Emma Tesdal, forfatter på Project Neon

Summer Switch Off. Brand Visibility On.

Posted on June 25, 2026July 7, 2026 by Emma Tesdal

“In the summertime,
when the weather is high…”

For many businesses, summer is a chance to slow down. Out-of-office replies are switched on, diaries become lighter, and attention shifts from deadlines to downtime.

But while you take a break, your brand doesn’t need to disappear from view. Your website is still live, your content is still searchable, and potential customers can still discover your business long after you’ve switched on your out-of-office reply.

The good news? Staying visible over the summer doesn’t mean staying busy. A little planning now can help your brand remain active, relevant, and ready for when business picks up again in the autumn.

Here are five Mungo-inspired ways to make the most of the summer slowdown:

1. In the summertime, when the weather is high, you can… give your brand a summer MOT

Summer is a good opportunity to take a fresh look at your digital channels.

Are your team profiles up to date? Does your website reflect your latest projects and capabilities? Have you added recent case studies or testimonials? Are there any broken links, outdated content, or missing calls to action?

It’s also worth considering whether your content answers the questions customers are actually asking, and whether search engines and AI tools can easily understand what you do.

Small improvements can make a significant difference to visibility and credibility.

Think of it as routine maintenance for your marketing, much like servicing equipment before a busy operational period.

A quick digital health check now can help ensure your online presence is working as hard as possible when visitors return after the holidays. If you’re not sure where to start, our guide to refreshing your marketing efforts provides a useful checklist.

2. In the summertime, when the weather is high, you can… put your content on cruise control

You don’t need to be online every day to stay visible.

Before heading off on holiday, schedule a series of posts to maintain a consistent presence throughout the summer.

This doesn’t mean creating lots of new content. In fact, some of your best-performing content may already exist.

Repurpose a case study into a series of social media posts. Revisit an older blog article with updated insights. Share project highlights, lessons learned, or answers to common customer questions.

Learning how to repurpose existing content can help you stay visible without creating everything from scratch. Read our article, How to turn one piece of content into a powerful multi-channel campaign.

Educational content tends to perform particularly well during quieter periods because it provides value without feeling overly promotional. Consistency matters more than volume here.

3. In the summertime, when the weather is high, you can… take stock of what’s really working

When was the last time you looked at your marketing performance beyond likes and impressions?

A quieter period offers the opportunity to review what content is generating engagement, driving website traffic, and supporting business goals.

Look at your website analytics, newsletter performance, social media engagement, and lead generation activity. Which topics resonate most with your audience? Which channels are delivering results? What should you stop doing completely?

Summer is also a good time to identify content gaps. Are there customer questions you answer regularly but have never documented online?

A simple marketing review can reveal valuable insights that help you focus your efforts where they matter most.

A structured marketing audit can also help benchmark performance and identify opportunities for growth. Learn more in our article, The Power of a Marketing Audit: Benchmark and Grow.

4. In the summertime, when the weather is high, you can… capture expertise before its forgotten

Many technical businesses are sitting on a wealth of knowledge that never makes it into their marketing.

Valuable knowledge often remains locked inside the organisation rather than helping build credibility and visibility externally.

Use the summer period to speak with technical experts, project managers, engineers, and leadership teams. Capture lessons learned, project successes, industry perspectives, and practical insights.

These conversations can become future blogs, LinkedIn posts, case studies, videos, presentations, or newsletter content.

Your people are often your strongest content asset. Summer can be a great time to uncover those stories before they disappear into the next busy project.

5. In the summertime, when the weather is high, you can… get ahead before the autumn rush

The second half of the year often arrives faster than expected.

Industry events, conferences, client meetings, budget discussions, recruitment campaigns, and year-end communications can quickly fill the calendar.

Use the quieter summer period to get ahead. Identify key milestones, content themes, campaigns, and business priorities for the months ahead.

Having a plan in place now means less scrambling later and more time to focus on delivering meaningful results.

Stay visible without staying busy

Summer doesn’t have to be a choice between taking a break and maintaining visibility.

By reviewing your digital presence, scheduling content, capturing expertise, and planning, you can keep your brand out there while you enjoy some downtime.

Summer is for switching off. Visibility doesn’t have to be.

From ChatGPT Curious to Building Her Own AI Universe

Posted on May 12, 2026 by Emma Tesdal

At our latest Morning Focus session, Susanne Todnem — founder, marketing strategist, and advisor to companies ranging from listed corporates to small businesses — gave her practical and witty take on AI in marketing. No hype and no prior coding knowledge required!

Susanne started using AI the way most of us did, with a nudge to try ChatGPT and a vague curiosity that something big was happening.

Jump forward a few years and she now runs her business with a Claude Cowork employee who never takes time off, and Petter Stordalen has talked her out of shutting down her company (she doesn’t know him at all – read on!).

Context beats prompting

Not long ago, the conversation around AI was all about prompt engineering. Susanne says that’s changed.

“Context is more important than prompting. Build your structure and framework. If you build a strong context with the right documents, a clear brief, a well-organised project, you can take that structure with you to any tool, regardless of how the AI landscape shifts. Your framework becomes the asset, not your knowledge of any single platform.”

Treating AI as part of the team

Susanne was honest about the business impact AI has had on her own company. Two years ago, she had three full-time employees. Today she has the same revenue and one Claude Cowork employee, running autonomously in the background while she makes herself a cup of tea.

Recently, she spent 40 days writing down every single task she did in her business – using a good old-fashioned pen and paper. She fed this insight into Claude and asked: what can be automated? What can be outsourced? What can be stopped entirely?

She now integrates AI into her client work. At the start of every month, Claude Cowork produces a full monthly content schedule across five social media platforms and a website – something that would have previously taken her days to produce manually.

It starts with strategy

Susanne made a point that’s easy to overlook: the heavy lifting in AI isn’t the tool, it’s the strategy behind it.

You need to know what problem you’re solving, why it matters, and how you’ll measure success. And while most Norwegian companies are now using AI, most are still in exploration mode. The next step is execution – outsourcing real tasks, not just experimenting.

Build your own Board

One of the more creative use cases Susanne shared is building a personal advisory board of 15 people inside her AI tools. The board includes Oprah Winfrey, Petter Stordalen, a Norwegian financial expert, and others she admires. When she’s facing a difficult business decision (including one moment where she genuinely considered shutting down her company) she asks the board for their perspectives.

AI amplifies expertise

Susanne pushed back on the idea that AI levels the playing field entirely. In her view, domain expertise is what separates good AI output from generic fluff.

The best designs from Claude Design will come from designers, because they know how to direct it. The best video content will come from people who understand video. And for Susanne, whose sharpest skill is writing, Claude Cowork produces better copy because she knows what valuable input and a good output looks like.

That said, she’s clear about where she draws a line: AI hasn’t written a single word of the book she’s working on. Claude knows her tone, her humour, her background, but she wants it to be hers.

Tools for marketers

A few specific recommendations Susanne flagged for marketers:

Claude + Canva or Claude Design — great combos for content creation
Wispr Flow — a voice-to-text app that dramatically speeds up workflow
NotebookLM — turns PDFs into podcast episodes or infographics for learning and content repurposing
Otter — a transcription tool that captures meetings and conversations, great for turning spoken content into written assets

Giving back

Susanne posed a challenge that went beyond tools and tactics.

AI will save you time and money — the real question is what you do with it. More time for walks, books, and creativity is a good start. But she also floated something more ambitious: if your company saves 20% by replacing external software with something built internally, could 5% of that go to charity, or directly to your employees?

Technology is moving fast. But the decisions about what we do with the time it gives us back are still entirely human.

Follow Project Neon for upcoming Morning Focus events and more refreshing conversations like this one.

Make It BRIEF: Avoiding sht in = sht out, with AI

Posted on March 27, 2026March 27, 2026 by Emma Tesdal

Improve AI outputs by treating prompts like creative briefs

We all know by now that AI isn’t a magic button – it’s perfectly capable of creating sh*t! But like it or loathe it, AI is here to stay.

We’ve been experimenting with AI across content, strategy and creative work. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can produce text, images and ideas at lightning speed. But the quality of the output depends entirely on the quality of the input.

Used well, it can speed up research, generate ideas and help structure content. Used poorly, it produces generic noise. One thing that’s clear: the quality of the output often comes down to the brief behind the prompt. If the instructions are vague, the response will be too.

AI doesn’t automatically understand your brand, your audience or your goals. Just like a new employee, you need to onboard it and provide a clear brief.

Feed the beast

AI is hungry for information. The more relevant context you provide, the more useful the response will be. Just like in marketing and communications, success starts with a strong brief.

The clearer the input, the better the output. Before prompting, it can help to upload reference materials like:

Brand guidelines

Target audience insights

Market context

Previous content or campaigns

BRIEF your prompt

One of the easiest ways to improve AI output is to think of your prompt as a creative brief.

A simple framework to follow is BRIEF:

Background
What’s the context? Where will the content appear and why are you creating it?

Reader
Who is the audience? Be specific about their role, knowledge level and interests.

Intent
What do you want the content to achieve? Inform, persuade, educate or inspire action.

Expression
What tone or brand voice should the content follow?

Format
What are the practical constraints? Think channel, word count, structure or platform.

Example prompt text:

I’m going to write a [type of content] for [channel].
Here’s the context:
Target audience: [detailed description]
Product/service: [what you’re selling + key benefits]
Brand: [your tone and positioning]
Competitors: [how you stand out]
Goal: [specific action you want people to take]
Write with [specific requirements for format/length].

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again

One of the biggest mistakes people make with AI is treating the first response as the final one. Think of it as a conversation. Ask for variations. Change the tone. Request shorter versions, alternative angles or different structures.

It’s also worth remembering that AI is designed to be helpful. In practice, this means it will often agree with your ideas. The most valuable results come when you challenge the output, refine the brief and keep iterating.

A designer’s perspective

Our designer puts it like this:

“AI isn’t a magic button. It works best when you treat it like a creative brief. When you move past generic buzzwords and start describing real-world context or clear objectives, the output stops looking like a default response and starts looking like something a human intended to create.”

Used well, AI can also remove some of the more cumbersome parts of the creative process -organising ideas, testing concepts or drafting early versions. Think of it like sketching before drawing. It helps you reach the interesting part of the project faster.

Humans still in the driving seat

Despite its benefits, AI doesn’t understand emotion, timing, cultural nuance or brand instinct. It can’t challenge strategy, interpret subtle messaging or make judgement calls. That’s where human expertise still matters.

The real value of AI isn’t replacing creativity – it’s amplifying it. Used as a sparring partner, it helps teams move faster while keeping the thinking, direction and craft firmly in human hands.

If you’re looking for help shaping clearer messaging, stronger storytelling or smarter content strategy, get in touch with the team at Project Neon.

When Marketing takes a seat at the table

Posted on February 16, 2026February 17, 2026 by Emma Tesdal

Morning Focus with Anette Veidung, CMO at Interwell

“It’s only when marketing is strategic and not just tactical, it becomes a source and an amplifier of sales and growth. That’s why it belongs in the C-suite.”

This was the topic Anette Veidung, CMO at Interwell, had everyone chewing over at our first Morning Focus event of 2026.

Speaking candidly about her impressive, international career spanning beauty, biotech, green tech and oil and gas, Anette shared how marketing only creates real value when it’s treated as an essential commercial function – not a support act. And whilst industries, distribution channels and customers have changed over the years, the red thread guiding her work has always been deeply rooted in strategy.

“Strategic marketing decides who gets remembered, trusted and earns the dollars.”

Anette Veidung at Project Neon Morning Focus

B2B marketing strategy

At its core, marketing strategy answers the big questions: How do we differentiate? How do we position ourselves in the customer’s mind? How do we build brand equity? And how do we create alignment?

“Without alignment, you end up with scattered arrows — some might hit the target, but most will fall to the ground.”

One of Anette’s most compelling examples to illustrate this came from a major rebrand in the oil and gas sector – a move shaped around three key principles: be relevant, be attractive and stop hiding. This wasn’t just about modernising visuals, but about uniting multiple business units, clarifying positioning and future-proofing the company for a changing energy landscape. The result? Stronger perceived quality, clearer differentiation and a brand that employees and customers could recognise and rally behind.

Set up for success

But influence doesn’t come from branding alone. Anette explained how marketers build credibility internally by understanding sales, being commercially fluent and tying marketing activity directly to business outcomes.

“If you don’t understand how the money is made – or lost – you can’t expect marketing to influence strategy.”

The conversation resonated because it was honest. About ambition. About burnout. About the tension between purpose and profession. And about the reality that stepping into strategic influence often means educating on marketing at leadership level, pushing for clear value propositions and challenging the status quo.

As the discussion drew to a close, one thing was clear: marketing doesn’t become strategic by title alone. It earns that position through speaking up, asking for influence and claiming strategic space deliberately, rather than waiting to be invited to the table. And judging by the conversations that ensued, hopefully more marketers now feel encouraged to pull up a chair.

Learn more about our events here and follow us on LinkedIn for updates on the next one

“In the summertime, when the weather is high…”