What 30 episodes of #seen taught us about modern marketing

This is the first edition of a new weekly thing from me. The plan: one email from me every week, one new conversation on the #seen podcast every week, and a steady stream of things you can actually use on a Monday morning. I wanted to start it with a milestone because we just hit 30 conversations, and I had a lesson worth sharing with you.

It's the right week to start, because we just hit episode 30 of #seen the Podcast.

I went back and re-listened to all of them in the lead-up to writing this. It's a strange exercise. You sit there with 30 hours of conversation in your ear, and you start noticing the things you didn't notice the first time. Patterns. I kept making repeated mistakes in interviews. Words I lean on too much. (I say “love that” like it's free.)

But across all 30 conversations on the #seen podcast, not a single guest credited the two pieces of advice I assumed they would.

Nobody said, “I just stayed consistent.”

Nobody said, “I just stayed authentic.”

The people who built something that actually worked all won the same way. They were aggressively specific.

Specific platforms. Specific timeframes. Specific numbers. Specific creators. Specific moments. One specific thing done more sharply than the next person.

There's a name for it I keep coming back to: specificity is the strategy.

“Be consistent” is generic, so it produces generic results. “Post a 1:30 vlog at 7 am AEST every Tuesday and Thursday for 30 weeks, where the visuals show your routine and the voiceover talks about something completely different” is so specific it can't be copied. That's what Maddi Daffara did at Kic. That's why it worked.

Below are five of the sharpest things I've learned from 30 episodes, then a link to the full 30 if you want them.

Hey, quick question before we get into it: what's the one specific thing you do for your work on social this week that you didn't do this time last year? Reply back and tell me. The best one ends up (anonymized if you want) in next week's email.

— Lach

Insight #1: Brief creators 20/80, not 50/50

Rach Webb at Sticki/DataSauce has run thousands of influencer partnerships, and her rule is brutally simple. 20% your brand building blocks, 80% the creator's voice. “If it's got four walls and they don't fall down, it does the job.” The viral creator videos for her clients are not the beautifully plated fine-dining shots brands keep asking for. They're the smashed-potato-salad video that hits 3.5 million views because the creator was allowed to make their own thing.

If you're writing a brief this week, count the constraints. More than four, you're writing a script, not a brief.

Listen to Rach Webb's episode →

Insight #2: Ship 150 ads a month or you don't have a paid strategy

Jack Delaney runs paid creative for Canva in North America. His team launches 150 to 200 ads a month. Per month. And he is direct about what that means for the rest of us: against the 750,000 videos uploaded to YouTube every day, “if I dedicate half an hour a week and batch my videos, that's not enough.”

You don't have to ship 150. But if you're shipping four and you're confused why nothing is breaking through, the answer isn't a smarter hook. It's another zero.

Listen to Jack Delaney's episode →

Insight #3: The verbatim quote from your audience is your wedge

Isaac Peiris at Pistachio (ex-Mamamia) said something that re-framed how I think about positioning. When the Mamamia team was deciding whether to launch Move into a saturated fitness-app category, audience research surfaced one quote: “fitness apps feel like they're for a 20-something that lives in Bondi, and that's not me.” That one line was the launch wedge. Move became the answer to that exact sentence.

Your audience has already told you what they need from you. The job is to find the line and write it down somewhere you will actually look at it again.

Listen to Isaac Peiris' episode →

Insight #4: Engineer DMs into content

Cal Ritchie's social team in London ran a Brita campaign where they prompted the audience to DM them 4,800 times (the size of the jug in milliliters). They took screenshots of the conversations and played them back as content. On another Brita TikTok, a commenter said, “100 likes, and I'll get a free water filter.” They got four. So followers scrolled back through every Brita TikTok hunting for the comment, and pushed other videos to hundreds of thousands of views in the process.

If your community manager is a service desk, you have miscast the role. Community management is a content engine.

Listen to Cal Ritchie's episode →

Insight #5: AI is for the admin. Keep your hands on the creative.

Three guests said the same thing in three different ways. Georgie Healy: never let AI write your LinkedIn posts because “even if you rewrite a post using AI, it will put it back in that formula again.” Jack Delaney: AI as editing partner, never bulk-accept. Gabby on the Hot Takes roundtable: the real AI superpower for social media managers in 2026 isn't writing captions. It's automating the reporting, the tagging, the customer replies. The boring admin that eats your week.

This week, list the five most repetitive admin tasks on your plate. That's where the AI hour goes. Not the caption.

Listen to Georgie Healy's episode →

Read all 30 lessons

Every one of those five had a specific name, a specific number, a specific platform, a specific tactic.

There are 25 more in the long version: Chris Mansour from BTS on why he repeats a winning format until it dies, Matt Navarra on his 347 RSS feeds, Lena Tuck on a six-month cold-pitch cadence, Renee Shaw at tl;dv on running a writers' room instead of a content calendar, Kelsey on owning a 25,000-person email send-fail with humor and a 25% discount, Yasmin Cooke re-cutting an 18,000-play reel into a 1-million-play one. Plus, the Hot Takes roundtables from our very own Gabby Torres-Soler and Hana Block.

Read all 30 lessons here →

Get in on the action

If this is the kind of thing you want in your inbox every week, you can subscribe here. If you're reading this because you already subscribed, thank you for being here for the first 30. The next 30 should be a lot sharper than the first.

One last thing: I read every reply. So genuinely, what's the one specific thing you're doing on social this week that you weren't doing this time last year? I would love to hear it.

Community @ Sked Social