3-Person Team. Zero Slop. Todd Fairbairn on B2B AI.

Todd Fairbairn runs marketing and brand at Emotive Mobility, a B2B automotive supply chain company. He sat down to talk about how a tiny team uses AI without diluting the brand, what he learned at Ford, and why B2B needs more humanity, not more polish.

Key Takeaways

• Todd runs marketing for Emotive Mobility with a 3-person team in a space that usually hides behind white papers.

• He calls lazy AI content "slop" and uses AI to gut-check work, not to write it.

• His plan: take one 25-minute CES fireside chat and turn it into 15 smaller pieces over 18 months.

• Small pilot budgets let him test ideas at CES without betting the whole annual plan on them.

• He wants TikToks of the assembly line because B2B automotive needs more personality, not more polish.

What does Todd Fairbairn do at Emotive Mobility?

Todd is head of marketing and brand at Emotive Mobility, a B2B company in the automotive supply chain space. His team is three people total. Todd, a marketing performance and operations manager, and a content creator. They had a big brand launch at CES in January and are heading back for more next year.

Before Emotive, Todd was at Ford Motor Company, where he picked up a principle he still uses today. Show the people behind the product, not the product alone.

That principle shapes how he thinks about B2B content now. Most companies in his space hide behind white papers and corporate polish. Todd is trying to do the opposite, even in an industry where his audience is engineers and operations folks who don't speak fluent brand.

How does a 3-person B2B team use AI without making slop?

Todd's rule is simple. AI is a gut check, not a North Star. His team uses it to keep website content fresh, scan what others in the space are doing, and think through blog topics and keywords. They do not hand it the brand voice.

The word he keeps coming back to is "slop." Last year everyone went nuts with AI and pushed out content nobody wanted to read. Now the pendulum is swinging back, with companies hiring human writers again because the audience can tell the difference.

His team's AI lane looks like this:

• Gut-checking activities and ideas before going to leadership

• Keeping website content fresh and on-keyword

• Looking at competitor content for gaps and angles

• Brainstorming blog post topics

What they will not do is hand the storytelling over to a chatbot. Todd has been a daily ChatGPT user for over a year, and his marketing performance lead has been deep in Claude lately. They use both to compare outputs and stay sharp on what each tool actually does well.

Why is "show the people, not the trucks" Todd's content principle?

B2B has been rigid and faceless for too long, Todd said. Most companies in his space are one piece of a bigger end product, so they hide. There is a hesitancy to step out and have an identity.

He wants the opposite. He wants the workers on an assembly line to have a TikTok where they show parts coming together. That kind of footage is everywhere inside a supply chain company, and almost nobody outside the company ever sees it.

The challenge is real. His facilities are union, so any worker on camera needs sign-off. AI video tools like Runway can fake some visuals, but accuracy matters when you make power trains and transfer cases.

Especially when AI sometimes generates a person with a second thumb on one hand. So the workaround is to capture the real moments, with real people, and use AI for what AI is good at, like editing, repurposing, and stretching the reach of footage you already shot.

How do you turn one fireside chat into 15 pieces of content?

Todd's team has a 25-minute edited fireside chat from CES. They are now turning it into roughly 15 smaller pieces of content they can use over the next 18 months.

This is what Dane calls video-first content marketing. You record one substantial conversation. You plan the chops, clips, transcripts, and quote graphics in advance, not as an afterthought. You get a year of content from one shoot.

Why it works for a small team:

• Subject matter experts don't have to write articles

• An interview captures on-brand thought leadership in their actual voice

• Transcripts feed blog posts, social copy, and SEO

• Short clips feed LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts

• One production day yields months of distribution

The trap most teams fall into is treating repurposing as an afterthought, like, "maybe we should clip that webinar from last quarter." Todd treats the small pieces as the plan from day one.

How do you sell experimental marketing to a skeptical leadership team?

Todd's organization had never had a real marketing function before he arrived. That means every new idea is an uphill education effort. His answer is small pilot budgets.

He carves a small line item out of the core marketing budget for tests. The main business carries the mail while the pilots run. If two or three pilots in a row show signs of life, he has the proof to ask leadership for more next year.

At CES, his team rolled the dice on TikTok. They brought a small agency team with cameras, scanned popular older trends from a few months earlier, and recreated them on the floor with the Emotive team. There was no master plan. The audience was at CES, so they showed up where the audience was. They were psyched with how it turned out.

Todd's view: the frustrating part of marketing is also the fun part. Everything you knew can flip in ten years, so the only way to stay in front is to keep taking small swings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Todd Fairbairn?

Todd Fairbairn is head of marketing and brand at Emotive Mobility, a B2B automotive supply chain company. Before Emotive, he worked in marketing communications at Ford Motor Company. His team at Emotive is three people, and they had a major brand launch at CES in January.

What does "slop" mean in AI marketing?

Slop is Todd's word for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that companies pushed out over the past year. It means copy and visuals that hit a volume number but feel generic, off-brand, or obviously machine-written. Heavy em-dash usage is one common tell.

How can a small B2B team use AI responsibly?

Use AI to gut-check work, not to write it. Todd's team uses it for keeping website content fresh, scanning competitor content, and brainstorming blog topics. The brand voice and the actual storytelling stay with humans, because the audience can tell the difference.

How do you repurpose one video into 15 pieces of content?

Start with a substantial recorded conversation, like a 25-minute fireside chat or interview. Plan the smaller pieces in advance, not as an afterthought. The transcript feeds blog posts and SEO copy. Short clips feed social platforms. Quote graphics feed LinkedIn. Todd's team is doing exactly this with their CES footage over an 18-month window.

Why does B2B automotive need more video personality?

Most B2B automotive supply chain companies hide behind white papers and have no public personality. Todd argues the market now demands the opposite. Showing the people on the assembly line, the engineers, and the actual product coming together creates a real brand differentiator in a category where almost nobody else is doing it.