Guest · AI in the marketing organisation
Niall McKinney
Founding Partner, The Creative Engineers
A P&G, Time Warner and Travelocity marketer turned agency founder and AI early adopter, now building a content model where scale never costs the craft.
About
Niall McKinney is Founding Partner of The Creative Engineers, a consultancy he launched with three other advertising and marketing veterans to help marketing teams produce more content without losing quality or brand. He also chairs the AI education company Edify, and is known for pairing classical production methods with an early, hands-on understanding of applied AI.
McKinney began in marketing at P&G, Time Warner and Travelocity before running a digital transformation agency called The Knowledge Engineers, which he sold in 2017 to a buyer he refers to as Evardo, and where he then worked. He describes his next move as accidentally working in AI before it was cool, joining the e-commerce AI startup Black Crow, which by his account raised money in 2021 and again in 2022 to capture intent using machine learning.
Across those roles McKinney kept meeting the same wall: media could target audiences granularly, but marketers never had enough content to match. He points to generative AI as the answer to a problem he had chased for 10 or 15 years, and with partners Helen, Chris and Morgan he founded The Creative Engineers, which launched the week of this interview and is, he says, already working with clients including Olwen, the National Lottery.
Career28 years
- 2026 to now Creative Engineers Founding Partner (inbound)
- 2023 to now Edifai Chair
- 2020 to now Freelance Educator & Consultant
- 2022 to 2023 Black Crow AI Chief Growth Officer (consultant)
Show earlier roles: Coteam, Black Crow AI, AVADO, The Knowledge Engineers, Travelocity, Time Inc. UK, Wowgo, Procter & Gamble
- 2021 to 2023 Coteam Senior Advisor
- 2021 to 2022 Black Crow AI Growth Consultant
- 2018 to 2020 AVADO President
- 2017 to 2018 AVADO Managing Director International
- 2007 to 2017 The Knowledge Engineers Founder & CEO
- 2006 to 2007 Travelocity CMO
- 2001 to 2006 Time Inc. UK Marketing and Publishing Director
- 2000 to 2001 Wowgo Marketing Manager
- 1998 to 2000 Procter & Gamble ABM
How Niall thinks3 convictions
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Content is the bottleneck
McKinney argues the media opportunity to target granularly has always existed, but marketers could never feed it with enough content purposed the right way. That gap, in his telling, is the real constraint on performance. The fix is a better content model, not more budget.
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Quality over mass production
For McKinney, scaling output must never come at the expense of the work. A proud brand marketer in both B2C and B2B, he insists brand and creative guardrails travel with every increase in volume. The point of AI is to be more relevant and efficient while staying creatively proud of what ships.
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Mindset over skill set
McKinney contends the durable capabilities are critical thinking, iteration and persistence, not coding or computer science. He points to forward-deployed AI engineers with no traditional technical background who became expert users simply by working hard at it. The next generation, he suggests, needs a mental approach more than a fixed set of skills.
