As every brand rushes to adopt generative AI, what if the greatest competitive advantage is no longer about speed and scale, but about sounding uniquely, verifiably human?
Agility requires moving beyond the hype of new technology to strategically apply it for true differentiation. It’s about being smart and selective, not just fast.
Today, we’re going to talk about a paradox at the heart of modern marketing. Generative AI has promised unprecedented scale and personalization, but for many, it’s delivering a sea of sameness where brand voice gets lost. We’ll explore how to break free from this generic output, moving from a reactive “test and learn” model to a predictive one, and discuss the critical balance of combining AI’s power with essential human expertise to maintain brand soul, safety, and performance across countless channels.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Toby Coulthard, Chief Product & Growth Officer at Jacquard.
About Toby Coulthard
Toby Coulthard is Chief Product & Growth Officer at Jacquard
Toby Coulthard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toocou/
Resources
Jacquard: https://www.jacquard.com/
Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code AGILE at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/agile
The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow
Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Palm Springs, Feb 23-26 in Palm Springs, CA. Go here for more details: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/
Drive your customers to new horizons at the premier retail event of the year for Retail and Brand marketers. Learn more at CRMC 2026, June 1-3. https://www.thecrmc.com/
Check out The Array, Jacquard’s podcast: https://www.jacquard.com/the-array-podcast-series/
Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code AGILE at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://advertalize.com/r/82d51f868454dec2
Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://ratethispodcast.com/agile
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
Don’t miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
[00:48:40] Greg Kihlstrom: As every brand rushes to adopt generative AI, what if the greatest competitive advantage is no longer about speed and scale, but about something uniquely verifiably human? Agility requires moving beyond the hype of new technology to strategically apply it for true differentiation. It’s about being smart and selective, not just fast.
[01:08:52] Greg Kihlstrom: Today we’re going to talk about a paradox at the heart of modern marketing. Generative AI has promised unprecedented scale and personalization, but for many, it’s delivering a sea of sameness where brand voice gets lost. We’re going to explore how to break free from this generic output, moving from a reactive test and learn model to a predictive one, and discuss the critical balance of combining AI’s power with essential human expertise to maintain brand soul, safety, and performance across countless channels. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Toby Coulthard, Chief Product and Growth Officer at Jacquard. Toby, welcome to the show.
[01:45:34] Toby Coulthard: Hi Greg, thanks for having me.
[01:47:33] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Jacquard?
[01:53:23] Toby Coulthard: Yeah, my name’s Toby. I’ve been in this space for probably about a decade now. I’ve worked for a number of um, kind of CPs or ESPs and joined Jacquard a couple of years ago. My role is Chief Product and Growth Officer and in that well, in terms of what Jacquard does, we generate predictive performance and distribute high-performing on-brand content for brands. And yeah, responsible for the product part of the business as well as um, growing it as well.
[02:25:47] Greg Kihlstrom: Wonderful. Well, yeah, let’s let’s dive in and I want to start with the the strategic view here is this this concept I I teed up in the in the intro, which is, you know, we’re we’re all talking about efficiency gains and and just the ability to to scale with AI, but what does that do in a negative way to erode the the uniqueness of the brand voice? So, you’ve talked about Chat GPT and and sameness. Uh from your perspective, what’s the underlying mechanism that causes these, you know, admittedly powerful AI models, yet, you know, they’re converging on such similar often generic outputs, and and what’s the what’s the business risk for for brands that fall into this trap?
[03:08:24] Toby Coulthard: Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, it’s interesting, you say these kind of models converging. I I think there is an element of these models converging on a on a similar output, but the reality is 85% of marketers are just using Chat GPT to come, you know, to generate content. And so it’s we’re not even talking about using some of these other models. And that and that 15% includes those who aren’t using any AI model at all. And so the risk is and it’s such a hard thing to put your your finger on, but we can all kind of feel AI generated content when you see it. If you go on LinkedIn, there’s a certain thing about it, there’s a tone of voice, there’s a cadence, there’s uses of different linguistic devices, but you can just tell that it’s it’s AI written.
[03:50:54] Toby Coulthard: And there’s this convergence of different people sounding the same, you know, my my LinkedIn feed is very much a lot of very similar posts and my emails are starting to sound similar. The subject lines that I see or the push notifications I receive are all starting to sound a little bit like Chat GPT. And the risk is not that your marketing becomes less effective, it becomes ineffective because you can’t differentiate your brand. There’s nothing unique about it. Brands rightfully are very discerning about how their brand sounds. They’ve got all these brand guidelines, but they’re forgoing that that quality for that productivity gain. And that’s where Jacquard comes in, where we very much care about an authentic brand voice, but we care about performance and what people want to receive. I don’t want to receive AI generated content. I want to receive content, well, content that feels AI generated. I want to receive content that I resonate with and that feels unique and feels human. And so that’s where we come in.
[04:52:43] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, even for season CMOs, that that idea of maintaining authentic brand voice can often feel a little abstract. Uh, you know, how do you translate a strategic goal into a concrete defensible asset when your teams are using AI tools that they’re by design pulling from the same data pools as everyone else, as you mentioned, you know, just the the extent of using Chat GPT for instance.
[05:23:41] Toby Coulthard: Yeah, so that’s that good question. So, we’re not really pulling from the same dataset actually. So on one hand, um, and and the way that we’re architected is that we have the the generative side of coming up with content, which is this and I won’t go too much into it, but this kind of neuro symbolic architecture where we we take the best creativity of an of a large language model and actually a range of large language models, but also apply some kind of deterministic guard rails to it. So there’s that’s one side, coming up with the content. But the secret source is really on the models that we that we train. So, um, we have predictive models. So so rather than being a generative model, we have an a natural language understanding model that uses a huge number of data points including the responses from the customers’ messages that they’ve sent, the opens, the clicks, the conversions. And we use that to really hone the content in a way that means that it’s going to drive performance. And it’s using a unique dataset and a unique model that isn’t the same as what all these other LLMs are doing. LLMs themselves, Chat GPT, Gemini, whatever they are using, doesn’t understand what works well. It can come up with some content, but it doesn’t know what’s good, what’s bad. So, applying this layer of of predictive AI on top of that, that that can kind of sort, you know, separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, means that you can actually take a very data-driven approach to coming up with content and and refining that output to to be very highly performing. And and on the authentic voice, like I say, CMOs and or or brands, they have very comprehensive brand guidelines. They know what they want to sound like. And so it’s shaping that and adding an extra layer on top of that and aligning the AI output to those guidelines and ensuring that it it is aligned, that’s the the the secret source and that means that we can come up with content that is both on-brand, safe, performant, and distributed to their customers where they need to uh, where they need to distributed to.
[07:28:09] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So let’s get get a little more tactical here then as well and talk a little bit about, you know, testing and experimentation as well as as predicting. So the test and learn mantra is pretty deeply ingrained in and with many digital marketing teams. Uh you’ve argued for predicting before you pay. Can you walk us through how that actually works and, you know, how can an uh AI confidently predict the performance of a creative variant before it’s seen by a customer?
[08:00:15] Toby Coulthard: Yeah, so the test and learn thing, that’s still very much should be part of a a, you know, um a marketer’s toolkit. Um, but what you don’t want to do is just test a bunch of bad variants of language, right? Like it’s it’s you’re just finding the best of a bad bunch. I think at the end of the day, you want to be able to start on, you know, put your best foot forward. You want to test a a range of diverse but also performant variants, because you’d also you don’t know what’s people cannot look at a piece of content and say that is going to resonate. Unless this is, you know, Mad Men and we, you know, you’ve got this expert marketer that can, you know, that can look at a piece of content and go, that’s that’s what the people want. Right. You know, it it’s impossible to especially when you’re thinking about many different channels and touch points and you know, there’s a scale element of this as well. And so you need to be able to have some level of intelligence. And so our model based off billions of data points, billions of of opens and clicks across channels and languages, we’ve trained these models to understand, okay, this is actually going to resonate with your customers. And we have all the data to back that up and the model can understand that. And so that’s our kind of that that predictive layer trained on all that data is what is our I suppose our secret source. It can enable you to still do all the things that you’re used to doing like testing and learning and doing things across multiple channels and touch points across the entire customer life cycle, but just gives you that leg up and enables you to scale that across, you know, as I say, channels, touch points, journeys and regions as well.
[09:42:55] Greg Kihlstrom: Well, yeah, because the the open AIs and Geminis and, you know, those large language models, I mean, they’re they’re also predictive but in a different way, right? They’re they’re predicting based on a very generic, you know, they’re trained on on many, many things, but they’re they’re trying to predict what someone else likely has done in the past, not what’s relevant to your audience on that on a specific channel and so on and so forth. So it’s a they’re all predictive but you but you’re what you’re talking about with with Jacquard is very much tailored to a brand and their audience, right?
[10:15:35] Toby Coulthard: Exactly. So, so most LLMs or all of them I suppose to some extent are kind of fine-tuned to be in this kind of question answer format. You know, in in Chat GPT, give it a question. You know, I think you’ve probably seen when you’re in Chat GPT, sometimes you get the do you prefer this answer or this answer? You know, that’s that’s it kind of that reinforcement learning of giving you an answer that you like. We’re doing that, but the call it the the cookie that we’re giving the LLM, this resulted in an open, this resulted in a click. And so we’re fine-tuning the output to something that ultimately people are going to resonate with, but we’re also ensuring that we’re not going so far to stretch away from someone’s brand guidelines that it becomes clickbait. Because the, you know, I can come up with an email subject line that everyone’s going to click on, it’s probably going to say something like you’ve won a million dollars, right? And so in that sense, there is there is a a framework that you have to operate in. And if you go too far on one end, you’re going to end up with coming up with content that is very clickbait, it gets opens, but at what cost. You might win the win the win the battle and lose the war. And so there’s a lot of nuance in both adhering to that brand voice, those brand guidelines, but also maximizing performance in a way that affects all your KPIs, not just opens and clicks, but gets more conversions, increases average order value, increases lifetime value, better retention, all these data points come into the mix when we think about what kind of content is going to resonate with with um customers.
[11:42:47] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, so how how does this change the creative and the campaign planning process then, you know, does it how does a role like, you know, copywriter, campaign manager change when, you know, it’s it’s not AI isn’t just there to give me 20 to your point, okay, maybe if we’re lucky ideas but not not ones that are that are likely to perform. You know, how does how does it change when it’s it’s also kind of for AI is forecasting success as well.
[12:13:46] Toby Coulthard: Yeah, I think about it as for a couple of ways. One is copywriters today can’t actually keep up with the amount of content that’s necessary. If you think about the number of channels now that’s expected of a marketing team, the not say the number of touch points, it’s it’s a and the number of variations of content that you need to do the test and learn stuff. You I mean it’s it’s impossible for anyone copywriter and any one business, there’s always more that needs to be done. And so on one end, we enable we enable copywriters to to do a lot more, but I also think that the role of the copywriter doesn’t really change that meaningfully. You know, you can be an expert in construction but not be laying the bricks. You know, like at the end of the day, a copywriter’s expertise is in brand voice. It is in how the brand articulates itself to its customers. And so in that sense, this is just another tool for them to use to to be that expert and to really execute better as as a copywriter. And so in that sense, it’s a tool that they can use rather than something that ultimately will ever replace a copywriter.
[13:22:27] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
[13:22:58] Toby Coulthard: I don’t think any copywriter needs to be an expert in typing, right? For example, to to for this to be for this to for this to work. And so in that sense, they’re still a very much necessary part of the process, but they’re the ones using the machine rather than being the machine, so to speak.
[13:39:27] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and I mean in that sense, I I think that elevates, I mean, it certainly AI is going to augment the work that they do, but I think it actually elevates the role of the of the copywriter as opposed to Right. as you’re saying, replaces the need for one, right? They’re very much integral to the process, but they’re just not needed for hands-on keyboard quite so much, right?
[14:00:36] Toby Coulthard: Right. It removes the menial element of it and adds intelligence to it as well. They’re still pulling the levers and twisting the dials. And especially when you get to things like hyper segmentation and personalization, you know, that that is that is an impossible task for a copywriter. You know, if you’ve got a thousand segments across a number of channels and touch points, you’re not going to write thousands of lines of of copy. But we can, you know, Jacquard’s able to do that. It’s able to to to generate hundreds of thousands of lines of copy and personalize that to individuals and ensure that that copy is performance. So in that sense, it’s it’s a force multiplier.
[14:42:40] Greg Kihlstrom: And so I know we’ve talked a bit about the the multichannel aspect and just the the sheer scale of this, but in in addition to those, there’s also depending on what industry you’re in as well and what geographies you serve, there’s also compliance issues and and things like that. From that perspective, you know, how does how does an AI system not only do the things we’ve talked about already, you know, scale with brand voice and all that, but also the the nuances of things like compliance and even, you know, cultural nuances.
[15:17:15] Toby Coulthard: Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s a couple of things. So, so one is there is some examples of compliance or or cultural nuance challenges. So compliance side, so we’ve got a number of customers in um healthcare, for example. You don’t want to make any health claims about something that maybe doesn’t have claims um around it. On our cultural nuance side, you know, what’s interesting is we have a customer where the tone of voice for that really resonated with boomers, for example, was the opposite of that that resonated with Gen Z. And so the sentiments, the urgency, the length. And you have to realize that picking a particular tone of voice for your brand may and in many cases will alienate one set of of of people. And also not only between um demographics, but um uh countries as well. I think, for example, I mean, I you’re American, I assume, I’m I’m British. In we’ve seen between even uh countries with the same language, the same largely applies to French Canadians and and people in France um who speak French. What we find is urgency has a massive difference. So in the UK, people do not like content that is highly urgent. They want calm, helpful language. They don’t want to have something that says sale ends in 24 hours, buy right now. But in America, that really resonates. Right. And so understanding that and and and training a model that understands the nuance of someone’s location, understands what kind of sentiment is going to resonate with the fact that they are 24 based in New York with a certain gender versus someone who’s in London, who’s 45. That can be the difference between really being successful in a brand and and not. And on that compliance issue of making a health claim or um or the regular or regulatory issues especially in a in both pharma or in in financial services as well, you don’t want to rely on Chat GPT that can hallucinate, that can not really understand the value of all the understand the product itself, not only the value of the product, but the product. it can go off the rails and it’s also not distributed into the systems where you want to send the content. And so that’s where these kind of neuro symbolic guard rails come in where we both do use generative AI to come up with content, but we have all these rule-based filters to prevent something from being sent that you wouldn’t want to send. And also feeding it with the data to ensure that we’re getting this cultural nuance both demographically and and and geographically as well.
[17:55:42] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think um, I I had somebody on the show recently talking about the difference between like the highest performing UK ads versus US ads and similar similar to what you’re saying as well and, you know, even just the idea of high context or low context. Yeah, yeah, yeah. is a whole that’s probably a topic of a whole other show, but um definitely definitely a lot of of of nuances there when you’re even, you know, country to country in Europe, there you know, there’s differences between levels of context and and all those kinds of things.
[18:27:54] Toby Coulthard: And it can it can go it can it can not only not help your brand, it can hurt your brand. You know, I remember growing up in the UK, you would sometimes get American ads on TV and people always wouldn’t like it if there was an American voice. And I actually am in the US at the moment. I’m I’m based in New York. And you do get a lot of ads with British accents on the TV. And Americans don’t mind it. And so, so there is there is a lot of nuance there that can either help your brand or hurt your brand and understanding that and taking a very data-driven approach to it is ultimately necessary. Because otherwise, everyone says send the right thing, you know, send the right message to the right person at the right time. It’s like this this thing that marketers always say. But they never say don’t send the wrong message, right? Like that that like not sending the wrong message is as important or more important than sending the right message. Yeah. And so having that cultural nuance uh and compliance layer um ultimately is is incredibly important for a brand to to achieve and and you can’t just achieve that with Chat GPT. It’s it’s not going to help you there.
[19:34:49] Greg Kihlstrom: Right. Well, yeah, and so let’s talk a little bit about, you know, moving moving beyond what what you’ve termed conventional AI and and what what that what that really means and you know, what what’s the shift in mindset and you know, we’ve we’ve talked about some of this I realize, but, you know, what’s the fundamental shift in in mindset and technology required for a brand to go from using AI really as just kind of a a workhorse to generate content to a much more strategic engine that actually helps them with their competitive and and brand differentiation.
[20:08:29] Toby Coulthard: Yeah, so conventional AI is an interesting phrase. So I think pre-2022 conventional AI was kind of predictive AI. Yeah. This kind of, you know, a lot of businesses were using data to do things like predictive churn or send time optimization or things like that. And that was kind of more conventional AI. I think now conventional AI has become generative AI, because that’s the AI that everybody knows. And so ironically, that that flip has now been moving beyond generative AI means that you kind of need to lay a predictive AI on top. Um because that’s the thing that ultimately shifts from just like I said a a productivity and efficiency tool to a performance tool. So yeah, so I think in that sense, that’s what we mean like if you combine those two concepts, you kind of get the best of both worlds. Um and we have this multi-agent architecture, as you say, whether it’s cultural nuance, compliance, whether it’s ensuring that it’s resonating with people on a demographic basis. All of these these components are taking the input of what what resonates and then feeding that back and then optimizing the system. So in that sense, moving beyond conventional AI means moving beyond generative and actually thinking about what is the outcome of this rather than I really hate the productivity efficiency argument a lot of the time, because everybody says it and it’s so hard to quantify. Yeah. And ultimately, what are marketers trying to do? You know, at the end of the day, are you just trying to not have to write the subject line or write the push notification or the SMS, or are you trying to achieve an outcome on a KPI within your within your business? And that we work with Sephora or Gap or United Airlines and and we start with what are you trying to achieve? What are what are your marketing goals? And we don’t really even think about the productivity and efficiency gain there, because ultimately that that may help the end goal, but the end goal and the outcome is ultimately what we’re trying to get to.
[22:37:37] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So for for marketing leaders out there, what’s a what’s a first step that they could take to again, get get beyond some of the the basics and and some of that generic output. You know, is it, you know, a technology change or audit, is it a process change, talent assessment, you know, what where where should they likely look first?
[23:56:04] Toby Coulthard: Yeah, it’s it’s it’s not that hard. I mean, one, I mean, have a have a brand guidelines, which every brand pretty much does. Have an understanding of what you’re trying to achieve. And we work with customers where, you know, we start with one channel, one campaign could be an abandoned basket campaign. Could be a welcome campaign. You know, it isn’t this kind of total transformation of your business that requires this. You start with one and and that also allows us to collect the data, that allows us to refine the output. We have a team of computational linguists that kind of walk you through the process, that can kind of align the AI’s output to to your needs. And it’s it’s super easy just to get up and running. Like AI in itself is is given how many people have adopted it is so natural and so easy to use. And so I think people look at this as oh my God, this is some kind of massive change management process. But at the end of the day, you’ve got all the right pieces. You just need the technology to enable you to do it and this is a this is very much a a cool a cool walk run approach.
[24:58:39] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, um Toby, thanks thanks for joining today. I got a couple of last questions before we wrap up here. So first uh, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
[25:11:80] Toby Coulthard: Uh, that’s a great question. I think AI slop is what everyone’s talking about at the moment. And I think it’s only going to get worse. I think, you know, there’s this whole kind of dead internet theory where the the whole internet has either already or will become just a series of bots talking to each other and commenting to each other and I think increasingly that is that may well become the case. And so in that sense, how to kind of navigate the internet, navigate your life surrounded by AI content that doesn’t resonate, I think that will become more of a challenge. And and hopefully Jacard can be a a part of that conversation where we can help brands kind of cut through that that noise and and and not sound like AI slop and not be ignored as much as I think it’s it’s going to become.
[26:00:19] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, um one last question for you before we wrap up. Uh what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[26:09:12] Toby Coulthard: So, that’s a great question. So we’re trying to do to go to a lot more events and be a bit more human with our approach. I go to conferences and just understand what people want and how people are talking about things. I don’t know about you, but I receive a hundred AI generated outreach emails a day asking telling me to buy something and we’ve kind of lost this human human part of communicating digitally. And so, um, I try and speak to people as much as I can on a one-to-one basis and and in front and and you know, get real face time. And I think that kind of grounds us in what we build. I think it helps us really make a product that is a good product. Um and I mean good in both that it it it’s it’s good for the world just as much as it’s a good product for for people to use. And so really understanding what people need and making sure that brands don’t kind of fall into this sea of sameness. And so getting out there, speaking to people and not kind of getting stuck behind a laptop being bombarded with um AI slot.
