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Wellington Networking Event
FREE Wellington Networking Event: Turning Crisis into Opportunity & Navigating AI
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Event
Monthly Marketing Meetup | July
Join us at the MA for an evening of networking and discussion!
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BE BRAVE with Thomas Barta Event 2025
Be Brave: Unlock Growth, Lead Change, and Redefine Your Marketing Career with Thomas Barta
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Event
Brainy Breakfast 2025 / Wellington
Bold Campaigns, Authentic Voices: How to Create Marketing That Resonates, Empowers, and Sparks Conversation
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Kelly Grindle
Managing Director
Special PR
If You’re in a Hole, Stop Digging
Sometimes it can feel like the end of the world when you brand or business is faced with a crisis – but there is always opportunity in adversity. Learn about how the world’s most resilient businesses rebuild reputation and brand love when things go wrong. Whether that’s amending a product or service, investing in local communities, or addressing the crisis head-on – skilled marketing and communication professionals need to be proactive, rather than reactive.
About Kelly
Kelly Grindle is the Managing Director of Special PR. Founded as part of advertising network Special Group in 2021, the agency specialises in PR, activation and influencer marketing for some of New Zealand’s most recognisable brands. Prior to launching Special PR, Kelly spent a decade in London working as Associate Director at M&C Saatchi, and PR Lead at Virgin Atlantic.
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Sam Prescott
Director
Sixteenth Letter
Messaging Beyond the Monoculture (How Big Tech and AI Thrives on Fragmentation, and Why That Sucks for Communicators)
LLMs have given people and bots unprecedented power to create soulless AI slop that threatens to overwhelm our already choked communications system - the one that we've been hectically social-first-ing to for fifteen or twenty years. Eventually, it's going to become unusable, but we don't have anything to replace it with. We've forgotten how to ensure our messages travel with trust, and wonder why so many of the platforms that seemed exciting during the social media gold rush mostly suck now. Everyone is locked in their own world when it comes to how they consume and interact with media, in which the algos and generative AI revel as they feed more and more rubbish into the content torrent. Let's start a conversation about how we'll beat this thing, and re-take the most human trait we have: making meaning..
About Sam
Sam is a communications consultant and analyst based in Wellington; he loves working with NGOs, membership orgs and industry collectives - "essential connective tissue" organisations responding to the gap created by well-intentioned policy and actual community need. He thinks networking is the last pure game in comms and that AI is going to un-make our communications system unless we take meaningful action to eschew mechanical consumption and instead build the human-led connection and creation utopia we were once promised by big tech.
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