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Adam, welcome to the show. I’m so pleased to have you on today. Thank you for having me. So to get us started, tell me a little bit about GH05T. So GH05T has been around for eight years, but my journey in social started in 2008. So quite a long time in social media speak when you actually think about it. GH05T was set up after I decided to leave Vice Media. So I was actually at Vice Media Group, I was an MD of the business unit there. And I felt it was the right time and place it at my own shop and do my own thing with my own vision. In terms of what we do present day, it’s very much focused on corporate business and social first. But my history was not that at all. So I’ve sort of done a 180 from music into, I guess, the corporate world. And what led you and GH05T to pivot towards more like high trust, highly regulated sectors like finance and insurance? So when you think about the birth of social media agencies, really, didn’t really happen probably until around about 2013, 2014, where a thing was even seen as a business or a unit or an ability to be able to create an agency that would be social first. So when I started, I had to go into an industry that would be happy for me to trial, error, play around and sort of see if the social media thing worked. Now, there’s no way you can go and do that in a global bank. But you can go and do that for Black Sabbath or a celebrity of such where, you know, they don’t really care what’s going on on Facebook or Instagram. They’re certainly not, you know, Ozzy Osbourne isn’t sat there looking at his Instagram and going, what’s the strategy? What’s the post going to be today? I don’t know if he’s ever even, I remember working with Black Sabbath and I was like, there’s no way he’s even involved in this at all. What does he even know that this exists? So we started in music because it was a great place to learn, to test, and to not really get in trouble if you got things wrong. And then over time, you sort of start to grow up, for want of a better phrase. You start to realize that there are bigger opportunities and more strategic things, not only for your business, but also for the need in the industry that you work in. And without downplaying music, I would say that music is sort of quite easy to do marketing for. It’s like, you know, everyone wakes up and wants to hear what Taylor Swift has to say on Instagram. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, I wonder what Berkshire Hathaway are posting on LinkedIn. So I thought that, you know what, like, let’s go to where it’s most complicated in terms of a social media point of view, but also getting it right probably has the biggest impact as well. And in terms of, you know, creative opportunities, what did that shift present to you? I mean, that is quite a stretch from Aussie to a bank, you know, I would think it is. Yeah. It’s so different. I mean, the only thing you have with working with celebrities is, depending upon the mood they wake up in, dictates what you can and can’t do. Right? But there’s no brand guidelines. There’s no such thing as compliance. Nothing goes through ad control when you’re dealing with a celebrity. Whereas where you are dealing with regulated industries, everything has to be checked. Right? not only from what you’re saying, but also from, is the brand correct? What’s the positioning of the brand? So the biggest difference is the fact that when you’re working in financial services, you’re working with inside a box that you cannot break. You have to fit inside that box. There’s no opportunity to break it. You can innovate in that box, you can change things, but you can’t ever break what’s inside the box. Whereas in the celebrity space, you were sort of told to break the box. like i have to be different i’m a celebrity i don’t want to look like another celebrity i don’t want to talk or act or think like another celebrity so creatively the thing that’s been most challenging is to work out how you can be creative in this sort of refined and prescribed box as well, which does have its challenges, especially in certain platforms that are outside of LinkedIn. Let’s get to that in just a minute, because I want to dive into that a little bit. But before we do, for traditionally corporate brands, you know, being social first can feel like a pretty big risk. How do you convince them to go all in on platform native content strategies? Yeah, the first question you have to ask any brand, whether it’s corporate or whether it’s actually even FMCG, is what are you trying to achieve with social? That’s number one. That’s the number one thing you have to know. And you have to have this sort of therapy session, for want of a better phrase, which is just tell me honestly, what is it that you want? Because if you don’t tell me what you want and what you’re trying to achieve with social, it’s impossible for me to tell you what you should do and whether or not LinkedIn, a TikTok, a YouTube is going to work for you. Once you understand that, and predominantly for most brands, it’s one of three things. It’s either I want to be seen more. I want people to engage with me more. I want them to buy something from me. It’s normally one of those three things. And once you understand that, you can then say to them, okay, well, if it’s a pure awareness play that you need to do, then your content has to do this. It cannot do anything else. You have to focus on specific styles of content that will drive this. If it is sales, then you have to be honest with them and say that follower growth is And organic metrics just aren’t important for you. So if you want a million followers on LinkedIn and all you’re going to use it for as a sales channel, you will never get there. So it’s having those honest open conversations from the offset, I believe is essential to steer the ship in the right way and set the right expectations for the person that is in front of you. So at least they know what is going to happen and being honest. You have to be brutal with companies, especially in the corporate world. If they say they want X, you have to say that’s not possible, but you can achieve Y. Interesting. How do you balance then brand storytelling with measurable business value and ROI that all of these companies are going to want, especially while working within that box that, as you said, you can’t break? Yeah. Yeah. So financial services, regulated industries and corporate business is always quite challenging when it comes to ROI, because what exactly is it that they’re selling? It’s not normally as transactional as retail. They’re not selling shoes. Selling a new shoe is relatively quite simple and quite straightforward from a sales funnel and especially through a social media sales funnel, especially with the e-commerce distribution of things like TikTok, et cetera. So the first thing is understanding what exactly is the product that you’re selling and then working out the audience that that’s associated with. and then working up the content structure that sits alongside that as well. The big difference we find with say corporate brands versus consumer brands is that your audience is specifically very different for the different products that you have. So if you take a bank, for example, someone who wants a mortgage is going to be very, very different to someone that is like a private bank member that is looking to invest a million pounds. Two massively different audiences. So the content that’s required for those is drastically different, and where they sit and how they consume is drastically different as well. Whereas if I’m selling Adidas shoes, you could argue that a lifestyle trainer in a running shoe is very, very different in two different audiences. There’s probably a huge amount of crossover between someone that wears Stan Smith and also runs and wears the latest carbon shoes for Adidas as well. So far more niche. I think that that’s probably what I’m getting at with that in a quick summary is corporate businesses, you have to be far more niche with your content distribution, your audience targeting, and what you’re trying to achieve to drive ROI. And would you say that that leads to a certain amount of challenges within the creativity aspect of working with those companies? And if so, what does that creativity look like? I mean, it almost seems like a fun challenge to me, but I’m not in the thick of it like you are. Yeah, it’s a fun challenge, but it’s a hard one because there aren’t actually that many brands or big corporates that you can go, this is the playbook or for B2B in particular. For B2B sales on LinkedIn, this is the playbook of how you make content look great. There isn’t really many. If I’m being honest, there’s no Red Bull, right? You know, the classic thing of when someone says, oh, who does marketing well? You just go, Red Bull. Everyone goes, oh, yeah, who else? TikTok. Sorry, Ryanair do it really well on TikTok, for example. There’s loads of these sort of consumer brands that you can pick up on. But B2B is very much more challenging. And there is a slight hesitation there. to do anything that is social first. And if we just talk about social first, so like vertical video filmed on an iPhone, really quick 30 second cuts to camera, for example, of a person talking about a product is not happening in big corporates like it should. You’ve said that the next wave of business growth will come from brands traditionally overlooked by marketers. What kinds of companies are you betting on and why are you betting on them now? Destruction is massive, right? It’s the buzzword that’s been around before AI is, you know, which companies are disrupting the marketplace. And if you look at any of these, so a company in the UK that’s done really well was a deodorant brand called Wild. And they were recently acquired by Unilever. And everything they did was… B2C, the rep to consumer, focused purely on driving e-commerce sales through social. That was it. I think the next biggest disruption that we’ll have in a B2B is someone building an insurance product that is similar to the challenger banks. We’ve seen Revolut and we’ve seen Monzo really dominate banking globally. No one’s quite packaged up an insurance product that is really, really easy to do. No one enjoys buying insurance. And I can’t even tell you now, I don’t know if you can tell me. Where your car insurance, home insurance, pet insurance, life insurance, where they all are. You know, all the four companies or the five companies. I can’t name them. I don’t know when they’re up for renewal. I don’t really fully know what any of them are. I don’t know exactly what, like, have I got the right deal? Have I not got the right deal? I’m waiting for somebody to launch a consolidated insurance company that is in the same vein as a Monzo and Revolut. And I think that will absolutely take off. Interesting. I look forward to somebody solving that because, yeah, you’re absolutely right. This actually came up for me a few days ago with car insurance. On the side of technology, you know, obviously we can’t get through this conversation without mentioning AI. And, you know, for that, I do somewhat apologize. But how is AI shaping the way GH05T creates, scales, and personalizes social content? And further, you know, how is it helping you and your team, you know, just day to day? Yeah, so I think from an AI point of view, when you run an agency, there’s three key things you need to look at. There’s the internal running of your organization and how are you building AI into that. So whether that’s just having an enterprise, you know, open AI account as an example, or whether or not you’re using Google Workspace and you’ve integrated Gemini into doing some tasks for you. But however that works for you, you need to solve that solution and problem yourself. Secondly, there’s then looking at something that is ownable that you can either create, build, or work out that gives you a differentiation to anybody else. So we at GH05T built something which is aptly named called GH05Twriter, which is an AI GH05Twriter for you as a brand, predominantly focused on community management. The reason why we have done this, it’s not because the name GH05Twriter is perfect for a second business when your company’s called GH05T. But social media, everyone is always focused on what you say in terms of a broadcast point of view, never what you respond. So we’re obsessed with what we’re posting today, what we’re getting out, how we’re going to convey this message. Very rarely do we look at all of the comments and respond back to those. And if you’re a massive global business, and you’re doing paid on social, the amount of comments you can have is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds a day. And there’s no way a human can answer all of those. And even if a human could, the cost of doing that is so big that no brand is going to really want to invest in that because they don’t see the benefit of that. So Dosed Writer for us was something that we built ourselves to be able to really do community management at scale. It’s in your tone of voice. It responds like you. It’s approved by a human. So you still have that human connection to it as well. I think that’s the second thing that agencies need to do is look at where their specialism is and what can be unique and new for them to be able to do from an AI point of view. And then the third is to understand the negative impact that it could have on your clients. So for financial services in particular, when you’re so trusted and you have to be trusted, whether it’s insurance or a bank, how does AI generated content fit into that? I think it’s a problem. I think it’s a problem for banks to use AI generated content When, you know, so say if you just want to, so say if we want to do something really simple, we want to take Times Square and we want to use a billboard in Times Square, but we can’t quite find the right billboard. So let’s create an AI generated image of Times Square with a billboard. And then let’s put an ad on that. So it looks like we’ve taken out this billboard, but we haven’t. That would be a huge problem. That billboard doesn’t exist. Hang on, so you as a bank are making content that is fake, but I’ll see you doing the background. I think for financial services, the adoption of AI-generated content is a challenge, is a massive challenge, for sure. And to get that right and to steer your clients in the right direction around that, I think is essential. Rather than just jumping on the bandwagon and saying, look, we can scale your content and make it far cheaper by using AI. I think it’s take a step back and say, protecting your brand is far more important than scaling your content and developing the right AI creative solutions. In practice, I’m very curious about GH05Twriter. You know, you mentioned it has kind of a human element to it, you know, and I assume that has to do with some kind of, you know, approval. So, you know, is it prompting somebody, you know, prompting a human with, you know, you’ve had this many comments there around this particular topic. Here’s some potential replies. And then, you know, pick A, B or C or, you know, D, don’t reply at all. Is that kind of how it works? It’s pretty much spot on. So GH05Twriter will look at the comment that comes in from the brand, and based on the platform, and the sentiment of that comment will dictate a response. So, for example, a response on Facebook that is negative is going to be very different to a response on LinkedIn that’s positive. You’re not going to have the same tone of voice. So you need to flex that tone of voice depending upon the platform and the sentiment of the comment. So it will write that based upon preconditioned prompts and, of course, tone of voice from the brand. If a brand likes to say a specific word or is known for specific phrases, it would include that in there. Or for whatever reason, you don’t use grammar as a brand. If you have a real edgy brand or something like this, you would also have that in there as well. Then the human sees the comment that the AI, GH05Twriter, has created, and then will chat to it and change it. Make it funnier. Oh, I don’t like that. Tone down this. Or can you make it shorter? Can you extend this? Can you make this longer? You’ve missed out this FAQ that’s really important for us. They’ll refine it to get it into a position that feels right, and then it’s ready to be approved by the brand to then be posted. That’s fascinating. And so when it comes to sort of tailoring GH05Twriter to various companies and, you know, all the different things out there, I mean, you know, financial being one of them, but let’s say, you know, you did get a partner who was, you know, a client who was a shoe company, you know, presumably then you tailor it far more towards that side of things. You know, it’s all about shoes at that point and maybe, you know, a completely different tone. Yeah. Absolutely. I think it’s important to stress here that GH05Twriter is set up differently for each client. So it’s not one writer that then decides for all of our clients. It is uniquely built for each client based upon their information, their tone of voice, their strategy, also their willingness to also want to respond quickly. as well so and and how many comments they get as well so we have one business where you know they’re uh they’re they’re actually more of a consumer brand they’re they’re like a holiday park and they get hundreds of comments peak zoom there are 48 parks across the uk each park has three thousand you know sort of places you can basically stay so you think about the scale of that Where there’s like, I can’t find my key. Where’s the Wi-Fi code? Whatever, whatever it might be. So some of those FAQs, the brand doesn’t care about the response because it is just really a, it’s a transaction comment. It’s like, help me out, you know, guide me in the right direction. So those things you don’t even need to get approved. You know, we just let that run the background. Whereas, for something that’s far more nuanced, where you’re working with financial services, where someone’s asking for advice on a particular product, or is this thing right for me financially, so much more complex, so much more carefully how you craft that and how you respond to that as well. And then the shoe brand would be different. So, you know, what’s the audience? What’s the style of the shoot? Who are you going after? What sort of tone do you want within your copy as well? Because the brands that get community management right get organic growth far better as well. Yeah, absolutely. Last question. What advice would you give to CMOs or brand leaders who want to unlock the full potential of social but don’t know where to start? I’d say this is probably the most important question and I would like to think I have the simplest answer for this very, very complex question. My answer for every CMO that wants to be able to unlock the power of social is to go to your marketing team and ask them this following question. What is our ROI commercially and socially for our presence on social media? And to clarify what I mean by that is, are we making money from social? But how are we also increasing our social performance as well? Understanding both of those is essential. You can’t just have social media as a sales channel. It will eventually just drain out and die. And if you’re getting great social performance and it’s not working commercially, there’s something amiss here. They’re knowing those two and they are separate. Yes, they’re interconnected. Good social performance should lead to better commercial gain. But you do need to look at them different because the metrics that you track are so, so, so different. If you’re looking at social performance, you’re going to be looking at things like impressions, engagement rate, clicks, et cetera. Whereas where you’re looking at commercial, you’re going to be looking at leads and actual conversions and sales as well. And the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Just because you have a high engagement rate on a piece of content doesn’t mean that you’re going to get sales off the back of that as well. So for me, to every CMO, it’s understand your social performance metrics and then understanding your commercial metrics, both through social and having a real clear view on how both of those are working. Well, Adam, this has been great. I appreciate you taking the time to be on. If one wanted to find out more about yourself, GH05T, and I think also GH05Twriter, where should they go? You can go to the website, which is GH05T, but it’s spelled gh05t.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn, just simply Adam Biddle. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to be on today. Thanks, Richard.
