There’s a specific kind of client conversation happening right now. It usually starts with a campaign, a product launch, or a visibility problem. But pretty quickly, the real question shows up underneath it all: Do we know where we have the right to win?

That question is getting harder to answer. AI is reshaping how people discover and buy. Categories are getting more crowded. Analysts, buyers, and boards are applying more scrutiny to every claim a company makes.

In that environment, “make us louder” is not a real strategy. An agency model built around more decks, more deliverables, and more ad campaign volume is starting to look creaky. AI is making speed cheap, but speed without judgment is just a very efficient way to make mediocre work.

The most valuable work happens before the brief gets written: understanding the market, pressure-testing the positioning, finding the commercial opening, and figuring out what the company actually needs people to believe.

Honestly, it kept coming up. A client would come in with a launch or campaign, and underneath it was a positioning question nobody had fully worked through yet. We’d be executing downstream of a decision that hadn’t yet been made.

That’s the thinking behind bringing Melody Brue and Jess Graham in.

Bringing the outside-in view

Melody is joining us as our Strategy Lead, Market Intelligence, operating as an “analyst-in-residence” inside the agency. If you’re in enterprise tech, you probably already know Mel – she’s one of the top 20 ranked analysts globally by ARInsights. And if you’ve ever wondered whether your positioning would survive a hard briefing with a top-tier analyst, that’s exactly the kind of question Mel is here to answer.

She covered modern work, enterprise applications, financial services, and AI at Moor Insights & Strategy before joining us. Critically, she spent 25 years as an operator before becoming an analyst – which means she understands both sides of the analyst relations dynamic in ways most AR practitioners don’t. 

For Codeword clients, analyst-grade market intelligence is now part of how we build communications strategy, not something you commission separately after your positioning is already locked. Mel stress-tests narratives against real category dynamics and buyer expectations, shapes AR programs around how analysts form their views in reality, and helps leadership teams understand where their market story holds up…and where it doesn’t. 

Connecting story to commercial outcomes

Jess is stepping in as our Strategy Lead, Go-To-Market (GTM). She launched Instagram Reels, drove $100MM+ in annual incremental revenue through Visa’s marketing practice, and has spent the last several years running Banquet, a consultancy focused on the strategic implications of agentic commerce. If this is your world, her Substack, “The Feast,” is worth following. 

At Codeword, Jess’s mandate is to close the gap between what leaders are being held accountable for at the board level and what agencies are being asked to build. That gap between commercial outcomes and communications briefs has always existed. Most agencies work around it. Jess works inside it. 

For brands navigating product launches, competitive repositioning, market entry, or executive narrative work, she brings the GTM lens to determine whether a comms investment moves a business metric, or just a campaign metric.

What this means for how we work with clients

You’re trying to land a launch while sales wants better leads, product wants more adoption, the CEO wants a bigger story, the board wants growth, analysts want proof, and buyers are comparing you against competitors you may not even agree are competitors. That’s the problem we want to help solve.

We’re continuing to design a leadership team built for this – communications counsel that connects to market reality and commercial outcomes, not just creative execution. 

We’ve always moved fast and built work that earns attention. What we’re adding is the upstream capability to make sure that speed is pointed at the right problems. Market intelligence to understand the playing field. GTM strategy to define the business case. Creative execution to make the story land.

Want to stress-test your positioning, sharpen your analyst relations program,  or think through what agentic commerce means for your GTM strategy? Let’s chat.