Attention is the most underrated thing we have right now. When anyone can make content with AI, the personal, the recognisable and the analogue win. That’s what my talk on marketing and brand is about.
Attention has become scarce
AI has made it easy to make more. More ads, more posts and more copy in less time. That makes it harder to be seen and even harder to be remembered.
I’ve run a marketing agency since 2015. The reason I believe so strongly in brand today is simple:
If not enough people feel and see and understand the brand, no customers will ever come into the shop.
A beautiful website that nobody finds is like a shop on a street where nobody ever walks past. It can be as beautiful as you like. Nobody comes in.
Strategy, brand and execution. In that order
Performance marketing still matters. It’s a tool, not a strategy. At Amplify, we work in this order: strategy, brand, execution. SEO, Google Ads and Meta Ads belong in execution.
We’ve helped more than 350 companies with strategy, branding and execution. The question is the same every time: what do we want to achieve for the brand?
And the client is still the hero.
In my world, the client is the hero, and we’re Yoda, trying to advise them.
Good taste can’t be automated
AI can help with a lot of what a marketing agency does. It can’t do good taste.
Ask a chatbot for an ad plan without enough context and you’ll get an answer that’s correct in theory. And not particularly cool. That’s bad taste. Something you make because you can, not because it lifts the brand.
That’s why we’ve built our own AI agent with our own knowledge and our own taste. It does the groundwork. A person makes the decision.
The personal wins
As a founder, your own name is a brand too. When things go well, you’re the one people want to talk to.
What I’m best at is meeting people and looking them in the eye. I started out on my own because my boss wouldn’t pay the roughly DKK 10,000 a year it cost to be part of a business network. The next day, I had a company registration number. I’ve written about it in Self-employed or salaried?.
From 2021 to 2024, I hosted the Danish-language podcast Den Nye Standard. It started from zero. Today it has more than 150,000 plays and 41 conversations. It was awareness right at the top of the funnel. It built the brand of both the guests and the agency, and the effect only showed a year later.
The analogue wins
When everything can be done digitally, what happens in the same room is worth more.
As a Klub 10 ambassador for the Danish Red Cross, I helped organise an evening at Kosmopol. We raised DKK 696,000 in one evening. It wasn’t a campaign. It was people in a room and a good cause.
The same thing can happen online when it’s live. During Jax’ Charity Subathon for the Danish Red Cross, we and the chat raised DKK 170,000 in five hours. Along the way, a business dinner with me was auctioned off in the chat. It raised DKK 16,000 for the Danish Red Cross and led to an evening with three entrepreneurs. That’s the kind of evening I hope there’ll be more of.
You can’t buy that kind of attention.
What the audience takes home
- Why attention has become scarce, and how a brand becomes recognisable.
- Why strategy and brand have to come before the ads.
- What AI can take over in marketing, and where good taste still makes the difference.
- How you can use the personal and the analogue in your own marketing.
The talk is a good fit for marketers, CMO networks and entrepreneurs. I use examples from my own podcast and from the companies we work for.
In 2021, I made Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe in the Media & Marketing category. Webamp, now Amplify, was named a Børsen Gazelle in 2021 and 2022.
Book a talk on marketing and brand
If you’d like a talk that gets your audience thinking differently about attention, write to me and book a talk. Tell me who the audience is and what they’re dealing with, and I’ll tailor the angle.
More talks
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All topics and formats, from keynote to workshop, are on the talks page.