(buckle in, there’s a lot to revisit!)
By Katie Warwick · September 21, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
(buckle in, there’s a lot to revisit!)
everybody hates marketing… even marketers. and yet there I was yesterday with 200 of my peers and some VERY clever experts, voluntarily spending a whole day talking about it 🫠🎀
I’ve been to plenty of conferences where you leave with a notebook full of things you should do, only to forget 70% of them by monday. this was not one of those conferences. a few things currently rattling around my brain:
✨ give before you take: George Sullivan reminding us that 90% of your audience aren’t ready to buy when they engage with your content. so… what are you giving them instead: community? entertainment? utility? personality? the job isn’t always to sell the thing. it’s to make people care about it, before they ever need it.
✨ “human” is not a brand value: the ‘beyond the brand account’ panel reiterated that people can smell corporate content from approximately 17 miles away. people buy from people they trust. obvious maybe, but something we collectively forget?
✨ social IS a search engine: Ray Saddiq’s session made me realise we aren’t even close to scratching the surface of what search can tell us. go where people actually search, discover and ask questions. build content for that behaviour. and rather than waiting for culture to move towards us… go make the cultural moment happen. who knew how much social currency a halterneck could hold? 🤭
✨ personality over product - every damn time: Faye Martin & Sophie Milham talked about building a presence people actually notice. be scrappy. write on an amazon wrapper. wrap your head in tights. the product is what you’re selling, the personality is what makes someone remember you. STOP BEING BORING 😴
✨ more than vanity metrics: a save says “I might need this..” a share says “you need to see this!” a follow says “I want more of this!” those can tell us whether we’ve made something that changes behaviour, rather than just screaming: LOOK AT OUR REACH! consumers don’t care about your follower KPI.
✨ protect your brain: Chloe Perkins 💘 final keynote might have been my highlight (shh don’t tell anyone else!) with a timely reminder that being permanently plugged into marketing/social media/the internet is… perhaps not a huge win for the nervous system 😂 mute the notifications. the algorithms will survive without you for 20 minutes.
✨ AI can give us tools, not a point of view: AI can help you make the thing. it can’t decide what is worth making. maybe that’s where marketer value increasingly sits: having an opinion, and making sure you care, because it makes everyone else care.
Sophie Miller and her phenomenal Pretty Little Marketer team just pulled off one heck of a marketing event 🫶🏼 I’ll be front of the queue for the next Scroll Forward 🎀