Unmissable is not reach. It is resonance. And trust is earned every single day, never bought.

It was stories. My mum says that from about five years old I would seek people out to tell them a story, she used to farm me off to people so I would stop driving her mad. I was an avid fan of glossy magazines and would pour over the ads, and I knew something was there, even though I probably did not know what marketing was. At about 18 I thought I would be a journalist, realised I was a bit shit at that, and went the other way.

Ten years at Google was fantastic, telling stories on one of the world's biggest canvases, and I am a massive AI and tech geek. But I became increasingly frustrated about invisibility, having done a lot of work with women and on closing the skills gap. It came down to two things. I wanted to make more of an impact, and I turned 50 and thought, how many more years am I going to do this for? I have always been rebellious and liked to break the rules, and there comes a time in corporate life when you cannot do that. So it was, let's go outside and build what I could not see elsewhere.

It is not literal visibility and reach, which is how most people interpret it today. True unmissability is about resonance, trust and connection. You can be seen by everyone and it can mean nothing, or you can be the person who so deeply connects that you have greater influence.

DJ AG fell out of corporate life and took his craft to the streets because music was becoming inaccessible, building huge crowds. But what makes him unmissable is that he remembers you, he will say, you had spaghetti last night, how was that? That connection is the unmissability.

Trust is earned over a very long period, though every marketeer wants to believe they can buy it. At Google, whatever you did you were held to account, rightly so given that size and influence. Earning trust meant really understanding the end user, and as an American business in the UK it meant cultural references, because British values around equality, fairness and standing in a queue differ from California. I helped launch YouTube commercially, weather the brand safety crisis, and created the Digital Skills Garage, and seeing people's lives transformed inspired what I do now.

The more artificial everything gets, the more doubt it creates, and being authentic and trusted becomes a superpower, because you cannot buy trust, you have to earn it. Brands think it can be borrowed through influencers and celebrity, but borrowed trust vanishes the moment something goes wrong. Trust tied too closely to anything transactional is not really trust, it is a transaction. You earn it every single day, and people measure it as a metric of sales while ignoring the trust of their own staff.

We never called it a personal brand, but we always knew reputation. Because trust in institutions and implied authority is so low, we look for human connection, so people think, I like you, therefore I will buy from you or work for you. But the wheels come off when personal brand is reduced to LinkedIn, a sea of self-congratulatory or AI-written bullshit. Not every founder needs to be on the front line, it can be distributed through your leadership and people, because your greatest demonstration of your values is how people actually are. And please, no more McDonald's CEOs eating burgers that are not real.

There is corporate coding, years of coded behaviour about what can be said, and it has to become a two-way dialogue, not broadcast. The missing piece is creativity, and I hope personal brand 2.0 is about episodic content you actually want to watch. Adam Mosseri is the gold standard, going live on his own product, answering questions, honestly saying, I do not know, I will check with the engineers. I am also focused on helping more women step into the spotlight, because visibility is skewing heavily towards men.

I am a self-confessed AI geek, my last job at Google was launching Bard, which was shit and embarrassing, though far better now. AI is an enabler, the amplifier of personal brand and storytelling, not the author. When people get the balance right, the time saved buys more thinking and doing, and the democratization of access lets you scale and go deeper on research than most had before. Use the time to be more distinctive, and imagine if brands focused on aliveness rather than awareness as a metric.

There will come a time when AI learns to fake mistakes, the em dashes will go and we will be back to bad punctuation, and it may even mimic empathy. But the human element remains in that beautiful touch, a set of words put together in a way that creates a vision only you can create. As authors we still hold that power, and the opportunity to go deeper.

As a little girl I was told, somebody like you cannot do that. We cannot keep ignoring 50 percent of the population, and around the world it is all rolling back. Hera Media is the UK's first female-led video podcast network, built because podcast is the least diverse media yet the most influential, 80 percent male-hosted and male-funded, which makes no sense when women love stories. It is also a commercial gap, brands come to me unable to find enough female content. Even men do not only want to listen to men, it is just what they get served, and by supporting one voice you do not take another away.

Financial freedom is always at the heart of it, so visibility is not for its own sake. Seen is confidence and tools, including AI. Heard is the platforms that need more diverse content. Paid is connecting commercial interest from brands and being savvier about who you invest in. The main objective is financial freedom, freedom of time, freedom of location, and more sequins, and a bit of disco.

Too many conversations are in rooms preaching to the converted. WACL and similar institutions are incredible, but we do not have good enough integration between men and women doing the same job. We have a male crisis too, and it can be solved by men and women coming together, so we will achieve more for both through collaboration. We need brilliant male allies to step forward, because the good people are off doing good work while a couple of wankers keep up all the noise.

I am off to the 93% Club, founded by Safi Pank around the 93 percent of people who go to state schools but are not reflected in senior leadership. And we are sitting on a potential youth unemployment crisis, which for our industry is our lifeline, because that is where the creativity comes from, so we have to fix these things.

Media contracts then expands, and right now it has gone back into contraction with acquisitions and streamers while fragmenting underneath. I think you will get more niche, like the old ITV days of Granada and STV, pockets of media hubs built around interest rather than old demographics. That fragmentation is a pain for marketeers, but it forces the real question, do you really need 7,000 assets and 65 million people, or the two million who will actually buy your product?

I start with the bit that makes people most uncomfortable, you have to go inwards and know your own story, and reacquaint yourself with your values and a bit of humanity. We have been obsessed with scale and world domination, but great personal brands are about focus. What is the one thing you want to say to that person, and why should they care? The reward, beyond progression and sales and talent retention, is a confidence that comes from vulnerability, connecting with people again.