Why Doing Less Made This Solo Marketer More Effective (Against All Odds)
Charlie Riley, Head of Marketing at OneScreen.ai, explains why 'use AI to do more' might be the worst advice B2B marketers are getting right now — and how being a team of one forces you to make better strategic choices.
“Use AI to do more!” might be the worst advice B2B marketers are getting right now.
In this episode, host Jason Bradwell sits down with Charlie Riley, Head of Marketing at OneScreen.ai, to talk about why mass personalisation is backfiring, how to actually build stakeholder buy-in for thought leadership, and why being a marketing team of one forces you to make better strategic choices.
Charlie’s approach is built around a simple but counterintuitive insight: people don’t work with brands, they work with people. Brands are boring. Personal profiles are the best distribution channel on LinkedIn right now, and the challenge is finding people in your company who are willing to get out there and back the business.
As a marketing team of one at OneScreen, Charlie’s had to get ruthless about focus. He shares his three-to-five channel strategy — LinkedIn, visual content showcasing real OOH campaigns, and live events — and explains how these channels create an owned media flywheel: content feeds community, community shows up at events, events create more content.
Key Takeaways
- Why “do more with AI” is backwards — mass personalisation is creating AI slop that people see right through.
- How being a marketing team of one forces better strategic prioritisation — three to five channels done well beats eight done badly.
- Why people work with people, not brands — focus on executive and team member profiles over company pages.
- How to get internal buy-in for LinkedIn advocacy — find a champion, time-block 15 minutes daily, and gamify it for competitive salespeople.
- Why non-scalable experiences convert better than scalable ones — and why doing fewer things deliberately is the actual competitive advantage.
- How the owned media flywheel works: content feeds community, community shows up at events, events create more content.
Chapter Markers
- 00:00 Introduction: Marketing as psychology
- 02:00 Why “do more with AI” is backwards
- 05:00 Building marketing as a team of one
- 07:00 Three-to-five channel strategy
- 09:00 The owned media flywheel
- 11:00 People work with people, not brands
- 13:00 Getting executives to share on LinkedIn
- 15:00 Internal advocacy: finding your champion
- 18:00 Gamifying LinkedIn for salespeople
- 20:00 The blank check question: curated experiences
