Five Marketers Walk Into an Anti-Conference

No prepared slides. Nobody had a run-of-show. And that, apparently, was the whole point.

The setup

AntiCon is Carlos Doughty's event series, and it's built around a simple premise: the right content, the right speakers, and an experience you'd actually choose to attend even if it wasn't for work. Less stuffy conference hall, more street food and a DJ dropping 90s hip hop from the moment the doors open.

At this year's edition in London, I grabbed ten attendees and asked each of them a single rapid-fire question from the same bank: things about career mistakes, AI beliefs, useless metrics, and embarrassing office habits. What came back was more honest than anything I'd have gotten from a panel. Here are the first five.

Attribution's slow death

Adam Clarke has been doing this for a long time. He used to believe in attribution. He's grown out of it.

"I was a utopian idealist," he told me. "I've become more of a realist."

His logic: the rise of dark social, the gaps no tool can actually track, and the gulf between what SaaS vendors promised and what attribution models actually deliver. It's not that he's given up on measurement. He just stopped pretending the maps were accurate.

"The attribution piece is harder than ever. I've made my bed with that."

The "wait, AI can do that?" moment

Roxanne Lewington, growth marketing manager at Canto, was asked about her most recent moment of genuine AI surprise. Her answer wasn't about a dramatic automation breakthrough or an agent taking over a workflow.

It was simpler than that: using AI as a focused assistant for a specific task. Building out projects in Claude. Getting it to actually do the thing you need it to do, rather than the thing it assumes you mean.

"It's just been so revolutionary," she said. And the way she said it suggests she means that in the most practical, non-hypey sense of the word.

The breakthroughs aren't always the big ones. Sometimes it's just the moment a tool stops feeling like a tool.

The generation gap nobody is talking about

Carlos Doughty's answer to "what will marketing look like in five years that nobody's talking about?" didn't mention tools or channels. It mentioned people.

His argument: we're about to hollow out the junior layer of the marketing workforce by replacing it with AI. And in doing so, we'll eventually find ourselves with a senior generation of experienced marketers who are getting older, and no pipeline of people behind them who've learned by doing.

"Who's the next tier?" he asked. "We won't live forever."

It's the kind of question that sounds obvious once someone says it out loud, and yet it almost never comes up in the AI-in-marketing conversation.

Friction is the point

Parry Malm runs Drumbeat, a LinkedIn optimization platform. His answer to "what's the most human thing left in your job?" was not what I expected.

He talked about how his team mercilessly makes fun of each other. How the harder you can go, the better. How corporate culture makes everything beige, and it's the rough edges that make things stick.

"Friction makes things stick, not the smoothness."

He's right, and it's more useful than it sounds. The thing that makes teams actually bond isn't the offsite or the values poster. It's the inside jokes that would get you in trouble with HR if you explained them to a stranger.

The metrics we pretend to care about

Gareth Chilton's answer to "what metric do you pretend to care about but don't?" started with a bit of misdirection about likes on LinkedIn, then landed somewhere more useful: the real question isn't which metrics are vanity metrics, it's whether you understand what any given number actually means to the decisions you have to make.

He also had the line of the episode on AI: the problem isn't the technology. It's us. And the next chapter of this story won't be about martech at all. It will be about anthropology.

"How we work as individuals to unlock the value in the technology we use."

The bottom line

This was never going to be a traditional episode. Five people, three questions each, no time to warm up or polish the answer. And yet.

What came through across all five conversations was a group of people who've been in this industry long enough to be genuinely skeptical, and still genuinely interested. Nobody was selling anything. Nobody had a product to mention. They were just thinking out loud.

Conversations like these might be the best example of what AntiCon actually is about.

If you want to find any of these five: Adam Clarke, Roxanne Lewington, Carlos Doughty, Parry Malm, and Gareth Chilton are all on LinkedIn. Links to their profiles are in the Youtube episode description.