Tag: creative business

By Max Fellows, Founder of allpoints

Have you heard of the R&D grant? When you run an event agency, production house, tech service or supplier, you probably don’t think of your team as a research and development department. You’re creating experiences, solving client problems, working around briefs, bringing different ideas, innovations and technologies together and finding ways to deliver ideas that haven’t necessarily been done before.

Occasionally, the heavy lifting behind the scenes isn’t just creative problem-solving; it’s actual research and development. If your team is already spending time and money to beat complex hurdles, those efforts might actually qualify for R&D tax relief.

What does R&D actually mean?

For tax purposes, R&D (Research and Development) has a much tighter definition than simply doing something innovative. HMRC looks for projects seeking an advance in science or technology while tackling scientific or technological uncertainty that couldn’t readily be resolved by a competent professional in that field.

For event agencies and event businesses, that distinction is important.

Creating a completely original activation, designing an incredible experience or finding a clever new way to engage an audience does not automatically make a project R&D. The creative idea itself isn’t the qualifying part.

The question is what had to happen technically, or from a research perspective, to make that idea possible.

Where could R&D appear within an event project?

Think about the projects where the initial response from your production or technology team wasn’t simply “we know how to build that”, but closer to “we’re going to have to work out whether this is actually possible.”

While much of the focus is often on the “development” of physical or digital solutions, the “research” element is just as crucial. This involves proprietary research, conducting systematic testing, gathering original data, or undertaking scientific exploration to uncover new technical knowledge that isn’t currently available in the public domain. If your team had to run controlled experiments, rigorously test new material properties under unique event conditions, or carry out formal investigations just to understand if a solution was theoretically possible, this essential groundwork is a vital part of a qualifying R&D project.

That could include projects where your team has had to:

• Develop or significantly adapt software because existing technology couldn’t achieve the required functionality.
• Find a new technical way of connecting platforms, systems or data where the solution wasn’t readily apparent.
• Develop technology for immersive, interactive or hybrid experiences that required substantial testing and experimentation.
• Overcome engineering or technical limitations within the physical delivery of an experience.
• Create new technical processes to improve areas such as performance, scalability, data handling or energy use, where the solution requires more than applying established methods.

Software integration can potentially qualify, for example, where combining existing technologies presents a technological uncertainty and a competent professional couldn’t readily determine how to make them work together as required. Simply connecting two existing platforms in a conventional way would be very different.

That distinction is where many agencies need to look more closely.

Six questions worth asking after a complex and technically difficult project

Rather than asking your finance team, “Did we do any R&D this year?”, start with the people who actually delivered the work.

Ask:

• What were we trying to achieve technically?
• What stopped us from using an existing or readily available solution?
• What research was carried out to uncover a new learning?
• Did we have to conduct original experiments or systematically gather new data because existing industry knowledge couldn’t provide the answer?
• What did our technical team genuinely not know how to solve at the beginning?
• What testing, development or iteration did we undertake to get there?

If there are strong answers to those questions, there may be something worth exploring.

Equally, there may not be. R&D tax relief shouldn’t become an exercise in retrospectively making an ordinary project sound more complicated than it was. If existing knowledge, products or standard processes could readily solve the problem, it is unlikely to meet HMRC’s definition.

What costs could be relevant?

Where a project does qualify, the associated expenditure can extend beyond the most obvious development costs.

Depending on the circumstances, qualifying expenditure can include areas such as employee costs, software, consumable items, data licences, cloud computing and certain contractor or externally provided worker costs. The rules around contracted-out R&D changed for accounting periods beginning on or after 1 April 2024, so agencies working across clients, production partners and specialist suppliers need to be particularly careful about who decided the R&D grant was required and where the work took place.

Good project records therefore matter. Technical briefs, development notes, testing, iterations and evidence of the problems encountered can all help build a much clearer picture of what happened during the project than trying to reconstruct the story months later.

Don’t wait until year-end to think about it

There are also deadlines attached to R&D grant claims. Businesses making their first claim, or those that haven’t made a qualifying recent claim, may need to notify HMRC within six months of the end of the relevant period of account. An additional information form must also be submitted before, or on the same day as, the relevant Company Tax Return.

For agency and business owners, the bigger lesson is to make R&D part of the project review process rather than something left entirely to the finance team at year-end.

When a job has required your team to push beyond what was technically straightforward, document it, because while your client may remember the finished experience, some of the most valuable innovation could have happened behind the scenes while your team was figuring out how to make it work.

By Megan Johnstone-Mackie, PR and Marketing Manager, allpoints

Every time I sit down and connect with event founders to chat about growth, social media completely hogs the agenda but rarely does email marketing get mentioned. We always end up lightly debating algorithm shifts, video trends, and how on earth to stretch a three-day brand activation into a fortnight of LinkedIn posts. I entirely get it, social is visual and immediate but, whilst everyone is busy fighting for organic reach, one of the most effective channels we have is sitting quietly in the corner: Email.

A glossy reel feels great to post, I won’t deny that, but the social platform controls who sees it. When you build an email list, you actually own the audience. No algorithm update can suddenly pull the rug out from under you and block access to the very people who explicitly asked to hear from your agency.

Why the Inbox Wins

Brands rarely hire event agencies on a whim. A brand manager might not need an exhibition stand today, but when a massive project lands on their desk in six months, the agency sitting quietly in their inbox is naturally the one they ring first. If you think email is a bit outdated, I’d urge you to look at the numbers. Litmus data reckons email delivers an average return of around $36 for every dollar spent. The secret is that the best returns always come from relationship-building newsletters, rather than relentless sales pitches.

The DMA’s 2025 report backs this up entirely. They found a 98% delivery rate and unique click rates creeping up to 2.3%. MailerLite also saw average open rates of over 43% this year, alongside a tiny 0.22% unsubscribe rate. Yes, modern privacy settings mean we need to take open rates with a pinch of salt these days. Even so, the core truth is undeniable: an email lands right in front of a decision-maker whilst they’re sitting at their desk working.

What on Earth Do We Write About?

The biggest roadblock I see is that most agencies think they have absolutely nothing to say unless they’ve just wrapped a massive, shiny project. You don’t need a fresh set of hero photos to send a brilliant email.

Honestly, explaining the gritty details of a job is usually far more valuable to a prospective client than showing off the final polish. Try mixing up your content like this:

Sync with their calendar: Drop them practical advice right when they start planning. A checklist for Q4 activations sent in late summer is incredibly helpful and shows you understand their timeline.

Share the raw lessons: Ditch the self-congratulatory case study. Instead, talk about the three critical planning decisions that kept 10,000 attendees moving smoothly. Talk about what actually went wrong and how you fixed it.

Discuss industry shifts: Weigh in on real trends. Have an opinion on sustainable staging materials or the classic mistakes clients keep making when writing event briefs.

Put your team in the spotlight: Let your lead producer share their golden rules for production, or have your creative director explain spatial flow. Exposing the brains behind the operation builds massive trust.

Gathering the Right Crowd

For any of this to work, you need the right people reading. In fact, I would take a list of 200 highly engaged brand directors over 5,000 random contacts any day of the week.

The smartest way to gather these contacts is by offering something genuinely useful on your website. Let’s face it, nobody wakes up wanting to “download your agency brochure”, but offering a definitive 20-point checklist to complete before briefing an experiential agency? That gives a busy marketing manager a proper reason to hand over their email address.

A quick word of warning on the legal side. You absolutely must play by the rules with UK data laws. The ICO doesn’t mess around with marketing consent under PECR and general data protection rules. So, get rid of any pre-ticked boxes, be completely transparent about what they are signing up for, keep a solid record of their opt-in, and always stick an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every message. Keep it clean, simple, and compliant.

Don’t Just Vanish

When someone does opt in, don’t just send them the download and vanish into thin air. Set up a straightforward welcome sequence. Just three automated emails introducing your agency’s ethos and sharing your best insights will do the job perfectly. After that, find a rhythm you can actually stick to. A thoughtful, high-value email sent once a month will always beat a rushed weekly blast you threw together in a panic on a Friday afternoon. 

Social media might catch someone’s eye for a few fleeting seconds, but the inbox gives you a private space to build genuine familiarity, month in, month out. When the next big pitch comes around, you won’t be pitching cold. You will already be the experts they know and trust.

The future of marketing may not belong solely to the brands that are seen the most, but to the brands people actually remember. Your next read, we recommend: Is Cannes Lions Worth It for Agencies and What Leaders Should Consider Before Booking 2026

By Megan Johnstone-Mackie, PR and Marketing Manager, allpoints

Here we are again… yet another layer of marketing we need to wrap our heads around, because fundamentally, the way people find information is changing, and it’s happening fast.

For a very long time, and certainly as long as I have worked in marketing (15 years now!), online visibility followed a relatively predictable formula: write content, optimise your website, and pray to the Google gods for a higher ranking. All in the hope of driving traffic and landing leads and, whilst traditional search isn’t going to vanish overnight, businesses seriously need to wake up to how quickly the game is changing.

Instead of scrolling through pages of search results, more of us are turning to AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to get direct answers to our questions. Research from Gartner found that traditional search engine volume is expected to decline by 25% by 2026 as users increasingly shift towards AI assistants and other virtual agents for information discovery. Meanwhile, news publishers expect search traffic to drop 43% over the next three years. 

To see how fast this is happening, look at recent data from Adobe. They found that traffic arriving on websites from generative AI sources skyrocketed by 1,200% between July 2024 and February 2025 alone. While AI-driven traffic might still represent a relatively small slice of overall web visits right now, that kind of exponential growth proves just how quickly these platforms are hijacking the customer journey.

Not only this, but users are being pushed to use AI left, right and centre. Google, for instance, often pushes AI Overviews immediately ahead of traditional search results. Users get their answer right at the top, without ever having to click through to a website.

For businesses, this creates a pretty major challenge. If fewer people are actually clicking through traditional search results, how do you make sure your brand still gets found in the never-ending depths of the internet? In reality, the answer boils down to three core things: authority, credibility, and trust.

AI Doesn’t Care About Your Paid Ads

Research highlights just how large this shift really is: a vendor study cited by Gartner found that an enormous 95% of links referenced by AI search engines come from non-paid sources, while 27% originate directly from earned media coverage. This means that AI-generated responses aren’t pulling from your paid ads, they’re drawing heavily from earned and third-party sources.

Why PR is Your New Visibility Hack

AI engines also can’t easily crawl walled-off apps like Instagram or Facebook. Instead, they are aggressively pulling answers from open, indexed platforms where real experts are having public conversations, specifically LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube transcripts, and digital PR placements.

This is where PR suddenly becomes incredibly valuable for brands and businesses. A solid PR strategy creates exactly the kind of digital footprint these AI platforms are looking for.

We’re talking about:

• Publishing original research and fresh insights (because AI models love new data)
• Providing expert commentary and securing media interviews in trusted publications
• Landing industry features and guest articles that build your off-site credibility
• Getting on podcasts and speaking at industry events to build human-led authority
• Building real, ongoing relationships with trusted media outlets
• Creating high-value, searchable content on open platforms, such as long-form blog posts, LinkedIn articles, Reddit AMAs, or YouTube videos, that other people actually want to reference and link to.

While you can publish unlimited content on your own blog, independent coverage carries much more weight because it proves to the AI that other people consider you worth listening to. For example, when someone asks an AI tool for recommendations, industry trends, or expert opinions, the sources that pop up are usually the organisations and individuals who have built authority through media coverage, research, and thought leadership.

Building Authority for the Future

The businesses that are going to successfully navigate these changes are those that are building genuine authority in their sector. As AI search continues to evolve, visibility is going to depend entirely on trust and authority. For a lot of businesses, that means PR is very quickly becoming one of the most important visibility strategies out there. Time to get to work!

By Max Fellows, Founder of allpoints

Brands have focused heavily on performance marketing for years, including online engagement, paid social, and digital visibility, all with the goal of reaching audiences faster, more efficiently, and at greater scale.

However, another shift has been happening alongside it. Research from Eventbrite found that 78% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers would rather spend money on experiences than physical products. That shift is changing the role experiential marketing and face-to-face events play within emerging business strategy. So what does that mean for the experience economy?

Events were once considered a “nice addition” to a campaign, but are now becoming a central part of how brands build visibility, loyalty, cultural relevance, and long-term engagement. For agencies, that creates both a major opportunity and a significant challenge as experience-led strategy becomes increasingly important for brand growth.

1. The Demand for Experience-Led Strategy Is Growing

Across industries, brands are investing more heavily into experiential campaigns, immersive activations, live events, community-driven experiences, and consumer-focused moments.

Particularly for businesses with B2C or consumer-facing elements, there is increasing pressure to create experiences that bring people together physically, not just digitally.

Festivals, immersive pop-ups, branded activations, community events, and interactive experiences are becoming more valuable because they create something digital marketing alone often struggles to achieve, emotional connection. Even digital-first businesses are beginning to pivot towards physical experiences and in-person connection models. Dating platform Thursday is one example of this. Originally built around online interaction, the brand has increasingly positioned itself around real-world events and physical meetups, recognising that audiences are actively craving in-person connection again, while still engaging with digital platforms more selectively. 

2. Why Younger Audiences Are Driving This Change

Your business visuals and fonts absolutely matter. Sans-serif fonts often feel modern, clean, and forward-thinking, while serif fonts can feel more classic, established, and rooted in heritage. Colours also carry meaning, blue often feels calm and trustworthy, while red and yellow can signal urgency or attention. These interpretations aren’t always universal, but can be heavily understood. Something to consOne of the most interesting shifts agencies are beginning to notice is the changing behaviour of younger audiences. 72% of 21-35 year olds feel positively towards events that offer meaningful, transformative experiences, highlighting the growing demand for immersive, experience-led engagement over traditional consumerism.

Audiences are becoming increasingly aware of oversaturation, algorithm-driven content, and performative online engagement. As a result, real-life experiences are beginning to carry more cultural value. People want moments they can genuinely participate in rather than simply consume through a screen. In fact, digital often amplifies the impact of experiential campaigns and the content captured through live experiences frequently becomes the fuel for wider social campaigns, PR, community engagement, and long-term brand storytelling. The difference now is that the experience itself is becoming the core asset with the online content becoming an extension of the moment rather than the entire strategy.

3. Why Agencies Need to Adapt Now

The experiential economy is still growing rapidly, and many agencies believe the next three to four years could see a major acceleration in demand for experience-led strategy. In 2025 alone, 74% of Fortune 1000 marketers increased their experiential marketing spend, signalling a clear shift toward experience-led growth and audience engagement strategies. 

However, adapting does not simply mean adding “events” onto a services page. It requires agencies to rethink how they understand audiences, measure engagement, build campaigns, and position value. The agencies likely to lead this next phase of growth are the ones investing in areas such as:

• Behavioural insight and audience psychology
• Experiential strategy
• Consumer engagement
• Data and analytics
• Community-building
• Immersive storytelling
• Hybrid digital and physical campaigns

Experiential marketing without audience understanding is ineffective. Brands now need deeper insight into behaviour, emotional engagement, and what creates lasting loyalty. 

4. The Biggest Challenge For Agencies

Despite growing demand, many brands are still cautious about experiential investment.

The biggest reason behind this is that proving impact is harder. Digital campaigns often provide immediate metrics including clicks, impressions, conversions, and attribution. Experiential campaigns operate differently, with value often being emotional, long-term, community-driven, and spread across multiple touchpoints, making measurement more complex and for agencies, this creates pressure to develop stronger ways of tracking success through:

• Data capture
• Audience engagement metrics
• Content performance
• Lead generation
• Brand sentiment
• Community growth
• Social amplification
• Long-term customer retention

The agencies that can clearly demonstrate commercial impact alongside emotional engagement will likely become increasingly valuable to brands over the coming years.

5. Challenges Agencies Need to Consider

There is also another reality agencies must navigate. In order to market experiential work effectively, agencies often need previous experiential work to showcase. Live events generate the content, engagement insights, and case studies brands want to see before investing, this means agencies may need to strategically invest in building experiential portfolios now, even before demand fully peaks. Once an experience happens, the value extends far beyond the event itself, creating content ecosystems, social assets, measurable engagement, and long-term marketing material that continues driving visibility long after the event ends.

This Is Not a Passing Trend

Brands are increasingly looking for ways to create deeper audience connection, stronger emotional engagement, and real-world visibility that cuts through digital saturation. While the industry is still evolving, the direction of travel is clear. The agencies that strengthen their audience understanding and build experience-led capabilities now will likely be far better positioned for where the industry is heading next. The future of marketing may not belong solely to the brands that are seen the most, but to the brands people actually remember. Your next read, we recommend: Is Cannes Lions Worth It for Agencies and What Leaders Should Consider Before Booking 2026

By Bethany Sharp, Social Media and Comms Specialist, allpoints

Most businesses think their branding is just their logo and a few visuals, and I can not say this enough, it’s so much more than that, especially in social media branding. I’m going to go straight into this and talk about my passport theory.

The Passport Theory

Your logo is your passport, it tells people who you are and confirms your identity which gets you through the door. It does a lot, it’s helpful and you can not go anywhere without it but, your branding is more like how you carry the passport. Imagine walking into an airport holding a passport wrapped in a bright pink, sparkly case, covered in stickers, before you even speak, people have already formed an opinion about you. This is because it’s a reflection of personality and energy.

Let’s imagine the same passport but it’s plain and completely untouched. It’s very functional, crisp and smart but that passport officer is not going to remember it. This is how branding works on social media as well, the aim is to be remembered when people are scrolling through thousands of posts a day.

Branding is often considered as colours, typography, and a logo style, but this is just the foundations. Your brand is:

• The way you speak
• The words you choose
• The way you show up on social media
• The type of content you create
• The feeling people get when they come across you

It’s how you present yourself as a business and how consistently you do it. The thing that lots of agencies and businesses miss is that it’s not just what people see, it’s what they feel, assume, and remember.

Branding on Social Media Goes Beyond the Visuals

This is where most businesses get it wrong and they treat branding as something they “set up” once, and that’s it. A logo, a colour palette, a few templates, and then they move on, however, on social media, your branding is always active.

Think of your brand as a continuous campaign:

• Every post reinforces who you are
• Every caption reinforces what you stand for
• Every visual reinforces how you want people to feel
• Every comment reinforces how you show up

If that’s inconsistent, your message becomes unclear. If it’s intentional, everything starts working together, and if you don’t shape that perception, your audience will do it for you.

Beyond Colours and Fonts

Your business visuals and fonts absolutely matter. Sans-serif fonts often feel modern, clean, and forward-thinking, while serif fonts can feel more classic, established, and rooted in heritage. Colours also carry meaning, blue often feels calm and trustworthy, while red and yellow can signal urgency or attention. These interpretations aren’t always universal, but can be heavily understood. Something to consider is that different cultures, industries, and audiences read visual cues differently, so if your branding only relies on visuals, you’re leaving too much open to interpretation, which means people will just make up their own minds about you and your business, and this is risky.

Strong branding isn’t just about looking aesthetically pleasing, it’s primarily about guiding how people think and feel about your business. Without being too bold and honest, strong branding controls what people think, it makes sure people take in your business in the way you actually intended and it can seem a bit manipulative, but that means it’s working, and you are not leaving space for misinterpretation. We’ve all read an email quickly, late at night or just before a meeting, and completely misunderstood the tone. You’ve skimmed it, taken it the wrong way, and gone with it, and sometimes this can even cause arguments and disagreements that didn’t even need to happen. That’s what a logo on its own is like. It’s there, but it leaves too much uncertainty. Let’s compare this to speaking with someone face-to-face, you can see their expression, you can also hear their tone, and you can read how they’re saying something, not just what they’re saying. That’s the beauty of face-to-face interactions, there’s far less room to get it wrong.

The goal with your branding on social media is to create:

• Context
• Tone
• Feeling
• Intention

So people don’t start guessing what your business is all about, they just know and understand it instantly.

Your Brand Is the Environment You Create

The strongest businesses create feelings through their branding. Especially in industries like experiential and events, this matters even more. If you’re creating high-energy, immersive experiences, your brand should reflect that. Your social presence, your visuals, and your messaging should feel like a glimpse into that world. If you’re an events agency designing and planning for festivals, your social media shouldn’t just show the event, it should feel like they are in it. The second someone lands on your page, watches a video, or scrolls through your content, they should feel like they’re already there, like they’re part of it.

That can come through in simple ways:

• A collage-style LinkedIn banner using real event moments
• Content that feels like lived experiences, not staged outputs
• Visuals that show movement, energy, and interaction

It can be messy, but in the right way that showcases energy and movement. Something that makes people instantly recognise the atmosphere you create because you’re not just showing what you’ve done, you’re showing people what it feels like to be in it. Plus, it helps clients understand what you’ll create for their audience, and they can already see the experience, the energy, and the reaction your team can create. On the other side, if you’re creating something like business retreats or wellness-focused events, the same logic applies, just in a completely different way. Your tone of voice should feel calm, and your language should slow people down. Even small details, like the music on your Instagram profile, can shape that first impression. If someone lands on your page and instantly hears something soft and meditative, you’ve already started building that environment before they’ve even read a word.

Content Is Social Media Branding

Content isn’t something that sits alongside your branding, it is your branding but in action. The format you choose, the way you show up, how often you post, the way you write, all of it is constantly shaping how people see you. On social media, especially, this is happening fast.

If you lean into video, your agency will come across as current and reactive, and if your content is more structured and analytical, you position your business as considered and strategic. Even the way you explain things builds a perception of how you think and how you work. If you show up sporadically or your messaging shifts all the time, people feel that, even if they can’t explain why. When everything feels aligned, your tone, your visuals, your opinions, your content style, it builds trust without you having to say it outright. People aren’t just reading your content, they’re reading if your business is right for them and if you operate in a way that feels right to them. We all know the main benefit of this: you draw in the right client and audience when this is done correctly.

The Real Goal of Branding

Branding on social media isn’t just about looking good or being recognisable. It’s about stopping the scroll and removing any form of confusion. You want the right people to come across your business and instantly understand how to feel about it, without overthinking it, without having to figure it out for themselves. If people need to figure it out themselves, they’ll either get it wrong or they’ll move on.

The strongest businesses don’t rely on one element AKA the logo and visuals. They focus on how everything is working together, their visuals, their tone of voice, their content, their presence, all aligned so clearly that there are no mixed signals. You don’t want to have to convince clients to work with you or overexplain why you are the experts in your field. People should feel this and know this subconsciously through your social media branding, this also follows through into how your team communicates to clients and the systems you have set up, but maybe that’s for another day, if you want to find five PR priorities for business and agencies for 2026, read here.

By Nic Neal, HR Specialist, allpoints

When a M&A deal is announced, the focus usually floods to the deal itself – the valuation, the press release, the handshake photo. The moment the ink dries is where the real strategic work begins.

M&A is designed to build stronger, more competitive organisations, whether that’s improving the client base (for example, moving from a UK agency to a global one) or combining services to give clients a more complete offering. Yet 70% of deals fail to reach their final earn-out targets, and one of the most common reasons isn’t strategy or finance, it’s integration.

Bringing two organisations together is far more complex than combining balance sheets. It means merging cultures, aligning teams, redefining roles, rebuilding ways of working, and building a clear talent strategy for the newly combined organisation. This is where many businesses underestimate what’s required.

Integration often becomes an afterthought rather than a strategic priority, layered on top of already demanding roles and operational pressures, when in reality it should be treated as its own programme of work. The result? Integration is moving slowly, inconsistently, or not happening properly at all.

When it doesn’t, the cost is real. People become uncertain about their futures, teams pull in different directions, and clients feel the disruption before leadership does.

Why Integration Is Often Overlooked

The common misconception in M&A deals is that things will settle quickly once the deal is done. Those teams will adjust naturally. The organisation will begin operating as one as soon as they get to know each other. This assumption is precisely why integration takes far longer than anyone anticipates.

Old ways of working are often applied to a landscape that has fundamentally changed. Processes that worked well before the merger are carried forward without fully recognising that the organisation now has different structures, people, and expectations. At the same time, a quiet tug of war can emerge between company cultures and the people within them.

Meanwhile a quieter challenge emerges: culture. Two companies bring two distinct approaches to leadership, communication, and decision-making. There’s an assumption that one culture will eventually dominate the other, when all that is needed is something new built intentionally from the best of both. That rarely happens by accident.

Instead, teams end up working alongside each other rather than becoming fully integrated. They share projects and clients, but deeper alignment – around ways of working, how decisions get made, how people communicate – hasn’t been built yet. 

Layer restructuring into the mix, and it becomes difficult for people to find stable ground. Reporting lines change, teams shift, and roles evolve, sometimes repeatedly. At the same time, operational pressures remain just as demanding as before. Day-to-day delivery continues at full pace, leaving very little space for people to step back and focus on the integration itself.

The Operational Reality of Integration

Integration isn’t just a people challenge, it’s an operational one. When two organisations merge, duplication is inevitable. Both have their own HR teams, finance, and operational functions. A combined organisation does not need two of everything.

This is where the integration strategy becomes critical. The goal isn’t to remove roles for the sake of cost-cutting, but to thoughtfully create a structure that is efficient, sustainable, and aligned with the future direction of the organisation. That often means consolidating duplicate teams into one core function. Sometimes it means redefining responsibilities so the strongest capabilities from both organisations are retained, not just the loudest voices or the legacy hierarchy.

When this is handled well, the result is clarity, efficiency, and teams that are genuinely stranger than either organisation had before. When it’s handled poorly, the result is confusion, uncertainty, and disruption that ripples far beyond the org chart. 

Treating Integration as Its Own Strategic Workstream

The organisations that navigate the M&A deal most successfully share one common approach: they treat integration as a standalone programme of work, not an operational side task.

That means establishing dedicated ownership from day one. Ideally, a named integration lead or small task force, with real authority and accountability, is responsible for guiding the process for up to two years post-merger. Not a committee that meets occasionally. A team with a clear mandate.

That team should have representation across every critical dimension across the business:

• People and culture
• Ways of working and processes
• Internal communication
• Financial alignment
• Talent strategy and workforce planning

Integration cannot simply be added to someone’s existing workload and without dedicated ownership, it risks being overshadowed by the immediate demands of the business.

A strong integration strategy also requires a clear talent strategy – not just a list of new roles to recruit. The organisation needs to understand which capabilities are needed for the future and how teams will evolve, and what the combined structure will look like. Recruitment has a role to play, but only in the service of that long-term picture. Hiring into an unclear structure just compounds the problem.  of the broader talent strategy. Hiring decisions during integration should support the long-term structure of the business rather than simply reacting to short-term gaps.

Communication, Culture and Role Clarity

Restructures are difficult, but uncertainty is often far harder for employees to navigate than the change itself. Timely, honest communication, about what’s happening, what’s still being decided and where individuals stand is one of the most powerful tools available during the integration. 

Role clarity sits at the heart of this. When reporting structures shift and teams are redefined, people need to understand how their role fits into the new structure. Even when every answer isn’t immediately available, establishing direction early helps create stability.

Culture deserves the same intentional approach. In most mergers, the smaller organisation naturally begins adopting the processes and ways of working of the larger one. It’s the path of least resistance, but it isn’t always the right one. The stronger culture isn’t automatically the bigger one, and the better process isn’t always the established one.

A thoughtful integration strategy gives leadership the space to evaluate deliberately: which behaviours, ways of working, and cultural strengths should actually shape the new organisation? Because integration isn’t only about systems and structures. It’s about people, mindset, and how teams experience the change from the inside.

The Human Ripple Effect

When integration is not handled strategically, the ripple effects spread like wildfire. If teams feel uncertain about their roles or direction, people become disheartened. When individuals feel disconnected from the company’s vision or unclear about their future, they leave. Attrition during integration doesn’t just create operational gaps, it destabilises the teams clients rely on, erodes confidence and begins to unwind the very value the deal was designed to create. 

This is how earn-out targets get missed. Not through bad strategy at the top, but through avoidable erosion in the middle. Key people leave. Delivery becomes inconsistent. Clients notice.

Integration strategies that focus exclusively on senior leadership structures without accounting for the mid-level teams, who are the heartbeat of the business, tend to create exactly this outcome. The people closest to the work, and closest to the client, are left without clarity, without direction, and eventually without reason to stay.

The deal was meant to build something stronger, but poor integration quietly derails it.

Integration Is the Real Test of an M&A Deal

Signing a merger or acquisition agreement is only the starting point. 

The true success of the M&A deal depends on what happens next. Integration is not a short adjustment period. It’s a structured process that can take years to fully realise. When organisations treat integration as a strategic priority, supported by a clear integration programme and talent strategy, the chances of reaching the intended financial and cultural outcomes increase dramatically, because ultimately, the goal of the M&A deal isn’t simply to combine two businesses. It’s to build something stronger than either organisation could achieve on its own.

By Max Fellows, HR Specialist at allpoints

Every year the same question comes up across the industry “Is Cannes Lions actually worth it?” For agency owners and senior leaders, attending the festival is a serious investment, between delegate passes, travel, accommodation and time away from the business, the cost can quickly climb into the tens of thousands, but still vast amounts of people return to the Croisette each summer.

So what do you actually get from Cannes Lions, and who in your agency should be going? Based on observations from Cannes Lions 2025 and conversations across the industry, here are a few realities that agencies should understand before planning for 2026.

What Most People Don’t Realise About Cannes Lions

One of the most surprising things for first-time attendees is that Cannes Lions is not just the official festival programme inside the Palais. In fact, there are two parallel worlds operating throughout the week. The official programme inside the Palais includes the keynote talks, awards ceremonies and scheduled sessions that require a delegate pass and outside the Palais sits the unofficial Cannes ecosystem. Across beaches, terraces, yachts and pop-up venues, brands, platforms and media owners host their own activations, panels and networking events.

Companies like Amazon, Google, Spotify, TikTok and Meta all create large branded spaces where talks, demos and networking sessions take place throughout the week and what many people don’t realise is that a large portion of these fringe events are free to attend with advance registration.

For agencies looking to attend without committing to the full delegate pass, this “unofficial Cannes” route has become a popular and successful strategy. It is also where a lot of the ‘real networking’ takes place.

The Topics Shaping the Industry Conversation

Cannes is well known for big conversations about the future of marketing and creativity however, many of the themes discussed each year are evolutions of conversations that have been happening for some time. In 2025, the main topics included:

• Artificial intelligence and its role in creative production
• Retail media and the shifting digital advertising ecosystem
• The creator economy and influencer-led campaigns
• Sustainability and inclusive marketing

These are important themes for the industry, but many attendees noted that discussions often focus on big-picture narratives rather than practical frameworks, and for agency teams hoping to return with tactical learnings, rather than a bag full of business cards, the key is to carefully select sessions or focus on smaller, more specialist events rather than relying solely on the main stages.

The Expectation vs Reality of Business at Cannes

One of the biggest misconceptions about Cannes Lions is that it’s a place where new business deals are made on the spot. That’s just not the reality at all, most commercial outcomes come before or after the festival and not during.

What Cannes provides instead is visibility and access, it puts decision-makers, agencies, platforms and brands in the same physical space for a few days. That environment can be powerful if you arrive with existing conversations already in the pipelines. Some industry leaders describe Cannes as a multiplier rather than a starting point, if relationships or opportunities already exist, the festival can progress them. Very few partnerships begin from scratch during the week itself and any agencies attending with a commercial objective, need solid and strategic preparation. With this, meetings should be booked in advance and agendas clearly defined long before the event even starts.

One of the ways we approached Cannes strategically was by starting conversations before the festival even began. Ahead of the event, we created a leaders Cannes Lions WhatsApp group with industry contacts so people attending could introduce themselves, share plans for the week and start building connections early. This meant that by the time they arrived in Cannes, many of the conversations and introductions had already started, making it far easier to meet people and organise informal catch-ups during the week. For us, this simple step proved surprisingly valuable and reinforced the importance of preparing and networking before the festival rather than relying solely on chance meetings once you’re there.

How Long You Actually Need to Be at Cannes

Cannes Lions runs across several days, but most of the momentum tends to concentrate in the middle of the week. If you are an agency leader, two to three days is enough to capture the most valuable opportunities. Flying in midweek allows teams to attend key talks, host or attend events, and schedule meetings without the expense of staying for the entire festival. By having this shorter attendance window is becoming increasingly common among agencies looking to balance presence with practicality.

Who Should Attend Cannes from Your Agency

Cannes Lions is not designed for everyone within an organisation, and sending the wrong people can quickly turn an expensive trip into a missed opportunity and candidly, a rose-feuled jolly. Typically, the individuals who gain the most value include (bear in mind sending large teams without a clear purpose rarely delivers strong returns):

Senior leadership
Founders, managing directors and senior executives often attend to strengthen partnerships and build visibility for the agency.

New business and partnership teams
Those responsible for commercial growth benefit from the networking environment and industry access.
Creative leadership
Creative directors and strategy leads can use the festival to benchmark work, track industry trends and build inspiration.

When Cannes May Not Be the Right Investment

Despite its reputation, Cannes Lions isn’t always the right fit for every business and The festival becomes less valuable if:

• There is no clear objective or agenda for attending
• The business cannot justify the financial investment
• The expectation is to gain deep strategic training from panel sessions
• The primary motivation is simply to be seen there

Without preparation and a clear plan, the week can easily become more social than strategic.

The Real Value of Cannes Lions

For agencies that approach the festival strategically, Cannes Lions can be highly beneficial, offering strong opportunities for growth, visibility and partnership building, this is due to so many industry leaders, brands and platforms gathering in one place, the potential for meaningful conversations and new connections is significant when done with intention and not as a shortcut to success. The agencies that gain the most value are the ones that arrive with a clear plan, defined goals and the willingness to actively engage with the opportunities around them. 

Conclusion: Should Your Agency Attend?

If your business is looking to expand partnerships, strengthen industry visibility or stay close to the global creative conversation, Cannes Lions can absolutely be worthwhile, but the real return on investment comes from strategy, preparation and purpose and not just simply showing up.

For agencies already planning their calendars for 2026, the most important question isn’t whether Cannes is worth it but how you intend to show up.

By Gary Richards, Hiring and Talent Expert, allpoints

I’ve spoken to a lot of people over the years about company culture, and something that always gets talked about is that it means something different to everyone. If you ask ten people what company culture is, you’ll probably get ten completely different answers. For some people it’s the feeling you get when you walk into the office, people being chatty and a friendly welcoming and upbeat atmosphere, but I’ve also come across others who value flexibility more, or just want the space and trust to get on with their work without constant noise or pressure around them.

That’s what makes culture such a tricky thing to define, because there isn’t one version of it that works for everyone. It really comes down to the kind of environment you want to build in your business and the type of team you want around you, because those two things shape each other more than people think.

When you talk about culture, there’s still a tendency to focus on surface-level things, what the office looks like, what perks are on offer, whether there’s a pool table in the corner or somewhere to sit with a coffee, and while those things might add to the environment, they’re not what actually holds everything together. The cultures that tend to work best are not necessarily the ones with all the fanciest aesthetics, but the ones where people are motivated, unified and genuinely collaborative, and that kind of environment is not created by a pool table or a few comfortable beanbags.

In my role, I’m constantly speaking to senior talent, people who aren’t always actively looking for a move but are open to the right opportunity if something feels right, so more often than not what makes them lean in isn’t just the job itself, it’s the environment they’d be walking into.

The most effective cultures I see across the clients I work with are the ones that make that decision easier, the businesses people are already curious about, the ones that come up naturally in conversation where there’s a sense of “I’ve heard good things about them” before we’ve even started talking about the role in detail. That usually comes down to how those environments actually operate day to day, when people trust each other, when there’s a shared direction, and when senior hires feel like they’re stepping into something that will support how they work rather than get in the way of it. At this level, culture becomes a real deciding factor, because when someone has options, it’s rarely just about salary or title, it’s about whether the business feels like somewhere they can grow and develop and deliver their best work.

Where Culture Proves Its Value

A strong example of this and how culture plays a huge role is from a candidate I worked with last year within the events industry. They had been in an agency where the experience had got to a point where they needed to take time out, and when we first spoke, they weren’t just thinking about leaving their role, they were questioning whether they wanted to stay in the events industry at all. That wasn’t because they weren’t capable or experienced, it was because they had only seen one version of how an agency could operate, and naturally assumed that was the norm.

We ended up placing them into a different agency, one I already knew had a strong, supportive environment, and while it took a bit of time for them to settle in and rebuild their confidence, the difference over a couple of months was huge and are now going from strength to strength. What changed wasn’t just the job itself, it was the environment around them and they moved into a space where there was genuine collaboration, team members trusted each other, and where they felt supported rather than scrutinised, that allowed them to work in a completely different way.

It’s a good reminder that culture doesn’t just influence how people feel at work, it directly impacts how they perform, how long they stay, and in some cases, whether they stay in the industry at all.

Communicating Culture Without Forcing It

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is not just creating a strong culture, but communicating it in a way that actually feels genuine. There’s often a tendency to try and spell it out too much, to list values or say “this is what we’re like,” but more often than not that can feel forced. It should come across naturally rather than being over-explained.

If it’s genuine, people will pick up on it quickly and the interview process plays a huge role in that, particularly when there’s a face-to-face element involved, because the moment someone walks into an office, they can get a real sense of what it feels like to be there. You can pick up on how people interact, whether there’s energy in the room, if people seem engaged or disconnected, and that’s something a video interview can not replicate in the same way.

Most businesses still rely on a fairly standard job description, a list of responsibilities and requirements on a page, but that only tells a very small part of the story. The companies that do this well take it a step further and build out something more complete, a document that gives a proper sense of the business someone is joining. That might include an introduction to the team, how people work together day to day, what the values actually look like in practice rather than just a list of words, and even insights from current team members so it feels like it’s coming from real people rather than the business speaking about itself.

Some also include the wider mission of the business, what they’re working towards, what drives them, and how each role contributes to that. By the time someone finishes reading it, they should have a clear picture not just of the job, but of the environment, the expectations, and the kind of people they’d be working alongside. When that’s done well, candidates go into the interview already understanding the business, and the face-to-face conversation then reinforces what they’ve already felt on paper.

However, culture can not just be packaged into a document or explained in an interview if it isn’t already there, culture has to come from the top. It comes from leadership, from how people are treated, the level of trust that’s given, and from whether people genuinely feel supported in how they work. When that’s in place, it naturally flows through the rest of the business, and you don’t have to try too hard to explain it because people can see it and feel it for themselves.

My Final Thoughts

Culture is never going to be a simple or fixed thing. It depends on the individual, on how people like to work, and on what they value day to day, but the environments that tend to work best are the ones where there’s trust in every direction, where people feel empowered to do what they do best, and where everyone is working towards the same outcome. When that’s in place, everything else tends to follow.

By Nic Neal, HR Specialist at allpoints

As People & Culture continues to evolve, driving meaningful culture requires the ability to surface, understand, and thoughtfully navigate the tensions that sit beneath day-to-day work, because culture is often defined by how organisations handle these moments. Our HR specialist, Nic Neal, has identified several key HR trends currently defining the industry.

1. The Progression Tension

There is a growing hunger among employees to know exactly when and how they will reach the next level. However, a significant disconnect remains. While the desire is there, investment in Learning & Development (L&D) or growth of any kind, is often patchy or ineffective.

The Reality: Even when L&D programs exist, employees frequently feel they lack the “cognitive bandwidth” or time to engage with them. 

What This Means For You: Organisations must move beyond “tick-box” training. Development needs to be intentional and integrated into the flow of work, ensuring employees have the protected time to actually focus on their own growth.

2. The Evolution of Work Ethic

Contrary to popular belief, “work ethic” isn’t the issue. The real challenge lies in how organisations communicate and provide clarity to their teams. We are seeing a “just get it done” energy that prioritises output while overlooking the conditions people need to perform at their best.

The Reality: Managers often feel frustrated when expectations aren’t met, while employees are often navigating ambiguity around priorities, standards and success measures. The issue is less about motivation and more about communication.

What This Means For You: For leaders, this means adapting how expectations are set, reinforced, and contextualised. A one-size-fits-all leadership style is no longer effective. To unlock performance within a diverse workforce, managers must embrace situational leadership, tailoring both their communication and support to the individual, the task, and the moment.

3. Returning to Basics

Employees are increasingly asking fundamental questions: What is my role? What are the rules? What can I actually decide?

The Reality: In an environment defined by constant change, people aren’t resisting responsibility, they’re managing cognitive overload. Without clear boundaries and decision frameworks, even high performers can feel stretched and uncertain. They want to feel that their work is sustainable. 

What This Means For You:  Clarity is the new competitive advantage. Businesses need to focus on stripping back the noise and providing clear “rules of engagement” so employees can navigate their roles without burnout.

4. AI: The Leadership Gap

AI is no longer met with hesitation – teams are increasingly open to experimenting with it in their daily work. The gap sits at leadership level, where strategic direction and consistent guidance are often missing.

The Reality: The potential for AI is immense, but it is currently lacking deliberate leadership. Organisations encourage innovation, yet fail to define what acceptable, high-quality AI use looks like in practice. Without clear expectations, teams are left interpreting boundaries themselves.

What This Means For You: Leaders don’t need to be tech experts, but they do need to be “AI-intentional.” Organisations must define a clear purpose for AI and provide the framework for teams to not only experiment, but confidently leverage its capabilities. 

The Bottom Line

The overarching theme for 2026 is intentionality. Whether it’s how we develop our people or our approach to adopting new tools, leadership that is defined by clarity, consistency and conscious decision making is what will drive high performance and connected cultures. 

By Andy Dougan, Strategic Business Consultant at allpoints

Recently, I attended The Drum Predictions 2026 event, surrounded by strategists, brand leaders, and industry commentators all attempting to divine what the next twelve months might hold. The honest answer? Nobody knows for certain. But several themes emerged that feel particularly relevant for those of us working in experiential marketing and live brand experiences.

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The forecast: flat, misty, familiar

Mark Ritson set the tone early. His view? 2026 will look dramatically like 2025. The economy sits in a strange middle-ground, political instability persists, and while AI will reshape certain marketing functions, the revolution won’t arrive overnight.

That’s not pessimism, it’s pragmatism. And running through the day was a useful reminder: don’t obsess over what’s changing and pay attention to what isn’t.

Dan Rubel, Brand and Marketing Director at Currys, reinforced this beautifully. He doesn’t believe marketing is at some unprecedented crossroads. It’s the same game it’s always been: build brands, market those brands. Referencing A.G. Lafley, he brought it back to two enduring questions – where do we play, and how will we win there?

For agencies trying to be everything to everyone, that’s a pointed challenge.

AI: still figuring it out

AI featured heavily, as you’d expect. But the nuance was refreshing. We’re all still working out what it actually means for our roles and our industries. Despite the noise, nobody’s truly “there” yet.

Ritson sees synthetic data and speed-to-insight as the genuine unlocks. Alice Anson from Nectar360 demonstrated real-world application, turning two-week processes into 90 seconds by starting with client friction points rather than technology for its own sake.

But Rory Sutherland offered a necessary counterweight. The bill for AI will eventually come due. The pressure to deploy it with cost-reduction as the primary lens means we risk destroying value we never properly measured.

His “doorman fallacy” captured this perfectly: the cost of a doorman is easy to quantify; the value they provide, status, reassurance, human connection, is not. Organisations will optimise processes, celebrate the savings, and quietly fail to account for what they’ve lost.

For those of us in experiential, that resonates deeply. The value of physical presence, sensory engagement, and genuine human interaction has always been harder to quantify than a click-through rate, but that doesn’t make it less real.

Human judgment is rising, not falling

Eileen Hanna Yague from General Mills offered one of the day’s sharpest observations: “As marketers we’re tasked to find solutions. With AI we’re being asked to judge solutions.”

That shift matters enormously. It places human judgement, taste, and decision-making back at the centre, precisely because AI isn’t there yet. The ability to discern, to choose, to apply context and cultural intelligence becomes the differentiating skill.

Sutherland extended this further. Marketers should stop selling what we do and start articulating how we think. That’s the genuinely differentiated capability in an age of automated execution.

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Brand matters more than ever

How you show up in the market, what you stand for, whether you bring original thinking – these genuinely influence customer decisions. Perhaps more than they did five years ago, when performance marketing promised to make brand-building feel optional.

The pendulum is swinging, but brands that try to do everything will struggle. Those that make deliberate choices and focus will thrive in a world that’s noisier, faster, and increasingly commoditised by AI-generated content.

There’s also a noticeable shift away from fast, wallpaper-style content toward slower, more intentional storytelling. A continued hunger for nostalgia. And a growing recognition that reach and frequency aren’t enough, brands need to enrich experience and relevance as the levers for genuine engagement.

The experiential opportunity

Tom Goodwin made an observation that stuck with me: our obsession with measuring things fast often means we stop measuring the things that actually matter.

Meanwhile, research cited during the event suggested we’ve entered an “efficiency death spiral” whereby we are optimising digital experiences to the point where they’ve lost sensory and emotional distinctiveness.

This is where live experiences and physical brand activations come into their own. Multi-sensory engagement, genuine human connection, and moments that create memory.

In a world increasingly mediated by screens and algorithms, the brands that invest in physical presence, thoughtfully, strategically, with genuine creative ambition, will stand apart.

Sutherland even predicted that Cannes will evolve from retrospective celebration toward something more like a trade show, where agencies and creators come to sell ideas they’ve already developed.

The mood in the room

Despite the cautious forecasts, most people I spoke to felt quietly optimistic. Uncertainty now feels like a certainty, and there’s a sense that people are simply getting on with it.

Clarity matters more than ever. Know what marketing can deliver and what it can’t. Stay rooted in brand health. Do fewer things brilliantly.

For those of us in experiential, that’s not a limitation. It’s a mandate.

By Saffron Sumner, PR & Communications Manager at allpoints

Public relations is entering a year in which visibility and credibility are shaped simultaneously by people and machines, changing how priorities need to be set without turning the discipline into something mechanical. The task for 2026 is to protect judgment and narrative while adapting to systems that increasingly decide who gets referenced and trusted. So here are five PR priorities for businesses.

GEO as a discovery discipline

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) has shifted from an emerging idea to a core reputational concern, as AI platforms now answer questions at a scale that directly influences brand perception and customer decisions. Organisations are defined by how they appear in answers rather than by their rank, which means discovery depends on whether systems understand who a brand is and why it is relevant. GEO focuses on that interpretive layer, ensuring brands are represented accurately as models curate information from across the open web.

This matters because generative systems rely on existing signals to determine credibility and context. Clear explanations and evidence-led narratives help reduce ambiguity, while consistent naming allows models to attribute work correctly. The objective is legibility rather than optimisation tricks, so expertise can move cleanly from source material into generated responses without distortion.

Early visibility in large language models (LLMs) is primarily driven by earned authority rather than owned content. Approximately 62% of brand mentions in AI responses come from earned signals, including editorial coverage, customer reviews, rankings, and awards, reinforcing the central role of PR in the answer economy. Reputation work now feeds directly into discoverability, because third-party validation gives generative systems the confidence to surface a brand as a credible reference.

LinkedIn as your always-on channel

LinkedIn has settled into its position as the most reliable daily platform for B2B visibility, yet its real leverage comes from people rather than brand pages. Businesses that invest in a small number of visible leaders, each with a clearly articulated point of view, tend to build familiarity faster because audiences follow thinking before they follow logos. Ongoing commentary that unpacks how to approach live experiences helps shape how the market frames challenges long before a brief is issued.

The platform becomes more valuable when it stops acting as a noticeboard and starts functioning as a running proof stream. Meaningful assets can be expanded over time, so the thinking behind a piece of work and the context around recognition are visible. This approach sustains momentum without inventing narratives, simply extending the lifespan of existing material and allowing credibility to compound through repetition.

Awards as structured proof

Awards still matter, but their impact depends on intention rather than volume. A rolling calendar that reflects an agency’s positioning creates a pattern of recognition that clients can interpret easily and trust over time. Selective entry, guided by a clear rationale, does more to reinforce reputation than broad participation across loosely related categories.

When recognition arrives, its value needs to be fully integrated into day to day visibility. Shortlistings and wins should be reflected wherever decision-makers are likely to look, because they serve as shorthand for quality. Referencing nominated work within discovery focused content also strengthens authority signals that resonate with human audiences and AI systems alike, particularly when that language appears consistently across touchpoints.

Speaking as an authority

Speaking remains one of the most efficient routes to perceived authority, provided it is approached as a repeatable system. Identifying a defined group of relevant stages allows spokespeople to return to the same ideas, refining them until audiences begin to associate specific challenges with that spokesperson’s voice. Over time, this repetition builds recognition, which is what turns visibility into commercial leverage.

The effect multiplies when each appearance is treated as source material. Talks can be extended through online slide sharing and reflective writing, allowing a single idea to travel further. From a discovery perspective, this consistent presence across different domains helps position speakers as reliable sources and supports both search visibility and generative recommendation.

Move away from using AI to write your content

AI has a role in modern PR, but that role sits firmly in support. Journalists are increasingly alert to pitches and releases that feel machine-generated, and the response is rarely generous. Using tools to improve structure or sense check tone can increase efficiency, yet the core argument and voice need to remain human if trust is the goal.

Remember, restraint becomes a priority. When AI is used to refine rather than replace judgment, content retains the nuance that makes it worth reading and responding to. That balance protects media relationships while still allowing teams to work intelligently in an environment that rewards speed without excusing shortcuts.

Final thoughts

PR in 2026 will be judged less by activity and more by how clearly a brand shows up when it matters. The discipline is becoming quieter on the surface and more consequential underneath, with reputation, authority, trust, and consistency doing the heavy lifting. The opportunity for comms leaders is to stop chasing volume and start designing systems that compound credibility over time. We can then see how PR returns to its proper role as a growth driver.

By Anton Christodoulou, AI Specialist at allpoints

Are You Training the Model With Your Data?

While I always prefer to focus on the positive benefits of new technologies, especially when writing about them, I am also a passionate privacy and security advocate. I have been thinking a lot about the emerging patterns we’re seeing around AI platforms, and the challenges of navigating the platform “tiers.”

Most people I speak to now use platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, to make their workload easier. But there’s a hidden detail many people miss, or underestimate. If you’re on a free or lower-tier plan, you’re not just using the AI model, you’re actually training it. It is why the free tier exists, as this is a great way to continue feeding and improving the models. In some cases this could prove to be particularly hazardous.

Why This Matters Right Now

Many organisations are already moving beyond AI in a chat window. It is fast becoming the orchestration layer, sometimes referred to as an “Agentic Ecosystem.” The benefits are immense, as the models are so powerful now, they can perform multiple tasks reliably and with limited oversight. While there are inherent risks around using “probability engines” to run your business (for a future discussion!), this also means they have unprecedented levels of access. There are now multiple new ways in which you can quickly and easily install AI directly on your machine – as an app, browser plugin, AI browser, even as a local command line tool. I use a combination of these in parallel (except the dedicated AI browser), and use a number of adjacent security and privacy tools to mitigate some of the risks.

The reality is that free-to-use tiers across all major LLMs (so called, Large Language Models) use your data and interactions to learn and improve. If you’re inputting sensitive budgets, client strategies, internal or personal data, you’re essentially feeding the model the information it needs to learn and train to get smarter. Your data becomes part of the model. This is why you can create images in the perfect style of a famous artist, and why you can ask them to build a go-to-market strategy and pricing model. On an enterprise tier, the benefits are obvious, as it can then use your treasure trove of internal data, without training the public model. You can even train your own internal models.

The models also use a version of the famous “summarise” feature to distill these interactions into a summary of you. When used ethically, this “AI memory” enables the models to provide much more personalised results. One positive step is that most models now, at last, enable you to at least access and delete your AI memory.

While enterprise models offer “walled gardens” and legal safeguards that keep your data private, not all platforms are created equal. We’re seeing a trend where Anthropic’s Claude is establishing itself as being more open and ethical, while all of the major players offer better protection on paid tiers, and the best protection on business and enterprise tiers – essential to building trust and meeting governance requirements.

I asked Claude how it differed from other companies in this regard. It started with “I have an obvious conflict of interest, so take it with skepticism.” Followed by stating its strengths, “Safety-focused research, relative transparency about methods, and designed to be honest rather than compliant.” In keeping with this, it was honest about its limitations, “Anthropic is still a commercial business, no AI company has solved alignment, Claude can still make mistakes, and privacy concerns apply industry-wide.” and finished with “You shouldn’t fully trust any AI system or company right now – including Anthropic. The technology is too new and the alignment problem isn’t solved. Healthy skepticism toward all of us is warranted.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“ There are real solutions to this challenge, however, they are not yet easy to implement (For a much deeper insight into this, and the history of the web, I can highly recommend Sir Tim Berners Lee’s book “This Is For Everyone”.)

However, OpenAI has just taken the extraordinary step of introducing ad-based revenue on the free tiers. While they claim that this will not impact the responses you receive, OpenAI can now freely share deep knowledge of you and your interests to advertisers, which they already openly admit to harvesting, with limited controls. This move is following the old social media playbook of exploiting you and your interests in any way possible to make more money. That was in an era when most people were unaware of the risks, and the risks today are so much bigger and more complex. Hopefully the other large players do not follow OpenAI’s lead, and use that as a critical differentiator.

The Competitive Risk of Ignoring AI Privacy

During a time of unknowns, using AI without a privacy strategy isn’t just risky – it’s a competitive liability. However, analysis paralysis, not using AI at all or ineffectively due to fear of the risks, presents an even greater risk.

The Takeaway

If your business is using AI, you and your teams must be hyper-aware of the platform tier you’re on. Other businesses can and do use AI to find information on competitors, uncovering budget spends and strategic pivots that can “leak” into the models via lower-tier or free versions. While this “search and source” capability is a massive benefit for some, it’s a significant detriment to others who haven’t secured their data, and is the tip of the spear.

We started allpointsAI to specialise in navigating these complexities, and create and execute AI strategies that help companies reap the benefits, safely, and effectively. We are also passionate privacy advocates, always seeking to identify and mitigate the inherent risks when integrating this new and exciting technology.