AI made content perfect and soulless. Put your opinion back in. People buy people, never brands.

Usher describes marketing as the dark arts and a lifelong fascination. As a child she watched the adverts more closely than the shows, and wanted to understand segmentation and audiences before she could articulate why. Her route in was wonky: she started in politics as a researcher for two MPs, then moved into a data analyst role, where she met the woman who became her mentor and is now an adviser and director at GingerMay. That mentor saw her passion for marketing and developed her, and it blossomed into where she is today.

Her passion, she says, is people and communicating better. So much poor communication comes from not understanding how people take in information and how they listen. People think that by vomiting out as much content as they can, something will stick, but it is a thoughtless journey with no sense of how they are perceived. The best people in PR and marketing are thoughtful, considering their audiences and carefully crafting what they want to say every time they are in the public domain.

The last two years brought a big pivot, a bit of recession, and heavy technology investment that took punch out of the market, and AI has confused matters further. Usher knows companies that decided they no longer need communications because AI will do it, and they are churning out pulp that all looks the same. She borrows a journalist's word, froth: a tiny bit of milk fluffed up to a full cup, still the same milk, another 400 words on the original 200, saying nothing. The winners, she says, use AI thoughtfully and put their own opinion and footprint into it.

Never in the history of mankind, she says, has content been so perfect: correct syntax, correct tense, and we all say wow. Marketing directors used to worry about grammar mistakes, and now everyone is bowled over that they can create polished content. But before, the grammar was not perfect and it was bloody opinionated. It had a point of view. She wants those days back, points of view and things she can learn, rather than froth that is boring to read.

Storytelling, for Usher, is invitation. It is like dating: persist and hassle someone and they back off, invite them into a space and they step forward. The best storytelling tells somebody something they may never have known, a unique point of view or something that helps them in their job. Blasting people with here is a bit more about me, me, me, that is not storytelling. That is just selling in a crass, ugly way. She likens the alternative to early social media, where companies shouted online when you would never walk into a bar and start shouting; you would ask questions and listen first.

There is growing understanding of how important personality profiling is, and it has never changed. Brands are boring, Usher says. Unless you are Coca-Cola with billions pumped into advertising over 60 years, most brands need a personality behind them, like Richard Branson and Virgin. People are interested in people, not brands. Technology companies can be dry, so what makes them interesting is a CEO or CMO who is a real character and can talk in a competent, intelligent way. Personality profiling sits at the absolute core of communications and PR.

Usher has done B2B for 20 years and it is her passion, and she dislikes B2C with equal passion. B2B is not harder, but it must be done more thoughtfully, because it is a crowded market. You might have eight companies doing more or less the same thing, with nuanced differences that are hard to communicate until you get under the hood.

American companies have always been good at this. US businesses come into the UK and Europe and hit PR and comms before they even land, building visibility and awareness, then put a salesperson on the ground into a warmed-up, profiled market where people already half-recognise them. AI helps here too, she notes, because a marketing plan from AI pushes that kind of profiling hard, and personal profiling and PR coverage run as a seam straight through generative engine optimisation.

At an event in April, Usher found the Americans open for business: open to being sold to, positive, upbeat, and genuinely wanting startups to succeed. Brits, she says, carry a bit of introversion and get embarrassed about selling. But it is not selling. She likes relationship building, and the two skills you need are asking great questions and active listening. You are building trust. The majority of her clients are friends, and she keeps doing favours for them for years because she wants their businesses to succeed.

We are born with two ears and one mouth and should listen more, but we do not. The minute Usher sees someone stop listening, she stops talking. Remembering things about a person authentically, not because you read your notes, is what makes people stand out. She points to the GingerMay three Rs, rigour, relationships and remarkable thinking, which lead to revenue, but you cannot start with revenue in mind. If people think you just want their money, why would they work with you?

Clients come to Usher not knowing what GEO even is. It is very timely, so an article from two years ago will not make it in, and while there are similarities to SEO it evolves incredibly fast. PR sits heavily within it: publications with a high ranking and digital footprint are rated more highly. There are nuanced areas like Reddit, but with limited time you prioritise. You need PR, up-to-date site content and blogs, a Q&A behind the site, a site map, and articles like Why We Are The Best DSP, because that is the prompt going into the engine. There is no silver bullet; you need 200 things. Her clients are still found for Wall Street Journal pieces years later.

Most clients are very early stage, struggling with product and sales before large language models even enter the picture, so it falls to marketing teams and CMOs to find best practice. In 16 years of running a business, even through COVID, Usher has never seen so much change, and there is still bullshit and overstatement about what AI can do; her own task force found within two months it could do less than promised. The answer is to keep learning: she does LinkedIn courses and experiments with ChatGPT and Perplexity in her spare time. People who do not, she says, will be left behind.

It is the job of every CEO to be a storyteller, Usher argues. If you lead from the front, you are telling a story to your team, your clients and the industry. Not every CEO is confident at it, and that is fine, because you can get good people in to help. What you must never do is stay silent, because if you do not tell your own story, someone else will take it over and you become unheard. It starts the moment you set up a business, not five years in. Introverts can write content, check every word, and push it out with confidence, which is far better than doing nothing while competitors push out content about themselves.

For young people entering the industry, Usher's advice is blunt: do not use AI to write the cover note on your CV. GingerMay put out one advert and had 2,000 applicants; the first letter looked good, the second was similar, and by the fifth and sixth it was obvious they had all used AI, so they went straight in the bin regardless of a double first from Cambridge or Oxford. You need personality and storytelling so they can see who you are. She would rather read a shorter, human-written note. And do work experience: give up a week of your Easter holidays, because when they read CVs they look for the ones who made the effort, the can-do people who show self effort.