Five Minutes With Jenny Stanley and Nick King

September 2026

In a regular Q&A session, Jenny Stanley, Managing Director at Appetite Creative explores the key trends, around AI, full-funnel marketing and agentic workflows, facing experts from across the advertising and marketing industry.

This conversation is with Nick King, Global Practices Lead at Overline.

1: What is one achievement from your career that you are most proud of?

Setting up a consultancy with an old university friend, Robert Webster, and building it from nothing into something an international business wanted to buy. We sold the business about four years ago, and seeing something we built from a standing start turn into an acquisition remains the achievement I’m proudest of so far.

2: What are the questions you’re most often asked by clients?

It’s no surprise that AI is the question everyone’s talking about. Clients are constantly trying to understand the balance between efficiency and the value it creates – where it will save them money, and where it will make them money. 

In this economy, a lot of the conversation is about saving: where can we reduce process time, where can we cut costs? But ultimately, the real gamechanger is value – how can AI make everything we do better, whether that’s creative, performance or media? The whole market is focused on working out how to do it tomorrow, not in two years’ time.

3: What are the biggest challenges your clients are facing today?

So many businesses are still stuck treating performance and brand marketing as binary decisions, rather than taking a full-funnel view. I think we’ve sometimes forgotten what it means to be marketers when we look at the industry as a whole. It’s either ‘what was my CPA on a specific keyword’ or ‘how beautiful was my creative’, with no regard for whether anyone actually saw it. Those two extremes seem to coexist.

There are some interesting shifts happening in AI too – in how platforms like ChatGPT are approaching ads, and how Google is rethinking search. At their recent conference, Google said keywords are dead. Does that give us an opportunity to take a much more full-funnel approach? I personally hope so. I worry it won’t happen in the short term, but you’ve got to believe that it will.

4: What one improvement or change would you like to see in the wider industry over the next 12 months?

It’s no surprise that agentic AI is the main thing everyone’s focused on, and for me the more interesting, slightly niche question is: will every platform build and own its own agentic approach, or will brands develop something more like an MCP – a ‘brain’ that sits with them and that they fully own? 

There’s a real tension between what companies with billions of dollars can build and offer their clients, versus what a brand develops internally and keep entirely theirs. You can see that tension playing out – every platform is racing to bring something to the table at high speed, often launching in H2 what wasn’t even on the roadmap nine months earlier. There’s a huge focus on getting things out the door, and agentic workflows are absolutely the key thing we’re seeing.

5: What legacy would you like to leave the industry?

I hope the legacy I leave – and that anyone who’s worked with me would recognise – is a habit of challenging the status quo. Why have we done something a certain way? Why do we think that? That applies internally, and it applies with clients too – why have they come to us with that hypothesis? 

The consultancy element we’ve always brought is that rather than just saying yes, we’ll do what you ask, we ask why. I think that’s exactly why we’ve built such strong client relationships over the years – even if it’s an approach that’s driven a few people mad along the way! I hope more people, rather than just saying yes, instead they ask why, and use that to evolve how they approach things.

Source: Appetite Creative

  Agency, AI, Appetite Creative, Jenny Stanley, Nick King, Overline