Welcome to a milestone episode of the CMO Series Podcast. We're pulling out all the stops to celebrate our 100th episode by taking a look back at our favourite moments as well as a sneak peek into the future of professional services marketing and business development.

I'm thrilled to be joined by Yasmin Zand, as we embark on a journey through the realm of modern marketing. We'll uncover the fascinating world of the composable approach to website architecture and explore the remarkable ways AI can supercharge your content marketing efforts. Plus, we'll share invaluable insights gleaned from our incredible guests, who spilled their secrets on successful law firm rebranding, building enterprise-scale websites, and forging a digital-first strategy.

A big thank you to our guests, including Julie Stott, Chief Marketing Officer at Travers Smith, Mary-Anne Russell, Global Managing Director of Marketing & Sales Enablement at AMS, Mikkel Keller Stubkjær, Head of Development at Novicell UK, Crossley Sanford, Managing Director at Ankura and Barney O’Kelly, UK Marketing Director at AlixPartners who left us awestruck at CMO Series Live in London. And heartfelt thanks to all the guests who have made the CMO Series the success it is today. Get ready for more amazing spotlights over the course of the next 100 episodes!

Transcription: 

Charlie: Hello and welcome to the CMO series podcast from Passle. Today, we're so excited to celebrate 100 episodes of the CMO series. I'm Charlie, Marketing and Communications Manager at Passle and I'm very happy to be joined by my colleague, Yasmin Zand, Client Success Consultant over in the US.

Yasmin: Hi, Charlie, how are you?

Charlie: Very well, thank you. How are you doing?

Yasmin: Not bad. Thanks. Happy to be on, happy to be on.

Charlie: Excellent. So for the benefit of the listeners, can you just tell us where you're joining from today?

Yasmin: I'm joining you all from Washington DC. So based on the east coast here in the US.

Charlie: Amazing to have you here today, Yasmin. We're celebrating a huge milestone on the CMO series podcast. This is episode 100. Can you believe it?

Yasmin: I know. When I first joined Passle, I think last year, the first thing everybody was telling me to do was listen to the CMO series and I've been hooked on it ever since and I think that's how we've really grown our audience base. So it's been quite the journey.

Charlie: Awesome. Yeah, it really has been. Yeah, we started the CMO series back in 2021 as a way to share best practices and learning from marketing and business development leaders across professional services. And it started actually one episode that was published on Passle and that became one episode per quarter to one episode per month. And now we actually publish every single week. So it really has grown and it's been an honor to be part of that. But over the past 99 episodes, the series has covered every aspect of a CMO’s role from client service to building innovative teams to the importance of content management, as well as the role of marketing in driving social inclusion. So a whole array of topics that we've covered, but have, have there been kind of any favorites of yours, Yasmin?

Yasmin: Oh my gosh. I don't even know where to start. I think I really liked Brenda Plowman's episode. She's such a good speaker. So I really liked talking to her or I guess I didn't talk to her but listening to her talk, which is fantastic. And then my personal favorites, of course, I'm gonna have to go with my CMO series REPRESENTS episodes. Diana Lauritson and Roy over at Clark Hill. Roy Sexton. He was enigmatic, I guess I should say just a wonderful energy.

Charlie: Absolutely. Personally, I always love hearing about the challenges and stories behind rebranding projects. So we had people like Erica Roman on last week from Cole Schotz and she was speaking about their rebrand. We've spoken to Rachael Schilling at Liskow and Sophie Bowkett over here at Bird & Bird in the UK. So I always take something away from those conversations on kind of how they tackled some of the challenges behind rebranding the law firm. As you kind of just alluded to Yasmin talking about CMO Series REPRESENTS, on a personal level. I've always really enjoyed hearing some of those approaches that fans have taken to ESG. We've spoken to several CMOs about that. So Tamara Costa at BLG, she came on a while back to talk about the role of marketing in driving those initiatives and actually how those values become a key differentiator for law firms.

Yasmin: Yeah, I think it's really interesting that we're hearing about how these social and environmental issues are becoming integral to RFPs and firms are having to respond. So it's not just about, you know, personal or firm values, but really they have to walk the walk. It's becoming a business issue which I'm sure Tamara and others have said.

Charlie: Yeah, 100%. And we had Suzie Williams on from a Canadian law firm McMillan recently and she talks about that from a client experience perspective and she said something about General Counsels are setting the expectations about what they want to see from their legal providers and who's on those teams. So I think they're seeing an increasing trend in, you know, the proposals and credentials and new business opportunities that now include questions around their EDI practices and, the makeup of the lawyers on the file. So those kinds of social and cultural values really are kind of front and centre at the moment and are becoming key to how law firms kind of differentiate themselves in the market.

Yasmin:  Yeah, definitely. And I think something that's interesting too is, you know, when we launched the CMO series represents, you know, we ended up doing it on International Women's Day and you know, it included so many sound bits from all of those kinds of incredible women from across the industry and just sharing their best practice and their experience. So including in all of those business bits that are really relevant to everybody involved.

Charlie: I think kind of working on that compiling those experience from, I think the 60 women in the industry that came on to talk to us for those kind of special International Women's Day episodes, those experience seem to really resonate with the community and kind of hearing those experiences was really powerful, but also great to hear how the industry is kind of moving forward. And some of those amazing initiatives are helping kind of embed equity within farm culture.And on that, you know, we talked about CMO series represents briefly just now, but it's been fantastic to have you on as the host for that series. So you mentioned Diana and Roy. Can you kind of tell us a bit more about some of those favorite moments?

Yasmin: Oh, my gosh, there were definitely a few, I think generally with both. I mean, there's an incredible opportunity with the Represents podcast to be able to hear stories and experiences from people who… You wouldn't, I don't think meeting both Diana and Roy, I mean, they're both so kind, but you wouldn't necessarily go right off the bat and be like, oh, you know, what has your experience been like, you know, in legal marketing as you know, a queer person or as a person of colour and you're not gonna jump out the gate with that. So it's definitely been wonderful being able to get to know both of them and also just hear their experiences. I think with Diana, you know, just getting the perspective of how she, you know, has definitely experienced adversity hearing that and then being able to see how she's kind of grown and evolved from those experiences and like, been able to take it back and support other women that she works with women of color and just raising everybody. You know, what do they say? Like a rising tide lifts all boats. So sharing that I think helps everybody grow and then with Roy something that really struck me was his sense of community is so vast and you see, you can feel it and see it in the way that he engages with people. And that when you meet him, you are immediately inducted into this community of just kindness and like support. And so hearing about his experiences and building community and you know, understanding where he's coming from and learning about, you know, where he grew up and his family and just being able to get to know him better on that way. I think it just is so integral to like how these people have become such incredible people and, you know, their work lives and also their, their personal lives. So, no, I know there was a bit of a ramble, but I think they were just, yeah, they were just so personal and I think that was, that was my favorite part of both of those podcasts.

Charlie: So I completely agree and I think what both Diana and Roy have in common is that they kind of talked about how being a kind of role model  in those communities and, and being the kind of spokesperson, you know, that comes with its own pressure and the pressure to kind of perform and to be, you know, be to represent your kind of community that's quite a burden to take on. And I know Roy talks about how sometimes, you know, you just have to give time to yourself, like, you can't give all of yourself away. And I thought that was really interesting. It's been fantastic to see the CMO series podcast grow and how CMO series represents has kind of been born out of that and see the community kind of build around both of those. But as you know, Yasmin and for the listeners, we hosted our first CMO series live event in London just last week. And I had the pleasure of sitting in on some of the discussions from the day.

Yasmin: Not that I was jealous at all that everybody that I get to work with in the UK got together and meet with all of our very cool clients and you know, folks in the industry. So it looked incredible and I heard there was a lot of arm wrestling. So I would love to know a little bit about the arm wrestling, but maybe for later because I think the content at the conference was incredible. So I got to listen to a few of those bits as well.

Charlie: The arm wrestling, I think maybe we'll go into one kind of like an extra episode and we can kind of do an after-party type session on that. But yeah, it was an amazing day and I'm sorry, you couldn't be there, Yasmin. But I hear rumours that we are gonna come over to the US so watch this space. But today, yeah, we're gonna share just some of the highlights from those sessions. We covered everything from the story of a successful legal rebrand through to the advantages of a composable website. And even the role of AI and content marketing.

Yasmin: This sounds like, I don't know if the digital marketers are listening, but you better be, I think, I think this is a good one.

Charlie: It was exactly that and it had a really good mix of marketing strategy, martech content, which was so interesting and you know, all the feedback we've had from everyone that came along has been that, yeah, they loved all of that kind of that content and particularly, you know, focusing on some of the more kind of tech concepts that we discussed. So we'll be delving into those topics in more detail over the next 100 episodes. But firstly, let's have a look behind the scenes of a legal rebrand with Julie Stott. Julie is CMO at Travers Smith and she came on last week to talk to us about how they recognise the need to completely rebrand their law firm. 

Julie: All of you will know this when you start any new job actually. And the first thing you do is you ask an awful lot of questions and questions of the people that are already working at the organisation, questions of the partners, but also questions of the clients. And I can see Greg Hobson there from Living Group in the audience and having done a rebound previously with Greg actually, and the team at Living when I was working at Lewis Silkin, one of the things that I think stuck with me about the question that Greg first asked, then when I was at Lewis Silkin was "What does this firm want to be famous for?" And that really stuck with me actually, because we all work in a market that is at times quite tricky to differentiate one law firm from another. We've all got corporate partners that think we all do great deals and we're amazing and we can turn things around or we're great advisory lawyers and we can do actually, arguably everyone in this firm works with lawyers who are great at what they do. That's why they are partners in law firms. It's why all of us are working for top-quality firms.

So the question of what do you want to be famous for? I'm not sure anybody has asked any of the organisations I'd been in previously that question. So it stuck with me. So there's definite credit there to Greg for that question. So as a consultant, I'm going around talking to people listening, talking to clients. And about six weeks in, I had a meeting with the partnership board and after I'd given them my assessment of their current BD marketing capability and where I thought they might want to make some changes they said, "Is there anything else?" And I said, "Well, yes, actually, I've got a number of questions for you, but one of which is what do you want to be famous for?" And there was complete silence, like a rhetorical question. And I was like, "It isn't, I was like, I genuinely want the answer genuinely." And they were like, "I don't really know. Well, we're a great city law firm" So is everyone else, so I just kept challenging them. And what became massively apparent is they had no idea actually what they wanted to be famous for. And so that kicked off if you like the conversation about, well, who are you and what is this? And what are we trying to achieve? Everyone has a strike by and everyone has strategies. You have business plans. But I was like, but there's not this single kind of thing. So that kicked start lots of conversations, one of which was then me talking to more clients and asking them, why do you instruct Travers Smith? What is different? Why aren't you going to a magic circle or another top-tier firm or someone else who might be cheaper than we are? And what came across to me, which is why actually we decided to do the rebrand was identifying what Travers Smith thought they were and what the market and clients thought we actually were. And I know in agencies we'll always say to you that's kind of identifying your brand gap. And there was a massive brand gap. So those of you who know Travers Smith of old, as Charles said at the outset, the 200-year-old firm, I almost didn't go to them because I was like, really, they're very pale, male and stale. It's like a blue-blood firm. Everybody said they are very posh, they do corporate work. And I was just like, when you're thinking of an organisation, is that really? And when I got in there, I was like, that isn't what this firm is at all. Actually, what the firm was, was very vibrant, very young, one of the youngest partnerships in the city, quite diverse, very inclusive, doing some really cutting edge, amazing innovative stuff. And I'm like, who knew? Because literally the market wouldn't know this, the market would not know that that's who this firm is because you're just looking like everyone else and you're just promoting yourself and talking about yourselves in exactly the way that you have done for the last 30 years. So that's a very long answer to what brought us to the decision actually, to rebrand was identifying that brand gap and recognising that it no longer reflected who the firm actually was. When you're choosing who your creative agency it's really, really, really important to not just go for the design aspect and the kind of creative ideas and what people might do. It's really important to choose a partner who completely gets law firms and understands partner dynamics and understands partner decision making and the different personalities and how any of us ever have to get anything through and the influencing and the time frames that it can sometimes take to affect organisational change. And so it's really important particularly for you if you're gonna be the kind of the face of the rebrand or certainly the person that makes it happen and that you've got partners that get that, because if they don't, you're just making it really, really hard for yourself.

Yasmin: I love that. What do you want to be famous for question - It's actually something that we have been talking about here at Passle as well. And it's such a great way to start the conversation around rebranding and how firms can stand out.

Charlie: Yeah, I think it really gets to the crux of like who a firm is and that concept of identifying the brand gap, I think is really important and some great tips there from Julie on kind of what to look out for in an agency partner. So hopefully some really good takeaways for our listeners there. Next up, we're gonna hear from someone with extensive law firm experience and she has taken that experience to her current role as managing director of marketing and sales enablement at AMS, which is a global recruitment firm. Mary-Anne Russell joined CMO series live to discuss why becoming digital fast has been so pivotal to their BD strategy.

Mary-Anne: One of the most critical things for anyone working within the sort of people space, specifically after the pandemic was everyone saw it in the news, great resignation, people moving jobs. All of a sudden, different types of work in different modes of working. People want three or four jobs, all these new generations coming through. So AMS had to really pivot hard because we're private equity owned and the private equity owner turned around to us and said, so what are you guys doing about technology? What are you guys doing about working, working remotely? What are you guys doing about this funny thing coming down the road called AI? So as a business, because we are incredibly heavy on people, we've had to look really hard at ourselves and do a bit of soul searching and say, "Okay, what part of what we offer to our clients can be enabled by technology?" And I use that word quite carefully 'enabled' by technology, not necessarily that the robots are going to take our jobs, but what is it that we can do that can help our clients be faster, better, fairer recruiters and bring their talent in. With that… We've had to set up a digital function within the business and I know a lot of businesses have got this, but it was very much from, I keep talking about soup to nuts. What part of what we deliver to our clients and what we do as a business internally. So finance, HR, marketing, business development, can we enable with technology? So we've launched yesterday was our third tech product, which is a very exciting AI technology product. We've also launched a tool that looks at your technology stack. If you're a TA professional, looks at your take stack and finds the holes and where your tech stack is. Don't we wish we could do that for marketing? Because so many marketing tools out there. So we've had to work quite hard to bring technology into our business and also make us a technology business. The sort of underlying bit of this is not only because the market is different and technology marches on and we've got to keep up with that, but also as you creep towards your next round as a private, your own business, your one of the first things the new private equity owner will say is how much tech are you doing and if you're not doing enough, they're not interested. So reporting some of those things that you can really get yourself in a bit of a knot with. And I'm sure a lot of people in the audience will be nodding their heads because you can report every single day. And Jenny who's in the audience, who's in my team said something turned on to me and said something quite profound that I will remember for the rest of my career, which was "Mary-Anne no matter how many times you weigh the pig, it's not going to get any fatter", which is so, so very true. So I think once you, once you sort of transition, or once we had transitioned into not the brand of comms function, but focusing on every single stage of the sales funnel to generate the market awareness, generate the leads, then nurture the leads and then get them down to bid and win. Once you've got everything sorted out like that, then you start thinking about, OK, therefore, what part of this is most important to the business for us to be able to report and then the frequency of reporting because I think we definitely did swing a little bit too far the one way because we then had the data like, "hey report every week" and you really don't need to report to absolutely everyone. So you've got to be really thoughtful once you've got the data, who's the most important person to report to and what are you reporting? And one thing that we did do well, I think, was that probably September last year, we said, "OK, let's just have KPIs for each of the teams, one KPI each" That's it. Otherwise, you can go and reach and quality and clicks and it just gets a bit bonkers because there is so much data and then you keep weighing that pig and it's not going to make it any fatter.

So for each of the teams. So for example, our Brand and Comms team. All I want to hear from them is share a voice, it's pretty blunt. It's a really blunt instrument, but all I want to know is share of voice. And I want to know that our share of voice is one percent more than our share of the market in each of the regions. That means we are louder than we are size-wise. And that's all I'm interested in. Click through rate. SEO - don't really care. That's all in Brand and Comms. On the Business Marketing. So the next phase down the funnel, all we look at is how many marketing-qualified leads we're looking at and what is the, how much of that is being disqualified. That's all. Nice and simple, easy. Everyone can get focused and also the business can understand it. So when they say to us, "Oh, there's this brilliant conference. We need 150 grand." I go, “What's going to give us? We need another 15 marketing-qualified leads. Is it gonna give us that? No, sorry, not gonna happen.”

Yasmin: Mary-Anne is fantastic. I love that phrase how firms, how they can be enabled by technology. It's something that, you know, we try to empower our clients here as well to do.

Charlie: Yeah, agreed and, and her point is also around metrics kind of choosing that very simple and clear KPI to really help focus everyone and prioritise their activities to support that,  I think is something we can all kind of take away from that session. But we know from many of the conversations that we've had with CMOs on the series that building a law firm website is no mean feat. And our next guest joined us to discuss the advantages of composable websites which might not be a term that everyone's familiar with.

But hopefully this next clip from Mikkel Keller Stubkjær who's Head of Development at Novicell UK will help describe, quite nicely I think, what that means.

Mikkel: So what is composable architecture? I'm a technical person and I'll try to explain in as easy terms as possible. So, in order to understand the future one must first understand the past. So as I mentioned, I'm Danish and that means that I grew up in a small town in Denmark, that happens to be the birthplace of the Lego brick. And it so happens that the legal brick is a fantastic thing to actually explain this topic. So imagine these building blocks have different responsibilities in your technology stack. This is your content management system, this is your email marketing platform, this is your personalization, etcetera. In the traditional approach, all of these were tied very closely together. So they are forever bound, you could not change one without affecting others. This is a monolithic platform that has all the functionalities that you need. But then at some point that's not enough. So you start modifying that monolith. Next time I'll use blue bricks instead, they're a little bit bigger. These are small. I know. However, there's a red brick here now and a blue brick here, they represent a change in your platform, which means that now you've modified your monolith, but that goes even further because that's not enough. Over time, you need even more stuff and then you start building on the side of your monolith and it becomes this weird looking. Now, it's not as nice as before. At least that's the intention here. So, what does that mean? That means that when this platform is out of life and you need to start thinking about building a new website. All of these nice bespoke business capabilities that you built here need to throw it all away and start from scratch. And that's at the heart of what this is all about. So the insight number two, I'm going to present to you today is there's no single system that does everything well, of course, that's not we know this from other areas as well. So how do we tackle all of that complexity? Because we want simple systems, we want the flexibility to change at will when and whenever it makes sense and we do that by dividing and conquering. So take a big complicated problem and split it into two. Now we have two less complicated problems and then you split them into two. And now we have two less complicated problems. And that leads me to another definition here that is digital business capability is everything that you need in a certain core business functionality that is available to your users. And the packages business capability is of course a single one of those. So that could be your personalization engine or your email marketing or your a and your jobs postings, et cetera. And it so happens again that the legal brick is fantastic to explain this concept because this is a brick. It has a function, it also have a clear boundary. So it doesn't try to do something that it is not capable of and it has a really nice interface or contract to the outside world. We know that we can put bricks on top on the bottom, but we cannot attach anything to the side of this. This represents a digital business capability, a single responsibility in your technology stack. So the idea around composability is we take the monolith and we break it into pieces. So it's not a single system. Of course, we need to combine these systems and we have certain technologies to do that. But at the end of the day, we just have a handful of responsibilities and they're loosely coupled because it's not a single vendor, it's not a single system, you can change any of these components that will and that means that you can substitute any one of them with another responsibility.

Yasmin: OK. So we had a really great opportunity to be able to chat to Mikkel and his team over at Novicell, I think it was a week or two ago just about that composable architecture. And it is something that is incredible. And I think his LEGO analogy, right? That's a great way of describing composable architecture.

Charlie: It's just perfect, really. A really nice way to kind of quite simply explain that approach and kind of when you hear it just makes total sense, doesn't it?

Yasmin: Yeah, it definitely does. It's just something that, you know, people don't really think about it. And then once you kind of give everybody the opportunity to put their bits of the Lego Castle in just making it flexible and adaptable. Yeah, it's definitely something that we're seeing a lot of clients doing these days.

Charlie: So before taking on the website, we build, we know it's important to understand and identify what little users' needs are gonna be. And we were really lucky last week to also hear from Crossley Sanford she is a Director at Ankura and she came on to share how they approach the enterprise scale website builds to align it with that BD strategy. So here's Crossley.

Crossley: Do you ever go onto a website? And you just think this, I don't know, I'm trying to get somewhere and I can't get there. I'm trying to look something up and I'm not getting the content that I need. I don't really understand this business. I don't really, you know, there's some stuff here but it doesn't really make sense. It's not intuitive. So I think a lot of the times, especially with consulting firms, you build these, you know, these websites, but no one really takes that time at the beginning to really think through why is it functioning this way in the first place. What do our people need out of the website? And most importantly, who is our customer that's coming to the website in the first place? And that all sounds like, yeah, like we think about those things, but really taking that time to identify sort of what are the breakdowns like for us, we had a website that was, you had to go like 20 to 30 clicks deep in order to get where you were trying to go. I mean, that is just pointless. And I'm probably gonna get in trouble for saying some of these things. But, so I think, and also kind of being really open to feedback, like a lot of people when I first joined the marketing department, they were like, we hate the website and people aren't afraid to say that. So I think being really open to feedback and saying, you know, ok, let me go and ask people what they really think about it. I mean, you can do it yourself and go on. We all have been to websites before where we, you know, sort of understand that this website doesn't really look, doesn't look flashy or it looks really flashy, but I don't really understand what they do. So we decided to tackle the three-headed monster and do a rebrand, a new website, a new thought leadership platform, all funneling for business development purposes at one time. So, yeah, no easy task. But I would say that it's kind of like building a house. You can put fresh paint on the walls but and the walls will look great. But if the foundation is broken, it's not gonna be sustainable. So I actually think that it's a gargantuan task to do that. But I would say that there was a kind of a key learning throughout all of this and I'm glad we did it that way because the rebrand really made us, we started there and it really made us go and do a deep dive of who are we. I think a lot of the time when you land on land on websites, you're able to see. Well, I see what they do and I get that they're a consulting firm. I get that they're a law firm. I get that they do, but I don't really know who they are and what they do and how are they differentiated in such a saturated space.

Yasmin: Crossley was great. It was so good to hear her in the CMO Series Live, one of the rare Americans. So that was really nice to be seen. But she really made a good point about using the website to build the personal brands of professionals and having everything integrated in one place so they can see who's viewing their thought leadership. It's something that we've really worked on with them as a client and just in general, like they're, they're really good about empowering the folks at their firm to just kind of develop their own brand.

Charlie: Absolutely. And I think it ties back quite nicely actually to what Mary-Anne was saying about having it really clear reporting metrics. So like having all of that data in one place on your website, makes that process so much easier. And particularly if you have limited resources. As you probably hear a lot about in your role, Yasmin and correct me if I'm wrong, but AI in content marketing is still hot on the lips of probably every marketer out there right now. 

Yasmin: Oh my God, every conversation I have is so what are you guys doing with AI? It seems to be just definitely all the talk on the town, of folks who are starting to test out, you know, ChatGPT with their content. It just there seems to be a lot of questions around how to use it and where it's best leveraged.

Charlie: Yeah. And, and we're hearing a lot of that. And we were lucky enough actually to hear from Barney O’Kelly, he's the UK Marketing Director at AlixPartners and he came along to the event to share his thoughts on the potential of AI in content marketing. And here's a clip from that session.

Barney: If you're trying to do something that's more meaningful in terms of demonstrating somebody's personal brand in the market. You know, we all work in the business of trying to sell relationships or sell some sort of emotional resonance. You know, we all work for advisory businesses that clients call in when they're experiencing something that is uncomfortable to them or they're doing something they've not done before. So the real components of that are emotional, their trust, their sense of certainty, their, and this sense of reassurance that people need. And I think using ChatGPT for content just straight out the box is the wrong answer. Using it to maybe break the back of an article that you're trying to write. You know, I often say people are better critics than they are creators. So giving them something to respond to and going, we've hoovered up all of this information from 2021 or if you're using Jasper from 2019, but they can say, well, that's wrong or I would do this or this has moved on. That can be quite helpful. It just helps shortcut the process and remove some of the friction where I think it's probably got the biggest impact for all of us is around social, sort of taking a longer piece and smashing it up into a series of smaller pieces because lots of people struggle to write social posts because writing short is harder than writing long. And what you actually need is for every 500-word article, you probably need three or four social posts and it just becomes a bit of a pain in the arse to create all of those things. So anything that fits into kind of a very specific task built into a bigger program like a campaign or amplification or atomization of a piece of content is a pretty good thing to work on. And I think another group we don't have in management consulting, which is practice development, lawyers, knowledge, management, lawyers, practice support lawyers, call them what you will. I think pointing it as an on-premise part of all of your content, all of your knowledge could be quite interesting. And I know like Lexology and Mondaq are here so the aggregators could have some quite good fun with it as well, I think, but I, I wouldn't use it to create anything too big and I wouldn't use it at the expense of getting across some degree of personality and authenticity, which is a highly personal thing. The other area where it is really interesting is around imagery. So I think creating the right prompts to try and achieve something that's distinctive and brand right from an image perspective, rather than using stock images, you know, some pieces of technology that shall remain nameless, have large stock image libraries in the back end of them. And after a while you start to see some of us using some of the same images. I think we've exhausted all of Getty's retail images at Alex Partners now. So something that's a bit more visually distinctive, whether you can own the copyright on it, you know, there's, there's legal precedent around mid-journey and so so on. I don't think that's really an issue. It might be one for your lawyers. But to be honest, if you're using stock, you've kind of decided that that doesn't apply and originality doesn't apply. So I think that could be really interesting.

Yasmin: Barney is so eloquent. I think Barney's point about using chat GPT to break up longer content into social media posts is a great place to start, right? Like once you have that authentic thought leadership in place, it should be really easy to do that.

Charlie: Yeah, I agree. And I think, yeah, his point around that kind of the personality and opinion, that's what your professionals bring to their thought leadership. It's that unique perspective and also his point around kind of using A I for company imagery and branding. I hadn't even thought about that. So hopefully, that's an interesting one for our listeners to kind of take away and explore. Well, thank you, Yasmin. I think that's all we've got time for today on this very special episode of the CMO series. We'll be digging into these topics and many more over the course of the next 100 episodes and we hope you will join us to listen to those. So thank you for joining me, Yasmin. It's been a pleasure as always. And we look forward to hearing the next edition of CMO Series REPRESENTS.

Yasmin: Thank you so much for having me on Charlie. Yeah, it's been fantastic to be able to join you today and yeah, watch the space. We'll be getting a new episode of the CMO Series REPRESENTS soon.

Charlie: Awesome. Thank you, Yasmin and a special thanks to all of our guests,  speakers and exhibitors who joined us at CMO Series Live and watch the space for the next one. In the meantime, you can head over to Passle.net and subscribe to the newsletter to be the first to hear about our latest news and events. So thank you all for listening and we'll see you next time.