How to Use AI Without Sounding Like Everyone Else, with Phil Treagus-Evans, CEO & Co-Founder at Giraffe Social | Ep. 433

Summary

The Marketing Millennials Ep. 433: How to Use AI Without Sounding Like Everyone Else

Guest: Phil Treagus-Evans, CEO & Co-Founder at Giraffe Social
Host: Daniel Murray
Date: July 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this compelling episode, Daniel Murray sits down with Phil Treagus-Evans—author of Human First Marketing and CEO of Giraffe Social—for a deep dive into the intersection of AI and authentic, people-centered marketing. Against a landscape flooded by automated, AI-generated content, Phil makes the case for recalibrating marketing efforts to put real human connection first—without shunning powerful new technologies. The discussion centers on trust, culture, employee advocacy, influencer marketing, and working with AI in authentic ways.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Phil’s Marketing Journey & Birth of Human First Marketing

• Phil’s accidental entry into marketing: Attempted to launch a social network at age 21, leading to early social media marketing experience.
• Origin of Giraffe Social: Helping friends and family with social marketing sparked the agency, which now celebrates its 14th anniversary.
  • “Today is Giraffe’s 14th birthday, so we’ve been around for quite a while now.” (Phil, 01:52)

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2. What Is Human First Marketing?

• Definition: Keeping people—both internally (team/executives) and externally (customers)—at the heart of strategy.
• Not anti-AI: It’s about balance, using AI intentionally, not generically.
• Rationale: Campaigns with people always outperform those that don’t, especially amid AI-fueled content overload.
  • “People now in marketing is rare, and rare is valuable.” (Phil, 03:13)

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3. Core Principles That Stay Constant (04:16–05:33)

• Trust in authenticity: Audiences trust people more than brands, and influencer marketing’s effectiveness stems from human connection.
• Pandemic effect: COVID-19 normalized low-fi, authentic content as resources and opportunities for highly polished content disappeared.
  • “Statistically, people were spending more time on social… but the ability to produce content was more restricted than ever… so we created slightly realer, more authentic content. The results were better.” (Phil, 05:00)

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4. Maintaining Human-First Culture in Hybrid Teams (06:11–07:19)

• Giraffe’s approach: Full team meets twice a month for in-person collaboration and creativity, creating genuine team-driven content.
• Tip: Carve out structured time for team interaction and spontaneous creativity—even in virtual/hybrid settings.

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5. The Role of Trust in Marketing (07:19–11:29)

• Trust as a core metric: The most vital—and hardest to measure—factor in marketing success.
  • “Trust is the most important metric in marketing and also probably the hardest, if not impossible to measure.” (Phil, 08:13)
• Trust deficit: Brands start from a position of mistrust and must earn it through consistency, transparency, visibility, and authenticity.
• Executives’ role: Leaders must be visible and real, not polished and corporate.

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6. Overlooked Marketing Assets: Team & Personal Brand (11:44–17:52)

• Audience gets focus, but team & personal brand are underutilized due to fear of losing message control or trust.
  • “If you don’t trust your employees to post, you’re probably hiring the wrong employees.” (Daniel Murray, 14:33)
• Culture as precondition: A strong, values-driven internal culture is essential for effective advocacy.
• Employee advocacy as ‘new channel’: Each team member's personal brand unlocks new, high-engagement reach.
  • “The reach and the engagement levels of those channels… is always way, way higher than a company’s.” (Phil, 17:37)

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7. Making Employee Advocacy Work (18:39–20:19)

• Start with ‘why’: Show employees how advocacy benefits them, not just the company.
• Find influential team members: Change happens faster when cultural leaders embrace advocacy.
• Gamify & maintain engagement: Programs need to be authentic and incentivizing—not just ‘pump channels’ for resharing corny company posts.

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8. The Lost Art of Customer Conversations (21:36–22:20)

• Direct feedback: Marketers almost never just pick up the phone to ask customers what’s happening for them right now—a simple but underused tactic.
  • “The longer that goes where you’re not actually having that conversation… the more warped your idea of what it is they want.” (Phil, 21:36)

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9. Navigating AI Without Losing Humanity (23:18–29:34)

• Pendulum swinging to analog: As AI-generated content floods channels, genuine human experiences gain new value.
  • “I’m not anti-AI; I’m anti-lazy AI.” (Phil, 23:18)
• Good use of AI: Leveling accessibility for non-writers and using AI for structure, data crunching, or as a ‘sparring partner’—not as an idea factory.
  • “For me, the way I use AI the most is as almost like an intellectual sparring partner… trying to get it to actually poke holes in your thinking.” (Phil, 27:08)
• Lazy vs. thoughtful AI: Direct copy-paste of generic AI content dilutes trust and relevance.

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10. Evolution of Influencer Marketing (30:05–32:45)

• Trend shifts:
  • Mega-influencers → micro/nano-influencers (higher trust, deeper engagement)
  • Over-briefing → authentic, lightly guided content (let creators bring their own voice)
  • “You’re probably better off working with micro-influencers… the engagement and the trust is much, much higher.” (Phil, 30:42)

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11. Creativity, Risk, and Internal Incentivization (33:08–35:07)

• Safe vs. brave marketing: Fear stifles creativity; pushing boundaries can mean bigger rewards but feels riskier.
  • “In marketing, the enemy is indifference, not backlash. If someone doesn’t dislike what you’re doing, you’re probably not being edgy enough.” (Phil, 34:03)
• Incentives: Companies reward safety unless they align rewards with ambition and creativity.

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12. Phil’s Marketing Hill to Die On (36:36–38:17)

• Ultimate non-negotiable: People must remain at marketing’s core—customers shouldn’t just be data points, and employees shouldn’t be censored.
  • “Marketing is just one group of people trying to demonstrate value to another group of people. I feel like we’ve lost that along the way.” (Phil, 36:36)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “People now in marketing is rare, and rare is valuable.” (Phil, 03:13)
• “Trust is the most important metric in marketing and also probably the hardest, if not impossible to measure.” (Phil, 08:13)
• “If you don’t trust your employees to post, you’re probably hiring the wrong employees.” (Daniel, 14:33)
• “I’m not anti-AI; I’m anti-lazy AI.” (Phil, 23:18)
• “You’re probably better off working with micro-influencers … the engagement and the trust is much, much higher.” (Phil, 30:42)
• “In marketing, the enemy is indifference, not backlash.” (Phil, 34:03)
• “We can’t lose track… marketing is just people demonstrating value to other people.” (Phil, 36:36)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Phil’s origins, Giraffe’s founding – [01:04–02:06]
• What is human first marketing? – [02:31–03:50]
• Pandemic’s influence on content & authenticity – [04:16–05:33]
• Maintaining team connection & creativity – [06:11–07:19]
• Trust as essential, not measurable – [08:13–10:10]
• Internal/team & personal brand underutilization – [11:44–15:14]
• How to launch employee advocacy – [18:39–20:19]
• Marketers rarely talk to their customers – [21:36–22:20]
• Balancing AI with human creativity – [23:18–29:34]
• Micro-influencers & authentic content – [30:42–32:45]
• Risk-taking and incentives in creativity – [33:08–35:07]
• Phil’s core belief: people at the center – [36:36–38:17]

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Episode Tone & Takeaways

Expect lively, unfiltered exchanges. Daniel and Phil’s tone is unapologetically direct, practical, and rooted in real-world experience. Their advice is actionable and occasionally contrarian, always circling back to the importance of genuine human connection, whether AI is in the workflow or not.

Takeaway:
AI should amplify—not erase—your brand’s humanity. Invest in your people, embrace authenticity, nurture trust, and let technology help you get there—but never lose sight of the person on the other side.

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Recommended action:
If you want to champion human-first marketing, Phil’s book is the manual you’ll want to hand to teammates and executives alike.

Transcript

[Daniel Murray]

Foreign.

[Podcast Host (Daniel Murray)]

Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the

[Daniel Murray]

we are back with another episode of the Market Millennials podcast. Today I have the co founder and CEO of Giraffe Social, Phil, and he's also the author of Human First Marketing. And this is a good time to talk about human first marketing, especially in the age of AI. So I'm excited to chat. Welcome to the show, Phil.

[Phil]

Thanks, Daniel. Good to be here.

[Daniel Murray]

Could you give me a little background how you got into marketing and your journey? Sure.

[Phil]

So I think it's fair to say that I stumbled into marketing. I didn't necessarily plan to do that. So when I was around 21, 22, a friend of mine and I, we decided to start a business. And being as wonderfully naive as you can only be at 21, we thought, hey, why don't we start the next big social network? So we tried to launch a social network with very little money, very little experience or knowledge. And although the website itself didn't last, the marketing that we did for it was all through social. And whilst we were doing that, our friends who had bands or family members who had businesses were asking, do you think you could do this for us? And it was early enough that social media was still only really just starting to be used for marketing. So we stumbled into it and we decided to start Giraffe as a bit of a plan B, a bit of a safe, a safer option. And actually, Today is Giraffe's 14th birthday, so we've been around for quite a while now.

[Daniel Murray]

I think we've got to say happy birthday. Sing happy birthday on the podcast. Happy birthday.

[Phil]

Thanks, man.

[Daniel Murray]

I'm excited to chat also because I think marketing has got a lot noisier, especially with all the AI there. And you wrote a whole book of why the answer is more human, not more automated. Let's start with what is human first marketing?

[Phil]

Sure. So Human first marketing is about keeping people at the center of your marketing strategy. So I think a lot of people assume it's anti AI, but it's not really. Like, I love AI, use it every day. I think everyone does, but it's more about just trying to understand where to use it and when. The book really covers the two main areas. So when we say human first marketing, one side of that is internal. So using your team in marketing Executives being more visible on social media and then the other side of it is your customers and trying to understand your customers at a slightly deeper level, making content that's a lot more relevant for them and potentially even making content with them through influencer marketing or UGC sort of work we've seen time and time again over the years at Giraffe that the marketing strategies and the campaigns that we deploy that have people in them always outperform everything else. And I think with AI and just the sheer quantity of rubbish that is being churned out now because of the ease, I always say that I think people now in marketing is rare and rare is valuable. So, you know, we know that when we include people in our marketing we see better results. But I also just think it's better. I just think it's better for marketers and better for customers.

[Daniel Murray]

I want to also ask because since you've been doing this in the space for 14 years, as you just said, you've seen influencer marketing explode. You've seen iPhone recorded videos outperform the polished branded content. Now you're seeing AI flood every channel. What do you think has stayed constant throughout all of it in the last 14 years? Good question.

[Phil]

I think influencer marketing, the common thread with that is people. And I'm going to sound like a broken record now, but I think people trust people more than brands. So influencer marketing is a bit of a no brainer when you think about it. But I think ironically influencer marketing's almost gone full circle now where I think people are a little bit more savvy and they're a little bit more so suspect when they think why are you promoting toothpaste? Like when you usually post about sports, you know. So I think people are a lot more savvy to these things. The sort of raw, authentic style content is really interesting. So I think that a lot of that stemmed from the pandemic because we had a real supply and demand problem of statistically, people were spending more time on social media than ever before because we were all stuck at home, bored out of our minds. But the ability to produce content was more restricted than ever. No longer did we have studios and models and lighting and all these sorts of things. So we really had an option. It was either post less, create less content or create slightly realer, more authentic content. And that's what we did. The results were better. And I think after the pandemic you saw that, that continued. Brands continued to create content in that style, that sort of low file lo fi style. Content.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, I think the pandemic changed so much for, I mean, especially part of your marketing strategy as human, first internal, and back six years ago, internal was you would go into an office, you would be sitting next to your co workers, you would go into meeting rooms, you would be going on those coffee works. How do you maintain that as a marketing team to make sure that that human connection's still there with your teammates, even though you aren't in the same room as marketing used to be six years ago?

[Phil]

Yeah. So the pandemic was a real challenging time, obviously for lots of people and for lots of businesses. What was the craziest thing about it for us as a business was that when we came into the office and we'd had made loads of hires during the pandemic, so these were people that we'd been seeing every day online but had never actually met face to face. So it was like this really bizarre experience of, oh, that person's taller than I thought they would be, and all these like weird little things you didn't know about each other. But yeah, we tried our best during the pandemic to, to create content like this, to be fair, like podcasts, joining video calls, these sorts of things. As a, as an agency, we are hybrid, so we work from home most of the time and we meet as a full team twice a month. And what we do is we protect those days to be all about collaboration, being creative, producing content together. So if you were to go to our TikTok, for example, you would see lots and lots of content of the team producing videos and these sorts of things. I think for businesses it's about carving out the time to make sure that you make the space and you make the time for creating sort of team driven content.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, I agree. And I also think I don't know how to make the space for this, but making space for spontaneity of meetings. I feel like some of my best ideas with my co workers back in the day was never in the meeting where we discussed the ideas. It was like, oh, let's go to a coffee. And then suddenly we're talking about the campaign and then ideas are flowing and we're getting closer. It's just protecting that spontaneity would be cool. But I also want to go into one part. I know that one of the foundations of your book is trust and it is also like one of the slowest things in marketing to build. So when you're talking to marketing leaders or founders or whoever you're talking to and they're chasing that the next quarter pipeline. How do you like, defend trust to that?

[Phil]

Yeah, it's really difficult. I think trust is the most important metric in marketing and also probably the hardest, if not impossible to measure. And I think when you're dealing with senior leadership teams, if something can't be measured, it's deemed not important. And I think that is a shame. And I think marketing kind of needs to get back to being. I feel like marketing used to be an art form and I feel like now it's becoming a science. And there's places where I think that's good. And obviously I'm not saying don't measure things, but I don't think everything has to be measured. And trust is, as I said, it's the most important thing in marketing. If you don't trust a brand, you're not going to buy the products or the service, regardless of how well people click through an ad or these sorts of things. So I always kind of say that trust, I don't think trust is there to be lost. I think it's there to be earned. We are in a trust deficit. We see it in the, in the Edelman Trust Barometer reports they put out every year. Like, people don't trust brands, they don't trust CEOs. So that's the first point, is to accept that we are starting in a deficit. It's not already there and we can lose it. We have to earn it in the first place. And I think trust is about being consistent. It's about being visible, which is huge. I think so many executives, especially you just never see them. They don't post, they don't talk, they don't. You might hear them in a sort of report that comes out that you need a masters in statistics to be able to understand what they're talking about. I just want executives to be real people and to actually be out there talking about the work, talking about the brand and being a bit more transparent, a bit more authentic. Not having to make everything polished and perfect and just being a little bit more raw and a little bit more real. And we see that when that happens, customers are more willing to forgive mistakes or errors or, you know, missteps if they have that visibility built in.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, I agree. I used to. I always think about this in like, sports terminology because I played sport, like college sports, and I always think that, like, the players I trust the most were just consistently showing up and doing what they said they were going to do next to me. So I'm like, if I, if They were like the players that one day were amazing and the next day were horrible. And the next day I thought they had the ability to be great as a, like a player, but I didn't have thought they had the ability to be trusted next to me because I didn't know next if they're gonna have that moment where they break through or the moment where they're just being. But if someone was a consistently B plus or A minus every single day, I thought, okay, I know what I'm going to get from this person. Even though they might not ever be that A plus, at least they're consistently coming out and showing that they're going to be like an A minus, a B plus next. I mean, I think about that in marketing too. If you consistently show up above average and with your audience like you are, there's that trust being built that, okay, this brand is here. They're consistently helping me. They can. I know what I'm going to get from them. And they're not going to be one moment doing something amazing and the next moment being gone like they're ghosting.

[Phil]

Yeah, there's a. There's a term in sports that I really like, which is that the best ability is availability. Like players who are always available is one of the best abilities a sports person can have, especially in team sports. So, yeah, I completely agree with the analogy.

[Daniel Murray]

I also want to ask you. So your book breaks down basically three assets. Your audience, like your team, and your personal brand. I would say that like a lot of marketing teams, I mean, not saying they do it great, but a lot of these focus on the audience part. Why do you think a lot of people under. Utilize the other two where the personal brand and the team aspect? Because I feel like one of the most underrated marketing forms is internal marketing, which so many people forget. That is also part of the marketer's job. Like, you think that your whole job is to get more customers, get more revenue, but you also are trying to sell your ideas internally to make sure that that happens. So why do you think those are the two most underutilized assets?

[Phil]

In a word? I think fear. I think there's a fear. I remember being on a panel and talking about employee advocacy and someone put their hand up and said, yeah, but how do you know how to trust your team to say the right thing and to not say the wrong thing? And what if they don't want to and you have to force them? And I just thought you're completely getting the wrong end of this. It starts with building a brand and a company and a culture that your team want to post about what it is you're doing. I think that's the main thing. So, yeah, I think fear, I think especially when we're dealing with big corporates, there's a fear of, oh, yeah, but what if we let the team loose and they don't get the branding spot on or the tone of voice is so different, or. And I think the main thing there is you have to let go. You have to. For it to work, you kind of have to let go because if you want people to engage with your team members when they're posting to Social, if it feels like they're a puppet with the brand's arm up their back, you might as well not do it. Like, it's not going to work. So. So you kind of have to let go a little bit and allow your team the freedom to be themselves and to post about their work and to post about their career and their beliefs and what they do. Obviously you can put guardrails in place to say things like, oh, this is the person's views, not the company, that sort of thing. And then it's the same with the personal branding side. I think it's fear. I think it's fear of putting yourself out there to be judged and worrying about what people might think. And I would say you probably experience this less in the US because your culture is a lot more so pro, just supporting people and celebrating people, whereas the UK is quite cynical. And I think there's a bit of a fear around putting yourself out there and trying to talk about what you believe and talk about what you think and what are people going to think about this? And who am I to talk about this? You know, like, there's a lot of that. We deal with a lot of that. See, I think the main thing is fear.

[Daniel Murray]

I agree. I also think one of my good friends, she's actually in the uk, Amelia, she says that. I believe this too. It's like, if you're not. If you don't trust your employees to post, like, you're probably hiring the wrong employees. If you really don't. If you really don't trust them to post on social. And your, your fear, like what? Like, and it goes down to the principle we talked about before. Like, it comes down like, do you trust your team or not? Do you trust. And the same, like, do you trust your team or not? If you don't trust your team, then you have a culture problem or you have a hiring problem or you have some sort of a guardrail problem. This is one of those are happening.

[Phil]

Yeah, 100%. And that's why in the book and complete transparency, I started writing the stuff about your team and your audience. And then I quickly realized that for this to work, you have to have your values and your culture nailed down. And I'm a big believer that there's an intrinsic line between culture and marketing. And I think you have to have that nailed down, especially if you are going to do sort of employee advocacy or trying to get your executives to post. I think culture is everything for that. I think that one prediction I have around hiring specifically is that. And I think we're already seeing it, but I see hiring is going to become more and more like influencer marketing. I think when you're hiring someone into your team, you'll look at their resume, but you'll also look at their social. Does this person have lots of followers? Do they have a personal brand? Do they post about the brand they work for at the moment? And you will be seeing people as not just employees and team members, but also promoters. Like people who are going to come in and be an advocate for the brand. I know that's something that we do when we're hiring. We will look at their social media and if I go on their LinkedIn and I can see like, oh, they're always posting about where they work and they're always talking about what they do and these sorts of things. Like, I love that and I think that's clearly someone who's passionate but they also understand how advocacy works. So yeah, I think that's going to play more and more of a role and it's a reason for people to think about their personal brands. Even if you think, I don't need a personal brand, it's going, everyone has one. So you have to think about it consciously.

[Daniel Murray]

I remember when like, like employee advocacy because he like six, seven years ago, six years ago was becoming like a thing, not a thing, but like starting. And I remember the people who got it just saw each new hire as just another social channel. That's true. Like the people who got it is. I mean it doesn't mean they are. And it's expected to be a social channel. But they saw like, okay, a new employee means there's a potential for a new channel. And if I, if we do this employee advocacy program right, and we teach people how, like how to create a good post or like we supply content to help them create a good post or we do things internally to Promote and show and our leaders are doing it so they know it's okay. We have another social channel to get our reach out, which is pretty much a free, free social channel that tapping

[Phil]

into and the data shows that the reach and the engagement levels of those channels of a person's presence is always way, way higher than a company's one. So you know, it's not just another channel, it's also like a more effective channel.

[Daniel Murray]

And then I want to ask you first before I move on to the next part is now it is pretty much like there's like words like employee generated content now like EGC and then there's like poorly advocacy programs. I think it is a buzzy topic that people are talking about. But in its core, what makes it work? What do brands need to think about if they wanted to start their own employee, where does it start? What are like the fundamental pillars to make sure that it becomes successful? And it's not just hey, post this post or like posting the channel and say everybody hype up this post. For me that's what the old days was like. There was a pump channel in every company where you post something and you put it in.

[Phil]

And there's still a little bit of that. Yeah, exactly.

[Daniel Murray]

There's a lot of bit of that.

[Phil]

But yeah, I think the thing to start with is not to be Simon Sinek but like to start with why, to give your team the reason of like why this is useful and not just useful for the business, but useful for them. And that comes back to what I was talking about earlier, that having a personal brand, even if it's not something you're thinking about that you want to use now in the future when it comes to maybe a different position, whether it's a case of just creating opportunities for yourself, I think it's about encouraging the team to see the benefit for them personally, not just for the company. Because I think if you go into it with the mindset of we need you to do this because it's going to benefit the business, unless you have an insanely good culture, the team are going to be a bit skeptical and a bit like, ugh, I don't know if I want to do that. Whereas if it's a look, this is why it's beneficial for you. Actually yes, it benefits us, but actually long term this is worth doing for you. I think that's where it starts and you mentioned it earlier that getting buy in from founders, from executives, but also from key influential people within the team. Because from my experience it isn't always about seniority. Sometimes there are people in teams who are the go to, but everyone kind of looks to say, is this okay? Should we be doing this? And I think if you can find who those people are and win them round and say this is why it's beneficial, you're more likely to get people to buy in to doing it. And then you start getting into the gamification of it to give it longevity to try and make it engaging and interesting in the long term.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, I also think like, besides, like leaders doing it, I honestly believe, like, you need some sort of evangelist that gets the audience more than anybody. So, like, if you're selling to the, say, gardeners, if you had someone who like, knew how to create good gardening content and they understand gardeners better than everybody, like, I think a lot of teams are markers trying to be in the shoes of their audience, but it's. They've never done gardening or they've never done. I mean, it's easier for like marketers to sell to marketers because marketers are marketers, but it's harder when you're trying to put yourself in the shoes. So that's why I think like, bringing on a creator, bringing on an advantage, bringing on someone who knows the audience to help talk through, like the hard talking points that your audience doesn't get is I saw that when I was at some companies, we hired either customers out of their, like internally or we hired evangelists, like someone who was like in the industry who was talking about this and they became like a face in the company. So then people had more like they saw we investing in like people who are doing this. Yeah.

[Phil]

It's always crazy to me when I say to people when I'm trying to help them understand their customers, I always say, like, have you just picked up the phone and spoke to them and sort of asked them about what's going on for them right now? And the answer is always no. Like, I think everyone universally thinks it's a good idea, but people don't seem to actually do it. And yeah, like, that's so key. Like, it's so key. Like, I think the longer that goes where you're not actually having that conversation with your client, the more warped your, your view and idea of what it is they want or what it is they're interested in or what's important to them, it just becomes more and more warped to the point where it's just no longer connecting. I love the idea of bringing someone internally who's like the. Yeah, the voice of the customer. I mean, that's a great idea.

[Daniel Murray]

I mean, it's a lost art of picking up the phone. I think it's a heart. Like we've lost the art of just picking up the phone or just like visiting our customers or we've lost. It's like an art that needs to come back because especially, like, we're talking about this now, like human first. I do think there's like a pendulum swing that's happening where everybody's being so digital that humans are going to start craving analog again. And human experiences and being with humans and seeing humans and trusting humans, and when they see a vid, they want to see someone consistent. That's not AI and no, it's not written by AI. And even though I love AI, I think it's just like humans always go like, anti the, like when something's too much in society. I know you've. You've thought about this for a long time and you've seen it through different phases. What do you think human first marketing looks like in this age versus, like, when AI didn't exist?

[Phil]

I like something you said there about, like going almost backwards a little bit. And I think I say that in the book at one point that if you were to speak to your grandparents, they would remember a time when they knew the name of their butcher and the person who run the local store and all of these little things that seem a little bit cliche, but I think people are craving that. They are craving that sort of. Is there a better feeling in the world than walking into your regular cafe and them saying, do you want your usual, like the, the little warm fuzzy feeling inside? Like, I think that is the human connection. And I think that's what we're trying to get back to. I think in the age of AI, I think human first marketing is even more important because obviously it's becoming more and more rare. And that's just making people crave that human connection. It's just so like scrolling through any social network now is just. I don't know, it's just. It's difficult to do at times because it's just. This is so clear that so much of this is just churned out by AI. And I was doing some research recently and found on LinkedIn had about 50 posts that were almost identically written. Like, same word for word content. It just makes me want to cry. I think it's awful. But at the same time, I also think that when something like AI or a technology comes along. You alluded to this People tend to have a. They like to remove the nuance and sort of be quite binary. It's either good or it's bad. And people are either like, AI is everything. And here's how you can use AI to run your whole life. And then the other side is, AI is the devil. Get rid of it, don't use it. People who use it are bad. And the reality is it's a spectrum. It's not as black and white as that. It's a lot more nuance involved. So I always say, like, I'm not anti AI, I'm anti lazy AI. I think if you are just going into AI and saying, Write me 10 posts about marketing and then you just copy and paste them into LinkedIn, that sucks. I think that's a bad use of AI. But if you're using it to say, hey, here's some ideas I have about marketing and this is kind of my belief and I want you to help me structure it into a post. I have less of an issue with that. I think. So long as you still have that human taste element. I think that's the key.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah. I think what I also think is like, at some point, it actually is a little good. This is my take when it's like the.

[Podcast Host (Daniel Murray)]

There.

[Daniel Murray]

There were people out there that had really good ideas and really understood their topic, but they just inherently weren't the best way putting it on paper. So I think AI is going to give the ability to people like that who have good taste and have expertise that maybe aren't the best writers or studied writing to share their ideas, their brain and tell you. Because I think a lot of ideas don't get shown because people don't. One, don't have time. Two, they're like scared of writing because they don't think they're a good writer or they just don't want to be on video. But at least AI has got through partial of that hurdle where the time gap is closed. So I think that it could be what you said, human first. If you're just writing into AI. Here's my idea. This is what I'm thinking about. This is how it structures this person. I just need help with the grammar part of it or I need help structuring it to people could read it easily and simplify it. And you working with AI as a thought partner, because I think there's so many ideas trapped in the brains of people doing things that aren't in the world. And I think AI will help that. But also I'm very scared of the lazy side of it. And the lazy people are tend to are winning out right now with a lot of their posts.

[Phil]

I spoke to someone recently who suffers from really severe dyslexia, and they made the exact case you just made that they're an excellent speaker, they can talk for hours on their subject, but when it came to actually writing it down into like social media posts, they just didn't do it because it was too much of a struggle. And whereas AI has kind of facilitated them to be able to do that. And I think, yeah, there are uses of it like that, which are awesome. I think that's a great way for it to be used. But I also think AI is like, too many people think of it as just literally something that can write stuff, right? A blog post. Right. You know, a social media post. But you're scratching the surface. For me, the way I use AI the most is as like a. Almost like a sparring partner, like an intellectual sparring partner. Where I say, look, this is, especially with my writing, this is what I think. Why am I wrong? What am I not seeing? Trying to like get it to actually poke holes in your thinking and challenge you, I think is a really great use of it.

[Daniel Murray]

I agree because I use it intensely for that and then I use it. One of my biggest issues as a marketer, even in marketing ops back in the day, it was just like, there's so much data out there and it took so much time to look through it and analyze it. And it would take, as a marketer, you would be like, send it to the data analyst team and you'd have to submit a ticket and then the ticket had to come in and then the data will come in three, a week later. And then that data's old, so you have to get the. So now it like spits things out like really fast. I mean, obviously you still need eyes as a marketer to see it, but it spits things out really fast, which I think that's good use case too. But I do think we overly index on like people writing things with AI. And that's where we people also becoming anti AI because people are using it for things like just spitting things out, the content side. But they're not thinking about workflows and data analysis and research and things that would have taken people years to figure out because they can put two things together if you give it 50 different data articles or research papers and they can find the connection between all of them, which would have taken us days to read through those papers. And then Days like underlining and the days looking at it. So I think I, I agree with you on that.

[Phil]

I think back to like when. And I'm dating myself here, but like when the Internet first became widely used. And I think there was a lot of point there where people were saying like, oh, it's almost like cheating to Google something and you should be looking it up in a book and these sorts of things. Whereas now that would seem ridiculous. If we want to find information, we would just go to the Internet. And I think we're in that. That sort of pattern right now with AI where we're kind of normalizing how it fits into society and into our culture generally.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, I think the ridiculousness of like school making us memorize things when we don't need to memorize it, instead of like, how to like how things actually work and the behind the scenes of why it works and why it's applicable into everyday life. I think that's where we. Missing it. Missing the chip sometimes. Is that part of it? I also want to ask you about what, like, influence and marketing really has, like, matured in a lot of ways of as like a core channel for some brands. What do you think is working now that three to five years ago wasn't working?

[Phil]

I think influencer marketing has flipped on its head. I think when it first became a thing, like, audience size was the most important factor. Like work with influencers who have millions of followers so you can get the reach. But now what we're seeing is that actually you're probably better off working with micro influencers, nano influencers who have much smaller audiences, but the engagement and the trust is like, much, much higher. So rather than work with one mega influencer of 10 million followers, maybe work with 10 micro influencers who all have smaller audiences, but a lot more trust in their audience to believe what it is they're saying. I think that's really, really key. That's definitely one of the things. The, the other thing that we're seeing as well is like, it seems counterintuitive, but almost scaling back on the creative briefing. I think in the past it would be very like, we want you to create a video. You need to say this, Here's a script. You need to say these things. But to try and create that authenticity and to allow a creator to create something that feels like them, that isn't going to be super jarring to their audience and actually feels, oh, yeah, this could actually just be their genuine sort of feelings on this. I think that's really key. So We've been trying to scale back a little bit in terms of how much creative briefing we do when we're going into an influencer campaign and trying to have the clear beats of what we want to cover but allowing them the creative freedom to freestyle a little bit.

[Daniel Murray]

It's actually funny because the word creative brief signals breathes and then we. Some people, some people give you books and, and five page things and it's like you're supposed to brief them and tell them what you kind the guard rails of what you want in this campaign. Not I give them every single. It's not like an instruction manual, it's just an overview of what you want. And we've got away from that word brief which means brief like compact basically.

[Phil]

So it comes back to what we talked about with fear and trust. I think in the same way that brands are a little bit scared of letting their employees post, they're probably a little bit scared about having someone completely external to the business post. So they want to brief to the extent where yeah, you're almost just limiting the person and sort of making the whole thing futile and not maybe worth doing in the first place.

[Daniel Murray]

I've always said it's like marketing is hard because like to win you have to do like the most logical thing that won't get you fired. Sometimes when most organizations, it's like if I know I'm going to invest in this and so I know other people investing this and I could prove because I could say these 10 or 100 or thousand brands are also doing it, it's like not. But if I'm doing something really out of the box like how do I defend that? And that's where the fear comes in. It's like the risk to reward is like I either go 10x in this campaign or I get fired.

[Phil]

It's like that's more, that's more fun though, right?

[Daniel Murray]

I mean I love the risk of the campaigns because I think. But I think some people have that fear of like nobody buys IBM type nobody like gets fired by buying IBM mentality.

[Phil]

I really hate that though. I'm writing a second book at the moment. I'm talking about that a lot that I feel like marketers have this constant need to prove their worth every two minutes and to reassure everyone that they're worth having around and that their work is worthwhile and I hate it. I just think it's like, it's almost like a bit of an inferiority complex. And I think as marketers we kind of need to and not Just marketers, but the people managing marketers. I think we need to like let people be creative a little bit more, try things and sort of be willing to. Yeah. To get back to it being more of an art form rather than a just make ultra safe, low risk decisions all the time that spit out vanilla beige content that doesn't get anyone in trouble but doesn't really do anything either. I'm a big believer that in marketing, like the enemy is indifference, not like backlash. If someone doesn't dislike what you're doing, you're probably not being edgy enough. You're probably not pushing it as far as you should.

[Daniel Murray]

I also think it comes down to how we incentivize marketing. I think like incentivizing with a salary and nothing more than that. It's like people are just going to come to work every day on the salary and they don't want to lose a salary. But if you incentivize like targets and you incentivize like growth and you incentivize. If we went, if we grew revenue 2x like you get X, like I think it becomes more of like a risk taking thing because it's just like betting on a stock or like, you know, if you, that stock goes 20x, like you will get paid out whatever as a stock worth 212 3%. But in marketing, you bet on the stock, you still get the same salary, maybe you get your 10 bonus, but you don't get anything more than that. So I think sometimes it comes down to an incentive thing internally and some people just don't want to lose a salary and they rather just be safe instead of or it becomes, it's a mentality like you said before, it's a mentality of a team. It's like do you celebrate risks? Do you celebrate creativity? Do you like or do you like disincentivize and also like punish them? Like when people do take a risk and goes out of whack, comes back to culture. Yeah, exactly. Mossi, I asked everybody in this podcast, but what is a marketing hill you would die on?

[Phil]

I feel like we've covered quite a few of the hills that I'm willing to die on. But yeah, I think if I have to be really obvious about it is that people belong at the center of marketing and that we can't lose that. We shouldn't allow customers to become data points in spreadsheets. We shouldn't allow staff members to be blinkered and told not to say things and not to have opinions and to be themselves. And let's keep people at the heart of what we're doing here because marketing is just one group of people trying to demonstrate value to another group of people. I feel like we've lost that along the way.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, it's funny because I think it always happens when we figure out things to like, game the system a little bit that other people aren't doing and then we start gaming the system and then the system catches up and everybody gets an even playing field again. And then it's. That's what happened with targeting, with marketing. It's like people who were good at targeting and understood how to target at a deep level one until targeting just became like table stakes. And then now creative is like the targeting. And now like AI is becoming like a. People who are using AI in the right ways are moving ahead of people. But then when it starts becoming flattening, it becomes the humans. It always becomes the humans that, the creativity and humans and taste that went out once technology becomes a little bit flattening.

[Phil]

I think that's the thing is like underneath all of it is people. And that's always going to be the case. So we can't lose track of that.

[Daniel Murray]

Well, thank you so much for joining. And everybody go buy Phil's book, Human First Marketing. Like you said, we need more of that. And if you need to defend this internally, the book will help you and also why you should be doing it, because it is. Everybody should be thinking about it. So thank you so much for coming on.

[Phil]

Thanks Daniel. It's been a pleasure.

[Podcast Host (Daniel Murray)]

Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.

[Daniel Murray]

Sa.