Bright Ideas

A delicate balance: Standardisation meets agility in marketing

At first glance, process standardisation and agile methodologies might seem like opposing forces in the world of marketing. Standardisation implies consistency and repetition, while agility suggests flexibility and rapid adaptation. However, in my years of experience as a marketer, I’ve discovered that these two approaches, when thoughtfully combined, create a powerful synergy that drives success.

Process standardisation provides a stable foundation and clear guardrails, enabling teams to be truly agile. By establishing consistent workflows and focusing on continual improvement and best practice, we free up the team’s mental bandwidth and release resources, allowing for quicker decision-making and more creative problem-solving in response to changing needs or market conditions. This paradoxical blend of structure and flexibility is at the heart of modern, high-performing marketing teams.

The agile paradox: Structure in flexibility

Consider the structure of a typical agile sprint. By establishing a consistent rhythm of planning, regular stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives, teams create a predictable framework within which they can focus on aligning to the business goals and being more strategic and creative in the work to be done. This standardised approach to time management doesn’t constrain creativity, instead, it frees teams from the cognitive load of constantly reinventing their workflow.

Similarly, task templates for common marketing activities like campaign planning or content creation can be invaluable. These aren’t rigid scripts to be followed blindly, but repeatable and flexible starting points that bring together previous know-how across essential elements while allowing for customisation to meet specific client needs.

Prioritisation and efficiency gains

One of the most striking benefits I’ve observed from implementing standardised and repeatable workflow management processes is the dramatic increase in efficiency and clearer prioritisation to focus on work that contributes most towards the business goals. By eliminating the need to reinvent the wheel for every project, teams can work faster and more effectively. This doesn’t mean churning out cookie-cutter solutions or getting trapped in a rinse and repeat cycle, but shifts focus into creative energy and continually improving results.

A centralised knowledge base or hub has proven to be a game-changer for us. By documenting best practices, guidelines, and lessons learned, we’ve created a resource that allows team members to quickly access standardised approaches while continuously improving based on new insights. This not only speeds up work but also ensures a consistent level of quality across all our projects.

How to get started

Effective process standardisation in an agile marketing model is not without its challenges. I’ve seen teams fall into the trap of over-rigidity, creating processes so inflexible that they stifle creativity and prevent adaptation to meet changing business and market needs. The key is to remember that standardisation should provide a framework, not a straitjacket.

Another common pitfall is culture and mindset; resistance from team members who feel their autonomy is being limited can derail implementing a consistent approach. Addressing this requires a change communications approach and involvement in the process development and optimisation. When team members understand the ‘why’ behind standardised processes and have a hand in shaping them, buy-in becomes much easier to achieve. Don’t forget to celebrate the big and small wins along the way, as you develop processes, toolkits and templates there will be a lot of test and learn opportunities, share these moments as a team.

Client success stories

The true test of any process improvement and optimisation project, is its impact on business outcomes. I’m proud to say that our work and agile marketing methodology has yielded impressive results for our clients. For example, our agile marketing training programme helped to drive 123% increase in revenue for Informa Markets’ CPHI Europe event.

Our standardised project management framework has also been a hit with clients. Regular check-ins, progress reports, and clearly defined milestones keep projects on track and allow for timely adjustments. Clients appreciate the transparency and predictability this brings to our projects and campaigns.

Perhaps most importantly, our focus on standardised performance measurement has transformed the way we demonstrate value to clients. With established KPIs and reporting templates, we’re able to provide clear, data-driven insights that help clients understand their marketing performance and make informed decisions.

Fostering a culture of continuous improvement

The real magic happens when standardised processes become ingrained in the culture of a team or organisation. This doesn’t happen overnight, but with the right approach, it’s achievable. We’ve found success by involving team members in the development and refinement of workflows, providing comprehensive training and ongoing support, and encouraging regular feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Technology plays a crucial role in this integration. By leveraging workflow methods with project management and collaboration tools that support our standardised processes, we’ve made it easier for teams to follow established workflows without feeling burdened by them. It also allows greater opportunities to measure time– to– market, lead times, task completion and rework rates and overall pace. We can also measure the impact of greater agility through improved processes and prioritisation of tasks.

Celebrating successes has also been key to fostering adoption. When teams see tangible improvements in their work and receive recognition for effectively implementing standardised processes, it reinforces the value of these approaches and encourages continued buy-in.

The path forward

As we look to the future of B2B marketing, it’s clear that process standardisation and repeatability will continue to play a vital role. The challenge, and the opportunity, lies in striking the right balance between structure and flexibility, between efficiency and creativity.

By thoughtfully implementing standardised processes within an agile marketing framework, we’ve achieved a powerful synergy that not only optimises marketing operations but delivers tangible benefits to our clients.

As you embark on your own journey of process standardisation, remember that the goal is not to create rigid, immutable systems, but to establish a strong foundation that supports agility, creativity, and continuous improvement. With the right approach, standardised processes can become a catalyst for innovation and excellence in agile marketing.

In this ever-evolving landscape, the businesses that thrive will be those that can harness the power of standardisation without losing the spark of innovation. It’s a delicate balance, but one that, when achieved, can transform the way we work and the results we deliver.

July 15, 2025 hannah.siva@brightinnovation.co.uk Agile Marketing In Practice

Busy but not better: why your B2B marketing isn’t delivering the results it should

Marketing teams are some of the busiest teams in the business. Content calendars are packed. Campaigns are firing. Budgets are being spent. But for many B2B organisations, all that activity still isn’t translating into consistent pipeline or strong returns. It’s not for lack of effort. The problem is often something more subtle: a misalignment of effort.

The real issue isn’t volume, it’s focus

When results stall, the instinctive response is often to do more. Launch more campaigns. Publish more content. Spend more budget. But we’ve seen this play out across dozens of B2B growth-stage businesses and “more” rarely fixes the root issue.

The truth? Most teams don’t have a volume problem. They have a distribution of effort problem. Marketing activity is spread unevenly across the customer journey. Some areas are over-resourced, others overlooked. And while it all feels busy, the outcome is misaligned, underperforming GTM execution.

That’s where a simple, strategic model can help bring clarity. We use a straightforward lens to audit and realign marketing strategies: Brand. Demand. Activate.

Brand

Are you building awareness and trust with the right audience?
This is what gets you in the conversation, builds familiarity, and primes your audience for future conversion.

Demand

Are you effectively capturing interest and converting it to pipeline?
From lead generation to nurture to sales enablement, this is where most teams invest the bulk of their time and budget.

Activate

Are you turning existing customers into a source of sustained growth? This often-overlooked area includes retention, upsell, and referral and it has a profound impact on CAC, LTV, and efficiency.

Here’s what we typically find when teams map their GTM plan across this model:

Brand work is often fragmented across silos.

Demand is stretched thin – expected to deliver ever more with ever less.

Activate is under-resourced, or worse, absent.

And that’s a big miss. Because Activate is where revenue resilience lives.

Why ‘Activate’ matters more than you think

In a world of tighter budgets, shifting buyer expectations, and longer sales cycles, growth doesn’t just come from net-new business. It comes from retaining, growing, and learning from your existing customers.

Activate isn’t just about post-sale comms. It’s about creating a systematic engine for:

Retention – Helping customers realise value quickly and stay longer

Upsell – Identifying natural expansion points based on behaviour and success

Referral – Turning happy customers into advocates and influencers

These levers don’t just improve efficiency — they help multiply your overall marketing ROI. And yet, most GTM teams still default to the front end of the funnel. Because that’s where it feels easier to show activity, if not impact.

Breaking the ‘busy work’ cycle

So why do so many marketing teams stay trapped in reactive mode? Because they’re stuck in what we call the ‘busy work’ loop:

Capacity gets maxed out chasing quarterly targets

Priorities shift weekly (or daily)

Budget gets spread too thin

Teams operate in silos

Strategy takes a back seat to delivery

And it all adds up to a huge disconnect between effort and impact. That’s where agile marketing becomes a real unlock, not just as a delivery methodology, but as a mindset.

It helps teams:

Prioritise what actually moves the needle

Collaborate across functions

Adapt quickly to data and feedback

Focus on value, not volume

In other words: aim before you fire.

Time to take a closer look?
If your team is doing all the things but still falling short on results, this might be the moment to step back. Try mapping your current marketing plan against the Brand–Demand–Activate model. Where are you over-investing? Where are the blind spots? And what might happen if you shifted just 10–15% of your time and budget into the areas that drive lasting growth?

Want to explore how this could work in your team?
We’ve helped B2B marketing leaders rebalance their strategy and unlock performance using this simple model. Let’s talk.

July 10, 2025 Zoe Merchant Agile Marketing In Practice

Agile isn’t just about moving fast – it’s about moving in the right direction

The setup

The event’s three weeks out.
You’re juggling six sponsors, four email journeys, and a keynote speaker who still hasn’t confirmed.
You’ve had the same budget sign-off doc open in three tabs.
Everyone’s “in motion” but no one knows what’s actually moving.

The diagnosis

That’s not speed.
That’s chaos disguised as hustle.

You’re reacting fast, working hard, staying busy.
It feels like agility.
But deadlines keep slipping. Approvals stall. Priorities blur.

That’s not agility, it’s survival mode.

The illusion of agility

Most teams don’t resist agile.
They just adopt fragments of it and assume that’s enough.

You might not run standups or retros.
But you’ve got project plans. A kanban board. Weekly team meetings.
You adapt to change. You move fast. You get things over the line.

It looks agile. It even feels agile, because it’s reactive.

But agility isn’t motion. It’s principled adaptation. It’s structure under pressure. It’s progress by design.

You’re not far off. But without principles, fast work is fragile work.

What Agile actually enables

When properly embedded, agile transforms how marketing teams operate:

Clarity on priorities→ Know what must move this week, and what can wait
Faster launches, fewer blockers→ Ship version one without endless sign-off loops
Real-time decision-making→ Adjust strategy based on what the data says today
Sustainable pace→ Avoid the burnout of always working at the edge of control

Agile gives your team the rhythm it needs to focus, adapt, and win under pressure.

Where Agile Slips

Even with the right tools, things stall:

Weekly priorities are set but rarely revisited
Meetings happen, but decisions don’t
Work is tracked, but progress feels stuck
Campaigns run, but lessons are skipped

Agile isn’t a label. It’s a living process.

What real agility looks like

In media and event marketing, agile shows up like this:

Clarity: Everyone knows what’s moving, what’s stuck, and why
Responsiveness: You pivot on facts, not fear
Confidence: Teams test, learn, and iterate fast
Visibility: Tools simplify, not clutter, the path to execution

From reaction to rhythm

To move from hustle to true agility:

Spot the sticking pointsWhere does work stall? What delays decisions? Clear the friction.
Shrink the cycleReplace long-range planning with tight sprints focused on one meaningful outcome.
Empower real autonomyDecentralise decisions. Don’t wait to move, equip your team to act.

Final word

You’re already moving fast. But if your speed isn’t strategic, your progress won’t stick.
Agile isn’t a checklist. It’s how modern teams build clarity in chaos, not just cope with it.
You’ve made the first shift. Now make it sustainable.

June 26, 2025 Sian Heaphy Agile Marketing In Practice, Publishing, Media & Events

The AI adoption divide: why some B2B marketers are pulling ahead and how the rest can catch up

We need to talk about the gap.

Not the buzz. Not the endless opinion pieces. But the very real performance divide opening up between B2B marketing teams who are experimenting with AI, and those who are embedding it into how they actually work.

27% of global CMOs admit their teams aren’t really using AI at all (TechMonitor).

Meanwhile, commercial teams are blending AI with customer experience and according to McKinsey are 1.7× more likely to increase market share.

This isn’t just a tech trend. It’s a strategic marketing shift.

The AI accelerators vs. the AI avoiders

Let’s be honest: every leadership team says AI is on their radar. But in practice, we’re seeing two camps emerge:

1. The Experimenters

Curious, but cautious. Teams dipping their toe in with the odd content assistant or AI generated image. But no strategic fit. No real integration and still asking ‘where does this actually belong and add value?’

2. The Accelerators

They’ve moved past pilots. They’ve embedded AI into campaign planning, content operations, and optimisation processes. They’ve built confidence and they’re gaining ground fast.

In fact, Deloitte found that 42% of top-performing B2B firms say AI is “critical” to their future competitiveness.

What’s holding others back?

From our work across fintech, SaaS, publishing, and industrial sectors, we’re seeing four big blockers that keep organisations stuck in experimentation limbo:

Skills and confidence gaps – across the whole team, not just senior leadership

Governance paralysis– fear of “getting it wrong” overrides the need to try

Unclear use cases– too many tools, not enough strategic focus

Scepticism on ROI – because we’ve all seen the martech hype fall flat

What the high-performers do differently

The B2B teams making AI work aren’t just tool-savvy, they’ve rethought how they operate. Three things stand out:

Cross-functional AI squads– blending marketing, ops, data, compliance and legal. No more innovation stuck in silos
Meaningful investment in AI literacy– not just a one off webinar. Structured training that includes prompt engineering, model interpretation and even ethical training for campaign planning
Agile ways of working– the real differentiator. Agile gives teams the framework and guardrails to test tools in live campaigns, measure what works, and scale quickly without the faff.

From theory to traction

Real world examples we’re seeing working right now:

A global publishing firm using agentic AI to build a new persona and create highly tailored content for a new market segment.

A global payroll and HCM solution provider integrating video AI tools to halve production time (and cost) for their quarterly internal marketing show reel production

A global industrial machinery firm is using generative AI tools to translate complex product specs into customer-friendly content at speed – to improve ad campaign performance and unlock localisation that used to take weeks.

These aren’t vanity projects. They’re operational advantages being built sprint by sprint.

This is a leadership moment

Marketing leaders have a choice to make.

Treat AI as a side project for “when we’ve got time” or we can treat it as what it really is – a lever for improving performance, agility and team effectiveness right now.

At Bright, we help teams bridge the gap. Not just by adopting and integrating the right tools, but by reshaping how marketing works, so AI becomes part of the engine.

That means:

Mapping your current AI maturity (and be honest about it!)

Identifying the workflows where AI can actually drive value and measure it

Giving your team the skills, space, and support to experiment with purpose.

Because in this era of B2B marketing, experimentation isn’t the goal. Transformation is.

What about your team?

What’s the reality in your team right now – are you experimenting or accelerating? What would help you move faster, with more confidence?

Want to get more value from Agentic AI?

If you want to Make AI work for you B2B marketing team and not just add more tools to your tech stack, download our AI Activation Framework.

>Download the B2B AI Activation Framework

June 17, 2025 Zoe Merchant AI

Don’t bolt AI governance on. Build it in

We talk a lot about doing the right thing with AI.

But in B2B marketing, knowing what’s the right thing isn’t enough. We need to build it into how we work.

Because if we want to earn trust in the AI era, we can’t treat ethics and governance like a one-off workshop or a slide in a risk pack. They have to show up in our workflows, in our stand-ups, the sprints and the day-to-day decisions.

That’s where brand trust is built or broken.

Don’t bolt governance on. Build it in.

As AI use ramps up across marketing, we’re seeing the risks rise too – biased outputs, non-compliant targeting, hallucinated content.

Not because marketers are careless or reckless. But because processes haven’t kept up with the tools.

A recent Salesforce report showed that 68% of consumers say AI makes it more important than ever for companies to be trustworthy. Thanks to the EU AI Act, trust is no longer just a brand promise, it’s part of your compliance checklist.”

But governance doesn’t mean slowing down. In fact, done right it helps you move faster, with fewer (nasty) surprises, clearer decision making and more confident launches.

What does it look like in practice?

Here’s how ethical AI governance becomes part of your agile marketing operations:

1. Sprint retros with a conscience

Use retrospectives not just for performance reviews, but for ethical checks. → Did any AI outputs raise red flags? → Was customer data used appropriately? → Were any decisions made by AI that need a second look?

2. Transparent user stories

When scoping AI tasks in your backlog, make the ethical implications explicit. → “As a campaign manager, I want to use AI to personalise content without profiling based on sensitive characteristics.”

3. Bias checks = part of QA

Don’t leave it to the data team. Embed basic fairness checks into your review process across your teams. → Spot gendered language in AI copy. → Challenge assumptions in segmentation or recommendations.

4. Approval flows for AI outputs

Fast doesn’t mean free-for-all. Define what must get human sign-off – whether that’s automated campaign triggers, AI-generated images or model-driven pricing decisions.

5. Governance rituals

Just like stand-ups and planning meetings, set recurring checkpoints for AI ethics. Create a shared scorecard or checklist. Use it regularly, not reactively.

Agile governance = scalable trust

At Bright, we help teams work in ways that support ethical marketing best practice.

We don’t run one off ethics audits. We help you turn governance into repeatable processes. That’s how agile marketing works best as an enabler not bolted on.

Because agile marketing isn’t just about pace—it’s about make confident, data driven decisions That you’re doing the right thing and that your team can move fast andbuild trust in your brand – not break it.

How we help:

Embed AI governance into sprint planning, reviews and retros

Define agile-friendly usage policies for AI and automation tools

Co-create internal ethics scorecards to use in QA and approvals

Train teams to spot risks early and manage them.

We’ve seen this work across publishing and events companies using AI to generate insight-led content, to manufacturing marketers localising technical content at scale. The common thread? Strong, agile marketing foundations that turn ethics from theory into a habit.

Over to you. How are you building AI governance into your team’s way of working?

If you’re just starting or already deep into it, let’s compare notes. Because governance is only a blocker if it sit outside your processes and workflows.

Want to get more value from Agentic AI?

If you want to Make AI work for you B2B marketing team and not just add more tools to your tech stack, download our AI Activation Framework.

>Download the B2B AI Activation Framework

June 11, 2025 Zoe Merchant AI

**Want to make AI work for your B2B marketing team and not just add more tools to your tech stack?**

This ebook is your practical playbook for doing exactly that.

Whether you’re under pressure to do more with less, or just looking to future-proof your marketing function, this guide will show you how to embed AI in your ways of working without the overwhelm.

Inside, you’ll discover:

What agentic AI really is (and how it goes beyond generative AI)
Real-world use cases across the marketing funnel – from personalising content and qualifying leads 24/7, to automating campaign reporting and improving ROI.
A 5-step agile framework to adopt AI in a smart, scalable way with tools to assess your readiness, pilot quickly, and track what’s working.
Metrics that matter – clearly explained KPIs to help you measure AI’s impact on engagement, conversion, operational efficiency, and ROI.
Expert guidance from Bright – leaders in agile marketing, offering tried-and-tested methods to help your team confidently test, adopt, and scale AI.

Download now to take your first (or next) confident step into AI-powered, agile B2B marketing.

June 4, 2025 Alaina Roberts AI, Marketing Effectiveness

Robot wars, agentic AI and agile marketing: insights from Bright’s Marketing Leaders Dinner

As B2B marketers, we’re deep into the next phase of AI. The focus has shifted from experimentation to activation – from tools to transformation. At our latest Bright Marketing Leaders Dinner, we brought together a brilliant group of marketing and business leaders to explore what it really takes to embed generative and agentic AI in marketing, and, crucially, to prove the value.

We were also joined by Max Gabriel CEO at Augmented AI who provided an expert perspective on where Agentic AI is going and how marketers can start to operationalise it so that agents take care of the repetitive stuff and marketers can shift focus to what really matters: strategy, creativity and meaningful engagement.

Held at Noble Rot in Mayfair, the evening centred on three practical questions:

Where is AI delivering value right now?
How are we measuring its impact?
What’s standing in the way of scaling it?

Here’s what came out of the discussion – grounded insight from leaders in the thick of it. One thing was clear: agentic AI is still in its infancy, with most teams only experimenting with application-based AI or single-purpose agents in isolated use cases, but there’s a shared ambition to understand, operationalise, and scale its role across marketing as quickly as possible.

Agentic AI: From automation to intelligent collaboration

There was strong consensus around the table: we’re past the point of automation for automation’s sake. The conversation has shifted to how AI, specifically agentic AI, can act as a collaborator, not just a tool. These agents don’t just complete tasks; they make decisions, respond to context, and work in concert with other systems and tools.

The promise? Marketers can move away from repetitive, manual work and focus on higher-value thinking. That shift changes the skill profile too – less emphasis on specialism, more on critical thinking, data literacy, stakeholder management, and the ability to interrogate and improve AI-driven outputs.

A standout theme was the concept of ‘agent crews’, sets of AI agents working in coordination across a campaign or marketing operation. Imagine one agent curating content, another analysing performance, and another adjusting messaging based on real-time engagement data. Each has a role, they talk to each other, and they evolve as the work unfolds. Everyone agreed this was an area to develop but no-one was close to this concept yet.

But that future raises important questions: How do we manage and maintain these agents? Who’s responsible for prompt optimisation, drift correction, or performance tuning? There was talk of creating an “agent ops” function – a new capability that acts like a team coach and tech lead rolled into one, overseeing agent quality and relevance just like you would with any team member.

It also became clear that as AI agents become more embedded, we can’t afford to import poor processes or bad habits into automated workflows. This moment requires unlearning – rethinking how we collaborate with machines and investing in training that teaches teams not just how to prompt, but how to think with AI.

Some teams are already going AI-first in their planning – starting with the question: “Where can AI add value here?” They’re building test-and-learn loops directly into campaign workflows, from strategy through to execution, with a view to scale what works.

Leaders have a critical role here. It’s not just about giving access to tools – it’s about creating the conditions where teams feel confident to explore, experiment and work with AI as a partner. It also means shifting the narrative: using AI isn’t ‘cheating’ – it’s a core skill for modern marketers.

Already, we’re seeing teams spin up synthetic focus groups to test and refine propositions, fast-track market research, and explore gaps in buyer journeys. Done well, it’s a route to faster go-to-market and more predictable performance.

Defining value: rethinking AI’s impact beyond cost savings

When it comes to AI in marketing, too much of the conversation is still focused on cost-cutting and headcount reduction. But this mindset is both premature and limiting. AI, especially in its agentic form, isn’t yet capable of running operations end-to-end. In fact, according to Gartner1, agentic AI can currently handle only around 15% of day-to-day work decisions without human intervention, with the rest still requiring input for strategy, interpretation, refinement, escalation and governance.

As the technology matures, that percentage will grow – but for now, marketers need to focus less on replacement, and more on redesigning work to get the best from both people and agents. So rather than asking, “How much cost can we cut?”, the better question is, “How do we redesign work so that humans and agents operate better together to drive grow and revenue?” The reality is we’ll have to find ways to achieve both.

This reframing is crucial. If we don’t rethink the human-agent relationship, we risk simply layering new tools onto old workflows – increasing complexity, not value. Many attendees raised concerns about creating more operational overhead if AI isn’t integrated in a deliberate, structured way.

That’s where agile marketing models are already proving their worth – offering clear workflows, transparent metrics, and sprint-based feedback loops that make it easier to embed AI into day-to-day activity, test and iterate, and track time-to-market gains and efficiency improvements.

At the same time, there’s a need to focus on where AI can drive growth, not just save costs. Agentic and application-based AI are already:

Accelerating content creation and testing, shortening lead times

Improving campaign segmentation and personalisation, increasing relevance

Generating insights from synthetic audiences, helping shape better propositions

The shift in search behaviour is another wake-up call. Traditional SEO performance is declining as more traffic comes via chat-based search and conversational interfaces. This opens up new questions: how do we optimise for AI-driven discovery? What does success look like when your audience is no longer clicking through, but getting summaries and recommendations from agents?

While advertising via AI interfaces is still in its infancy, leaders are watching closely. It’s early days, but brand influence may become a critical lever – how your brand is presented, mentioned, or prioritised by generative models could impact awareness and consideration. Brand metrics like share of synthetic voice, AI-indexed reputation, or visibility in curated responses may soon be standard indicators.

Meanwhile, we’re also seeing a move by larger corporates to recentralise marketing operations – pulling back from distributed field teams to create more standardised, scalable models that are AI-ready. This is partly driven by cost pressures, but also a recognition that data, tools, and processes need to be integrated and governed centrally to support AI-led execution.

But here’s the tension: pressure from the boardroom to cut costs fast, or slash headcount prematurely risks destabilising current marketing models. These agents are still nascent. We’re still working out what good looks like. There’s broad agreement that marketing needs to reinvent itself – and agentic AI will play a key role – but this requires investment in capability, operating model, and culture.

That means shifting how we measure success – not just by cost savings, but by the value created at every step of the workflow. That includes speed, accuracy, creativity, personalisation, and business outcomes like pipeline, engagement quality, and revenue contribution.

Scaling AI means scaling capability – not just tech

The ambition to scale AI was clear – but so were the blockers. Two major themes emerged: capability and confidence.

Many teams still lack the skills or structures to use AI in a way that feels safe, effective and measurable. From prompt engineering to critical thinking alongside AI, the capability gap is real. As one guest put it: “Some people are brilliant prompt engineers. Others need more structure, frameworks, examples – and permission to experiment.”

But capability isn’t just about individual skills – it’s about building confidence at the team level, and fostering a culture where experimentation is expected, not exceptional. That means leaders must shift their focus from performance oversight to enabling their teams to work in new ways, encouraging group learning and creating space to try, test and refine how AI is used.

There was also healthy debate around organisational readiness. It’s one thing to introduce new tools – it’s another to adapt your operating model to make them work. Agile marketing was seen as a crucial enabler here – not just as a methodology, but as a mindset. Agile ways of working support AI adoption through sprint-based testing, prioritised backlogs, and visibility of outcomes, giving teams the structure to embed AI iteratively, without overhauling everything at once.

And then there’s governance. With agents acting semi-independently, how do we ensure risk is managed and brand integrity maintained? There’s growing recognition that AI governance needs to be proactive, not reactive. Leaders shared early examples of building guardrails and escalation paths, defining what AI agents can and can’t do, and how to intervene when things go off track.

Underpinning all of this is a bigger shift in how we think about work: we must start asking higher-level questions, such as “What’s the best resource – human, agent, or hybrid – to deliver this outcome?” That means rethinking workflows, roles, and decision-making frameworks – and being clear about where AI adds the most value, and how to measure it.

Scaling AI isn’t just a technical rollout – it’s a transformation programme. The most successful marketing teams will be those that invest in capability, reimagine how their teams operate, and embed agentic AI in a way that’s strategic, not just opportunistic.

Final word: the winners will be those who change how they work

If there was one shared takeaway from the night, it was this: the value of AI in marketing doesn’t come from the tools – it comes from how we work and the data that underpins them.

The marketers who will win in this new era, aren’t those with the most tools. They’re the ones who rewire their ways of working to be more responsive, experimental, data-led and human-centred. They’re enabling their teams, building the right culture, and proving impact where it matters most.

This dinner wasn’t just a great conversation. It was a clear signal of where the smartest B2B teams are heading next.

Interested in joining our next dinner?

We’re curating the next conversation now. Drop us a message to register interest and join a growing community of marketing leaders navigating the AI shift with purpose.

May 21, 2025 Zoe Merchant AI

Let’s be honest – we’ve all heard it before. Brand and demand need to work together. It’s not a revelation, it’s common sense.

And yet… senior B2B marketers are still stuck trying to prove the value of long-term brand investment. Still battling short-termism. Still explaining – again – why awareness and trust are just as important as leads and pipeline value.

This session isn’t about rehashing what we already know. It’s about how to make it stick—with the board, the wider business, and across your marketing teams.

There were some great insights shared by our B2B marketing expert panel, including:

95% of buyers aren’t in-market, so marketers need ‘always-on’ brand activity
The role of storytelling to help justify brand investment to leadership
The importance of social listening to provide real-time insight and improve campaign relevance
B2B search behaviour is shifting with buyers now searching via social and AI platform.

Plus, we reveal the biggest growth opportunity in B2B.

If you’re trying to educate the business, prove marketing’s value, and deliver consistent performance across brand and demand – this is your session.

Meet the panel

Zoë Merchant

Managing Director,
Bright

Zoe Merchant is the founder and managing director of Bright, a strategic B2B marketing consultancy that gives marketers the power to do great work and deliver business results. With over 20 years of experience in agile marketing, she helps clients reinvent their marketing operations, align with business goals, and deliver tangible value.

As a leader and innovator in her field, Zoe has been recognised as a top 10 women leader of 2020, a 3x #40overforty advertising and marketing leader, and a #CannesLions70 Creative B2B juror in 2023. She is also a certified Agility in Marketing professional.

Zoe is passionate about investing and reinventing marketing teams, promoting diversity and inclusion, and championing marketing’s role in business transformation.

Christina Minshull

CEO
The Brand Audit

Christina Minshull is the CEO of The Brand Audit, helping CEOs, Founders & Execs transform influence to impact through personal brand strategy.

A storyteller with a spreadsheet mindset, she has nearly two decades of experience leading high-performance Brand, Social, and Digital Marketing teams at global enterprise corporations like EY, LinkedIn & WestJet. Christina is passionate about helping others turn potential into reality with the visibility that comes from social media.

A Top LinkedIn Voice in Brand Strategy & Social Media, Christina is a sought-after global speaker and creator, with 25K+ followers across LinkedIn (@ChristinaMinshull) and TikTok (@thelinkedinguru). Her human-centric approach to social media has attracted high-profile clients from EY, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, and more across the UK, EMEA, US, and Canada.

Emma Moorman

Senior Director, Demand Generation
Informa

An experienced and commercially driven leader with global experience in driving growth in marketing and product management roles; a strong product background in building solutions to empower and solve problems for marketing professionals.

May 21, 2025 Alaina Roberts Bright Videos & Podcasts, Marketing Effectiveness

It’s not the tools. It’s your marketing leadership that makes AI work

There’s a gap opening up in B2B marketing, and it’s not just about tech. It’s about fluency.

AI is moving fast. And while tools grab the headlines, it’s how we use them and how we organise around them that will separate the leaders from the laggards.

Let’s be clear: you don’t need to become a machine learning expert. But you do need to understand how AI can shift how your team works, what you prioritise, and where you place your bets.

57% of UK B2B marketers now rank AI understanding as the most important skill for future success – above data analytics and collaboration (Marketing Week).

McKinsey found organisations with AI-literate marketing leaders are significantly more likely to see ROI from their investments.

And the EU AI Act puts responsibility firmly on business users, not just developers, to ensure AI is used safely, ethically, and effectively.

That means marketing leadership must understand how, where and why to adopt these tools and scale them across their marketing operations.

The role of marketing leadership

We need to build a growth culture focused on establishing the value of the tools available to us or that we want to test. We need to ask better questions, set smarter, measurable expectations, and create space for our teams to experiment without fear of failure.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Working within test-and-learn frameworks grounded in clear hypotheses

Equipping teams with the training and guardrails to operate and maintain tools confidently and correctly

Building prompting best practice

Understanding the biases and blind spots in models

Creating an AI adoption roadmap tied to your commercial priorities

And developing the instinct to spot vendor nonsense a mile off

But here’s the catch: AI only delivers value if your ways of working are actually built for it.

Agile ways of working are crucial

It’s hard to get value from AI if your processes are broken.

If your team is stuck in long planning cycles, siloed roles and perfection paralysis, AI won’t help you, it’ll confuse the hell out of them!

Agile marketing unlocks the value. It gives teams the frameworks needed to successfully test and learn. It’s data driven and customer centric, so it can help leaders spot what’s working and scale it quickly. It reduces risk while speeding up results.

Being agile allows you to use:

• Short sprints to test value

• Early indicators of success (or failure)

• Data to scale what works, fast

• The confidence to stop what doesn’t.

It’s not about moving faster. It’s about moving smarter and proving value as you go.

A brighter approach

At Bright, we believe this is another challenge for marketing leaders and the importance of reshaping how we work so we can lead confidently in an AI-enabled world

We’re not AI evangelists. We’re practical optimists. We help teams:

Cut through the hype and find where AI can genuinely add value to their marketing

Build business cases that stand up in the boardroom

Use agile ways of working to integrate new tools, data and tech in a systematic and scalable way.

Because if we don’t, we risk falling into the same trap that’s caught us many before: investing in the latest tech, without the strategy, mindset or muscle to show it adds value.

May 20, 2025 Zoe Merchant AI

Welcome to a curated collection of inspiring and insightful reads and podcasts to help you align brand marketing and demand generation to drive commercial growth.