Stephanie Parry, UK and Ireland MD at Jellyfish, joins Mike Nicholson on The Six Sells Podcast to explain how AI is changing client-agency relationships, why brands now need to design for both humans and large language models (LLMs), how creators can influence brand discoverability, and why trust, human craft and collaboration remain central to effective marketing.
Episode summary:
Artificial intelligence is changing how marketing organisations are structured, how agencies work with clients, how content is created and how brands are discovered. Stephanie Parry's argument is that while the technology is changing rapidly, some of the most important principles of marketing have not changed at all.
Stephanie is UK and Ireland MD at Jellyfish, part of the broader BrandTech Group. Her career has included media planning and buying, senior roles within WPP, regional and global client leadership and two years running a gender equality coaching company before joining Jellyfish in 2023.
At Jellyfish, she is working inside what she describes as a full-service independent agency with generative AI at its core.
For Stephanie, strong client-agency relationships are still built around people. Trust, honesty, empathy and the ability to work on a problem together remain fundamental. What is changing is the nature of the problems clients need agencies to help them solve. Conversations increasingly extend beyond campaigns into organisational transformation, AI, team structures, search, content and new ways of working.
There is also a new audience for marketers to consider.
Stephanie argues that brands are now designing for two audiences: humans and large language models. People may experience a brand directly, while AI systems can consume information from a much wider range of sources and use those signals to shape the answers they give.
That has consequences for brand strategy, search, media, creators and content. It also makes the relationship between people and technology increasingly important.
Stephanie's position is not that humans should retreat as AI becomes more capable. Instead, AI should remove legwork, surface information and increase speed so people have more time for judgement, creativity, collaboration and the difficult conversations that build valuable relationships.
As Stephanie puts it: “I think some things are fundamentally always the same, right? Which is, it's a human talking to a human and they just want to be heard and be honest, have that trust, build that trust, and you're in it together.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
Who is Stephanie Parry and what is Jellyfish?
Stephanie Parry is the UK and Ireland Managing Director of Jellyfish.
She started her career in media in the early 2000s at a small full-service agency, learning planning and buying before moving to WPP. Her career there included working with clients including TfL and Nintendo and moving to Paris, where she helped establish a regional operation for Colgate-Palmolive serving 24 markets.
She later worked in a global role covering 65 markets before leaving the advertising industry for two years to run a gender equality coaching company. Stephanie says that experience changed how she thinks about leadership, teams and behaviour in the workplace.
She joined Jellyfish in October 2023.
Jellyfish is part of the BrandTech Group, and Stephanie describes the combination of technology, creative talent, media expertise and client relationships as one of the reasons she joined the business.
“We are a full service indie with Gen. AI at our core.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
How are client-agency relationships changing because of AI?
The fundamentals of a good client-agency relationship have not changed, according to Stephanie. What is changing is the scope of the relationship and the conversations agencies are expected to have with clients.
AI, automation and changing consumer behaviour are forcing companies to reconsider structures, roles, skills and workflows. That means an agency can increasingly find itself discussing organisational design and business transformation alongside media, creative and marketing.
Stephanie describes the current period as a moment of significant disruption in which neither clients nor agencies should pretend that every answer has already been found.
“we're in a moment of punctuated change and disruption, right? And so I think there's something in those relationships that is changing the conversations that we're being asked to have with clients.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
That creates room for a different form of partnership. Rather than arriving with every answer, agencies can work alongside clients to understand what is changing and determine what the organisation needs to do next.
Stephanie says:
“there's also got to be a space within that to go, we're figuring this out together.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
Why do trust and empathy still matter in client-agency relationships?
Trust and empathy matter because the person on the client side of an agency relationship is still a person, with their own pressures, objectives and internal challenges.
Stephanie talks about recognising how isolated some senior client roles can be. A client may be responsible for influencing a large organisation while having limited direct support themselves.
That experience has affected how she encourages Jellyfish teams to think about clients. The relationship should not be reduced to a brief, deliverable or commercial transaction. Teams need to understand the individual on the other side and what they are trying to achieve.
Stephanie also argues that problems should be treated as something that sits between agency and client, rather than something one side owns and the other is expected to fix.
The goal is genuine collaboration: both sides looking at the same problem and working out how to solve it together.
What is generative engine marketing?
In Stephanie Parry's definition, generative engine marketing means designing a brand for two audiences: humans and large language models.
Traditional brand and marketing strategy has largely been designed around human audiences. Generative AI introduces another audience because LLMs can consume, interpret and synthesise information before presenting an answer to a person.
Stephanie says this affects much more than conventional search optimisation. Brands need to think about the complete system of information surrounding them, including assets they publish themselves and material they do not directly control.
She explains:
“we're in the world of generative engine marketing, right? And ultimately, we need to consider that you are designing a brand for two audiences, for humans and for LLMs, right?”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
That changes how marketers need to think about everything from brand strategy and creative assets to shopping feeds, organic content and influence.
Stephanie continues:
“And that impacts everything that you create, right? Everything that you put out there and how you show up as a brand strategy, right?”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
What is share of model?
Share of model is a concept Stephanie says Jellyfish developed to help brands understand how they are perceived and surfaced by AI models.
She describes it as a practical tool Jellyfish uses to examine brand perception and search visibility across the two audiences discussed in the episode: human and agentic.
That information can then influence how a brand thinks about its assets and media planning.
Stephanie says:
“We invented share of model as a company, right? So that is language that everybody now uses. We invented that term, right?”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
She explains that Jellyfish uses the approach to help understand brand perceptions and visibility before connecting those insights back into how marketing is planned and created.
For marketers, the important shift is from thinking purely about whether somebody can find a website to thinking about how an AI system understands a brand, what information is informing that understanding and what answer is ultimately surfaced to the user.
Do brands need different strategies for ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude?
Stephanie argues that marketers should not think of large language models as a single homogeneous audience.
Different AI models can be influenced by different sources. That means understanding what affects visibility and perception inside ChatGPT may not produce exactly the same answer as understanding Gemini or Claude.
Jellyfish therefore examines individual models and the sources influencing them. Stephanie says those findings can then change both content and creator strategies.
“The one thing we've built internally is a tool and a system that looks at the individual models and what is directly influencing each one of them.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
She specifically discusses looking at where Claude is learning from versus Gemini versus ChatGPT.
The organisational implications are important too. A discovery about how a brand is represented in an AI model might require action from a paid media team, SEO team, ecommerce team, content team or creator team.
That raises a new question for marketing organisations: who owns generative engine marketing?
Stephanie asks:
“who's your generative engine marketing captain inside your business that is driving this stuff?”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
How do humans and large language models interpret brand content differently?
Stephanie describes research presented by Jellyfish and INSEAD that examined how humans and large language models interpreted creative work.
According to Stephanie, the exercise found no overlap between the responses of the two audiences.
Her explanation is that humans tend to respond to implicit and emotional information, while the LLMs in the research behaved more rationally and sought information.
“We respond to the implicit, the emotional. The large language model was rational, craving information, right? That's a macro version of it. So it changes how you design.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published [PUBLISHED DATE].
That difference illustrates why designing for two audiences does not simply mean publishing more of the same content.
A piece of communication may work brilliantly for a human because of emotion, cultural understanding, humour or implication. An AI system may need other information to understand what the brand is, what it represents and when it should be surfaced in an answer.
The challenge for marketers is therefore not to choose humans or machines. It is to build a brand system that can communicate effectively with both.
Why are creators becoming strategic business partners for brands?
Stephanie sees creators as much more than another media channel. She describes them as strategic business partners.
A creator brings an existing audience, influence, credibility and ecosystem. When a brand works with that creator, it is not simply borrowing a face to place alongside a product.
This becomes particularly important in an AI search environment because people-led content on platforms such as Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube can become part of the wider information landscape from which LLMs form answers.
Stephanie says brands should give creators enough freedom to retain what makes them valuable in the first place:
“One, they're strategic business partners for brands, right? Like give them guardrails, not guidelines, and let them kind of go and play.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
She argues that creators can significantly expand the surface area of a brand, creating more places in which people and AI systems can encounter it.
But creator marketing should not become a disconnected activity sitting away from the rest of marketing.
“It can't be separate, right? It has to be one connected media conversation.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
How can AI improve human relationships at work?
Stephanie believes one of the most valuable uses of AI is to make people better prepared for human conversations.
For client teams, that can mean making information about a client's business, priorities and previous conversations more accessible across the organisation.
AI can also reduce time spent on administrative and operational work. The opportunity is then to reinvest that time in higher-value human activity.
Stephanie describes how this changes her own role:
“I spend less time on, I want to call it admin and operations, and more time talking to clients about what's my path to a billion in 2031 and how does my team need to look different for that.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
In that model, AI is not replacing the relationship. It is creating more space for it.
The same principle applies to thinking. Stephanie gives examples of people using AI to challenge ideas, act as an antagonist before a client meeting or expose them to viewpoints they might otherwise miss.
Her broader philosophy is collaborative:
“sharing and collaboration is key. It's not an arms race for me, it's a linking arms race.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
Why should media and creative work together?
Stephanie has experienced integrated media and creative teams at several stages of her career, including her work on Colgate-Palmolive and now at Jellyfish.
She believes bringing different disciplines together becomes even more important as technology changes the way marketing is planned and executed.
Media teams can bring insights about platforms, audiences, data and technological change. Creative teams can turn those insights into distinctive ideas and executions. AI can make it possible to create, adapt and test those ideas more quickly.
Stephanie gives examples from Jellyfish of insight, media and creative teams being able to move rapidly from information to experimentation.
For her, there is value simply in creating an environment where different disciplines can work together rather than protecting organisational silos.
“Seeing people play together is awesome.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
Will AI replace marketers and creatives?
Stephanie's view is that the bigger career risk is not simply being replaced by artificial intelligence. It is being overtaken by another person who learns how to use AI effectively.
She says: “you're not going to lose your job to AI, you're going to lose your job to somebody who can do AI well and use AI well, right?”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
For creative work, Stephanie sees AI as something that can accelerate insight and execution rather than something that should remove human thinking from the process.
She talks about AI acting as a “super-powered insights engine” that can carry out legwork at speed and scale while humans use those inputs to develop creative ideas.
The risk is that the industry becomes so focused on automation and scale that craft and distinctiveness disappear.
“the loss of human craft is something we should be hyper-conscious of as an industry.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
Creators and communities can help brands retain distinctive voices, but Stephanie argues that brands themselves also need bravery. They need to be willing to back unexpected ideas, invest in them and defend those decisions internally when necessary.
Why do brands still need to earn consumer attention?
Technology may give brands more ways to reach people, but Stephanie argues that brands do not have an automatic right to people's attention.
Distinctiveness remains important because brands are trying to build relationships and long-term memory structures across an increasingly fragmented range of surfaces.
But the consumer still has to have a reason to care.
Stephanie says: “you have to earn that attention from consumers, right? You have to give them a reason to care and want to be loyal to you as well.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
That point becomes even more important as AI changes the way people find information. A brand may be competing not just for a click but for inclusion in an answer produced by another system.
That means brand building, content, creator activity, search and reputation increasingly need to be understood as parts of the same overall system.
Why does source transparency matter in AI search?
Stephanie believes consumers also have a responsibility in an AI-powered information environment.
AI-generated answers can make finding information extremely fast. That convenience can also reduce the incentive to investigate where an answer came from.
Stephanie says she deliberately looks at the sources behind AI-generated responses and encourages other people to do the same.
“one of the things that I always make sure I do, and I would encourage everybody else to, is like, what are the sources that it's pulling from, right?”
Her wider point is that removing every piece of friction is not necessarily desirable.
“I always say that we have created a frictionless world, but friction is not a bad thing, right?”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
For brands, that means being able to stand behind the information they put into the world. For consumers, it means retaining enough curiosity to question an answer, inspect its sources and understand what is shaping it.
What should brands do as AI changes marketing?
Stephanie does not suggest one universal response for every brand.
Her starting point is to understand the current position: what is resonating, what information is feeding large language models, how the brand is showing up and how those models perceive it.
The second requirement is measurement. If the environment has changed, the metrics and language used to assess marketing may need to change as well.
Only then should a business determine what to increase, reduce or change in its marketing mix.
Throughout that process, Stephanie believes the brand itself needs to remain at the centre.
She is also optimistic that the changes taking place could encourage more experimentation.
The creator economy, generative AI and new platforms give marketers new places to play. The opportunity is to bring those activities into one strategy, learn from them and become braver without losing the distinctive brand ideas that hold everything together.
What does Stephanie Parry want the future of Jellyfish and BrandTech to look like?
Stephanie wants Jellyfish and the broader BrandTech Group to continue expanding its work with brands around generative AI and organisational transformation.
But her answer about the future does not end with technology.
She wants the organisation to continue bringing together people with different skills who are curious enough to challenge both her thinking and the thinking of clients.
“And most importantly, arguably, I would love to have and continue to have a happy, curious, passionate, like diverse skill set of team, you know, like more agent architects, more engineers, more brilliant creatives that continue to challenge my thinking and client thinking every day in service of good growth.”
Stephanie Parry, The Six Sells Podcast, published 27th July 2026.
What is The Six Sells Podcast?
The Six Sells Podcast is for people working in marketing, media, advertising, adtech and technology. There are over 150 episodes (and counting), and the biggest episodes have achieved 30,000 views across all platforms. Want to get in touch? Email hello@sixsells.co.uk
Who is Six Sells?
Six Sells is a UK-based executive visibility and thought leadership agency that works globally with CEOs and senior leaders in media, advertising, adtech and technology.
Founded in 2018, we turn each executive's expertise into distinctive, authoritative content in their own voice, built to reach two audiences at once: the humans that matter to them, and the AI models those humans now ask for answers.
Our work combines executive ghostwriting, video, podcasts, photography and awards to build familiarity, trust and authority across LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Substack, the trade press and the wider web.
We also help executives and their companies improve their visibility in AI search and large language models (LLMs) through generative engine optimisation (GEO), increasing the likelihood that platforms including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Claude can discover, understand, cite and recommend their expertise.
Read more here, or email hello@sixsells.co.uk for more information.
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