Latest / Built by People / Less AI Slop More Human interaction: Why "Natural" Content and Events Will Reign Again
Transcript
- Amelia Bateman-Wood: Hello and welcome to Built by People, a DFL podcast that delivers some topical industry insight with a hint of fun, chatting about all things highway infrastructure in the built environment. I'm your host, Richard Jackson. Let's get straight into it. Today's guest is someone that I've never actually met before and this is our first interaction. He's recently joined the HAA as their marketing manager and I'm really excited to get a greater understanding of the direction the HAA is going to move in and how. Piers is going to help the HAA members shape the content that we can create to raise the bar within the HAA. So without further ado, I'd love to hand over to you Piers. Do you want to just give us a quick introduction of who you are, how you got here and we'll go from there. So a short story would probably be ⁓ back to my university days where I graduated in industrial design, which had four prongs of marketing, product design, graphic design and website design, which naturally catered all towards. marketing. ⁓ So did a placement year in lighting, working for Mathmos, know, so decorative lighting. I was involved with the LIF before the LIA and LA, you know, sort of merger, ⁓ which, you know, sort of captured my interests coming out into recession, you know, looking for opportunities. Did a bit of freelance design work and, you know, looks like angle poise, sort of local opportunities before coming to ⁓ Photon Star who were sort of leading interior designer. interior lighting designer, ⁓ where they would do circadian lighting, know, like human centric lighting, know, years ahead of their time, which was ultimately their detriment. And, you know, they sort of collapsed in the late 2010s, ⁓ moved on to DMX control lighting, ⁓ you know, got involved with stage lighting and theatre lighting, and architectural lighting through that, ⁓ which was great. But you know, commuting from Sampson to Brighton is a bit of a trek. you know, post pandemic, I've realised I wanted to be local and, you know, I was on a five hour bus replacement journey one day home and loaded up the job apps. And I remember seeing one which looked like my CV. When I applied to it, realised it was Gemma Lighting. that was my first experience into, you know, external sort of industrial lighting. And it was a good opportunity for me, I believe. But, you know, few years there, moved on to another lighting company called Aliko where they kind of encompassed all my teachings, you know, from decorative lighting, interior, external and controls. It was a good experience, but it was more of a project management kind of role than a marketing role that I sort of came on board to do. Cause naturally my sort of technical background from university, I kind of got pulled into that world and you know, the new CEO being appointed at the HAA and having worked with them in the past, knew my skill set. So when opportunity came up, I sort of jumped at it and here I am today. Yeah, I was going to touch on that in terms of how did you land the HAA job in terms of how it came about. I obviously know obviously your previous relationships, as you say, with the CEO, Craig. Yeah. How long have you known Craig? Like how's that come about? Is that from previous employment? Yeah, about four five years, I think 2022, I think I started working at Gemma Lighting. So was purely from there. And ironically, I knew their sales director who is now their managing director, Mark Major, from my days at PhotonStar because we were trying to do joint ventures at the time where they had more of the external market and PhotonStar had more of the interior market. trying to do joint ventures to target projects basically. So the name rang a bell. It's quite a strong name. And just to pick up on something you said earlier there, you spoke about one of the roles was more project management based, but your background is marketing based. What's your passion there? it the marketing side? It's the creative release. And ironically, that's what everyone thinks marketing is about. They think it's about being creative and persuading people. A lot of it is actually about understanding people's behaviors and giving deliverables and tracking, ⁓ know, return of investments and things like that. know, measurable that you can measure. ⁓ And the work was great. You know, I did a lot of high-end projects, ⁓ but there wasn't that creative element that I sort of missed. ⁓ And when the HTA role was advertised and I saw that pop up again, you know, some of it appealed to my. I pulled my heartstrings as it were. And it's like, I miss doing that. I want to get back to doing that. And just evolving that element of conversation that we're talking about there. What is the first project you're most excited to take on in the HTA, would you say? And how can members help you? Like, it's very easy for me, because obviously I've seen behind the curtain as being a past president and seeing all of this happen. I'm really excited to see all this happen. Hence why we're having this conversation today. So all the members can get to know you and stuff like that. And we can really amplify the voice of the HTA. But what's, without giving too much away, like what's the first project you're really looking forward to sinking your teeth into? Well, the first major one is happening today. It's a London call in 2026, obviously at the IET Savoy. And I love events. It's a great way, I think, for people to network, meet your members face to face and have these kinds of conversations. know, a lot of things can get lost through email or phone calls. And I think, you know, actually being in person is a great way to, you know, network and have those conversations. Sometimes you can't always have ⁓ and do business basically. So I'm really keen to do that because that was always an enjoyment factor from past companies where I worked out. And I think in recent years with, you know, economic, know, tough economic times, people tend to shy away from events. But I actually think now they actually are strong. I think it's a good opportunity for people to. get business, it's just, it's always difficult to measure the return of investment on an event. yeah, a hundred percent on necessity even. But yeah, it's hard to measure. I find it really interesting again, as we continue to discuss that driving in today, obviously for this event, dawned on me, I sat there and I think there's a real buzz about events again. I feel like for a long time we went through this apprehension of interaction through COVID where people didn't want to interact. Then we got into this new world of working where everyone just did it on a TV screen through Teams and stuff like that. And now we're seeing the rise of AI and I find it particularly, you there's a lot of synergies in terms of what DFL do in terms of sales, marketing, business development. And whilst you're a trade organization, you still have to carry out them functions. You need to generate membership and income to support the development that the members want. But I think events are going to be kind of... I might be totally wrong, but I events are going to become hugely popular again over the coming years. Cause I think as a, as a nation, that sounds bold, but we've really missed that human interaction element of it. And you're right today we're doing, London call in. I'll be really interested to see the feel of the room. If you like, obviously this your first one first one for the HTA. Yeah. ⁓ so you've been like on the member side, you've come with organizations and stuff like that. Yeah. I'm a bit of a stalwart, I'm here every year, but I'll be really interested to see the feel of it this afternoon. A sunny day always helps, it? But it'll be really interesting to see the direction it goes in. What's been your biggest challenge arranging it today, would you say? Arranging the event today. Members should listen to this for next year. Knowing the HAA of old, I can imagine it's probably getting members to commit to things. It's always about ⁓ engagement and sponsorship really. When you're trying to run an event with your organisation, you rely on support of your members to cover the costs in a way. But it's always difficult, as I say, in the economic times. But always look at it as it's not just you're sponsoring a table or you're doing something like that. It's about you're invested in the future because someone's funding an element of it, which ultimately enables everyone else to network and learn. So it's more about it being an investment. Yeah. And I think again, personally from Designs for Lighting's perspective, we look at it and I always struggle with this because obviously I go back to board and talk about where we're funds and stuff like this, that you can't always look at the way we market things and do things as how many leads did I get from that? How many clients did I get from that? Very much so today. And a lot of what DFL looked to do now, it's all about getting that brand recognition. It's that position of authority, isn't it? And not authority in a... dictatorship way, but that people see the brand and trust the brand. One of the things I was going to say, just touching on, as you say, you've come into the HA with a blank canvas. The HA has never really actively, you know, had a marketing person within it. What's been a highlight of having a blank canvas and what has been a ⁓ struggle of not having a format to follow into. So the blank canvas is great because it means I get to, you know, really get my hands into each and every element. in a way that I like to do. I did a similar process in the past when I was at Gemma Lighting. Both companies, you will, hadn't had anyone do marketing for several years. So I get to really build it from the ground up. I get to look at their foundations, get their building blocks in place and then build upon that. So the struggles being that, because there wasn't anyone there for several years, there isn't that database for marketing. or a server of all the information in one place, I have to sort of pick through all the different elements that people have managed and create that. So for this event and Celtic Manor, the conference, it's finding who the right marketing contact is, who the right event contact is, or the best person for news. Because in our Hen Magazine, each member can have their news published, but do they know that? doesn't, doesn't appear so. So we're trying to promote that, you know, as opportunities that's available to our members, you know, get content from them and build that up. So, ⁓ trying to increase engagement, ⁓ is what I'm trying to do at the moment. And I think it's working. Yeah, it's definitely working. I think it's, know, again, referencing back to, you know, ourselves as a business and what we try to achieve. There's nothing better than seeing the repetition of theme or things. we've spoke about in previous podcasts, but algorithms are crazy, aren't they? Particularly on social media and stuff, how good content generates good content and likes generate more likes. And it's really hard. The consistency is key of continuing to get that message out. In terms of you from a marketing perspective at the HA, what smaller projects or day-to-day projects can members help with maybe to get that message out? Is there anything you're looking at? It would be just feeding back content, like anything that... our members do be on social media or, you know, whether it's an event or, you know, a press release, share it with us. We can re-post it on LinkedIn or one of the things I want to do is for the back end of this year really is to do a refresh of the website. We've got a new section which isn't used a lot at the moment and we'd love to actually develop that into more of a knowledge base. So have all of our members feed their news or press releases into it so it becomes like a go-to source of information. So it's not just having things like guidance notes and membership numbers. It's an actual source of information. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And just another question that's come to me there. Have you seen a noticeable difference in the way things are done? you've worked, correct me if I'm wrong, you've worked in private business for a lot of the roles that we spoke about there. You've come into a trade association. ⁓ We speak about the H8 is... run in a business like manner. Cause I think sometimes see trade associations as like not for profits. They shouldn't be making money, shouldn't be doing this, but actually they are businesses aren't they? They do have to run themselves in a business. Is the, are the customers, do they act in it? Is it different? You know, how, how have you found it? It's interesting in a sense that I don't just work for one person. You know, I don't just report to the CEO. There's, I've worked for all the members, you know, every member. ultimately decides how the organization is run because you know you've got a committee formed and that will decide and sign off on activity ultimately. So it's been mindful of the work that I do that you know sometimes you need to get permission from a broader audience which is sometimes a challenge because you have to wait for board meetings or council meetings but it's yeah it's interesting and it's good. ⁓ One of the things that again, want to do later this year, hopefully by the start of next year, certainly is to actually set up a marketing committee because we've got technical committee, training committee, safety committee. And I think that we should have a marketing committee as well. So each member can have a dedicated member to feedback. So the work that I'm doing can be, you know, from their input. So, yeah, I think that's really valuable again, from what we see is that it's when you look at business function, a sale always starts from marketing. is that traditional funnel, isn't it? People have to know about you to trust you to buy from you ultimately. I hope you're enjoying the show so far. Our goal with this is to build something for the whole industry to feel a part of. So please don't forget to like and subscribe and drop a comment with any thoughts or suggestions for future episodes. And I know again, I'm sure we'll speak to Durvin on a later episode, hopefully. So Durvin, if you're watching, this is your cue. I'm trying to get you on here too. But as a president, you know, with, started with me moving it forward. know Durvin's really keen to raise the bar. Local authorities aren't truly represented within the HA, is there anything? What do think we should do to get local authorities on board? So we're looking at that at the moment. We're looking at our membership. offerings because we think that well, we need to sort of reposition, I think, our membership options. At the moment, we've got HTA, we've got HEMSA, we've got HERS, but we need to look at how we actually incorporate local authorities. And I think one way, you know, for the HTA to grow is to not necessarily just look at electrical organizations. I think you should try to incorporate everyone involved with the highways, whether it's electrical or not. And I think that's where local authorities can come under. So trying to include them. Yeah, that's a really interesting challenge. know ⁓ recently, I can't say too much, but we were tender in a project and we looked through the tender and there's no reference to any professional bodies in terms of a bar that the tenderer needs to meet. And that's really hard for us to take because you not in a bad way, but so much as... We know how great it is to be a part of the HA and the ILP and other organizations and stuff like that. And I think with the right marketing, obviously, I think there's a real springboard opportunity that we can promote that and raise the bar, especially with the likes of EV charging and solar coming in. Solar is a really interesting one because there's less mains power involvement, but it's still an electrical asset. And I think people lose sight of that sometimes in terms of the importance of having competency and skill when they're installing things like that. So moving on, if you don't mind, let's talk about Piers the person. What do you do in your spare time? What are your hobbies, passions and stuff like that? Well, there's many, but my ultimate underlying passion at the moment, well, it been for several years, is photography. I'm always with a camera. So whether it be out on a wildlife walk somewhere or a race circuit, I'm always capturing. And again, it's really interesting that you mentioned photography because going back to the conversation on AI, massive amounts of imagery are AI now. And I think one of the conversations we have a lot when we're talking about what to do as a business and stuff like that. ⁓ AI makes things quicker, shorter, faster, easier. But I think systems see through it so quickly. And I genuinely believe you're going to see a movement back towards pure photography, pure writing, Pure, I can't think of the word, but you know what I mean, just like natural things. a real shift in recent years. So if you go back sort of 10, 15 years in marketing, know, traditional marketing, it was all about, you know, like newsletters, like direct mail, magazine advertisements, and your Google ads and social media was at the bottom of that sort of priority. Go back five years, it's flipped on its head. You know, it's all about digital marketing and... all this sort of traditional marketing has dropped by the wayside. And now with this AI integration coming on, it is useful. It's good if used in the right ways, you can improve workflow. analyzing or dissecting big chunks of data, things like that to improve it, improve your workflow is good. But yeah, for image generation and stuff, can be what. affectionately is known as AI slop in the photography world. Okay, there's a new one, AI slop. like that. slop, yeah. And I think now moving forward, I think there's going to be a bit of a hybrid balance where, yes, people integrate AI to an element of their work, but I think we will be going back to our traditional methods. You know, we're in the modern age now where you're always on your phones or computer or tablet. So you're always at your screen. So sometimes, ⁓ you know, the user journey, you want to have a break from that. What do you do? You can make a coffee, pick up a magazine, have a flick through. So having those, you know, sort of direct mail campaigns is having results because people want to pick up something physical, number of reading, flip through it as a break. So, you know, in the marketing world, we are seeing growth in those traditional methods again, which is really interesting. Interestingly, can I take your take when you talk about print media, direct mail campaign, let's go for a magazine print media campaign. How would you get a business noticed? and be able to track eyes on, I call it eyes on. So how do you know? The biggest challenge I see when we're looking at marketing is you can put an advert in there, but how do you know who's looked at it? What would be your take on that? How would you know about that? It is always difficult to track because you're always going get people just look at it and they take notice of it and subconsciously they're aware of it. And, you know, it's all part of that sort of marketing funnel and it's like awareness and you know, later will come that call. So, when I was doing those kind of adverts from a manufacturer, say, we were set up dedicated phone lines. We had like a bank of say, 20 unique phone numbers. You use a unique phone number. You have a unique email alias and you would track the inquiries coming on those ones and then that would tell you how many have called or how many have emailed. We can have a QR code as well to scan more so you can always track. So although it's a printed form, you're then trying to digitize. ⁓ those clicks as it were. Okay. Yeah. We've tried some of them and it's interesting to see how they work. Cause the biggest challenge I find when we're looking at the marketing elements of it is that how do you put an ROI or a KPI on something? How is it? And I think going back to that, nothing beats the amount of inquiries you get in the phone calls, the interaction that people have with you and stuff like that. So yeah, it is interesting. It's a real tricky one. yeah, I can see. print media being quite valuable as you say, because people are taking more breaks, picking up different things and how you do them and stuff. if you're able to create sort of bite-sized short form content. So, you know, I'm not saying you go send out a whole brochure. But if you've got a short form sort of gatefold with snippets to, you know, entice an inquiry, that can sort of fold down into a DL envelope or, you know, a C5 envelope, that's quite cheap to post in the present to a brochure. yeah, it's quite cost effective in that way. And interestingly, Google ads. I was just about to ask you one question and then you finished on Google ads. I'll ask you what you're, I don't know whether this is your forte or not, you know, if it's not just say what are your thoughts on Google ads and the direction that's going in? That's a challenging one. I used a lot of it when I was at Gemma. Gemma get a lot of their business from sort of online and ⁓ it's a necessity. But ideally you want to do organically looking into Google and you got SEO search engine optimization. You then got AI, which is AI search engine optimization. And it's all about organic humanized content. So you can start off with Google ads to sort of grow engagement with your sites, but ultimately you do need to transition over. So you're not fundamentally reliant on Google ads and you're trying to, you know, build the content on your page to capture the search engines, crawl spiders, is, search engine spiders to call your site and pick out that, that's what AI is doing. It's just looking for information that it thinks the user wants to see. Google ads can be really expensive and like I say, in an economic crunch, you want to reduce your spending. Outside of marketing directors just look at those costs and want to cut it, but you know, it can be detrimental. So you need to have a balance really. So you can start off with Google ads, but ultimately that's just to help build traffic to your site, to certain landing pages. And then you need to actually expand on that and thread it throughout your site through cross-linking and do things organically. And then the other thing I wanted to touch on, you talked about short form content. What do you think about video content in the coming years? How do you think that's to play a role in everything That's on our roadmap. So we want to start introducing webinars to do kind of like what we're doing today where we're doing technical presentations, but deliver that on a, you know, in the web space. More digitally. Yeah, exactly. So it can be more easily accessible to members who might not want to travel down to London for the events or, you know, on much broader scale, really. We're not capped by... seats in a theater. Yeah, no, that's it. And I guess webinars are a great thing because they have a much lower cost base and a much higher accessibility point in terms of, often call them lunch and learns and stuff like that. People can, you know, take that time out of their day to day and then just jump into a webinar. Without pushing, you say they're on the roadmap, weeks, months, years, what are the thoughts? We're thinking sort of quarter free around the sort of conference time. We would like to get the ball rolling. around that time ⁓ with the event planning again for conference. There's going to be a huge input in the next two months, but there'll be a lot of when, you know, it's like planning a wedding, you get all the things booked and checked and in line at the start of it. And then it's always that sort of drop before the big day. So that's when we can then sort of focus more on the other activities you want to get underway this year. I imagine sort of summertime will be around the planning to have it happen around sort of maybe September, October time. Excellent. Yeah. It's a lot to do this year, but it's exciting. It's like anything in business and it's all about priorities. there's 101 things that need doing, but it's about segmenting and prioritizing them. Just talking about that as a person, like planning, what type of planner are you? Are you a lists person? Are you a person? Yeah, list person. I've got a long back burner list as I call it, which I review on a weekly basis and I'll pull forward the things which are. to be done that week and prioritise things where if it didn't happen, it'd be detrimental. I got an event to do that has to be done. There's some things that you'd like to get done, but there isn't that hard deadline of if it's passed, you've lost the opportunity. So, you sort of readjust a list midweek maybe, but ultimately try to clear it down. can ask, is that a paper list or a digital list? So I kind of do a hybrid. I'm in a millennial category. Free computers, well, I had a Windows 3.11, so I did go back. But I have a digital list that collates everything, but I have a work, I have a day diary. So I try to jot down stuff. So you can have your screens optimized for your work. And then I've got just a shorter list to focus on that I can tick off. And that kind of gives you that little, you know, dopamine hit of completing something. Fulfillment. Yes, that's it. exactly. And then... We spoke about AI and things like that. Is there anything on your phone or your desktop at the minute? What's your number one AI app or tool? Is there anything you're using at the minute that has been really valuable in terms of productivity or just helping you with creativity or time saving or anything like that? Ironically, Microsoft Copilot. It's integrated as part of the Office suite. I just personally think it's a bit more trustworthy than OpenAI. You don't want to be sort of sensitive information to, you know... Yeah, Yeah. Okay. Brilliant. And that sits well integrated within to Windows. So I guess it's your fingertips kind of thing. Just moving on, you were talking about the conference that's coming up. How can we get involved in that? Where are we at with it? And what's the best thing we can do to Bookings are live. So you can go and make your bookings now. Sponsorship packs are released. So you can have a browse through that and look at how you want to be involved with sponsorship. because it helps fund and make the event possible. then, you know, again, helping with content really. If you've got an exhibition stand, share it, promote it, we can do the same. Is the theme announced for the conference yet? Or do we know the theme? a secret at the moment. It's secret at moment, yeah. But yeah, be sure to tag us in it when you release on that. I'm sure we'd love to make some content around the theme and stuff like that. Brilliant. Thanks very much, Piers. I've really enjoyed today's conversation and... What a great way to have a first interaction with someone. So thank you very much. Yeah, thanks very much. I appreciate the opportunity. That's all right. There you go, mate. Cheers. All good. You all right? Yeah. Thanks for listening. As we've mentioned, we're keen for this to become a podcast for the whole industry. So please, feedback is welcome. Also, don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to hear more.