Overvoew

What does it take to build a category when customers do not yet know they need what you are selling?

In this episode of The Digital Diaries, Peter Woods speaks with Amit Sharan, SVP of Marketing at Tatari, about building brands, marketing teams and entirely new markets.

Amit shares lessons from helping build LiveRail into a leading video advertising platform before its acquisition by Facebook. He also reflects on his time at Meta, where he worked across advertising and products including Facebook Watch, Facebook Live and video monetisation.

The conversation explores why Amit prefers building over maintaining. He explains why clarity of positioning was so important at LiveRail and why marketing needs to do more than generate demand. It also needs to build the value and reputation of the company.

Amit explains what category creation really means. Sometimes customers are not actively searching for your solution. You first need to show them why the category matters before explaining why your company does it better.

Peter and Amit also explore the evolution of TV advertising. TV is becoming more measurable, targeted and accessible. Connected TV, retargeting and new advertising formats are bringing it closer to the performance marketing world.

They also discuss the growing role of AI in marketing. This includes how brands appear in LLMs, AI-powered media planning and AI-generated advertising. Amit shares why AI can reduce production costs, but also raises questions around consumer trust, synthetic talent and regulation.

Finally, Amit explains why he believes TV remains one of the most powerful brand-building channels available. Social media might amplify cultural moments, but many of those moments still begin on television.

• Why Amit prefers building businesses from zero to one

• Lessons from scaling LiveRail and working at Meta

• Why clear positioning can create a competitive advantage

• The difference between demand generation and category creation

• Why digital-first brands eventually need new channels to grow

• How connected TV is changing television advertising

• The opportunity for TV retargeting in B2B marketing

• How AI is changing search, media planning and advertising creative

• Consumer trust and regulation around AI-generated talent

• Why TV and social media can be stronger together

• Why leaders should give people problems to solve, not just tasks to complete

Great marketing is not only about capturing existing demand. Sometimes you need to create the market first.

That means educating customers, establishing the category and building trust before someone is ready to buy.

For Amit, the same thinking applies to leadership. Give talented people a meaningful problem to solve and the space to work out how to solve it.

In this episode of The Digital Diaries, host Peter Woods speaks with Dr Rebecca Hinds, author of Your Best Meeting Ever, founder of the Work AI Institute at Glean, and former head of the Work Innovation Lab at Asana. They discuss why workplace meetings have become so dysfunctional and how applying product design principles can transform collaboration. Dr Hinds reveals actionable frameworks like the 4D CEO test, methods for managing calendar overload, and how artificial intelligence is reshaping modern work practices.

• Treat Meetings like Products: Organisations should view meetings as critical internal products, using intentional design principles to optimise alignment and decision-making.

• Meeting Doomsday: Conducting a calendar cleanse at the team level can reclaim substantial time, including up to 11 hours per person each month.

• Combating Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill allotted time; setting shorter meeting durations (such as 50 minutes) or wrapping up once goals are achieved prevents wasted effort.

• Verb-Driven Agendas: Structuring agendas around actionable verbs ensures attendees understand the exact objective of each item.

• Measuring True Costs: Beyond direct salary calculations, unoptimised schedules inflict heavy cognitive costs and fatigue across organisations

• Navigating AI and "Bot Sitting": AI can streamline operations, but poor setup forces workers to spend up to 6.5 hours weekly supervising automated too

Key Takeaways

• Treat Meetings like Products: Organisations should view meetings as critical internal products, using intentional design principles to optimise alignment and decision-making.

• Meeting Doomsday: Conducting a calendar cleanse at the team level can reclaim substantial time, including up to 11 hours per person each month.

• Combating Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill allotted time; setting shorter meeting durations (such as 50 minutes) or wrapping up once goals are achieved prevents wasted effort.

• Verb-Driven Agendas: Structuring agendas around actionable verbs ensures attendees understand the exact objective of each item.

• Measuring True Costs: Beyond direct salary calculations, unoptimised schedules inflict heavy cognitive costs and fatigue across organisations.

• Navigating AI and "Bot Sitting": AI can streamline operations, but poor setup forces workers to spend up to 6.5 hours weekly supervising automated tools.

This week Peter is joined by Bryan Adams — CEO and founder of Happy Dance, best-selling author, TEDx speaker (1.4M+ views), and one of the leading voices in employer branding and candidate experience. Over two decades, Bryan has helped nearly 200 global organisations — including Apple, Canva, Salesforce and Johnson & Johnson — rethink how they attract talent.

In this conversation, Bryan and Peter dig into why the best employer brands are built on honesty, not hype — and why "selling the truth" beats selling the perfect story every time.

• The origin story — how a workshop moment that "gave Bryan goosebumps" set him on the path from marketing to employer branding, before the term even existed
• Sell the truth, not the perfect story — why leading with the real challenges of a role (not just the perks) attracts the right candidates and repels the wrong ones
• The imposter syndrome fix — how radical clarity about what a job actually demands removes the guesswork for new hires
• Why career sites still fall short — page speed, legacy tech, and the risk-aversion of large organisations
• AI and conversational candidate experience — how career sites are moving from static job boards to systems that "listen before they speak," cutting a 1,200-job firehose down to the 3 roles that actually fit
• Good friction vs. bad friction — why re-typing your CV into an ATS is needless friction, and what good candidate experience removes
• The three layers of story every organisation needs — reputation (what you're known for), expectation (the deal you're offering), and experience (the stories only your employees can tell)
• Leadership advocacy — why employer brand only works when it's championed from the C-suite down, not run as an HR side project
• Bryan's own story — nearly going out of business from a fear of public speaking, and the standup comedy course that changed everything
• Five years out — Bryan's prediction that transparency, not perfection, will become the ultimate measure of emplyer brand

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About Bryan Adams

Bryan is CEO and founder of Happy Dance, and author of Give and Get Employer Branding. His new book, Sell the Truth — a storytelling playbook for leaders who want to build cultures that win — is out 17 September in all good bookstores and on Amazon.

• Learn more about Bryan's work at Happy Dance
• Pre-order Sell the Truth, out 17 September