intelligence: Use AI to compress information, not create it. Whether it’s analysing analyst reports, synthesising customer feedback, monitoring industry trends, or extracting insights from internal documents, AI can provide a wealth of information to inform your decisions. To inform, not to make your decisions.
Iteration velocity: Use AI to compress the time between concept and polished work, not to replace human judgment. It could be generating 10 variations of positioning statements in minutes for a human to choose, creating initial frameworks for presentations or proposals that humans refine, or rapidly prototyping campaign concepts, taglines, or messaging angles for review; the value of AI is in getting senior talent to ‘finished’ faster, not in eliminating human judgement.
Personalisation and segmentation at scale: Use AI to handle the ‘mail merge’, while humans write the template. Tailoring email sequences, landing pages, or ad copy to micro-segments; generating account-specific insights for sales teams from CRM data; customising product recommendations and content paths by user behaviour; or adapting messaging for different regulatory environments, regions, or personas - the lesson is the same: humans should set strategy and create core messaging while the robots handle the amplification across channels and different target audiences.
Get help
Two ways I can help you:
Tackle a specific challenge by retaining me in an advisory capacity or on a part-time basis.
Elevate all your marketing and communications by hiring me as a full-time member of your team.
Top stories
The other articles that are worthy of your time.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Why Wall Street won’t see the next crash coming
③ A crash is coming. But no one knows when.
“One correction has already begun. When might others follow? For anyone who is hoping to beat the market—including the quant shops and other hedge funds that promise returns whatever the weather—there are few more pressing questions. ‘The nirvana of macro trading is forecasting these turning-points,’ says James White of Elm Wealth, an investment firm. The snag is that achieving nirvana is just about impossible.”
“Unfortunately, few such strategies actually seem to work well enough to beat the market. ‘I know of no other firm than Bridgewater that has been successful with these macro models,’ says a former trader at a rival hedge fund. And even the best of them cannot be expected to predict a ‘pure shock’, like a pandemic or a run on a bank. The very unpredictability of such shocks means they have the greatest potential to trigger a correction. Macro models can pinpoint situations in which one might have an outsize impact on markets, yet not when it will occur.”
“A good way of improving on the predictions of flawed models, says the head of quantitative strategies at another big hedge fund, is to combine many independent ones. Even then, the best a trader who lacks divine inspiration can really hope for is to identify a correction early and cut their losses. Wall Street’s finest might warn of a crash—do not expect them to say when it will arrive.”
TECHNOLOGY
Blockchain to ‘eventually’ power all transactions - StanChart CEO
④ Standard Chartered is all in on digital assets.
“Bill Winters, the chief executive of UK bank Standard Chartered, has stated that nearly all transactions will be settled on the blockchain, eventually. ”
“In addition to his views on blockchain, the bank boss also stated that all money will be digital and that bank executives will have to be more imaginative when it comes to anticipating the ‘rewiring’ of the financial system that will be needed to facilitate such a development.”
“Standard Chartered has been an active participant in the rapidly developing digital assets market. In June, it offered digital assets trading for instituional clients. The bank also has a digital custody servcie through its Zodia offering.”
MEDIA & MARKETING
AI may fatally wound web’s ad model, warns Tim Berners-Lee
⑤ AI will disrupt display ads but don’t bet on them disappearing.
“The multibillion-dollar advertising model that has underpinned the internet economy could ‘fall apart’ due to the rise of generative artificial intelligence, according to the inventor of the World Wide Web.”
“Google’s domination of online search is already under threat for the first time in a generation since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. Google has responded by launching ‘AI mode’ in its search bar, browser and apps, allowing users to receive conversational answers to questions generated by chatbots instead of a list of blue links — a move that further pushes users away from online advertising.”
“As yet, however, there are few signs of the web-based ad model collapsing. Last week, Google’s parent Alphabet posted a record $100bn in quarterly revenue. Meta also reported revenues in the third fiscal quarter of $51.2bn, a 26 per cent increase year on year on a constant currency basis. However, the social media group’s share price was hit by investor concern about plans for huge additional spending on AI infrastructure.”
WILDCARD
Should facial analysis help determine whom companies hire?
⑥ Your face reveals your probable performance at work.
“Previous research suggests that personality types can be encoded in facial features, and that artificial intelligence can spot them. So Mr Guenzel and his co-authors used an algorithm to analyse the pictures of 96,000 MBA graduates, and extract what they call the ‘Photo Big Five’—as they rename the Big Five personality traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism and openness. They then used data on these individuals’ labour-market outcomes to see whether the Photo Big Five had any predictive power. The answer, they conclude, is yes: facial analysis has useful things to say about a person’s post-MBA earnings and propensity to move jobs, among other things.”
“Even setting aside the risk of bias, though, there are other big concerns. Some are obvious: aggregate patterns do not tell you how an individual will perform. Others are more insidious. An industry of coaches and self-help gurus is built on the idea that it is possible to control and modulate your behaviour. What’s the point in self-improvement if your face is still going to give off the same signal that you’re a dilettante?”
“How you react to this prospect also tells you something about AI and perceptions of fairness. It matters whether people retain a sense of agency. However good the algorithms get, a chance for a candidate to win over a human interviewer in a hiring process—and for an interviewer to decide for themselves if they want to work with someone—is likely to always be valued.”
Off cuts
The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
👏🏻 António Horta-Osório returns to banking at France’s CCF
♓️ UK’s private share trading scheme faces delays as Pisces approvals languish
📉 UK fintech Wise profit falls amid shifting primary listing to US
🐕 JPMorgan hit with record fine from German finance watchdog
🌍 European private markets face liquidity squeeze as exits stall
TECHNOLOGY
🦾 Bank of America, JPMorganChase execs report returns on AI
🤖 Lloyds Bank to embed AI financial assistant into mobile app
💰 Ripple raises $500 million at $40 billion valuation in round led by Fortress
📈 LSEG to licence Nasdaq eVestmen private markets datasets
🍊 Engine by Starling signs ‘largest-ever’ deal with Tangerine Bank
MEDIA & MARKETING
💬 How B2B brands can build real communities through social media
🗞️ Newsweek editor on making brand ‘more reflective of the modern era’
📊 Wynter’s quarterly survey of B2B marketing leaders
📲 UK leaders are losing trust on LinkedIn
👩🏻💻 The death of the website menu: How gen Z is rewiring search expectations
The last word
⑦ Patrick Jenkins, the FT’s deputy editor, on Britain’s economic growth:
“If Britain is serious about growth, it needs strong banks with the capacity to reinvest in financing the economy, not whipping boys.”
Don’t settle for marketing.
Aspire to InMarketing.
Wishing you an innovative week,
P.S. As if I needed one, this week I came across another reason I love the Danes.
