Marketing is about telling stories. And those stories are built on engaging content. You will have noticed in the last year that AI has transformed how this industry thinks about and creates content. So, if AI is disrupting content, it’s disrupting the entire marketing landscape. I could spend a lot of time in this post explaining how exactly this is happening. If you want me to get granular, ping me on LinkedIn - I’m always happy to talk about ai marketing and related topics.
But let me get to the bottom line: marketing as we know it has changed forever.
As the owner of a digital agency, I can’t just ignore this new world. And given that our agency’s sole focus is the technology sector, I couldn't even if I wanted to. Every day we are seeing new tools, new tech, and clients who are ready to run campaigns with the help of artificial intelligence.
For us as a company there are two options. To continue to do our work in a traditional way and risk being swallowed up by the tide of change. Or to realise the intrinsic value we bring to this new world and position ourselves at the forefront of what is coming.
You can quit reading if you think we’ve gone for option 1.
In our embrace of this brave new world, we are launching our own AI marketing SaaS app, with the aim of building the ai marketing agency of the future.
Our ambition is bold. But we’ve always been forward-thinking and forward-looking. When we first stepped into the world of B2B marketing for technology companies, especially within the Microsoft Partner ecosystem, we saw clearly the need and appetite our clients had for high-quality, in-depth, engaging inbound content marketing. So we delivered it to them. And they loved us for it.
I’m really excited to tell you where we’re going next and the technology companies we’re bringing with us. But first let’s go back a step.
Learn about the bespoke marketing platform we built for Microsoft that placed us on their map. Click here.
What is the problem we are trying to solve?
AI's impact goes beyond changing marketing practices. It has opened our eyes to something so fundamental to our world, our clients' world, and likely in every industry on the planet, that I feel almost embarrassed to mention it. I’m referring to domain knowledge - the shared knowledge between agency and client.
All good service businesses pride themselves on their domain knowledge. Agencies do it, their clients do it, and their clients do it when selling to their customers. Domain knowledge is the key fundamental that enables any business to sell its vision. Now, we’ve always known this, of course. But when we connected it with the power of generative AI, a big bell went off in my head.
As I’m sure you’re aware, keeping your domain knowledge up to date and relevant is really hard. What really happens is there is always some kind of knowledge gap.
All agencies and clients attempt to codify domain knowledge with intranets, document management systems, digital notebooks, call recordings, and all manner of knowledge management systems. However, we’re always fighting a battle against volume, formats, and the ability to generate insights.
Then, there’s just the reality that people and relationships change all the time. Service businesses are delivered by people. But people move on, change roles, change companies. It’s totally natural and in most cases a positive thing. But it can wreak havoc on the ability to maintain domain knowledge.
Even if you manage to retain all your top talent, the best individuals are still naturally inclined to operate in silos. With the greatest knowledge management tools, and the finest people, silos will still occur. From drawing different conclusions in the same workshop to issues with communication or internal politics, gaps in knowledge and understanding are inevitable.
In a world where AI-generated content will proliferate, quality control and keeping the heart of your story-telling human will be essential for standing out.
At Fifty Five and Five, we overcome and mitigate these issues through the efforts of smart people, hard work, and good communication. Domain knowledge is why we are so successful. But even so, there is a better way. We believe an AI-powered solution can solve these challenges and transform the future of digital marketing.
And we’ve already begun building it. Let me introduce you to Compass.
What is Compass?
As I said, our ambition is to build the ai marketing agency of the future, as an AI marketing SaaS app. We are starting with the brain of the agency, and the problem of domain knowledge. Compass will be able to codify domain knowledge in a way never possible before. Once we have built the ‘brain’, our platform will solve a host of digital marketing challenges via lightening fast, domain-rich executions.
It should be said that Fifty Five and Five, the agency, isn’t going anywhere. In fact, the agency is one of Compass’s superpowers. In a world where AI-generated content will proliferate, quality control and keeping the heart of your story-telling human will be essential for standing out. And excitingly, we will be using Compass ourselves to power our own work, helping our clients benefit in huge ways.
AI Marketing - What makes Compass unique?
Compass is at its heart an intelligent repository of proprietary information covering its users, enterprise tech, marketing, and everything Fifty Five and Five knows (which is a lot).
But what makes it unique? There are three things:
- Continuous improvement - By combining the latest developments in large language models (larger and larger context windows, native retrieval of external content) with our extensive experience in building scraping tools, we can develop a brain that is always learning, whose information is always getting better.
- A wealth of knowledge - Compass will draw on multiple sources: large language models (LLMs), real-time web content and data, bespoke marketing collateral provided by the customer, and exclusive insights and expertise from a founding team with over 50 years of agency experience.
- An understanding of marketing - Trained with the knowledge amassed by Fifty Five and Five and its founders, Compass will have a deep understand of what 'good' marketing is and what 'good' customer collateral looks like. In a world where anyone with access to AI tools can create content, knowing what’s good marketing and what’s not will be ever more vital.
Compass doesn’t provide outputs on its own. For that we are going to build specialist apps. They each address an established use case, but in combination can enhance each other.
So we take this powerful, knowledgeable brain, and use it to solve a bunch of different problems (problems we solve for our clients every day, as Fifty Five and Five).
Different apps for different use cases
This bit I can’t talk about too much. We have a number of apps we are building. We are doing some very interesting things in SEO, reporting, and content approval. There is a lot going on. We are building clever tech and we can’t share too much too soon. But perhaps what’s most exciting is that we’ve already got paying customers for the functions we’ve released so far.
The one app I can tell you about is Compass Content. This is our AI marketing content generation tool (right now short form, but v2 is doing some very exciting things with long form content) and our customers who are using it are already experiencing massive time and cost savings across their content production. The future of work will not be solely AI, it will be driven by AI-enabled knowledge workers who can perform faster and better with the use of the best tools.
Speaking of the best tools, why is Compass better for marketers than a subscription to ChatGPT, or Jasper, or the thousands of content competitors out there? Simple: because it’s powered by extremely precise and proprietary domain knowledge. When you use Compass Content it automatically knows all about your company and its marketing goals and strategy (website, content, personas, value propositions, tone of voice, and brand guidelines). It knows which blogs and social copy you have already produced, and what makes them good. Compass is trained on everything that has made Fifty Five and Five such a success over the last 10 years, every ounce of our proprietary domain knowledge, and powered on by the latest in LLM technology too.
We basically bundle together a ton of unique marketing and client specific knowledge and feed it to Compass Content. So minimal prompting produces fantastic output.
One of the current customers of Compass Content is Suhail Adam and his team, from Tata Consultancy Services:
We have worked with Fifty Five and Five for a long time, and they write a lot of content for us. When Chris presented me with Compass Content, their AI content tool, I immediately saw the benefits. Version 1 is off to a good start, and having seen the roadmap for v2 we are excited for the path ahead.
AI Marketing for enterprise tech companies
Our initial target audience is marketing folks in enterprise tech companies. Those looking to gain market share, drive leads and brand awareness and out muscle their competitors. We are going to transform how they do digital marketing by giving them Compass, the next generation of digital marketing agency, provided as an AI SaaS app.
We have been working on Compass for over a year. There's some cool ai marketing technology at the heart of it, engaged customers, and an exciting roadmap ahead. I can’t wait to show it to you. Get a sneak peak over here → trycompass.ai. Or message me for more!
Your AI marketing partner for B2B marketing
Your marketing tools should be bespoke to your business. We've already developed an AI marketing content tool for one of our biggest clients, trained around their products and services, their brand values, personas and TOV. We can do the same for you. Ready to simplify your content marketing with us?