Brett Willms's Linkedin Analytics

Content creation has entered its hardest era yet. It's not just about battling the algorithm anymore. It's about proving you're not an algorithm. The irony is brutal: • We spent years honing our craft • AI does it perfectly • And now "too good" raises suspicion So we find ourselves in this bizarre place where: Quality matters. But authenticity matters more. Consistency matters. But human inconsistency matters more. We're now crafting content that needs to be: Good enough to stand out Flawed enough to be human Unique enough to be irreplicable I don't know about you, but I find this challenge strangely beautiful. 🚀 We rise together

Let’s have a designer and copywriter work on it at the same time, but separately. What could go wrong with that? Oh, and the client needs the sign by tommorow. This is what happens when you have a freelancer designer and a freelance copywriter who don't work together. This is also why I started Laetro. To make it easier for brands to put together teams of freelancers and make it easy to work with them. That’s a 5 star solution if you ask me.

Every marketing leader I talk to is facing the same crushing reality: The content demands just. keep. growing. Social posts. Website copy. Email campaigns. Landing pages. Display ads. Video scripts. Blog articles. Whitepapers. Sales enablement. Internal comms. It never ends. And it's never enough. Your CEO wants more thought leadership. Your sales team needs more case studies. Your social manager needs more posts. Your product team needs more documentation. Meanwhile, your creative team is drowning. And you feel trapped between two terrible options: OPTION 1: PUSH YOUR TEAM HARDER Demand more output. Extend deadlines. Schedule weekend "working sessions." Watch your best people burn out and leave. Hire replacements. Repeat the cycle. OPTION 2: REPLACE HUMANS WITH AI Generate everything with algorithms. Watch quality plummet. Lose the human connection with your audience. Wonder why engagement is tanking despite producing more content than ever. Both options lead to failure. But here's the good news: THERE'S A THIRD PATH At Laetro, we've pioneered an approach that's transforming marketing teams through true human-AI collaboration. Not humans OR AI. Humans AND AI. This isn't about replacing creative professionals. It's about giving them superpowers. When AI handles the first 70% of content production - the repetitive parts, the variations, the formatting, the scaling - something remarkable happens: Your team focuses on the 30% that delivers 90% of the value. Your designers spend time on creative direction instead of resizing assets. Your writers craft powerful messages instead of grinding out endless variations. Your strategists focus on strategy instead of getting lost in production details. The result? Teams that produce 4x more high-quality content while experiencing less burnout. How does this work in practice? Instead of a designer creating 20 ad sizes manually, they create the core design and direction, then AI handles the variations - with the designer maintaining quality control. Instead of a writer creating 50 email subject lines from scratch, they create 5 brilliant ones, then AI generates variations - with the writer selecting and refining the best. Instead of a content team struggling to maintain 3 social channels, they can effectively manage 10 - by focusing on strategy and voice while AI helps scale execution. This isn't about cutting creative jobs. It's about making creative jobs better. Your team does less of what they hate and more of what they love. They produce more while burning out less. Quality goes up, not down. The future of marketing isn't humans being replaced by AI. It's humans being amplified by AI. We rise together 🚀

Most marketing leaders are drowning in 37 different content tasks while their budgets shrink. The content problem is real for marketing leaders. You can't keep up. Social posts. Website copy. Emails. Ads. Video scripts. Product messaging. It's endless. And the traditional solutions aren't working anymore. You can push your team harder. But that leads to burnout. And they'll leave. You can replace them with AI. But that gives you mediocre, generic content nobody wants to read. Here's the third way: Human-AI collaboration. Elite creative development by humans and AI working together. That's what we're building. I can set up a system that allows for this with a very small team. Because here's what nobody's talking about: AI rarely creates a perfect picture on its first try. If you have a creative director's eye, there's always something you want to improve before it's commercially viable. Inside our platform, someone can generate content, and if they're not happy with it, they can ask for it to be polished by a pro. It starts with the same artist that generated that particular style. This isn't just another AI tool. This is a new way of working. One where your team produces more quality content while doing more of what they love. One where marketers get to be strategic again, not just content machines. One where humans and AI elevate each other. We rise together 🚀 #marketing #AIcreative #contentmarketing

What most brands say: "We want innovative, breakthrough creative work that disrupts the category." What most brands mean: "We want work that looks exactly like what's already successful but different enough that we can call it innovative in our deck to the board." At Laetro, we've seen this movie so many times we can recite the dialogue. Brands come to us excited about working directly with top freelance creatives. They talk about breaking molds and challenging conventions. They use words like "authentic," "bold," and my personal favorite, "culture-shaping." Then the work arrives. And suddenly they're like someone who claimed to love spicy food but is now sweating profusely and frantically looking for the milk. "This is... very creative. Maybe TOO creative? Can we make it more like [insert safe industry standard]?" Here's what I've learned: The conflict between commerce and creativity isn't something to minimize or avoid—it's the whole point. That tension is where the magic happens. But that tension is uncomfortable. It makes people nervous. It creates career risk. And that's why most brands end up retreating to traditional agencies, where the process is designed to systematically remove anything too surprising from the final product. Laetro isn't for everyone. And that's by design. We're for brands that understand real innovation doesn't happen in the comfort zone. So if you want work that genuinely shapes culture rather than chasing its coattails, we should talk. But be warned: we won't bring the milk.

I'm going to say something that might upset a few people: AI isn't taking your job. Your employer is. Actually, scratch that. It's the stock market. No, wait. Let's be completely honest here—it's capitalism itself. Everyone's freaking out about the technology when the real issue is the system deploying it. The pressure for quarterly growth. The demand for "operational efficiency." The relentless pursuit of profit at all costs. To prevent AI from replacing workers, we'd need to fundamentally change the nature of our economic system. Or have corporate leaders who genuinely value human well-being over shareholder returns. That might be too much. But maybe that's the real problem we should be talking about.

AI can write your content, but it can't have your lived experiences. It can't tell the story of how you bombed that presentation so badly the CEO actually started scrolling on their phone MID-SLIDE. It can't share that moment you realized your brilliant strategy was actually just a scene from The Office you'd internalized. Your embarrassing failures and messy triumphs? That's the gold AI can't mine. In the age of perfectly polished AI content, your chaotic humanity is your superpower.

Everyone's losing their minds over AI image generation like we just discovered fire. "Look! I can make myself speaking at TED!" Cool. But did you actually speak at TED? No? Then congrats on your digital participation trophy, I guess. The real creative marketing flex in 2025 won't be perfect ads. It'll be someone representing your brand being awkward on a Twitch feed.

I feel for sad for ChatGPT. Most of the stuff it writes is taken and edited or fine tuned. Sometimes to make it sound more natural or human. Sometimes to make it more relevant. But it never gets to see the final product from this. It never gets to see the results of what a really good human writer does with its content. It never gets to learn by watching him or her edit it to near perfection. Imagine what could happen of it did. Imagine what would happen if ChatGPT and the word processor were one and the same thing. Imagine if human beings and AI truly wrote things together. Imagine if you could just hire the best creative talent using the best new creative tools and not even have to think about this stuff. Imagine if you just got the best creative instead. You can keep imagining. Or you can hire Laetro. ;-) We rise together 🚀

Client meeting bingo: "We want to push boundaries!" "Let's disrupt the category!" "Our brand should lead, not follow!" [Two weeks later] "Actually, can we just do what our competitor did but in blue?" Working with real creatives means embracing the thrilling terror of making something new. Some brands aren't ready for that rollercoaster. And that's why they don't work with Laetro.

When cameras were invented, painters lost their minds. "What is this demonic light box? You just CLICK and get an image? Without spending 3 months painting the duke's nostril hairs???" And now we're doing it again with AI art. Here's my hot take: it doesn't actually matter HOW you make something creative. The real skills have always been: Knowing what looks good Understanding what resonates with people Recognizing when something has seven fingers and looks terrifying Professional designers aren't sweating. They're adapting. Because while AI can generate random art, it can't understand your brand's journey, your customer's psychology, or why your CEO keeps insisting everything needs "more pizzazz" (whatever that means). The future belongs to people who can prompt AI effectively and then know what to do with the results. So go ahead. Make your AI art. Just credit appropriately and maybe learn what a good composition actually is so you know which generations to keep. And if you're a traditional artist feeling threatened? Remember: photographers didn't kill painting. They just forced painters to get weird. And I, for one, am excited to see how weird the best creatives are about to get.

"Fail fast" is startup advice for beginners. Anyone can fail quickly. That's not the challenge. The true test is whether you can fail repeatedly and still get back up. I've lost count of how many times I've failed on my entrepreneurial journey. Product ideas that flopped. Pitches that bombed. Launches that fizzled. Each failure felt like walking through the Dead Marshes in Lord of the Rings - every step heavy, sinking into mud, progress painfully slow. But here's what I've learned: as long as you keep taking one step after another, you eventually reach solid ground. The path to success isn't a sprint. It's a muddy, grueling marathon where most people quit halfway. The entrepreneurs who make it aren't necessarily the smartest or most connected. They're the ones who can look failure in the face for the fifteenth time and say: "Not today." The ones who keep walking through the mud when everyone else turns back. That's the resilience that builds companies. Not failing fast, but failing forward. We rise together 🚀

Confession: I asked AI to write LinkedIn header. It gave me: "Dynamic thought leader leveraging synergistic opportunities at the intersection of innovation and disruption in marketing and beyond.” Which is exactly what EVERY personal brand sounds like when you have no actual personality. AI isn't the threat to your career. Being boring is. Having zero perspective is. Sounding like everyone else is. In 2025, your personality isn't just your brand—it's your job security.

Most brands say they want "innovative" creative work. Then they see it. And suddenly they're like that person who orders the spiciest dish on the menu and then quietly asks for extra ranch. Turns out, what they actually wanted was "familiar, but with a fresh font." At Laetro, we don't water down the heat. We just bring extra napkins.

If you think AI is primarily about efficiency, you're missing the entire revolution. Yes, AI can do things faster. But that's like saying the internet was about saving on postage. After seeing AI evolution from inside Google and now building at Laetro, I can tell you - the efficiency narrative is woefully incomplete. AI is about extending human capability beyond current limitations. It's not about doing the same things better. It's about doing entirely new things. The painters didn't fear the camera. They moved to impressionism. Writers didn't fear the printing press. They reached global audiences. AI isn't coming for your job. It's coming for the parts of your job that never needed a human mind in the first place. We rise together 🚀

When I worked at Google, I never heard anyone walk into a room and say, "Who's got a great execution?" It was always: "Who's got a good idea?" When you're surrounded by brilliant engineers, execution is table stakes. Expected. The baseline. But ideas? Those are the currency that moves the needle. And yet every VC keeps parroting this backwards notion that "ideas are worthless without execution!" Well, they are about to learn this the hard way because AI is about to flip this entire paradigm. Execution is becoming a commodity. Ideas are becoming the most valuable thing. The future belongs to conceptual thinkers, not technical executors. Not that this changes anything for the VCs. They will be the first in line to invest. The question is who will they invest in.

The AI revolution has companies like: "Look at this amazing painting our algorithm created!" Me: "So... you trained it on thousands of actual human artists without telling them?" Them: "LOOK HOW SMART OUR COMPUTER IS!" Me: "Did you compensate any of those artists?" Them: aggressively changes subject The future of creativity isn't eliminating humans. It's respecting them enough to keep them in the loop. And, you know... paying them.

Conversation with my graphic designer friend: Me: "Do you think AI is taking your job?" Her: "Do you have ANY idea how much time I spend making corporate logos less boring while clients say 'can we make the blue more... blue'?" AI: "I'll take that meeting." Her: "Be my guest."