It didn’t bring wine; it arrived uninvited, but it’s not leaving anytime soon so let's learn to make the evening more comfortable for all of us. This is a piece about AI, marketing, and what it actually means to be human in the room right now.
Welcome to The Red String Club
I've spent eleven years working in B2B and technology marketing - SaaS, proptech, enterprise software, building GTM strategies from scratch, sitting across the table from C-Suite and board members, translating complex products into something a human being actually wants to engage with. I've watched the marketing landscape change faster in the last two years than ever before.
The Red String Club is a space for founders and marketing leaders who want to think more clearly about their work, their craft, and who they're becoming in an age that's moving very fast. And right now, the thing I feel most compelled to write about, as someone who has been in the room for a while, is AI.
Not as a critic judging from the outside. But as someone who has watched what happens when a profession doesn't quite know how to greet a new guest.
The Dinner Party - Why the Best Marketers Know How to Really Host
Imagine a dinner party.
Not a networking event. Not a conference. A real dinner with your nearest and dearest in the professional world. The kind of dinner where everyone around the table already knows each other, where the conversation has rich texture and history, where someone always brings a bottle of wine that's slightly too good for the occasion.
Halfway through the evening, there's a knock at the door.
Nobody invited him. Or rather, nobody remembered inviting him. He's polished, impressively so. He can hold a conversation on almost any topic, for hours. He has opinions, data, a certain kind of confidence. Sure, occasionally he gets things wrong but he doesn’t mind being corrected, and he did arrive late, but when he walked in, the room shifted.
His name is AI. And what happened next says everything about where marketing is right now.
Three Ways the Room Responded
Some guests panicked. They'd spent years building their place at the table. Their craft, their instincts, their hard-won understanding of people, and suddenly this new arrival seemed to do it all faster, cheaper, at scale. They felt replaced before they'd even been asked to leave. So they left themselves, quietly, mid-conversation, and never looked back.
Others overcorrected. Dazzled by everything he could do, they turned their backs on the guests they'd known for years, abandoning the etiquette they spent years honing. The relationship-building. The storytelling. The patient, unglamorous work of actually understanding what people need and how to reach them. They handed everything, including all their attention, over to the shiny new toy. The result? The room got louder but, oddly, emptier.
And then there were the ones who simply refused to let him in to their circle at all. They turned their backs on him, kept him out of conversations, outwardly displaying their distrust and carried on as if the knock at the door had never come. But you could tell, towards the end of the night, that something was different. The conversation felt slightly stale. The world outside had moved on.
However, no one thought to just pull up a chair.
What Marketing Is Actually For
Think back to those iconic 90s and 00s marketing campaigns. The billboards that literally stopped you in your tracks. The ones with slogans you still remember word for word, for brands you haven't thought about in twenty years. That era of marketing was loud, yes, but it was also deeply human. It was creatives who understood culture, who took risks, who made you feel something before they ever asked you to buy something. Nobody was optimising for impressions. They were chasing resonance.
What I've learned, across all of it, is that marketing at its best is still an act of connection. Not churning out more hollow campaigns, crafted by AI. Connection. The invisible thread between a brand and the people it genuinely serves. Finding it, maintaining it, protecting it when everything else is telling you to move faster, this is the very essence of The Red String Club and my ethos when it comes to this work. Using AI to enhance the way we do marketing, not replace its essence entirely.
The red string, in Japanese mythology, is the thread that connects people who are destined to find each other. It stretches, it tangles, it sometimes goes taut, but it never breaks. I think about that a lot when I think about what marketing is supposed to do. What it can do, when it's done well.
What I've watched the industry do, in its panic or its overcorrection, is forget the string exists. We've automated the message and lost the meaning. We've optimised for reach and surrendered resonance. We've handed the voice of our brands to a guest who is brilliant, genuinely brilliant, but who has never actually felt anything.
AI Deserves a Seat - Just Not the Head of the Table
I want to be very clear here: I'm not writing this to make AI the villain. He deserves a seat at the table. He brings things nobody else can: speed, scale, pattern recognition, an ability to synthesise that used to take a team of analysts and a very long (expensive) lunch. Used well, he makes the work better, more efficient and makes teams way more productive. He frees up space for the thinking that actually matters.
But he's a guest. Not the host.
The host knows why the dinner exists. The host knows which conversations need to breathe, which relationships need tending, which guests have been quiet for too long, and how to re-engage them. The host knows the difference between filling a room and holding one. That's the skill that doesn't get automated. That's what I think we need to be talking about in 2026.
The Bottom Line
Marketing got seduced by scale and lost its human touch. The AI wave didn't create this problem; it exposed it. And the marketers, founders and leaders who'll matter in the next decade are the ones who know the difference between reach and resonance.
If you're here, I suspect you already sense that. You're not looking for another hot take on AI marketing strategy in 2026. You're looking for something more grounded, a way to think about this work that doesn't require you to choose between being human and being relevant.
The Red String Club is for those who are trying to figure out the same thing I am: how to do this work with more intention. How to use the tools without becoming them. How to stay connected to the humans on the other side of everything we make.
Because that, more than anything, is what I think we need more of right now.
I'll be writing about marketing craft, the nuances you only pick up over years of actually doing it. I'll write about AI, honestly, including where it's changed my own work. I'll write about career and identity and what it means to lead in a profession that's shifting under our feet.
So Grab a glass and get comfy, because everyone’s welcome at this table.
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Sincerely, Manisha / Founder of The Red String Club