Creative technology company, Aer Studios, has appointed Jay Robinson to lead its user centred design practice as the studio continues on its growth trajectory. Taking up the role of Creative Director, Jay rounds out the leadership team while bringing additional expertise to develop the company’s creative and design capabilities.
Jay is a senior creative leader with a track record of delivering complex, high-impact work across brand, digital and experience. He has led global teams, built design capability and delivered work that operates at both cultural and commercial scale. He has worked across leading agencies (such as Taxi and Epoch Design) and direct client engagements, partnering at board, client and team level to deliver for brands including Netflix, Microsoft, Samsung, Clarks and Cube Bikes.
Amongst Jay’s recent achievements, he led the end-to-end brand and digital design for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Shakespeare Curriculum, a nationally scaled education platform reaching thousands of UK schools. He also headed digital delivery on a year-long engagement with Nestlé, overseeing a UX transformation across 70 international markets and lifting global performance rankings. Bringing a wealth of expertise in creative strategy and user-centred design to Aer Studios, Jay champions purpose-driven ideas, craft and clarity to create products and services that people love to use while delivering genuine business impacts.
Jay will join the senior leadership team alongside Head of Technology, James Hobbs, Head of Marketing, Sarah Dennis, Head of People, Culture and Operations, Emily Armstrong and Head of Finance, Kate Stubbings. The cohort will work closely with CEO Tom Harber, and Director, Geoff Wells.
Aer Studios continues to grow steadily year on year with a mission to create meaningful digital experiences that have a positive impact on people and planet. The last few years have seen the agency expanding their partnerships with key clients including the BBC and Dogs Trust as well as winning multiple clients both locally and globally, including CEPI, GAVI and Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity.
Speaking on joining the company, Jay says, “From my first conversations with the team at Aer, it was clear there was something already impressive to build on. The studio’s focus on thoughtful, user-centred work for clients doing positive things aligns closely with my own values. The depth of talent across both design and technology stood out, as did the ambition to bring those disciplines closer together.
I believe the best outcomes come when design and development shape ideas together, not in sequence. At Aer that mindset is already in place – and it’s something I’m excited to help build and evolve.”
CEO Tom Harber says, “Last year we set out our vision for the next five years, and Jay’s appointment is crucial to delivering on that. Having come highly recommended from across the ecosystem, Jay brings a brilliant blend of creative firepower and design thinking capabilities needed for this next phase of growth. This is a really exciting time for Aer Studios with a number of significant projects landing and with Jay’s leadership, we’re looking forward to being able to deliver even more impact for our clients and their audiences”
A solid content marketing strategy is the foundation for meaningful results and long-term success.
A content marketing strategy is a plan for creating and sharing content that appeals to your target audience and helps you achieve your business goals.
Whether you’re a start-up trying to make your mark or an established brand wanting to stay ahead, having a clear content marketing plan can be a game-changer. At AMBITIOUS, we’ve helped many businesses turn content into business growth by integrating it within the broader PR and digital marketing landscape.
This guide will walk business owners and marketers through the essential steps to create a content marketing strategy that drives growth and keeps your brand competitive.
We’ll cover everything from defining your goals and understanding your audience, to planning content types, mapping the buyer’s journey, setting SMART goals, and measuring results.
By the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap to build a strategy that delivers real business impact.
A content marketing strategy is a blueprint. It outlines the groundwork for the types of content you will produce, the topics it will cover, and the formats and channels you’ll deliver in.
You could think of it as a game plan for winning over potential customers and keeping them coming back for more… and that wouldn’t be incorrect. When viewed in isolation, a content strategy absolutely supports sales.
But, for the most successful brands, content marketing and content strategy do so much more than support sales. A content strategy keeps your brand fresh and your insights timely and valuable.
In short, it helps you remain relevant in a fast-changing market.
Now that we’ve covered what makes a strategy successful, let’s look at the key components that go into building one.
Building a content strategy involves several key components, each of which plays a crucial role in ensuring your efforts are effective and aligned with your business objectives.
To quote Simon Sinek, ‘Start with Why.’
Before you create a single piece of content, you need to understand why you’re doing the things you’re doing. Not just from a content perspective, but from an entire sales and operational perspective.
In his book,Start with Why, Sinek puts forward that the most successful brands put the why at the heart of everything they do. Taking a purpose-led approach allows you to approach subsequent strategies from a position of authenticity.
So rather than coming from a starting point of pure economics, put your mission and your vision at the heart of your content strategy.
You wouldn’t show up to a black-tie event in flip-flops… right?
Well the same principle applies to your content.
If you want to effect change and impact consumer decisions; you need to understand your audience, inside and out. Creating detailed buyer personas that go beyond basic demographics of age and geography can be incredibly valuable here.
What are their aspirations? What keeps them awake at night? What are the main pressures and challenges they’re facing?
Someone’s age, location, and job title isn’t going to give you great insight. By going beyond just demographics, you can establish what kind of content your audiences are engaging with the most.
With deeper, more detailed audience insights, you can create content that resonates with your audiences on a much more personal level.
You can then use existing audience insights and customer feedback to further refine your personas, curating your content to better address their needs.
You have your mission, your vision and your customer profiles.
Next, it’s time to understand the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey typically includes three stages: Awareness, Consideration and Decision.
In this sense, every business is different, and as such, strategies and tactics must adapt. Content strategy and content creation aren’t a one-size-fits-all approach.
An FMCG brand will have a much shorter customer journey compared to a business that makes diagnostic machines.
A few blogs and some social posts aren’t going to make a quick conversion if your customer’s buying journey is traditionally 12 to 18 months or more. In cases like this, it’s about creating content strategies that are heavy on touchpoints and reinforcing your brand through much longer periods of awareness and consideration.
On the flip side; shorter journeys with bigger audiences – like FMCG – get to decision stage making much faster, so require content to match this cadence. It’s much faster, much more fluid and in the moment.
Creating content is all about matching audience and intent; you need to make sure that you’re putting the right content, in the right places, at the right time.
Your brand voice holds power, so use it wisely.
This is the real-world reflection of your mission, vision and brand values. Are you the wise mentor? The innovative disruptor? The friendly neighbour? Whatever your brand voice, consistency is key.
Also, people don’t just buy products; they buy into brands they can relate to. A strong brand identity, guided by clear brand guidelines, ensures consistency in both visual and tonal style across all content and marketing materials, strengthening brand recognition.
Maintaining a consistent brand voice across social media platforms is crucial for establishing and maintaining brand loyalty, which is key to amplifying your reach and engagement over time.
With a brand voice established and a firm understanding of your audiences, you can answer the question: what kind of content shall we produce?
There’s a lot of format options to choose from, including:
You don’t need it all to succeed. The key is to select the types of content that are most likely to resonate with your target audience. This will then inform the most appropriate channels upon which to activate those assets.
Generally speaking, having your own on-site content like blogs and articles is a universal must.
Whether you’re selling MRI machines or barefoot shoes, having on-site content that pulls through into search engine results pages and AI search platforms is going to be a major part of your content strategy.
So owned content has to be a foundational pillar of any content strategy.
Beyond your own channels, it’s about selecting the content types and channels that resonate with your target audience. If one of your prime audiences is NHS procurement teams, then you’re going to want to focus your efforts into channels like LinkedIn—with a mix of written thought leader content and video-led content marketing to catch their attention.
A fast-fashion brand would find more value in focusing on TikTok, with its in-built shopping API and fast-moving, trends-focused nature.
Important note: there’s a reason why we don’t classify social media platforms as ‘owned’. The reason being, that while the account itself is yours, you don’t own the channel itself. If TikTok or Instagram went under, then that channel is gone. Anything that is not 100% within your complete control, is classed as shared.
There are two more universal must-haves: video and direct-to-consumer content.
Whatever platform or channel you’re activating – whether it’s YouTube, LinkedIn, or TikTok – video content is the primary focus. So you need to account for video production in your content marketing strategy.
Then there’s direct-to-consumer content. Or in simple terms, email marketing.
Personalisation in sales and marketing is booming. With the sheer number of brands competing for attention across every channel and platform, the space has never been louder and more competitive. It’s incredibly easy for consumers to simply become overcome with brand fatigue and when that happens, they just start switching off.
But if you can successfully leverage a direct line of contact via email marketing, that can be a powerful thing.
Now that you have a sense of the key elements, let’s explore how to activate your content across multiple channels and formats for maximum impact.
The most effective and impactful content strategies take place across multiple channels, in multiple formats. By choosing the right mix, you can ensure your content reaches and resonates with the people who matter most.
To make this as effective as possible, combine owned elements, like on-site blogs and articles and your email channels, with the right mix of shared channels for your audience for maximum reach and effectiveness.
Look to ways you can repurpose content across different channels and formats.
Uou may want to conduct a piece of industry trends research. That piece of research becomes a designed whitepaper. That whitepaper can become a valuable sales asset, in both digital and print formats.
But it can be more.
It can then be broken apart, with news stories and releases created to generate earned media. Key elements of the whitepaper can then be created into shorter social assets, which can be activated across company and personal LinkedIn channels.
It can also be created into various blogs, summarising your findings and offering the whitepaper as a download. This gives you a lead magnet and a means of generating valuable consumer data.
You can activate these findings in your newsletters. You could even take it one step further and bring it into interactive formats like webinars, which can be especially effective for audience engagement. Those webinars could then be repurposed as further video content to be used on LinkedIn and even YouTube.
When taking this kind of integrated approach, the ultimate aim is to connect as many dots as possible.
When distributing your content, consider a broad mix of marketing channels from email marketing, social media accounts, video, digital and print design, even paid advertising like Google ads to create the greatest possible reach and impact.
With your content now planned and distributed, it’s essential to keep your strategy organised and on track.
A content strategy without a plan is like a road trip without a map. Chances are you’ll have fun, but you’ll most likely get lost.
This is where your marketing strategy and plan intersect with your content strategy. Through your marketing plans, create schedules and roadmaps, outlining campaigns, moments, and activations. Detail this with the outputs and assets you’ll need to create, with time-bound goals, to help keep you on track.
In the day-to-day, content calendars can keep everything on track and on schedule, particularly if you’re having to manage complex production schedules for video.
This will not only ensure consistency but also help you allocate resources, raise issues and delays effectively, and adapt to any required change. This helps ensure all team members and freelancers are on the same page, maintaining alignment and efficiency throughout the entire production and content creation process.
You want to stay on track and you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew. To manage expectations, it’s crucial to set SMART goals. These are:
SMART goals help you to achieve a few things.
Firstly, they’re built on solid foundations of goals. For example, instead of saying, “We want more website traffic,” a SMART goal would be, “We aim to increase website traffic by 20% over the next six months by publishing two blog posts per week.”
This helps join all the dots and create content production processes with firmly established timelines and completion journeys. This clarity ensures everyone on your team knows what you’re aiming for and how to get there.
They also help you outline what’s achievable, given your organisation’s current production capacities and capabilities. For example, you may not be in a position to be able to produce your own video content, either through lack of capacity or capability.
So SMART goals can also help you identify areas where you need to bring in extra resources and skills in order to achieve these goals.
These goals act as your guiding star, helping you focus your efforts and measure the success of your content marketing efforts.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that help you measure the success of your content marketing strategy.
These are ultimately showing how well your overall strategy is performing, relative to your original strategic goals and aims.
For your website, look to metrics like:
While overall impressions can give you a picture of the general reach of your site, actual on-page data is going to be much more valuable when analysing your content.
Social media platforms offer a different set of metrics. Here you’ll be looking at:
But you’ll also need to monitor sentiment on social. 1,000 comments look like a good number on a report. But if 950 of those comments are negative in sentiment, then it’s far less positive than the numbers show.
The reason why we establish KPIs isn’t to dictate any success or failure further down the line, it’s more about identifying progress, tracking what’s working, and most importantly, what isn’t.
Ongoing auditing and analysis help shape tactical, strategic, and creative decisions.
One of the biggest self-imposed flaws you can bring into your marketing strategy is to only review your activity once per year.
Ongoing auditing and analysis is a crucial step, not only in creating a content marketing strategy, but evolving it in real time.
Review your existing content to see what’s hitting the mark and what needs improvement. Determine which types of content are the most effective. Then, put plans in place to create more content which matches this.
You need to identify what isn’t working and establish why. If something doesn’t work once, try it again in a different way. But if something isn’t working over long periods of time, then continuation is likely not worth it.
By doing this, you can identify gaps in your content. Look for opportunities to repurpose content into new formats, maximise the value of your existing content, and remove anything that is low-value and surplus to requirement.
Rather than doing this once a year, do it with more focused regularity. More regular content audits provide valuable insights that inform your ongoing strategy.
With your strategy organised and performance measured, let’s look at how data can become your superpower.
We know that optimising your content for better visibility in search is crucial to ensure it reaches a wider audience, improves your rankings, and ensures your content stands out in search results.
But competing for keywords, intent, and eyeballs is more than just a challenge in creative writing.
It’s about leveraging the right data and insights and using tools like Google Analytics, SurferSEO, and SEMRush to give you the edge.
The same applies to social media platforms. Proprietary analytics, or third-party tools such as Hootsuite, let you see what’s working in real time.
But don’t just collect data… act on it.
You need to be prepared to adjust your strategy based on these insights. The best content strategies are the ones that adapt.
With data as your guide, you can confidently plan and adapt your strategy for ongoing success.
There’s no silver bullet for successful content. What makes a content strategy successful is two-fold.
Firstly, it’s about strategic planning, critical thinking, and creativity. You need to be able to hone in on audiences, demographics, messaging and narratives, and understand the buyer’s journey and how you can subtly influence it in your favour.
Great content strategy establishes these foundational elements, meaning you can have great creative outputs underpinned by strong data and insights. So before you’ve even drafted a word of copy, or shot a second of video content, you need to have this understanding.
But you also need to be able to react and adapt.
A framework is great. It gives you guardrails. But a dogmatic approach to your strategy could do more harm than good.
Things may not work as you predicted, attitudes change, behaviours adapt, trends come and go, and algorithms change the way content is delivered and consumed.
If all you’re doing is staying within the lines of your strategy, chances are you’re missing out.
By following these steps, you can build a content marketing strategy that is structured, effective, and adaptable.
Having a documented content marketing strategy is crucial to guide your efforts and ensure success.
Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, improve your search ranking, surface in generative AI responses, or create personalised marketing content for your customers, a robust content marketing strategy underpins these goals and gives you the roadmap to achieving them.
But a winning content strategy isn’t just about creating more and more content. It’s about creating the right content, for the right people, and putting it in the right place at the right time.
At AMBITIOUS, we’ve seen firsthand how a content strategy can transform businesses. It’s not just about getting likes or shares; it’s about building relationships with your audience that last and deliver real results.
Get in touch to talk about how we can help you develop a strategy that’s as unique as you are.
GenAI video has been causing quite a stir recently: whether it’s backlash over the tide of AI slop, something being decried as an AI fake (whether it is or not), or an agentic AI business formula that’s made ‘millions’ overnight. Oh, and the ‘ultimate’ prompt-writing masterclass? You’ll have seen all the ads…
But look a bit harder and there’s some really interesting work out there:
One thing is undeniable: AI is going to affect digital industries – the debate around the extent and exact timeline gets far more complicated.
With all that in mind, we wanted to use our yearly Xmas video as a test bed of GenAI, to see what it could do and, importantly, what it couldn’t. And we thought we’d bring you along for the ride…
It all started in August (don’t judge). We had just ironed out our company-wide AI training roadmap and we were updating our AI usage policy. As a creative agency, it felt like we were taking real leaps forward. But it also gave our creative studio a lot to think about. We each mulled over our own questions around authenticity and the future of creative production (the part of our job many of us love most of all).
So we got our heads together and talked about how we should be doing things. What we arrived on was that creative thinking, sketching, scribbling, chatting, tinkering, and FUN should all be ring fenced and given the time they deserve. That’s why we decided to collaborate on a brief so ambitious and outlandish it simply had to work.
It should no longer come as a surprise that typing a basic prompt into AI engines only leads to AI slop.
So, before we even touched a computer, we came up with a basic concept – the ultimate tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Christmas perfume ads – and then had a mass brain-storming session where we asked the whole company for their craziest ideas. And boy did they deliver!
In a short space of time, we had suggestions ranging from a simple Xmas magic box to rivers of gravy, something about a unicorn that didn’t quite make the final edit, and the perfect name – ‘Sléj’ (pronounced as ‘slay’, obviously).
Our copywriters pulled the ideas together into a script, using a knowledge of Christmas-related puns that took a lifetime (or previous life editing rather niche magazines) to develop.
This isn’t the place to be overly reliant on AI. Allowing people free reign to throw stuff at the page works well. Importantly, don’t shut down ideas too early. The most unlikely suggestions can get workshopped into something surprising and brilliant.
This could turn into a whole blog by itself. More than any other, this stage will determine the look of your film so the more references you can include the better.
It’s crucial to find references that you have rights to both use and pass to a third party – in this case, an AI model.
For this reason, we used Generative AI to generate our reference images, feeding the output images back into the AI multiple times and asking for tweaks and refinements.
This produced a combination of a storyboard and multiple accompanying style frames (high-quality images that give a good overall feel for what the video will look like once animated).
You’re aiming to find references for each part of the shot you want to generate, for example the setting, tone, pose, character and composition etc. You want the AI to have as much information as possible and limit how much it figures out by itself.
We quickly learnt that there isn’t one AI model to rule them all, with different options performing better for different tasks. We’d highly recommend experimentation here to find which works best for your requirements.
Using detailed prompts and the bank of reference images we had gathered for each shot, we generated our footage. Prompts were written in a similar way to how we’d add
notes on a storyboard, i.e. ‘camera push in’, ‘talent to walk across frame left to right’, ‘high-key lighting’ etc but they also included additional things that wouldn’t usually be directable without heavy VFX work, i.e. ‘swirling wind kicks up dust behind legs’.
The point here is to think like a filmmaker and art director, you need to be able to supply image references but, just as importantly, you need to be able to articulate what you want to see in the frame. Playing AI like a slot machine will lead to slop.
In the same way that you rarely edit footage together straight out of the camera, generative video will almost always benefit from some post work. Again, this is a place to add further human touches that a text box often doesn’t offer. This could be reframing, changing the colour, or in/out painting of items in the scene.
Editing and sound design is another area where, as far as we’re concerned, humans just can’t be beat (not yet). Editing – the process of deciding where to push and pull those beats and gaps – and sound design are very much a process of creating a feeling and mood.
As with traditional film making, have in mind what you want to see. Those hard-won post skills still have lots of value.
It would be remiss not to briefly discuss some of our thoughts behind the ethics of our experiment.
The ethics of AI are extremely complicated. As with most things, a simply binary choice may feel tempting, and at times compulsive, but this rarely does justice to the many nuances of a topic. There is so much for every individual and organisation to consider, and I’d argue the often-discussed environmental and job-replacement angles are just the beginning.
For further information I’d highly recommend:
For me, I think After Effect’s AI roto-brush sums up a lot of the debate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXMTHe8z6Tw
So, how do I feel about the finished video? I think the team have done a great job of making a whimsical and audacious Xmas vid with just the right level of self-awareness. And with a level of production that, prior to GenAI, our budget simply wouldn’t have stretched to.
I also hope it’s as clear to you, as it is to me, that we couldn’t have come anywhere close to the result without the thought, skill, talent and humour that went into it from right across the agency.
And how do I feel about AI? It’s complicated…
At P+S, we’ve spent over 15 years delivering enterprise Drupal solutions. We’ve seen the good, the bad, and the painfully slow. That’s why we created the P+S Drupal Starter Site – a modern, headless, editor-friendly solution that gets you to market faster than ever.
Drupal is one of the most powerful content management systems (CMS) available today. It’s trusted by governments, global enterprises, and mission-critical websites to manage:
Unlike many SaaS-based platforms, Drupal gives you complete control:
And thanks to its modular architecture, Drupal isn’t just for websites. It can power e-commerce, employee, customer or partner portals, learning platforms, and more – all from the same backend.
“We’ve gone ahead and created a custom Drupal distribution that changes EVERYTHING. It’s a production-ready Drupal backend, preconfigured in alignment with best practice. Content structures, SEO tools, and accessibility are all baked in and ready to go.”
Despite its power, Drupal has long had two major drawbacks:
Many organisations end up trading control and flexibility for a quicker launch and better editorial UX elsewhere – even if it means compromising in the long term.
A traditional content management system (CMS) bundles two things together: the backend where you create and manage your content, and the frontend – the design that displays it to visitors. Everything comes as one package.
When everything is bundled together, making changes becomes difficult and expensive.Want to redesign your website? You might need to overhaul your entire system. Want to create a mobile app using your existing content? You’ll likely need to start from scratch. Need faster loading times? You’re limited by what the whole system can handle.
A headless CMS separates content management from website design. You still have a user-friendly interface to create and organise your content, but the content isn’t tied to any specific website design.
Instead, your content is made available through an API. This gives us the opportunity to match our clients with the best possible solution that delivers all the benefits of Drupal, along with design, flexibility and usability that rivals any other CMS.
We’ve gone ahead and created a custom Drupal distribution that changes EVERYTHING. It’s a production-ready Drupal backend, preconfigured in alignment with best practice. Content structures, SEO tools, and accessibility are all baked in and ready to go. This means it solves most of your needs right out of the box.
In short: an enterprise-ready, headless Drupal solution that’s as quick to launch as a WordPress site, but far more powerful.
Our starter site is designed to eliminate the two biggest historical issues:
We care as much about your editor experience as your end-user experience.
Next.js gives us everything we want in a modern frontend stack:
Next.js helps your website load incredibly fast. And that’s important; faster pages mean a better user experience and can lead to more conversions.
Next.js is built to help your content get found on Google. It gives you the tools to rank well in search engines, which is essential for attracting the right audience.
Since the CMS backend is decoupled and not publicly exposed like traditional CMS systems, it’s far less vulnerable to direct attacks.
From subtle transitions to full-screen motion graphics, Next.js handles complex animations with ease. The kind of high-impact visuals that turn heads and boost engagement.
Whether you’re launching a single marketing site or a multi-brand, multi-region platform, Next.js scales beautifully both in architecture and in performance.
By going headless, we can deliver content not just to the web, but to mobile apps, digital kiosks, voice assistants, AI agents, and more — all from a single source of truth.
For B2B marketing sites, it means fast load times, a flexible design system, and future-proof technology.
Despite the advantages list above, headless Drupal often comes at the cost of the editor experience.
We’ve created the headless Drupal CMS we all want, need and deserve:
It’s time to empower your team and future-proof your stack with complete control – and faster than ever.
To learn more about how the P+S Starter Site can transform your next digital project and explore all your CMS options, get in touch: [email protected]
A website that takes digital accessibility features seriously reaches a wider customer base, performs better for SEO and reduces legal risks for the business. Recognising this, world-famous restaurant chain Benihana asked us to deliver a fully up-to-date website that adheres to WCAG 2.1 guidelines.
A website that takes digital accessibility features seriously reaches a wider customer base, performs better for SEO and reduces legal risks for the business. Recognising this, world-famous restaurant chain Benihana asked us to deliver a fully up-to-date website that adheres to WCAG 2.1 guidelines.
Our extensive accessibility work on the Benihana website helped improve its overall accessibility score.
We reduced instances of vague and ineffective link text, replacing them with clear and descriptive alternatives to make navigation more intuitive for users.
Identified and replaced ineffective alt text with accurate descriptions, ensuring that information is accurately conveyed to those using screen readers.
The work we conducted on the new Benihana site significantly improved accessibility, ensuring compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA standards. The changes allowed Benihana to reach a wider proportion of its customer base, providing excellent user experience features for those with accessibility needs.
The accessibility improvements also strengthened SEO. By adding features that enhance usability, such as semantic HTML, clear navigation, and descriptive links, Benihana’s fully accessible website achieved a noticeable boost in overall SEO performance.
AI doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. AI isn’t a single tool or website and it’s not even a single piece of technology. So it’s not surprising that there are as many opinions about AI as there are AI tools on the market.
Every leap in technology has come with its detractors. The mechanisation of farming led to a huge increase in the efficiency of food production which helped reduce commercial food costs but there were significant jobs losses and, in some cases, the destruction of supporting industries. Likewise, the machine-breaking Luddites of the 19th-century whose violence against automated factory practices became so impactful that it created a whole new term for the technologically adverse. Social media, mobile phones, 5G, electric cars; every advance in technology comes with its cynics and rightly so.
Progression doesn’t stop, it’s simply a matter of working out how emerging technology can be a benefit for you, your tasks, projects or processes with the correct diligence and caution for its potential downsides.
If you aren’t a naturally good writer or need to improve the pace of research, AI can help. Likewise, for the huge majority of people without design skills or access to premium Adobe subscriptions, AI will improve the quality of creative output for non-specialists. Access to higher levels of creative output is suddenly democratised with free or low cost AI tools. This, in turn, raises the quality of the lower end of written, coded or visual work. In time, this also helps push industries forwards, helping to raise the standards of work across all participants.
Taking a step away from Generative AI, there is a huge scope to improve the access businesses of all sizes have to high volume data processing tools to enhance predictive modelling, productivity and automation.
AI uses vast data sets to generate its outputs, whether that’s an answer to a question or designing a logo. Most commonly, that data set is created by crawling accessible content and data of all types from across the internet. An AI model will pull from all its available data and reference points, weighing up the authority and trustworthiness of its sources and returning an answer or output to you. AI isn’t creating anything from scratch, really it’s just aggregating and combining what already exists online.
That comes with its downsides.
Early roll-outs of Google AI overviews led to many single posts on Reddit being used as a source for questions asked via Google search. Citing a single anonymous personal opinion as a definitive answer comes with an enormous amount of risk. McDonalds tested AI driven voice orders for nearly 6 years before decommissioning it in 2024 because of misinterpreted orders.
If you are a top level designer, copywriter or developer, AI can still offer you productivity improvements but it’s likely its creative output isn’t going to match what you are already doing. Also when it comes to various factors such as ownership, compliance and brand impact, there are some further risks that come from aggregated work.
In most jurisdictions, AI output is in the public domain, and isn’t owned by the user or company using the AI tool. When it comes to branding or other high value work this can cause serious issues in the long term. In many regions, including the EU, AI generated content has to be labelled as such. For many users, this may discredit the work and reflect badly on the brand. Equally, nothing risks long-term damage to brand perception than if brand copy, statements or assets are too similar to the competition. This is a risk created by using the aggregated information which AI tools rely on.
As indicated in the chart above, Generative AI can make the average more achievable than ever before. For most businesses being average isn’t good enough. The use of AI thus becomes a question of how it can add the most value to you, from where you are now. If you are a great designer, don’t compromise by leaving critical design decision-making to AI. However, if you have to make one poster a year for the Christmas party, congratulations! AI is here to help.
Pick your battles, know where you outperform the average and double down on skills which set you apart from AI.
Ever wondered if those dramatic peaks and troughs in your GA4 data are part of a wider industry trend or just unique to your site? You can now know for sure with GA4’s recently upgraded Benchmarking feature that, for the first time, allows you to compare absolute metrics like New Users and Total Revenue – not just percentages and ratios.
GA4’s Benchmarking feature received a game-changing upgrade this October – letting you compare absolute metrics like Sessions, New Users, and Total Revenue against your peers. Previously limited to normalised metrics like bounce rates and percentages, this update finally lets you see how your actual numbers stack up against the competition.
This is a great new feature that our team absolutely loves (pun very much intended). Before benchmarking, you either had to wait until the end of the year to see rough industry averages from various whitepapers, or manually compare data between clients in the same industry. Neither option was reliable – whitepapers covered too broad a timeframe to spot real trends, whilst client comparisons only gave you a limited sample size rather than true industry insights.
In comparison, with GA4 Benchmarking data updating every 24 hours, we finally have near real-time industry comparisons at our fingertips.
Why we love GA4 Benchmarking
GA4’s benchmarking feature provides reference metrics in percentiles (median, 25th, and 75th) based on peer groups of similar businesses. It offers two types of benchmark metrics – normalised metrics (like percentages and ratios) and unnormalised metrics(absolute numbers like “Total Revenue” or “Active Users”).
According to Google’s official benchmarking documentation, for absolute numbers, GA4 estimates a performance range based on your property’s number of active users by multiplying the peer group’s normalised metric by your property’s active user count.
For example, the benchmark for Sessions is calculated as: Peers’ sessions per active user × Your active users
This ensures you’re comparing apples to apples, even when businesses have vastly different traffic volumes.
Step 1: Open Google Analytics and select the account then the property as usual. In the Home view, you can see the overview card with the four metrics you viewed last time and the Benchmarking icon.
Step 2: Click on the Benchmarking icon, then on the dropdown of industries to select your peer group.
Step 3: Find the peer category that describes your industry most accurately.
Step 4: Turn on Benchmarking to see the peer median (solid turquoise line) and peer range (light turquoise shaded area) for a quick visual comparison.
If you’re one of our clients, we’ve most likely already set this up for you. But as always, we encourage you to explore different features yourself. In this case, you could switch between different peer groups – for example, Restaurant → Fine Dining or even Cooking → Cuisines → Cuisine Type – to understand the overall interest in specific aspects of your industry.
If you’re a fellow digital marketing specialist, you’ll appreciate how this feature transforms client reporting. We now have realistic and comparable industry data. No more awkward conversations explaining why a 10% drop in traffic might actually be an industry-wide trend, or defending why a 15% increase isn’t as impressive as it sounds when competitors are seeing 30% growth. The data speaks for itself, adding invaluable context to every report and strategy discussion.
Benchmarking in GA4 is one of those features that once you start using, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it. It adds context to every spike and dip in your data, turning guesswork into informed strategy. Give it a try – your next report will thank you for it.
AI is a controversial topic across many industries, but particularly among those whose work involves creative output. The rise of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Claude has enabled creators, marketers, and businesses to produce content at an alarmingly fast and cost-efficient rate.
Ownership of AI-generated content remains a legal grey area. Unlike traditional work created by humans, content produced solely by AI does not qualify for copyright protection. The U.S. Copyright Office maintains that only works with substantial human authorship are eligible for copyright Reference. However, content that blends AI generation with meaningful human creative input may qualify, depending on the extent of the contribution and your location. In the UK, there may be more flexibility, with some protection granted to the individual directing the AI tool Reference.
If you’re considering creating content entirely with AI and minimal human involvement, it is likely to be considered part of the public domain. This means other businesses could legally reuse, repurpose, or monetise it without your permission.
Another consideration is the training data behind many AI tools. If your AI-generated content closely resembles existing copyrighted material, you could face infringement claims, even if you were unaware of the similarity.
AI offers significant benefits for brand content strategies. It accelerates the production of written, visual, and audio assets, allowing brands to maintain consistent output and stay competitive. However, there are risks. Audiences may perceive AI-generated content as impersonal or low-effort.
Errors or misinformation can erode trust, and irresponsible use of these tools may lead to legal disputes. Content that lacks human refinement often feels generic. This can weaken your brand’s distinctiveness within the industry.
AI is transforming the content creation landscape, but legal protections are still evolving. The Fanatic Creative Team treats AI tools as creative assistants, not standalone creators. By combining the efficiency of AI (for tasks such as removing image backgrounds) with our human creativity, your brand can remain protected, distinctive, and trustworthy in an increasingly automated and visually homogenised world.
Bristol… we are coming to meet you! Help us shape the future media creatives for our region. We are looking to engage with TV, film, content media, games, animation and the photography industry on 26th November at the gorgeous St George’s Hall
✅ Discuss key challenges and opportunities in the creative sector
✅ Shape future talent pipelines and influence taught curriculum
✅ Strengthen collaboration between education and industry to drive
Enjoy breakfast and open discussion with representatives from Weston College, University Centre Weston and Business West LSIP team
If you’re an employer in the creative industries and would like to join us, sign up through here
https://www.weston.ac.uk/event/media-production-photography-games-and-animation-employer-advisory-board
Winter is rolling in, which for most means a time of hunkering down and getting cosy, for some signifies the start of an incredibly hard and worrying time for the rough sleepers in Bristol.
This winter, we’re on a mission at Great State to warm up Bristol in time for the festive period, one jacket at a time. And you know what? You can help.
We’ve teamed up with BOSH (Bristol Outreach Services for the Homeless), a community service that are a central hub for rough sleepers and those vulnerably housed. And they’re in urgent need of more winter coats and jackets. Jackets are always in demand.
In fact, BOSH hands them out every night, along with other essentials like hats, gloves, shoes and trousers. Every donation makes a real, tangible difference – wrapping someone in warmth during the coldest months of the year.
So, here’s the plan. We’re hosting a jacket donation drive in collaboration with Runway East Bristol Bridge, which is where you’ll find our office and the home to over 20 other local businesses.
Most of us have a jacket or two gathering dust at the back of the wardrobe. Maybe it’s last year’s style. Or maybe you simply don’t wear it enough. Why not let that jacket live its best life? Keeping someone warm instead of taking up space.
Together with Runway East, we’ll collect, quality check, and deliver every single jacket to BOSH and see firsthand how your generosity keeps Bristol’s streets a little warmer.
We’re Great State – an independent customer experience agency delivering digital experiences for the next generation. For more than 25 years, we’ve called Bristol home. It’s the city that’s shapes us, inspired us, and kept us fuelled on caffeine and creativity in equal measure.
You’ve probably seen our work without even realising it. Take our work with Bristol Airport for example, where we took passengers on a sustainability journey by turning big green goals into stories people actually read. We’ve worked with Bristol Uni and UWE on their digital transformation programmes, and we have partnered with organisations like Babassa to make sure disadvantaged young people are given pathways into a career in tech. Giving back to this wonderful city feels right. Bristol’s given us so much over the years and we want to return the favour.
This winter let’s prove that Bristol’s warmth isn’t just a feeling – it’s something we can share. Because one jacket might not change the world, but it can change someone’s night.
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