The £99 Expert, the Dead BI Team, and the Bloke with Women's Feet
* This isn’t about the businesses or the people behind them.I genuinely rate both. But a good product in lazy hands is still a problem. Andaccountability doesn’t disappear just because you’ve automated something. Ifanything, that’s when you need it most.
Three things happened this week that I can’t stop thinking about. Separately, they’re funny. Together, they’rea warning and I think people need to hear it.
The Ad That Started It
A company advertising heavily right now is selling AI agents. The pitch is simple: replace your marketingteam, usually £285,000 a year, for just £99 a month. It’s bold, it’s everywhere, and apparently people are buying it.
I sat with that for a second.To be fair, in twenty years of marketing I have come across teams where a chocolate fire extinguisher would have been more useful. But that’s not the point.
Let’s be honest. There are agencies and marketing teams out there that deserve to be replaced. The yes people. The ones who take the brief, nod along, and deliver exactly what you asked for without ever questioning whether you were asking for the right thing. No challenge, no pushback, no uncomfortable conversations. Just output on a timeline. If that’s what you had, then yeah, a $99 tool probably does the same job. You might as well have outsourced it years ago.
But that was never the value. The value was always in the thinking that happened before anyone opened a laptop. The person who walked into the room and told you something you didn’t want to hear. Who spotted that the brief was wrong, that the campaign was working for the wrong reasons, that the strategy made sense on paper and nowhere else. The £285,000 wasn’t buying you content. It was buying you the judgement to know when the content is wrong. And no subscription replaces that.
When “Intelligence” Wasn’t
Earlier this week another founder reached out. His business was struggling. The first casualty had been his BI function, Business Intelligence, because clients were simply using AI to do it themselves. He’d had to let people go. He wasn’t bitter about it, just matter of fact. And honestly, I understood why.
Because in twenty years of marketing I’ve said the same thing more times than I can count. The "I" in BI stands for intelligence. Not reporting. Not dashboard building. Not telling a room full of stakeholders what already happened. Intelligence. And the difference between a business analyst and someone who can actually interpret data in acommercial context is enormous. Just because something correlates doesn’t mean it causates.
I did a talk at Prolific North a few years ago in front of about 400 marketing professionals. Live demo. I showed the room how ice cream kills children. The data was real, the pattern was clear, and every number lined up perfectly. Obviously ice cream doesn’t kill children. But when you’re looking at correlating datasets without the intelligence to interrogate what’s actually driving them, that’s exactly the kind of conclusion you reach. This happens constantly in iGaming. It happens everywhere.
The BI teams that are dying right now aren’t dying because AI is too good. They’re dying because they never evolved beyond the report. The ones that will survive are the ones that use AI to eliminate the grunt work and spend the time they’ve saved going deeper. Asking harder questions. Challenging what the data is really saying. That’s the job. That was always the job.
What AI is doing, and I think this is actually important, is putting a spotlight on the people who were never really doing it. That’s not a tragedy. That’s just the lights coming on.
The Loudest Person in the Room
A friend messaged me this week asking if Vega Gibraltar was responsible for a local company’s social media. We weren’t. But I was curious enough to look them up. Their Instagram is fully AI generated. And I mean fully. Team photos showing men with women’s feet. Different shoes on the same person in the same picture. Four seconds to spot - Live - On their brand!
I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or feel genuinely sorry for them.
I’ve managed social media teamsfor most of my career. When content marketing became the buzzword, businesses started throwing resource at it. Algorithms were being influenced by social engagement and everyone panicked. I went from Head of SEO to Head of SEO and Social almost overnight, and what I quickly learned is that salary has almost nothing to do with quality in this space.
I’ve hired six figure social media experts and I’ve hired people on thirty grand. The expensive ones weren’t always better. In fact some of the most damaging hires I’ve seen in social were people who were brilliant at being themselves online but had no idea how to represent a brand. There’s a fundamental difference between being a good social media user and being good at social media for someone else; one is instinct, the other is discipline.
The best social media lesson I ever learned is knowing when you have nothing worth saying. Because the answer to that is simple, don’t say it. The goal isn’t for people to see your brand, it’s for people to feel something about your brand. Those are completely different briefs and most people conflate them. Look at GoCompare. They created one of the most recognisable campaigns in UK advertising history and the primary emotion it generated was irritation. Loud isn’t the same as good. Visible isn’t the same as valuable.
At Vega Gibraltar we didn’t post a single piece of organic social content for our first twelve months. Not because we couldn’t, but because we didn’t have anything useful to say yet and we respected our audience enough not to fill their feed with noise. We have clients right now with no organic social presence whatsoever who run profitable paid social acquisition campaigns at scale, because we understand that organic and paid are two completely different ecosystems that require two completely different strategies.
Slop at volume isn’t astrategy. It’s just noise with a logo on it.
What This Is Really About
I want to be clear, I’m not anti-AI. We use it at Vega Gibraltar, we think carefully about where it genuinely adds value, and we’re honest with ourselves and our clients when it doesn’t. This isn’t a rant against the technology. It’s a rant against the laziness and naivety sitting underneath all three of these stories this week.
The belief that cheap and fast is the same thing as good. The willingness to hand your brand, your intelligence, your customer relationships to a tool you don’t fully understand because someone ran a convincing ad. The assumption that if it sounds efficient, it must be smart. None of that is new thinking. It’s the oldest mistake in business, just wearing a shinier jacket.
The Businesses That Will Survive
If it sounds too good to betrue, it is. That hasn’t changed and it never will.
The businesses that get through the next five years won’t be the ones who adopted AI the fastest, or the ones who avoided it the longest. It’ll be the ones who never dropped their standards. The ones who understood that quality over quantity isn’t a slogan, it’s a filter. That accountability isn’t optional when things get automated. That some things are worth keeping human, and that giving enough of a shit to protect those things is exactly what separates a real business from a cheap imitation of one.
Stop outsourcing your judgement. Stop confusing automation with intelligence. And for the love of God, check your content before you go live.
