Incubeta

Thank you Performance Marketing World for including me in your Power List 26'!

Big news from The Strategic HR Coach: I'm honored to announce that I'll be speaking at SHRM National 2026 — and if you know me, you know I've been building toward this moment for a long time. John C. Maxwell is taking the main stage with High Road Leadership. I'll be in the breakout session picking up that baton and bringing it straight into the world of HR strategy — because HR leaders don't just need to understand High Road Leadership, they need to BE it. What does that look like in practice? → Moving from transactional to transformational → Building stakeholder relationships, not just compliance checkboxes → Leading with integrity even when it would be a lot easier not to As a John Maxwell Executive Director and Strategic HR Coach, I take seriously the responsibility of extending that message to HR professionals who are in the trenches every day. This isn't a theoretical conversation — it's a practical one. If you're attending SHRM National 2026, join me in my session. Let's make sure HR isn't just in the room — HR leads the room. And to the SHRM team and Johnny C. Taylor: thank you for creating space for this conversation. 🙏 Drop a comment if you're attending SHRM National — I'd love to connect in person. #SHRMNational26 #HighRoadLeadership #HRStrategy #KeynoteSpeaker #JohnMaxwellTeam #HR #HRLeadership #TheStrategicHRCoach #Stakeholder #TransformationalLeadership

I covered the three distinct mindsets in AI adoption among marketers in a previous post, so it's time to focus on the winning mindset now: 𝗙𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝘅𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀 (𝗙𝗢𝗠𝗔) AI leaders achieve powerful results: companies that are in the most advanced stages of AI adoption see 60% more revenue growth than companies that are just starting to implement AI essentials. Here’s how to put this mindset into action and transform your organisation with AI: (1) Partner with AI AI can extend your abilities. Think about your daily tasks, and bigger goals. • Which are the thoughest? • What have you tried before, but couldn’t achieve? • What’s already working well, and what can be improved tenfold with AI? (2) Learn AI by doing • Allocate time to practice. If you don't prioritise, you will never "have time". • Workshop the big strategic questions in a team setting. • Share your learnings and get input from others. (3) Embrace AI uncertainty • Rebrand "failure" into a "learning". • Include people from the cross-functional team that can make decisions to scale successful AI projects that do work. (4) Proactively add business value • Incorporate AI into annual planning discussions. • Make deliberate AI decisions to unlock the areas that genuinely address business challenges. (5) Reimagine with AI • Don't just optimise what exists. • What is your business’ true competitive advantage? • How do you and your team contribute to it? Mindsets matter. The way we speak about things to ourselves ultimately determines our behaviours. Adopt a FOMA mindset about AI today and capture its transformational potential tomorrow. #AI #AIupskilling #AImindset

Had a fantastic morning at Digitaloft 's Digital PR Summit. What a great conference to have in Manchester. I loved being involved and kicking off the conference this morning on Stage 2, focusing on International Digital PR. It's been great to be back on stage after a little while and seeing just how much our industry has progressed. Especially in how we're now leveraging LLMs to navigate campaigns and scale outreach without losing that essential human touch. It's been lovely to see some familiar faces and meet new ones.

For those attending Google Cloud Next, I want to have a BIG shout out to all the "other halves" this week. It's not lost on me that I can only attend this event while my wife is left at home dealing with a 4 and 6 yr old. With school runs, swimming lessons, piano classes, and everything in between being left on the shoulders of one person this week, the "mental load" is at an all-time high. While we are here networking, learning about the future of AI, and enjoying the energy of Vegas, the real MVP is back home managing the chaos of the daily grind solo. Success in this industry is rarely a solo mission. It’s built on the support systems we have in the background. So, if you’re at Next this week, take a second between sessions to send a thank you text (or maybe browse the gift shops for something better than a Vegas keychain). To Pam (my wife) and everyone else holding it down: Thank you. We couldn't do this without you. #GoogleCloudNext #CloudNext #Next26 #WorkLifeBalance #Gratitude #SupportSystems

One week until the Strategic HR Circle — April 24th at 10 AM! 🗓️ Here's what I love about this community: nobody is pretending HR is easy right now. We're all in it together — the understaffing, the leadership expectations, the compliance pressure, the strategic aspirations. That's exactly why we need a space like this. Come as you are. Leave with a plan. FREE. Link is below. #StrategicHRCircle #HRCommunity #FreeHRTraining #HRLeadership https://lnkd.in/gvPFGsrz

Google released Gemma 4 on April 2 under Apache 2.0. No revenue thresholds. No user caps. No compete clauses. Build it into a product, ship it, move on. Llama 4 still restricts companies above 700M monthly users. GPT-4 charges per token. This one doesn't. The model holds up on its own. 31B parameters, 89.2% on AIME 2026 math, #3 on the Arena AI leaderboard. 400M+ downloads across all Gemma versions. Runs on a single RTX 4090. The trade-off is ecosystem. OpenAI's tooling is more mature. Llama has a bigger community for now. Whether those gaps matter depends on what you're building. But the "let me check with legal" step just got shorter. #AI #OpenSource #TechLeadership

Most delays in high-volume creative production aren’t caused by speed — they’re caused by process gaps. Case Study: Scaling dynamic creative for 2 concurrent retail campaigns using Plainly The need: Video automation at scale to support dynamic creative across two campaigns during a high-volume period The challenge: Short turnaround timelines during the holiday season, multiple stakeholders, and late-stage updates that could have delayed launch What I did: • Identified efficiency gains using Plainly and built a clear, dependency-driven timeline in Monday.com • Prioritized critical path tasks and enabled my team with tool-specific workflows • Streamlined communication across creative, media, and client teams to maintain alignment • Implemented a QA checklist to reduce revisions and scheduled a post-project retro to capture learnings Outcome: Delivered 108 ad units on time with minimal revisions Takeaway: Leveraging the right tools is key to scaling dynamic creative efficiently Building QA into timelines upfront keeps fast-moving campaigns on track

This is excellent, as always, from the esteemed Mark Ritson . His defense of the funnel as a diagnostic tool is hard to argue with. You need some way to understand where your market sits. The funnel does that. Custom funnels, built from real insight, do it better. On that, I agree completely. Where I'd push further is on how benign the tool is in practice. Ritson says the funnel is fine, just use it properly. Again, he's not wrong. But "use it properly" is a lofty expectation in an industry that has spent two decades proving it won't (or cannot). The "common" funnel's native language (Not AIDA but the even more reductive, awareness, consideration, conversion) maps so perfectly onto publisher product tiers that separating diagnosis from sales pitch becomes almost impossible. In media deployment (where funnel-abuse is most rampant) if we consider ~95% of your category to be out-of-market at any given time, "consideration" describes a population so small that dedicated media investment against it is often economically irrational. Mark talks about Marketing, I snipe at the funnel through a media scope and in that instance, I'm a firm believer in Quick to Mind, then Easy to Find. If nothing else, it's harder for vendors to corrupt. Which is exactly why it's better.