Welcome to Human Marketing, a weekly podcast for B2B marketers, unpacking how brands can stay authentic, demonstrate authority, and build trust as AI floods or feeds with content. I'm Chris Nelson, founder of Human Video. We remotely produce podcasts and other video content with real humans and just the right amount of soul. I'm really pleased to have Phil Treagus-Evans with us today from Giraffe Social and he's the CEO and co-founder of Giraffe Social, but also the author of a new book, human First Marketing. So welcome Phil.

Thanks Chris. Nice to be here.

Told me before we started, Phil, our worlds are pretty closely aligned. My company Human Video is all about creating authentic human first content and I think from looking into what you do as well, what you did at Giraffe is very much about human first marketing. Can you just to start, tell me a little bit about your journey to this point, if that's okay on getting to becoming, I guess co-founder of Giraffe and what kind of came before that. What's your journey in marketing or anything else been to get to that point?

Sure. So Giraffe has been around for 13 years and before Giraffe Kane, who's the co-founder of the company, we met working in a shop whilst we were going through education. So started working in a shop when I was around 16. He was a year older. We became good friends during that time and towards the end of our time in education, we both agreed that we had a bit of an entrepreneurial itch and we wanted to start a business. And I think with the naivety that you can only really have as a 21-year-old, we decided to start our own social network, felt like the obvious choice. So we did and we spent all of our money on a very, very complicated website that we had designed and we had no money left for marketing. So we did what we knew and what we do was social media. So we started to market it through social and ended up having around a thousand users in the first few weeks, crashed our web designers server on launch night, which sounds cool, but was really, really scary at the time.
And yeah, we quickly realised that we didn't really have the capital knowledge to really make a good go of this and to continue it, but luckily whilst we were planning that we actually started giraffe. We thought maybe let's start a safer business. And we started giraffe and I always joke that the website we started before we planned for a year, whereas Giraffe, we started in an afternoon, didn't overthink it, just got a website out. And really the reason for that was that a lot of our friends who were in bands and we had family members who had businesses we're kind of seeing what we were doing and saying, could you use social media for my business or for my band? And it just kind of took off from there. So that's sort of the origin story if you like. And we're 13 years in, and it was probably around two or three years ago that I started to think about this idea of human first marketing.
And the reason for that was a few things. One, obviously ai, which I'm sure we'll talk about in great depth, was appearing on the horizon. On top of that, the results that we were seeing from more traditional methods were starting to decline. It felt like advertising paid advertising was becoming more and more expensive, less and less wanted. There's a lot of ad fatigue. And on top of that, we found that consumers were, they had a more heightened level of curiosity and consciousness around purchasing decisions, who they do business with, what's in their food, all of these extra details that haven't always been there. And I think over the last few years have really kind of heightened and we sort of stumbled on the commonality between all the strategies that we're using that work are people, when there's people at the centre of it, it works better.
And then you started to see influencer marketing explode, which again is quite people focused. Things like employee advocacy. We're doing a lot more of that for our clients. We're doing a lot more social media for executives and helping executives manage their LinkedIn presences. So it kind of all came together and there was a bit of an aha moment where I phoned Kain at about 10 o'clock at night and said, I've got this idea, I'm calling it Human First Marketing. And yeah, it's just sort of spiralled from there really, and it's kind of all come together and the book is kind of the culmination of that journey.

I love that. That's a fab origin story. So 15 years ago you started the agency, is that right?

About 13 years.

13, yeah. Yeah. So has been mean, the world has changed a lot. The world of marketing has changed a lot in that time, I'm sure. What is the, I guess day to day of giraffe now? I mean what sort of skill is the company? What do you do for your customers? What's your main service offerings?

Yeah, so we're a team of around, I think there's 15 or 16 of us now. We're based on the South coast in Portsmouth. However, we work predominantly hybrid. So we do have an office in Portsmouth and we meet as a full team two, three times a month. But we work with all sorts of clients, all different industries, B2B, B2C, and our main offering is social. We specialise in everything that can happen on social, so from the organic, so content creation, community management, through to paid ads, through to influencer marketing. If it happens on social, it's kind of our thing. But in the last six months, 12 months, obviously with the book, we're in the process of really repackaging and sort of introducing some new services that are a lot more human fest focused. Some of that's happened organically because we're attracting clients that are interested in what this human fest thing means and what should they be doing. And as I said earlier, a lot of our clients now, the work we're doing with them is on human fest tactics, if you like.

Brilliant. Cool. I see it on the shelf behind you, but I've got my copy ready. I already, I was looking back, I first stumbled across you on LinkedIn, I think you posted four images of the possible cover of the book
And it lapped out of my faith, human First marketing, it was like, this is everything I've been looking for because I started human video sort the middle last year, but officially at the start of 2025. So it's early days. I'm formulating all these thoughts of what it means and what we're trying to do for people and it was kind of a lonely journey as well at that point. It's just me. I have a couple of contractors currently, but it's still just me. So there's a lot of conversations about all of this happening inside my head. So it was a real moment for me to see somebody's written an awesome book all about this. And I think I was looking back, I said this slightly excitable connection request to you saying, this is awesome. We definitely need to talk. So bring you onto the book, human First Marketing, the Art of Being Seen, trusted, and Remembered, which I absolutely love. Give me the overview, the thesis behind it all, what's the headline over to dive into that a little bit for me, just as an overview.

I'm so glad that you like the subtitle because
Honestly the most difficult thing about the book was deciding on the title and the subtitle and then probably the cover, the writing of it sort of flowed out me and I didn't find it too challenging. I actually really enjoyed it. But there was something about the finality of a title and someone said to me at one point, 99% of people are going to read the title and not the book. More people see the title of the book than actually read it. And then suddenly I was sort of entered into a bit of a existential crisis. I remember sitting and across the coffee with a friend of mine and he had his notepad out and we were just, okay, what'd you like about this and what'd you not like?

Can you remember any of the other auctions?

My second favourite title that I still was just Marketing for Humans, which obviously was a double entran and then it's got the Marketing for Dummies vibe to it. But I was really keen to, and you sort of touched on this earlier, that this is a new area, this ISS 500 books on the topic. It's kind of being written at the moment and I sort of wanted to really just put the name of what it is on the front cover. So that's why I ended up going with just Human First Marketing, but the art of being seen, trusted, and remembered. The book was originally going to be called Beyond the Logo, going past just branding and thinking more about the human behind it. And then the subtitle for that was going to be The Art of Being Seen. But the more I wrote the book, the more I thought actually a lot of this is about trust and it's also about being memorable and not just a corporate facade.
So I've gone off on a complete tangent here talking about the title, but that's great. That's what I want. Yeah, it's great. The book, the was quite a selfish project in the sense that all of the ideas that are in the book were floating around in my head, but it was chaos and I needed to bring them together into a coherent framework and really question myself on each chapter think, well, what do I think about this and what have we done? What's worked, what didn't work? Why? And also look into the science behind some of it as well, okay, so this works, but why? What's the psychological theory or sociological theory that backs this? I'm a bit of a nerd. I kind of like looking into that sort of stuff. So the book was, let's see if we can build a framework that allows people to use this. So it is not something I want to just safeguard for giraffe. I think this is a positive for marketers and for society generally. So yeah, the goal of the book was let's understand what this is and then create the framework of how other people can use it.

I love that. Yeah, it's 432 pages. It's not a small book. There's a lot going on in there. I love that it's full of case studies, nearly every other page I've spent this morning kind of I to hold my hands up, I haven't made my way through the whole thing yet. It's been a bit, I only got it a week ago. It is a big, big read, but it's great. I love all the case studies. It's either case study or a whole section of here's how you can use this or here's a practical application of it all the way through the book, which is really great. And even just the structure of it, it feels like the agency playbook of, I imagine you had all those thoughts and you were applying them in giraffe and it's just like this is pulling it all together, is it? Yeah,

That was one of the fun things about it was having ideas as I was writing and then having a platform to immediately try them so that everything in the book has been tried, tested, reworked, the book's long, we got the interior design of it back and I had a serious conversation with my editor because she said, this is a bulky book. There's a lot in here. And we had a big discussion about whether or not we wanted to trim it. But to be honest, Chris, I've read a lot of business books over the years and there are some brilliant ones, but there are also some books that I read and think that could have been a blog post

A hundred percent

Where they've taken one small idea and it is kind of been dragged over the length of a book. And I was desperate for it to not be that I really wanted to write something that was so overflowing with ideas and things you can do and lessons and theory and that no one could possibly buy it, read it and feel like they've been shortchanged. There's so much in there and that's important to me. That's the main reason I wanted to write the book was so it could help people. So yeah, I probably went a bit overboard, but

No, it's not a criticism at all. I think it's great and I think anyone that dives into it, it's just going to get so much out of it. There's so much of the practical there. For someone like me, I'm holding it in. It is awesome and I really look forward to diving really deep into it and applying it because so much of it is applicable for what we do for our customers and even for me and what I'm doing in building my, I asked about the size of your agency, I have a plan to grow human video. There's a potential for there to be more Chris Nelsons and more editors and more remote producers. So that's kind of my dream. And I guess there's so much in there that I could get out of it. I know just even from your recent posts about it, tell me a little bit about what it's been like to become a published author today. You had a great post talking about all the messages you received, including my photograph of me in the car going, I got it. Tell me a little bit how that has been, how it's been received, how you felt about it being out in the world. You've mentioned it a few times in posts, how's all that been?

Yeah, I think it's something that was really important to me was that I walked the walk and there's no point in writing a book on human first marketing and not actually using that as the main form of marketing style for actually talking about the book. So from when I started, I decided I'm going to share everything I'm going to share where I am in writing it, what I'm working on, what's going well, what's not going well. You talked about the covers earlier, I really wanted people to feel like they were on the journey, and I don't think I could have anticipated just how much support I got through the process. It was really, really lovely people I don't really even know reaching out and supporting. I mean, Chris, we didn't know each other before you reached out. And

Yeah, I mean my question to the guess, is there more people like me, has it led to more connections and finding other people out in the world with similar views or it's certainly interested in human first approach?

Yeah, definitely. And another thing I did that was really helpful was I built a cohort of early readers, a collection of people that I trusted to read as I was writing. So some of that was a collection of people I already know. So my co-founder read the book and can always trust Kane to give me brutal honesty, which he did in spades. Some of our partner agencies, so other agency founders, some of our clients that we work with at Giraffe and also some people that I didn't know, the level of kindness and support that people put in it really sort of made you appreciate humanity, which was on Brown I suppose. I was speaking to a chap called Freddy, who's the head of marketing at the fa, and he's someone I've had on LinkedIn and we've had brief exchanges in the past, but he offered to help and read the book and become good friends since. And stuff like that has been a really nice sort of byproduct of writing. So yeah, it's been really lovely. The launch day itself was incredibly stressful because I wasn't in the country. So my wife is a destination wedding photographer, which means we travel a lot. I

Used to be a wedding photographer, I 50 weddings under my belt, so before video I was photographer for 10 years.

You know

How I know what that life is. I mean, not so many destinations in my time, but in the video world I've been really fortunate to work in nearly 50 countries.

Oh, that's amazing.

What's

Your favourite country you've been to?

It's a close tie between Japan and Columbia.

Nice.

I love both for very different reasons. Yeah, I was in Japan. I was only in Japan once about six or seven years ago, but I got to work kind of in a remote fishing village in the north coast of Japan as well as I was in Tokyo, spent a day in Kyoto, did the train and everything, but then spent about a week in this very remote fishing village working with local folks. And it was amazing. It's just such a different culture. I love the respectful nature of it. The train conductor goes down to carriage and before he leaves, he turns around and just buys to the whole train carriage. And when the bus is moving away from the station, the ticket guide is bought. I love that. There's so much respect and that whole experience was amazing. But Columbia, for all sorts of wild and wonderful other reasons, not too wild and wonderful, but just really cool place. There was a INE in Columbia and I really love, I've been in lots of different parts of South America, but it was fabulous too. So I appreciate the world and different cultures and different people.

It's huge. It is something that if you go back 10 years, my wife and I sat down and planned out what we wanted our life to look like. And one of those things was travel and trying to find work that could either facilitate travel or sustain it. So obviously my work, occasionally we travel, but predominantly the beauty of what I do is I can do it from anywhere so long as there's wifi, which sometimes is difficult and whereas Leah's business, it takes us all over the world. So she shot a wedding in Barbados a few years back and it ended up being featured in Vogue and it just really took off. And since then she's taken us all over the place. So on the day of the launch, I was actually in St. Martin, one of the Caribbean islands. And because of the time difference, I was up at about half two in the morning because my whole networks professionals, so everyone was sort of clocking into their laptops at seven, eight o'clock. So yeah, I got up at half two and just sat in the dark, just frantically messaged people. The

Glamour of launch day and the Oh my goodness,

Exactly.

But isn't that the fact that you could do that and the remote thing? So a big part of the whole point of human video is remote production. So we were joking, I was getting you to change your lighting and close your blinds and whatnot. It went through a whole process. But that is my life and it's because so many people work remotely now, the interviews that we conduct every day with people, and we're all about real interviews with real human beings and creating content around that. And we've kind of produced it like this because people are remote and not just employees are remote, but we create customer testimonials and those are with people all over the world. And business especially B2B is so global now, and many of our clients there might be based somewhere, but actually their workforce is completely scattered all over the world. And so your actual staff are not all in England as well. Do you have some remote, are they remote? Remote maybe In England,

Our clients are more worldwide. I don't think we have a single client in Portsmouth. We know we are not local focused, but our team are pretty local. I think the reason for that is that we tried fully remote and struggled with it. I found that we were missing some of that culture, and I like getting face to face. I think that's the human first sort of part of me. I guess that sometimes you just can't beat being in the office. I love being in the office with the whole team and you end up having conversations about random stuff that you would never have had over teams because it would just be so out the blue. Last week we all met as a team and we went bowling. And I think some of that stuff, it seems cliche, but it is really important. I genuinely like doing it. And I think for what we do as well, a lot of our work's quite collaborative and you can't replicate the feeling of sitting in a room and just brainstorming something, whether it's a campaign or a new client that we're trying to work with. So yeah, our clients are all over the place, but our team is pretty local just because we do like to have those face-to-face days.

And what is your reality of hybrid working? Are you in? Good question.

Yeah.

Is it's a movable feast, is it? Or?

Yeah, I think it's an endless quest to try and find the best way of doing it. So currently we meet twice a month as a full team. The rest of the time we're from home, there's a chance that could increase, but I don't think we would ever go past, say one day a week in the office. And the beauty as well is that we have people in our team who have family in other countries, for example, and we have a work from anywhere policy. So there's a woman on our team who's all our family lives in Bulgaria, so a few times a year she goes back to Bulgaria for a couple of weeks, just continues working as normal. You wouldn't really even know, but she gets to see her family and that's really important. So yeah, that policy is really helpful. Fab. Yeah,

Our biggest clone to the moment is a series B SaaS that's actually based in Belfast, but completely scattered is nearly a hundred headcount now, but they're all over the world and they're fully, fully remote, but they get together three times a year, the entire company, and it just happened last week and it's always in Belfast. And even though all the work we do for them is remote, I get to be at their offsite with them. And for me it's amazing as well, but I just get to this moment where they all come together again. And sometimes they're growing so quickly that every time they get together there's like 20 people in the room that have never physically met all their colleagues and they've never spent at that point, months on road calls. And it's just amazing seeing them for the first time walk into the room and Guin

After COVID, wasn't it?

Oh,

Our team grew and changed and then we all met up for the first time and it was lots of, oh, you're a lot taller than I.

That's the one, isn't it? You're like, oh,

Stuff like that. Yeah, it was really weird seeing people that you feel like really well, but you've never met them. It's quite bizarre sensation.

My brother's a software developer and I remember he had, it must have been the 2022 Christmas party or something. It was the first time his colleagues had got together physically in a year and a half. And he says it was bonker, the people that he'd worked with for really a long time only ever through the screen and we're suddenly in a room together. And I totally get that human connection. And I mean, it's the thing we're trying to replicate, isn't it, in terms of the content and bringing that all that goodness and all that purpose of connecting as humans into the content. Do you want to dive a little bit into that? I know we're kind of bouncing between things, but think it feels fundamental to me that you're presenting as real humans and humanising a brand as well through content. Tell me a little bit more, I guess, how that fits in with the human first approach.

So I think there's two sides to this. One is the customers and one is the team. So I say this so often that my team are probably absolutely sick of hearing me say it, but businesses are just one group of humans trying to provide value to another group of humans. When you really boil it down, we think of B2B and B2C, but really it's just humans to humans and so on. So we're always looking for ways to how can we bring the team forward, how can we involve the team in the marketing so that when someone encounters your brand, they're not just encountering a logo or a colour palette or a selection of fonts that they're seeing people, they're seeing the real people that work there and getting a feel for the culture of the organisation. And then the other side is the customers. So how do we involve customers in marketing?
And there's lots of psychological reasons why that's effective in terms of just as a marketing technique, social proof, seeing what other people are doing, seeing that someone else has bought this product. We talked earlier about customer testimonials. Those things are obviously really effective, but it's also making sure that the marketing we create is designed for our audience and we're not fully into the trap of thinking of our customers as data points in a spreadsheet or there's a classic example of two customer profiles that have exactly the same demographics like year they were born, where they were born, like their interests, blah, blah, blah. And then you zoom out and it's King Charles and Ozzy Osborne, and you sort of think, okay, well does it work then because you're not going to be able to market to Aussie in the same way you're going to be able to market to the king of the country.
So there's a lot in the book about understanding your audience, and that goes beyond just demographics, and it is more about understanding them emotionally, understanding the context that they're living in at the moment, how they behave, how they make decisions. It is kind of trying to move away from just generic demographic based customer profiles and actually starting to almost come to terms with the fact that you're not going to be able to create a box where you go, this is my customer, because these are people, they're all dramatically different. So it's just trying to understand the commonalities of what their day-to-day life is like and what it is they're looking for and what they're experiencing.

And how do people go about accessing that sort of those different pieces of information that aren't, I guess data points. Are you talking about customer interviews and spending more time talking to your customers and trying to discover that thing or looking deeper into who are your customers already or what practical ways do people achieve that?

I feel like you're setting me up here to talk about something from the book, so I'm going to Oh,

Okay. I wasn't totally into, it's not on my list, but yeah, go for it.

So in that chapter, I've created something that I call the empath framework, which is a tool for understanding your audience and I love an acronym. Good. Yes. Anyone who's read the book will know I love an acronym. So the E in this stands for emotional understanding. And for me, one of the most emotional places are reviews, just the internet generally, to be honest on social. And so one of the things I suggest doing is collating all of the reviews that you have, collating reviews from your competitors, looking at forums, looking on social, searching for keywords to see people discussing things. So for me, that might be searching social media agency and just seeing what people are saying. And what I then do is I would bring all of those things together and probably get AI to review it and analyse it and then find me the common emotional words that keep coming up, almost create a word map of the emotions that seem to be appearing.
I'm going to wilt through this. This could take ages. The M is for market trends. So this is about understanding the world that your customers are living in, what's happening with the economy, what's happening in their industry. These are really important things. The peers for patterns of behaviour, a lot of this comes from data you could draw from your website in terms of seeing how people interact with your site, how long do they spend on it, how many times do they visit it before they actually get in touch or buy something. I put out a poll yesterday because I'm reviewing our marketing strategy at the moment for giraffe, and I'm using this framework and I wanted to know how people search for agencies. If you're a senior marketing person, where do you start and what's your behaviour for finding? And it was interesting that more people seem to start by asking someone for a recommendation and they do a Google search, which is pretty crazy and really should shape how we're doing our marketing.
So that's the A is audience feedback. So you touched on it earlier, customer interviews. It is crazy to me how many businesses don't speak to their customers about this sort of stuff. We try and speak to our customers about how did you find us? What was it about us that gave you the green flag? Were there any red flags that you thought a little bit worried about this or it's interesting to find out what it is that made them pick us and what it is that they were experiencing when they were looking for an agency. Tiers for team feedback, and again, it's often overlooked, especially in larger companies. So usually your sitting on a gold mine of information because your sales team are speaking to prospects all day, every day. They see the patterns, they see what keeps coming up, what are the problems, what are the frustrations, what's the commonalities between the ones that convert and the ones that don't.
And then also your team that are customer facing, they know better than anyone what makes a happy client, what it is they're looking for, what criticism do you get? And then you bring all of those data points together and you create what I call a human understanding map, which is essentially a collection of realities and trying to understand all of those things that we've just collected and put them into something that you can return to and understand. But I would also reiterate that people are always changing, so this is something you should be doing at least once a year because it always changes.

I love all of that and there's so many almost new thoughts that people, anyone listening to this I imagine are just going, oh, well, I've never done that and I can totally see the value in it. I know especially in the B2B world, there's a whole movement now to really dive into gong interviews and transcripts of sales calls or even something, a deal you've lost and just a great chat to find out more about what went wrong or what they could do better. And even then, just as you say, piling all that into ai, looking for the patterns pulling out, that's all great advice. I love that. Really practical.

Yeah. Well that was really key for me with the book was to, yes, it is great to stand there and say we should be doing more of this and we should be doing more of that. But I wanted to create some things that people could go and use today. And I think with understanding your customer, a lot of the roadblocks are fear of negative feedback, fear of hearing something you don't really want to hear, which I get, I fully get. But those are important conversations to have and it's important to not live under a rock with these things and face up to them. And we've naturally, as a social media agency, we pour a lot of our time and effort into our own social media. And what I'm finding from all the research I'm doing at the moment is that your social media for a social media agency anyways is a portfolio, but it's not really how people are going to find us for our clients. So you literally start thinking, okay, well should we be doing more SEO? Because that's often where this starts. Should we be doing more networking? Because a lot of this is on recommendations, doing more stuff like this, getting out on podcasts, going to events. So it's going to have a bigger effect on our strategy for sure.

Yeah, it's like your customers could be a B2C brand, but then you're trying to put yourself out there, I guess is completely a B2B relationship, and you're trying to market yourself in a completely different way to what you do for your customers, I guess, isn't it? It's almost like completely parallel or opposite world, actually, tangential world. No, I love all of that. Thinking of diving into the book and you've mentioned we touched on there, let's go for it. Ai, we've already listed in the flow of this conversation, talked about really useful practical applications really of AI that we're both use in our daily lives. I mentioned before the call, it's something I think about a lot. It's almost fundamental to why I started the company. I've been a commercial filmmaker for the past 15 years, and that is charging around the world, making commercial films for all sorts of businesses, but doing that in a really fairly high production beautiful way and in the past couple of years, so much more in the past six months.
But thankfully I think I saw a bit of this coming. And even just the post pandemic acceptance of and actually embracing of lower production values and video production, user generated content and content just produced on a phone is the opposite world, I guess, to what I've been doing for the past 15 years. And I mentioned that there's loads of great things with ai and as far as I can see, but I really suppose I push against or I really wonder about the trust that is lost when brands create visual content, particularly solely using ai. The extreme example would be AI avatars of maybe completely fictitious people. And I've seen just scroll through LinkedIn today, you'll see companies saying, we will create user generated content, fully created an AI on mass for you, and it doesn't make any sense to me. And actually scrolling down the comments of that, it's just full of really where's the trust?
How are your customers going to feel when they finally realise that none of these people are real? And all of this recommendation is doing all the opposite of what real user generated content actually does, which is delivers authentic social proof and shows people really liking a product and using it. So yeah, over to you. Where do you sit on all of those things I just talked about? How do you feel about maybe particularly this dive particularly into kind of visual content created solely using AI and visual and I guess text content. You'll see comments and LinkedIn posts and all sorts of things done well or done really badly with ai.

I mean it snap absolute can of worms, isn't it? Correct,

Isn't it?

Some is should make a

Podcast all about it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean I always say the same thing, but I'm not anti ai. I'm anti lazy ai.

Yeah, I love that.

It shouldn't be replacing humanity. It should be supporting and helping and giving us the space to do more creative work, I would say on AI generated imagery. I mean, firstly it's crazy impressive. I'm a bit of a geek for tech and stuff.

I like the word terrifying.

Yeah, equally terrifying,

Creatively terrifying.

But I would argue it's no real difference to stock imagery in the sense that brands that use stock imagery, these aren't their people, these aren't photos taken in their office. And I mean equally against that, to be honest, as AI generated, the only difference is that at least the stock imagery, they usually have five fingers and two legs, two arms.

Oh man, you still see it. You still see it. Absolutely.

I saw a great photo the other day. Someone had generated a LinkedIn profile photo of themselves and they just had three legs. It's just, it's amazing. There's nothing

Wrong, nothing to see here.

So yeah, I think AI is amazing. And I think naturally there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of insecurity, and I understand that. I think that's a completely plausible reaction to what is just unprecedented. That I think when it first started to appear, I'd often compare it to when the internet first came out and say, I'm sure I'm old enough to remember the sounds of a modem turning on and

Oh man,

All those sorts of things. And I remember at the time people were having fear about the internet and my mum wouldn't bank on the internet for a very long time or buy something on the internet or researching something on the internet seemed a bit sort of like you were cheating. And whereas now we don't think of any of those things. And I do think we're at a similar point with ai, but I think AI is just, it's on another level and I think that's why it's so hard to predict because there's nothing in history that really replicates what's happening at the moment. And I think that the main thing is we have to embrace it. We can't fight against it because it's not going to go anywhere. It is too useful and it's too good and it's getting better all the time. So we need to figure out how to use it effectively without losing the human touch.
And I think that's why the book is important. It's important why what you are doing is important that we don't lose that human element. AI is great for admin analysis and to fair even as a sounding board sometimes to kind of balance ideas off and just get a different opinion. But it can't replace, it can't replace humans in marketing. And I think that's going to become even more important because I think smaller brands with smaller budgets will probably turn to AI more and quicker. So there's an opportunity there. There's an opportunity there for small brands to say, actually we're going to double down on posting photos of our team and being founder led or getting our customers involved in marketing and what is already working well now will work even better in two years, three years time. So that's why I think this is the right approach to take to marketing at the moment. It will help you differentiate yourself.

I love that. Even you mentioned stock photography. So as a photographer by trade a long time ago, I always advocated just capturing great photography of your team or what your people doing today and videos. Well in the day, I've made so many videos over the years that we're all about just humanising a brand. So even thinking of a furniture manufacturing company or something like that. And I've been in the workshop seeing the folks doing all the different processes and just showing that this is real and these are people that love what they're doing and put so much care and attention into it. Even last week at the offsite for that company, I took hundreds and hundreds of photographs even as well as video of, because it's a fairly remote company, it's just this big SaaS brand, but actually their thing and the thing that differentiates them is their people.
And just seeing that these great humans behind the brand is just, when you drip that out, it just creates so much more trust. I've heard people talk even about you could speaking stock photography these days, you could just throw up any, I could create any company brand and throw in some stock photos and just pretend to be something. But if you really want to, I mean the trust element is just so critical to everything. People buy from people that trust. And I just feel like humanising, really humanising the brand is so critical to that. And I remember, I think the first time I came across avatars was Synthesia, who kind of one of the big players in that world, but for a couple of past couple of years, they put the product out into the world saying, this is just a really great way of creating internal training content at scale.
You no longer have to power studio, get talent auto write scripts. We can put a human ish avatar on screen for you and create this stuff at scale. But it was very specifically just for internal training coming. And I sort of thought, oh, it's still not great. You're kind of showing that you don't really care that much and you're not maybe instilling any brand values or whatnot and not having your own staff produce that stuff. But I could sort of see what they're doing if it needs to be a massive scale. But I recently stumbled across them and they were pitting, their whole focus has kind of understandably shifted to actually user generated, fake user generated content, which is just a whole, it's not user generated, it's computer generated. I can't get my head around that one at all in particular. So that world of just a completely faking something and it not being a real person even at all, you can create an avatar of somebody in your company that's one step below where it's actually a real personality or somebody connected with your company that you're maybe trying to create more and more content of.
But I just feel like a completely fake person as a whole thing.

I don't really have many concerns about that. I don't think it's ever going to really take off and this can get clipped up and

Yes. Do you remember last year when you said Phil, that that'll never take off that thing that has,

The reason for that is that I think we're already seeing an influencer marketing a bit of backlash in the sense of macro and mega influencers. People aren't trusting them as much because people are a lot more hyper aware of influencer marketing and the fact that these aren't just people who are saying, Hey, this product's great, we know they're getting paid, which,

And they have to on Instagram, they have to say they're getting paid, don't they?

Yeah, you have to claim it. And I think we're already seeing that. I mean, most of the influencer campaigns we do at Giraffe now are with micro or nano influencers. And the reason for that is that their audiences are just, they trust them more and they're more particular about what they do and what they take on. So I sort of feel like if we're already starting to distrust real people because we think they're trying to market something to us, surely ai, I mean we're going to go the same route we mean, and that these sort of AI avatars aren't going to necessarily have engaged audiences that want to know about their life. They don't have a life. I talk a little bit in the book about parasocial relationships and people having these relationships with people that haven't met yet. I just can't see that happening with AI because there isn't the sort of authentic context of them living.

So what is the opposite of that in the book and then your kind of approach to first marketing, what should companies be doing, particularly maybe thinking in terms of the audience of this podcast in the B2B world, what sort of activities and what sort of content should people be doing either for their teams? And you mentioned led, founder led stuff for you, what do you recommend people do?

I think it starts at the beginning of the book because most of the ideas and the techniques and stuff within the book, they only really work if you kind of have your stuff together. I'm assuming this is a family podcast, Chris.

I dunno, I haven't decided yet.

And I think that means being authentic and having values and a culture and these sorts of things. So if you have all of that stuff down, my advice is don't overthink it. Get your team involved. See how they'd like to contribute, whether that's doing videos, blog posts, getting out to networking events, find what suits them and allow them to share without overly policing it. Go for the authenticity piece. Most of my LinkedIn posts aren't me saying, Hey, if you want to make another million pounds next year, if I had to start my agency again, here's the five things. I just find that stuff just really fake. And it is not that these people Don dunno what they're talking about. I'm sure they do and I'm sure they're really successful, but it's not very relatable. And for me, I'd much rather share like, Hey, here's how I messed up last week. Here's what happened last week. And share the good and the bad because the number one currency for marketing is trust.
Trust comes with, I always say trust starts with truth. You have to be real and you have to own the good and the bad. And people are more likely to believe what you're trying to push and what you're trying to sell if that they know that you're also really honest about stuff that maybe is less glamorous or less of a positive. So that for me is what I always start with is put out authentic content, get your team involved and start there. Our team love doing all sorts of marketing. I mean obviously we're a marketing agency, so you'd expect that, but

You've been in trouble if they didn't.

Yeah, exactly. But I just get out of their way. They know the brand, they know what we do, they know our culture better than anyone. So I let them come with the ideas and say, look, I think we should do this, we should do that. We're in the middle of relaunching our podcast and we've got some really great people in our team who have essentially said, look, this is the direction that I want this to be real. Do what you think is best. Go out and make stuff and let's see what we can learn. And I think that's the key is, and you sort of touched on it earlier, that you almost don't want your content to be overly polished. You do want it to have an element of rawness and in the video world, an example I always use is Gary Nevilles, the overlap show on YouTube, I think it's called Stick to Football. And I just love how every episode starts with everyone kind of walking in to set and there's real conversations happening. They've almost like they've started rolling the cameras 10 minutes too early, but that makes you feel like you're in the room with them and that they're your mates and that you're getting to see a side of them that you wouldn't see if they were on Sky Sports News

Or something. They're pulling back the curtain, aren't they?

Yeah, exactly. And it just makes it all feel real and sort of more engaging. And that all happened in the pandemic. We had a supply and demand problem. We had people using their phones and going on social media. I think it was like three times as much because everyone was just at home bored. And then we also had a supply issue in the sense that we were stuck at home with limited resources and still needed to create content.

Oh man, you should try being a travelling commercial filmmaker in the Global Pandemic. That was a whole story. Oh wow. Yeah.

But that was when needs must and people started creating lower quality.

But it created a shift, didn't it? Just totally.

It resonated. I always use the example of, I think it's Dior who did an advert for a new fragrance and they spent millions on an advert. It was sort of transnational. It was all these different places and celebrities and all these sorts of things. And then I think they had someone recorded behind the scenes on a phone and that got more views

Brutal than the multimillion behind film, brand film probably thing that

Was scripted out and I had music. I think it's because people, they want that. They want real, they want something that feels authentic and they can connect with.

Yeah, totally. Totally. And yeah, for me, that whole mobile phone thing, I mean whenever anyone says to me, oh, over the phone wobbly content, I kind of dive into the fact that that works because it's authentic. It's the authenticity that from just being real on camera doesn't necessarily need to be terribly lit and wobbly. It's the fact that the people and the humans are being themselves and you are getting the real unscripted version of something, and that's within the limitations of remote production. That's what I try to capture with our clients is just these conversations and not real encouraging people to be real. And that includes multiple people in a company, usually more senior people, but sometimes it can be a technical thought leader as well. And just having those, creating that real content. That's brilliant.

We've started to do this with giraffe. We've a member of our team who does a lot of our video content. I've asked him to start just recording our office days and creating vlogs of them. I

Saw one of the recent ones when we were all together and you were in the office and then walked down there down the street. It's

Not perfectly lit, it's a bit wobbly, but what it does is it captures the vibe of an office day at Giraffe. If you were at the day and you watch the video, you're like, oh yeah, that feels exactly like what it was to be there. And I feel like that's more important. I think it's great that people get to get a feel for giraffe and who we are and what our team are like and

Create for recruitment.

Oh, it's as long as Chris that we get that rumour we're interviewing and people say, oh, I listened to the podcast, or Oh, you guys are great on TikTok, or it always comes up. We've even had people turn up on their first day and be a little bit starstruck of Bri on our team who's does all our tiktoks and stuff, and they're like, oh my God, you're Brie from TikTok.

Well, that's it, isn't it? That extends to being, if you're in the B2B world being on a trade show and people just come up and go, oh, I've been listening to your podcast for a year. I already know you. Or even just sales conversations and you're like, actually, I know all about your product and I all know all about your team already and just I, I'm here to get a price and sign on the dollar line. The hard work has been done really it shortened sales cycles. It does all sorts of amazing stuff by just putting the team right there. I love it. I'm conscious of time filled. So I want to the last few minutes just to share with folks, what's the best way to connect with you to find out more about what you're doing? Where would people find you?

Yeah, so connecting with me personally, probably linked in to the place I'm hooked up to the most to an unhealthy amount of time. So you can find me on there. Just search filter Evans. I'm on Instagram as well. Obviously draught the website's, draught social media.co uk. But yeah, check out the book, the book's on Amazon. Thank you very much. I love my glamorous assistant. Yeah, yeah. Is

Amazon the best place for people to get? It's kind of like the easiest,

But yeah, it's the easiest, the place to get it. It's available as an ebook and as a paperback there's a hard back on its way and to basing whether to do an audiobook, the main sort of thing there is, I hate the sound of my voice.

Look, hey, I'll just do that for you, Phil, that I've heard.

It's totally fine. It would be very useful. Can you imagine anti-human first to get anyone up for me to record it? So yeah, at some point I have to

Plop twists all done by computer. Yeah, no, look, I highly recommend the book. I've loved dipping in and out of an I can't wait to be able to spend more time on it. I've really appreciated this conversation. I suspect it'll not be our last. I'm sure it's great that everything you're doing is so aligned, I guess, with what we are doing as well. And as you said, it's just this kind of understanding seems to be, and enthusiasm for thinking more about the humans first in all the marketing that companies are doing. And yeah, I think the book just have a wonderful, as almost playbook, as I say, to diving into all aspects of that and so many parts of it. I think people will just have real aha moments where they didn't think how to apply stuff or just new ways of thinking about things as well. Some of us really refreshing and we didn't get into pinball machines and all sorts of other great thoughts, but maybe in another conversation, but there's some

Wonderful absolute teaser there. Chris, I know you

Like that

Part two,

Right? Folks will have to just buy the book to find out what that's all about. But I really appreciate your time, Phil. It's been really cool conversation. And I say always for me as a solo founder diving into all of this stuff, it's just really cool to have a conversation about humanising marketing and yeah, thank you so much.

I couldn't turn down being on a podcast called Human Marketing. That would be, I'd have to just hand the book in I think at that point. So it's a bit of pleasure and yeah, hopefully we get a chance to do it again.