46 playbooks, five stacks.
The methodology Manual Focus brings to AI marketing work. Filter by stack, by stage, by channel. Pull what fits the brief in front of you. New to The Lens? Start here for the orientation guide. Each playbook is honest about what AI can and cannot reliably do, so see the capability reference.
Founder voice and institutional voice, the dual-voice approach
Separate the founder's voice from the brand's institutional voice. Map surface ownership, build a credible peer voice, write the contract that lets both work.
Tagline system, generate, eval, A/B
Generate 200 tagline candidates, filter to 15 by rule, A/B test to pick a winner against a real metric. The whole sprint runs in three working days.
Endurance brand voice, the language of suffer, craft and quietness
Layer category-specific lexicon, credibility checks and inauthenticity tells onto a base voice profile, so the brand reads like someone who has actually done the work.
Message house generator from positioning brief
Turn a positioning brief into a four-tier message house in one day. Narrative, pillars, proof points, channel-mapped lines, plus a rebuttal sheet for the 12 hardest pushbacks.
Naming sprint, multi-pass with linguistic filtering
Compress a quarter's naming exercise into a working day. 400 candidates, phonetic and trademark filters, eight defensible finalists with rationale.
Brand voice extraction and prompt library
Extract a falsifiable voice profile from your best writing. Build a prompt library and a scoring rubric so new drafts read like the brand, not like AI.
Positioning audit pipeline
Run a brand's public surface through a six-pass audit and ship a sharpened positioning brief in a working day. Said-versus-shown gaps, contradictions, defensible ground.
Direct-to-coach distribution, the underused endurance channel
Build a programme that sells through coaches, training plans and clubs. Tier menu, sample distribution, attribution, and the language coaches respond to.
Subscription and membership programme for endurance brands
Design a subscription or membership tier that earns recurring revenue without diluting the brand. Tier shape, benefit design, cancellation expectations, attribution modelling.
Retail partner programme, bike shops, run stores, multisport retailers
Run a retail partner programme that sells through specialist shops. Tier menu, sell-in kit, training cadence, sell-through measurement, honest annual review.
Event sponsorship beyond logo-on-banner
Turn event sponsorship into compounding audience value. Tier menu, on-site activation playbook, content rights that survive the event, post-event scorecard that drives renewal.
Ambassador programme, athletes, rights, content cadence
Run an athlete ambassador programme that earns audience credibility. Selection rubric, contract with AI augmentation rights, monthly cadence, quarterly review.
Race-day demand pipeline, campaigns timed to the calendar
Build a twelve-month campaign calendar timed to spring classics, marathon majors, gran fondos and trail-ultra majors. Pre-event, event-day and post-event lines ready by month.
Attribution tear-down using GA4 and incrementality signals
Untangle channel attribution using GA4, platform pixels and incrementality. Find overclaiming channels and the ones quietly working. Done in a week with the tools you already have.
Paid-search bidding agent with margin-aware optimisation
Install a bidding layer that adjusts paid-search targets by contribution margin rather than revenue. Recovers profitable keywords platform-side smart bidding abandons.
Category Entry Point research and prioritisation
Surface and rank the buying triggers that drive recall in your category, then map your brand's coverage. Ehrenberg-Bass framework in three days, four discovery streams.
Lifecycle journey builder with eval-gated touchpoints
Map a multi-segment lifecycle journey, draft every touchpoint with voice gating, route by behaviour signal, ship in a working week. Replaces three weeks of agency work.
Channel-mix simulator with reach-curve fitting
Fit diminishing-return curves to each channel from twelve months of weekly data, simulate twenty allocations, walk into the budget meeting with three defensible options.
AI studio news pipeline to LinkedIn content
Monitor frontier AI studio releases, draft LinkedIn posts on what each release means for marketers, plus audio or video demos via ElevenLabs and Higgsfield.
Training-content engine for endurance brands
Build a year-round educational content series from a brand's coaching POV. Training, periodisation, recovery and mental work formatted for endurance audiences.
Race-result content engine, timing data to editorial recap
Turn live timing data, lap splits and race officials' results into editorial recap content within 90 minutes of race finish. Fact-checked, voice-gated, ready to ship.
Segment-specific b-roll, AI-augmented production for endurance
Plan and produce b-roll across road, gravel, trail, swim and triathlon. What is worth shooting, what AI can augment, what AI cannot touch.
Video script system, brief to shootable script
Convert a marketing brief into a shootable script with beats, b-roll suggestions, captions and a thumbnail brief. Saves a producer a week of prep.
Social-content factory with channel-native generation
A production line for organic social that respects native form on each channel. Generates the week's content from a single brief, gates per channel.
Earned-media pitch generator with journalist matching
Match a story to the journalists who actually cover that beat, draft personalised pitches against their recent work, gate against the patterns editors hate.
Eval-gated drafting pipeline
A drafting pipeline that scores its own output against four objective gates before a human sees it. Triples editorial throughput without dropping the standard.
SEO cluster generator, pillar, spoke, intent map
Build a defensible topic cluster from one seed keyword. Intent-mapped, GEO-aware, with the eval criteria for surviving the next algorithm update built in from day one.
Crash-replacement and wear-out programme
Build a crash-replacement or wear-out programme that earns customer loyalty instead of draining margin. Tier rules, claim handling, evidence requirements, fraud safeguards.
End-of-season inventory and clearance
Manage the end-of-season inventory cycle for seasonal endurance gear. Forecast accuracy, clearance timing, channel sequencing, brand-protective discounting.
Customer content rights pipeline
Get permission to use customer race photos and gear reviews in marketing at scale, without burning the relationship. Consent, attribution, AI augmentation policy.
Gear launch sequence for endurance brands
The 12-month calendar for launching a product in a sport with a season. Build phase, pre-orders, public reveal, race-day proof, sustained sell-through.
Quarterly planning ritual for AI-leveraged marketing
A repeatable 5-day ritual that converts last quarter's learning into next quarter's bets. Built for marketing functions that ship faster than the calendar.
Hiring shape for AI-native marketing teams
The role taxonomy, the interview signal, the trial-task pack. How to staff a marketing function whose leverage comes from AI without becoming a team of prompt engineers.
Evaluation frameworks for marketing AI outputs
How to score AI-generated marketing work objectively. Rubrics, deterministic checks, model-as-judge patterns, calibration ritual.
Brand guardrails as code
Turn the brand guidelines from a PDF nobody reads into a programmatic check that runs on every piece of content before it ships. Catches drift before, not after.
Brief-to-ship marketing pipeline
A single operating system for the marketing function. Brief intake, eval-gated production, scheduled ship day, post-mortem feedback. Replaces ten tools and three meetings.
Inbox to task pipeline, emails that need work become tasks automatically
Inbound emails that contain work get parsed into Linear, Asana or Notion tasks with the context attached. Nothing falls through the gap between inbox and project tool.
Personal knowledge base, Notion and Obsidian with Claude as the search layer
Notion and Obsidian wired up with Claude as the search and synthesis layer. Your brain at scale, not just your notes.
Quarterly OKR synthesis, team reports to CEO and board summary
Status reports from five team leads compressed into a CEO-ready quarterly summary and a board narrative. Two hours instead of two days.
Weekly pipeline rollup, CRM data to stakeholder-ready status
HubSpot, Close or Salesforce data to a stakeholder-ready weekly rollup. No spreadsheet wrangling. Twenty minutes from export to delivered.
Document drafting partner, outline to Google Doc with brand voice
Outline becomes a brand-voice-loaded Google Doc or Word draft. Briefs, memos, proposals, board updates. First draft in twenty minutes.
Slack focus pass, read what matters and ignore what doesn't
Strip Slack noise to the threads that actually need you, draft replies in the right voice, and stay out of the channels that drain attention. Twice a day, 15 minutes.
Call follow-up loop, transcript to CRM update, email draft and tasks
Granola or Fireflies transcript into a CRM update, voice-loaded follow-up email and Linear or Asana tasks. Closes the loop opened by meeting prep.
Meeting prep stack, auto-generated context pack per meeting
A context pack per meeting from LinkedIn, past notes, CRM history and recent emails. Walk in informed, ten minutes of work instead of forty.
Email triage and draft, 100+ unread to clean inbox in 20 minutes
Process a hundred unread emails to a clean inbox in twenty minutes with brand-voice-loaded drafts. The pipeline does the sorting, you do the sign-off.
Daily briefing pipeline, calendar, inbox, Slack and CRM in one read
Stitch calendar, inbox, Slack and CRM into a 5-minute morning brief. The version of your day a chief-of-staff would write if you had one.