The system finds it. People fix it.
We say run by marketers, and we mean it literally. The automation is real and it does a lot, but it does a specific lot. Here's the line, and why it sits where it does.
The machine
- Reads your site and scores what it can actually see
- Runs the same scan again every month, so the number either moves or we have something to answer for
- Drafts content against a brief, then holds it until a person has read it
- Watches campaign numbers daily instead of at month end
- Chases the enquiry that went quiet on Friday
The people
- Deciding which three of twenty findings are actually costing you money
- Anything that needs a phone call — a supplier, a venue, a journalist
- Sitting in a shoot, or judging whether the photos are any good
- Knowing that your quiet Tuesday is a pricing problem, not a traffic one
- Signing off every word before it goes out under your name
Why the line is there
Any tool can hand you twenty things.
Run any audit tool and you'll get a list. Twenty issues, colour-coded, most of them technically true and almost none of them worth your Tuesday.
Knowing which three actually cost you money is the whole job, and it's learned by running campaigns and watching what happened afterwards. That's the part we didn't automate, because it's the part that was ever worth paying for.
Nothing publishes without a person
Drafting is automated. Publishing isn't. Everything written for you is held until somebody has read it, and that's a deliberate constraint rather than a stage we'll grow out of.
We hold that line because we've watched what happens without it. On a sister project, a generator with a thin brief and a guard that wasn't actually being called produced over a thousand words of confident, specific, entirely invented pricing — and every automated check passed it. The guard existed. It just lived on a screen rather than in the pipeline.
A check that runs is worth more than a policy that doesn't. It's cheaper for everyone if the thing that stops a bad paragraph is a person who reads it.