Marketing For Learning®

Look, I'm not going to lie, this is a bit of an experiment. This song gets in my head more than I care to admit, so I thought I'd share it with you.

Sorry? But also, you're welcome.

The Canva Confession: the most expensive lesson in corporate AI

Canva gave all 5,000 of its employees a full week off — cleared calendars, best tools, guided workshops, a hackathon, 26,000 hours of hands-on AI. Then its Chief Customer Officer wrote a confession in Fortune: "The bottleneck wasn't the technology. It was us."

If it happened to Canva — AI-native, generously resourced, staffed with people who wanted the tools — it's already happening to you. Only your budget was tighter and nobody cleared a week off anyone's calendar.

In this episode Ashley unpacks why record AI spend is delivering almost no return, the difference between access, adoption and embedding, and the five reasons every stalled AI rollout fails — every one of them a marketing problem, not a technology one. Plus what 82% engagement actually takes, and the discipline Canva walked right up to and never named.

The data (all sources):

• Download the AI Adoption Playbook and stop paying for tech no one uses. It includes the same methodology behind our award-winning Capgemini work.
• Rob Giglio's confession, Fortune
• Enterprise GenAI spend hit ~$37bn in 2025, Menlo Ventures
• Near-universal adoption, and only ~a quarter measuring return — McKinsey, The State of AI
• 95% of AI deployments delivered no measurable impact (MIT), Fortune
• 42% of companies abandoned most AI initiatives in 2025, S&P Global
• 80%+ of workers use AI at work, 78% bring their own, CIO —
• Willingness to support change fell from 74% to 38%, HBR (Gartner)
• How we drove 82% engagement at Capgemini

Key topics:

• AI adoption challenges
• Behaviour change vs. technology deployment
• Marketing and communication in change management
• The importance of internal champions and community
• Measuring true success in AI initiatives

When the vacuum cleaner was invented, slightly dusty floors became socially unacceptable overnight. According to Mark Eggers, co-founder of micro learning platform Yarno, AI is doing exactly the same thing to your output expectations, and he's not wrong.

In this episode, I'm joined by Mark and Tom Bailey, Head of Learning at OFX and L&D Professional of the Year 2025, broadcasting from Australia at a deeply unreasonable hour. We cover the attention economy, what it's actually doing to your employees, and why "proud to announce" is not a communications strategy.

We get into:

• Why the average knowledge worker toggles between apps 1,200 times a day, and what that means for learning design
• The quiz-first model, spaced repetition, and why "cheating" in micro learning is actually the whole point
• AIDA — and why L&D routinely skips from Awareness straight to Action and then wonders why no one shows up
• The internal marketing moves that drove 91% completion on genuinely dry commercial content
• Why a great campaign and a mediocre product will always kill each other
  

Tom's take: marketing and sales skills are non-negotiable for modern L&D practitioners.
Mark's take: someone in your C-suite needs to be on camera.
My take: both of them are right, and most L&D teams are doing neither.

A sharp, honest conversation about attention, engagement, and why the learning industry needs to stop navel-gazing and start competing for the eyeballs it's losing.

The conversation delves into the death of a campaign and the marketing strategy behind it. It introduces the fictional business Axion and its learning program Apex, highlighting the tragic death of Apex due to neglect. The importance of personalization in marketing is emphasized, drawing parallels with Netflix's approach to personalization. The conversation delves into the critical elements of successful campaigns, emphasizing the importance of design, copywriting, and strategy. It highlights the need for integrated and consistent marketing efforts that span a period of time to capture attention, build trust, and drive action.

Takeaways

• The five things that make learning campaigns die prematurely
• Marketing Strategy Design is as important as your learning products
• Campaigns need to span a period of time

Attention is our employee's most equitable asset - but there's fierce competition for it. Marking the first episode of 2026, Ashley joins Giles Hearn, Chief Marketing Officer at The Learning and Performance Institute  and unpicks the challenges L&D are really facing. A meaty conversation for a meaty subject. 

Marketing in learning isn’t just about flashy emails or poster campaigns. It’s about trust, visibility, and staying human, especially when the ground is shifting under our feet. In this episode, Ashley Hinchcliffe and Hannah Clark unpack why silence is the enemy of People functions, and how to keep your audiences engaged when uncertainty, redundancies, and AI-fuelled upheaval dominate the workplace. From K-pop obsessions to bluntly honest bank ads, they explore what makes campaigns stick in 2025, why hyper-realism beats sugar-coated spin, and how multi-channel, multi-touch campaigns are the only way to cut through the noise. If your L&D or HR team has ever wondered how to keep marketing alive in messy times, this conversation will show you why the fundamentals matter more than ever.

SHOW NOTES

This isn’t your average EdTech chinwag. In this special episode of the Marketing for Learning podcast, Ashley is joined by Lori Niles-Hofmann (author of The 8 Levers of EdTech Transformation) and Dr. Serena Gonsalves-Fersch (Global Head of Talent at SoftwareOne) for a no-fluff, no-slides-needed conversation about what really makes EdTech work — and what makes people quietly nope out of your platform.

Together, the trio unpacks:

If you’ve ever been promised an “AI-powered, Netflix-of-learning” experience and ended up with a glorified folder of SCORM files, this one’s for you.

L&D doesn’t need more content. Or more dashboards. Or more chaos.

It needs structure. Strategy. And a system that actually works.

In this final episode of Series 2, Han brings it all together — showing how every part of the People Impact Loop® helps you stop reacting and start delivering real, measurable change.

You’ll learn:

This isn’t a recap. It’s a blueprint.

Because impact doesn’t come from good intentions.

LINKS:

L&D knows measurement matters.

In this episode, we’re joined by Nelson Sivalingam to unpack how learning functions can shift from reporting activity to demonstrating real business value.

We explore:

This isn’t about dashboards or data overload. 

It’s about designing for outcomes from the start — and knowing what success actually looks like.

Because if you don’t define impact, you’ll never be able to prove it.

LINKS:

Most L&D “campaigns” are a poster, an email, and… silence.

This episode calls time on one-and-done launches — and digs into what it really takes to build marketing for learning® campaigns that cut through the noise and drive action.

You’ll learn:

If your initiatives start strong and fizzle fast, this episode is for you. 

Because attention isn’t guaranteed. You’ve got to earn it — and keep earning it.

LINKS