Marketing for SMEs Podcast: Chris Melotti on The AI Trap Hurting SMB Marketing

I recently had the pleasure of joining Christopher Melotti, founder of Melotti Content Media, for the first episode of Marketing & AI for SMEs. Chris is a marketing consultant and brand communications coach based in Sydney with 25 years in the industry.

We talked about how marketing has changed, why strategy has to come before execution, the real danger of handing your brand voice over to AI without scrutiny, and what it actually takes to stand out when every professional service business looks and sounds the same. If you work with an agency or are thinking about it, this one is worth your time.

You can find out more about Digital Goliath’s paid ads services here.

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Guest Introduction

Jeremy: Welcome back to another episode of Marketing & AI for SMEs. I’m your host, Jeremy Yang of Digital Goliath, and today I’m with Christopher Melotti. I met this man about 10 years ago at General Assembly when he was running one of his sessions. He’s the first person who contributed to my blog and really helped me along the way. Good to have you here, Chris. Please give a quick intro of yourself.

Christopher: Thank you so much, Jeremy. It’s an honor to be here. My name is Christopher Melotti. I’m a marketing consultant and brand communications coach. I have a marketing agency, Melotti Content Media, and I help make brands relevant through consistent execution, strategy, and brand communication foundations.

Jeremy: And we always like to start with what they’re promoting. Sometimes I listen to a whole episode and then go, I can’t afford this guy anyway. So we go from the start so people can decide if they want to keep listening.

Christopher: Yes, I agree. I work with a lot of large brands and governments, and a lot of people assume they can’t afford me. But actually, a lot of my strategy sessions sit around $400 to $600. The reason I do that is because I work with a lot of startups and I want to make strategy accessible. 

Christopher: A lot of clients just say, “Can I book an hour or two of your time?” We run through something practical. Sometimes it’s as simple as going through their website live on a recorded session, pulling the brand apart, and working out what needs to change.

Jeremy: You’ve been in the game for 25 years now. And I came from a tradie background, only been at it for about nine years, so very different. What was marketing actually like back then, in the Don Draper era?

Christopher: 100%. I studied marketing in 2003, 2004, 2005 at Macquarie. When I started as a marketing assistant, it really was like that. Long lunches, conferences, holidays. I worked agency side, I worked client side. It was about the politics, the schmoozing, the learning. And honestly? It wasn’t always glamorous. 

Christopher: But there were advantages that have been lost. Back then the reason we did those lunches wasn’t just to win the account. A lot of it was to learn, grow, brainstorm, and think. We had more time for that. We launched campaigns that really went for awards. Today there’s still good work out there, but that depth of in-person collaboration has changed.

How Marketing Has Evolved

Jeremy: Right now, most businesses listening are smaller businesses thinking, how do I actually work with someone like you? What’s your process?

Christopher: Always start with a strategy session. If an agency wants to rush into tactics and execution straight away, that can be quite dangerous — they don’t fully understand your circumstances. Every business is so different that the same marketing execution for two different businesses could flop for one and succeed for the other. 

Christopher:So I sit down and work out where they’re going, what they’re doing, what the competitors are doing, who the customers are, what their needs and goals are. The best marketing isn’t just execution. It comes from a plan built around goals and a real understanding of the situation.

Christopher: The first question I always ask a client is why. If someone says, “I want to run a LinkedIn campaign,” I want to know what goal or ambition sits behind that. Sometimes the answer is that something else entirely would serve them better.

Christopher: Then what I do is brand positioning. And I don’t mean logos and colors. I mean vision, mission, narrative, internal culture, personality, tone of voice. Your brand DNA.

Jeremy: Yep. I run into that a lot. That’s why I like working alongside marketing strategists. When they’ve already done the plan, I come in knowing the language, knowing the goals. Then I can draw the dotted lines.

Christopher: And I’m also a fan of empowering clients to do things themselves where they can. Where there’s a time or expertise gap, I step in. But when they have the capability in-house, I encourage that. Because today, marketing is not a department in your business. It’s not a function. It’s the whole business. 

Christopher: If your website says you’re friendly and approachable, and then someone calls and gets treated badly — that’s brand damage. That’s your marketing. If you promise something and don’t deliver it the same way, everyone finds out. Reddit, reviews, word of mouth.

Christopher: Marketing is your whole brand positioning, your corporate identity, your execution. They all have to be aligned.

What Happens When There’s No Clear Goal

Jeremy: What do you say to businesses that don’t have clear goals? The ones who say, “Everyone else is doing marketing, so I figured I should too.”

Christopher: That’s dangerous. I want to explain to them that they’re going to waste their money, and money is too precious to waste. I’m not the guy who says, “Well, just spend it with me.” Because then they’re going to be angry when they don’t get results. So if a business doesn’t have any sort of goal, I encourage them to go away and define one, or I’ll run a goal workshop with them. What’s the business doing in a year? Two years? Five years? 

Christopher: Even as a small business, you need something. It might be a revenue target, or it might be as simple as launching a new product line. But you have to have something, otherwise your marketing has nothing to aim at.

Standing Out When Clients Have Been Burned Before

Jeremy: A lot of clients will look at you and think they’ve seen this before. Half-finished documents, cookie-cutter templates. How do you convince jaded people to trust you again?

Christopher: It’s the conversation. When I speak to clients, I’d say eight out of 10 have been burned before. I had this conversation just last week with a family business from Queensland. He’d had multiple agencies come through and just couldn’t trust anyone anymore. 

hristopher: So I spent time walking him through exactly how I work, reassuring him. Because people today have tight budgets and a lot going on in the world. If you’re not able to confidently explain what you do and how you do it, it’s a real problem.

Christopher: Lawyers have this problem. Finance companies. Mortgage brokers. Insurance. A lot of professional services look and sound the same to the average customer. If you don’t invest in making yourself look authentically different — your photos, your language, your tone, your videos — that’s where you stand out. Not AI-generated copy. Your actual stuff.

The AI Trap: Sufficiency Bias

Jeremy: What are the hidden fears you see in clients? The things that stop them from doing marketing at all?

Christopher: Two big ones. The first is, “I can do it myself using AI.” And look, I love AI. I’m not here to tell people not to use it. But the problem is what’s called sufficiency bias. When you ask AI to do something for you, you think, “Well, it’s better than I could do,” and so you don’t vet it with scrutiny. You just use it.

Christopher: Here’s an example. You’re a dentist in Mosman. You give ChatGPT a few competitor websites and ask it to write your homepage. At first glance it looks fine — it says you’re a dentist, covers cleaning, ticks the boxes. But then you realize half of what’s on your competitors’ sites is now on yours too. Same tone, same language. And if you sound exactly the same as your competitors, guess what you’re competing on? Price.

Christopher: The point isn’t that AI is bad. It’s that you need to put your originality into it. What makes you different? That has to be in there, and AI doesn’t know that — you do.

Jeremy: I’d never heard of sufficiency bias before this conversation. That’s a great way to put it.

Christopher: It’s the biggest thing I try and raise when it comes to AI. Not to discourage people, but to push them toward scrutiny. My own copywriters do it. They’ll use ChatGPT for research, come back and say “that’s great,” and I’m like — but did you check the tone? 

Christopher: Is it contextually right? ChatGPT has said irreverent things, used internal strategy language in external-facing copy. Someone reads it and goes, “That’s a bit on the nose.” ChatGPT doesn’t know the difference. You do.

Christopher: I also call it the human-AI-human sandwich. The human prompts, the AI does its work, and then the human must come back at the end. Must. You’re in charge. The platform’s terms and conditions make that very clear — if something goes wrong, it’s your problem, not theirs.

Jeremy: Yeah. “Human in the loop” has become a bit of a cliché now, but the way you explain it with sufficiency bias — that actually lands differently.

The Second Fear: Budget

Christopher: The second big hesitation is budget. I get it. Every business decision is a risk. A new CRM is a risk. A new HR policy is a risk. But when you embed marketing in strategy and centre it around your business goals, the risk goes down significantly. 

Christopher: Because everything you’re doing is aimed at something you actually want to achieve. If you want more leads, your marketing should be fighting for more leads. And you can use your own judgment to look at the activity and see where it would logically go.

Brand Alignment Across Every Touchpoint

Christopher: The other thing I’d add — you can’t trust one touchpoint to sell you. Make sure all your marketing is aligned. You see your brand every day, so you think it all looks consistent. But your customer might be hitting your Google profile, then your website, then your LinkedIn, and if those don’t align, it’s confusing. 

Christopher: And people today don’t put up with confusion. They move on to whoever is clearest. Your website, your events, your brochures, your social — if they all look different, you are easy to forget. And in a world with this much competition and noise, you don’t want to be easy to forget.

Advice for New Marketers

Jeremy: What’s your tip for the people graduating now, the interns trying to get in the door? It was tough when I came through — I did an unpaid internship for a year and a half.

Christopher: It’s really tough right now. Tougher than it’s ever been. My advice: get experience in any way, shape or form. Marketing is an experiential discipline. You can learn as much as you want, but you have to be able to get out there and problem-solve. Every day, every client, every circumstance is different. Someone will come to you with an issue and say, “Solve it.” Your boss can’t always walk you through it.

Christopher: So the question is: how can you get experience that demonstrates your ability to problem-solve? It might be a personal project. It might be going to your local vet and offering to run their social media for a short stretch, just to build your portfolio.

Christopher: Then when you go for jobs, you can say, “I ran social for a local business. Here’s where it started, here’s where it went.” That matters. Do more courses. Build your resume of projects. Because your career will be built on reputation and demonstrated experience.

Christopher: Networking is important too. In today’s world, people want to see you getting involved. You don’t have to be an extrovert — it’s not about getting a megaphone. It’s about connecting, meeting people, letting them get a feel for you. You’re not going to build your career sitting and waiting.

Christopher: Look at what’s evolving and get ahead of it. When TikTok launched, people who started TikTok agencies early are huge now. If you’re younger in marketing, you don’t always have to compete in already crowded spaces. Look at what you love and where the demand is building.

Jeremy: There’s a new AI tool every day right now. If you can string two or three of them together to actually solve a problem, not many people can do that yet.

Christopher: And people will pay for that. Look at you, Jeremy. You came from a trades background. That’s an advantage. You could have said, “I’m a tradie who does marketing — I get you.” That’s a niche. You specialise. And then people go, “This isn’t some random marketing person. This is someone who understands my world.” That drives career momentum.

Running an Agency With Your Name on It

Christopher: I’ve got a great team. I’ve got people in Queensland and elsewhere. I’ve actually stepped back from a lot of the day-to-day. Angela is my managing director now, and I’ve got a team of executors. People know me, and they work with me, but it’s not always me involved in every piece of work. I check as much as I can and I’m heavily involved in a lot. But honestly? I don’t care that I’m entrenched. I love it. People tell me that’s not scalable. I don’t care.

Christopher: Because here’s what I’ve seen: so many marketing agencies fall into the “used to be good” trap. The founder builds something great, then builds a team, steps back, and slowly the thing that made them special disappears. The authenticity. The real passion for it. I’ve seen it happen with agencies around me, and it costs them.

Christopher: My team follows my lead. They use the same approach and methodology. It does work without me, but I choose to stay involved because I want to make sure every client is respected and looked after. That’s how it should be.

Jeremy: That’s great. I’ve worked with your team a few times already and they’re excellent. Angela too.

Christopher: Thank you. Reach me at melottimedia.com.au or christophermelotti.com.au. Or find me on LinkedIn — Christopher Melotti. You’ll see the orange everywhere. I love to chat.

Jeremy: Thanks so much, Chris. We’ll see each other soon.

Key Takeaways

• Strategy before execution, always. Rushing into ads, social, or any marketing activity without a clear goal and brand foundation is how businesses waste money and end up frustrated with the results.
• If your brand lives in your head, it’s already a problem. Your vision, tone, personality, and positioning need to be written down. The moment you hire someone new or bring in an agency, they need something concrete to work from.
• Sufficiency bias is the real AI risk. It’s not that AI produces bad output — it’s that people accept it without scrutiny because it looks better than what they could have written themselves. That’s how you end up sounding identical to your competitors and competing on price.
• Brand alignment across every touchpoint matters more than people realise. Your website, Google profile, LinkedIn, social, and in-person experience all need to say the same thing. Inconsistency is confusion, and confusion loses customers.

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