His Dad Lost His Business in COVID Lockdowns. Now He Shows Clients Their Finished Garden on an iPad Before He's Touched a Shovel.

Robin O'Connell has spent more than a decade at LinkedIn, now leading content and marketing strategy for the ANZ team. His central argument is a pointed correction to how most people think about AI and marketing: the technology has conquered tactics, not strategy. "The vast majority of people will go straight to, okay, what are the ads," he says, "but advertising is a very small part of marketing." Strategy — the actual thinking about what to say and why — is, in his view, a different skill entirely, one AI still can't substitute for. "I don't think it has the ability to write an end-to-end marketing strategy," he says. "I still think now, and for a long time into the future, you will need a marketer."

Dennis, after COVID

The story that makes his abstract argument concrete is about his own father. Dennis O'Connell ran a retail technology business in Dublin until COVID-era lockdowns took it from him. "During COVID he had a retail technology business," Robin says. "Tough time to be in retail. He lost that business." Dennis rebuilt as a landscaper — and has started using ChatGPT's image generation on an iPad to show prospective clients a photorealistic mock-up of their finished garden before any work begins. "He's going back with an iPad and he's showing people what this will look like," Robin says. "I was blown away. It is such a brilliant use of AI."

"Don't underestimate Dennis."

Strategy is picking a direction, not following one

Robin's working definition of good marketing strategy is almost contrarian in a landscape saturated with AI-generated sameness: deliberately not doing what everyone else is doing. "If all your competitors are blue, be pink," he says. "If all your competitors are logical, be highly emotional. Don't follow the crowd — everyone goes left, you need to go right." He names Monzo Bank's intentionally unhinged, funny LinkedIn voice as a case study — a bank choosing to sound nothing like a bank, specifically because every other bank already sounds like one. It's advice easy to state and hard to execute, precisely because it requires a judgment call no model is positioned to make on a company's behalf: what does this specific brand actually have the nerve to say differently?

A business built on ignoring confident nonsense

He's equally direct about the noise currently flooding the category he works in. "If you see a post that says, 'Hey, I've replaced my marketing team and grown to a million dollars revenue, comment delusional and I'll send you a PDF of how I did it,'" he says, "you can ignore those posts for the most part." His closing argument ties back to his father without him needing to say so again: "The future very much belongs to the experts, and not the engineers." Dennis didn't need to understand how the image model worked. He needed to understand what his client actually wanted to see — and know how to ask for it.