Author: Jai Whiting

The biggest shop on earth keeps trying to become somewhere you go for inspiration. A Halloween walk through the headstones, one zombie and the real monster.

The BBC’s new director general, after more than a decade running Google in Europe, wants the BBC to be “the antidote to the algorithm.” Good line. Shame the algorithm he came from has been enforcing his values since 2011.

Marketing teams have a tendency to take themselves more seriously than the work warrants. Here’s the line I use to recalibrate the room.

A senior colleague’s son, fresh out of uni, recommended for a marketing role. I assumed the worst. I was completely wrong.

The AI-disclosure debate asks the wrong question. Nobody needs a “made by a machine” badge. They need to know a real person is answerable, and that the thing is what it claims to be.

New managers think they have to become a different version of themselves. They don’t. Here’s what actually changes, and what should stay exactly the same.

This year AI became detectable: watermarks, EU rules, a “seems like AI slop” button. Useful. But detection answers a question that was never the one that mattered.

My first hire told me, to my face, that he had never been more bored. He was right about himself. What he taught me about hiring for fit over CV.

Marketing is the first department cut when the business hurts. Here’s what the conversation is actually like, and the mechanic that gets you through it.

I flunked the postmodernism module in my first year and had to retake it in summer school. Twenty-odd years later, the most postmodern thing I have ever seen is the tool half of marketing now runs on.

LinkedIn just gave everyone a button to flag “AI slop.” Useful. But the machine was never the problem, and a pile of likes was never the defence.

I called AI a fad, then generic slop. I was wrong twice. What changed my mind, and why the tool only works if you bring your own methodology.