Common questions. Direct answers.
The questions senior marketing leaders ask before commissioning. Honest answers, no dressing up. If something is not covered, the Diagnosis is where to start.
About Cypher
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Cypher is a Senior Marketing AI Consultancy. We help organisations decode and take control of AI in their marketing function.
Marketing has not changed. The way it gets done has. The information about AI is already in the room. Tools, platforms, vendors, peer opinions, board questions. What is missing is the judgement to know which of it matters.
That is what Cypher does. Senior marketing thinking applied to the AI question. An honest assessment of where AI belongs in your function and where it does not. A plan that uses AI inside a strategy, not instead of one. Capability built inside your team so you own what gets built and can run it after we step back.
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Most providers in the AI-and-marketing space are structurally built to stay.
AI agencies optimise for managed services. Their revenue depends on keeping the capability. They cannot transfer it.
Management consultancies treat marketing as one workstream inside a larger transformation. Heavy. Slow. Rarely marketing-first.
Fractional CMOs bring marketing depth but rarely with credible AI fluency, and never with a structured methodology.
Tool vendors sell software and call it strategy. The tools change. The selling does not.
Cypher is different in one structural way: we are built to leave. Senior marketing thinking, credible AI fluency, a structured methodology and the explicit commitment to step back. When the engagement ends, you own and run what has been built.
Diagnosis and First Step
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A free, AI-native diagnostic on the website that names where AI sits in your marketing function today.
You answer eleven adaptive questions. The Diagnosis returns the likely shape of your AI marketing challenge, mapped against the Cypher Clarity Framework: where the gap sits, what category of work it points to and what the most useful next conversation looks like.
It takes eight to ten minutes. You receive a reading on-screen and a personalised written diagnosis by email, specific enough to share internally with senior leadership and clear enough to act on without further explanation. -
One of three outcomes:
A clear next engagement. Where the call surfaces a specific need that maps to a Workshop, Advisory, the Marketing AI Audit, the Blueprint or Strategic Oversight, we send a Proposal that sets out the scope, the timeline and the fee.
A recommended starting point that is not Cypher. Where the call reveals the real need sits outside what we do, we say so and point to where the right help is. Honest qualification protects both sides.
No action. Where the timing is not right or the case has not yet formed, we leave it there. The Diagnosis result and the call notes are yours to use whenever you choose to come back.
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That is fine. The Diagnosis is the flagship entry point but it is not the only route.
If the need is already clear, you can go directly to Advisory or make a direct enquiry about the Marketing AI Audit or the Blueprint. The Clarity Call still happens, because every engagement begins with a fit conversation, but the path forward moves at the pace your readiness allows.
The Services
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Five services. Each with a defined purpose and a defined boundary.
Advisory. Senior judgement on a specific decision. Expert-led working sessions. Prepaid in hourly blocks.
Marketing AI Audit. A structured feasibility assessment of AI in your marketing function. The Audit gives senior leaders the evidence, the recommendation and the document they need to decide whether AI investment in marketing makes sense, where in the marketing function it makes sense and what it should look like.
Blueprint. A scoped engagement that designs your AI marketing operating model and identifies the capability your function needs to operate it. Three modules combined in different proportions per engagement: Strategy, Capability Identification and Governance.
Strategic Oversight. Ongoing senior steering after Blueprint delivery. A configurable set of components selected to match what your function needs. Opted into, never assumed.
Workshops. A senior-led half-day or full-day session that builds AI marketing literacy inside your marketing and communications function. The lowest-commitment way to engage with Cypher's thinking.
Before any of them, the Marketing AI Clarity Diagnosis. Free. AI-native. Names where the real issue sits before any commitment.
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Different purposes. Different depths.
The Marketing AI Audit is a structured feasibility assessment. It answers the AI in marketing question before further investment is committed. Five questions sit inside it: where are we today, what is the commercial case, what are the risks, what capability would we need, and should we invest at all. The deliverables are an Audit Report, a senior-led presentation and a Recommendation Pack the senior team can circulate internally without Cypher in the room.
The Blueprint is what follows when the Audit recommends investment. It converts the Audit’s findings into a designed AI marketing operating model and a capability map that names exactly what your function needs to operate it. Three modules combine in different proportions: Strategy, Capability Identification and Governance. The dominant gap surfaced in the Audit determines which module leads.
The Audit identifies. The Blueprint designs.
Building the capability the Blueprint identifies happens separately, inside Strategic Oversight, where the client opts into it. The Blueprint is the map. The client decides who builds from it.
The Audit can also stand alone. Where feasibility is weak, the honest recommendation is “do not invest” and the engagement ends there. That recommendation has commercial value of its own.
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Advisory is the right entry point when the decision is specific and the need is for senior judgement, not structural work.
The kinds of moments that send senior teams to Advisory:
About to sign a multi-year contract with a marketing services provider and not sure the case holds up
Marketing leadership proposing to move a significant marketing function in-house using AI, and the implications need pressure-testing
Finance leadership challenging marketing to justify agency spend in light of AI claims
An AI tool being offered for trial inside the function and a decision needed on whether to take it
A board presentation on AI in marketing coming up and the answer needs to be senior, defensible and short
These are illustrative. Advisory is not limited to them. Clients use it whenever a specific decision needs senior judgement applied to it quickly.
Sessions are expert-led and bounded to the named decision. The client prepays in blocks of 5 or 10 hours and uses them as the decisions arise.
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Workshops are the right entry point when the priority is building shared AI marketing literacy across a team, not solving a specific decision or designing an operating model.
The kinds of moments that send senior teams to Workshops:
A marketing and communications team needs a common language for AI in their function before any structural work begins
Leadership has commissioned an AI initiative and wants the team aligned on what AI is and is not before scoping it
A new senior marketer wants to set the AI tone with their team early in their tenure
A function wants to experience Cypher's thinking before committing to deeper engagement
Sessions run half-day or full-day, founder-led throughout. Most of the content is standardised across engagements. A defined portion is tailored to your industry and context.
Workshops produce literacy, a common language and frameworks the team can apply. They do not produce a strategy, a capability map or a transferred operating model. Where the conversation reveals that the real need is structural, we say so.
Fit and Credibility
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Engagements are led by an experienced senior consultant who acts as the single accountable owner for the project from scoping through to closing presentation. They sit inside every key moment where senior judgement matters: the scope definition, the working sessions, the strategic outputs and the senior-led delivery to your team.
Where specialist depth is needed, Cypher draws on a vetted bench of partners. They are introduced visibly, joint-present with the lead consultant and operate under their review. Every output that leaves Cypher passes senior review before release.
The result is a single accountable owner across every engagement, supported by the right specialist depth where the work calls for it. One coherent output. One coherent voice. No handoffs.
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Yes. Engagements are designed to run hybrid by default.
Senior working sessions, founder-led presentations and key strategic moments benefit from being in person where geography allows. Working delivery, discovery and most check-ins run remotely without loss of quality. The shape of each engagement is calibrated to the senior team’s location, the nature of the work and the level of cross-functional involvement required.
For clients outside primary geographies, we work fully remote where the engagement design supports it and travel for the moments where presence genuinely changes the outcome.
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Fit is a question of context, not size.
Cypher works with organisations that have a marketing function with real commercial weight, a senior team that can commission and absorb AI work, and a genuine AI marketing question that warrants senior engagement. That can apply at a funded growth-stage business with a meaningful marketing budget, at a corporate division running an established marketing operation, or anywhere in between.
Where the organisation is too early-stage for the AI question to be worth engaging at depth, we say so. Where the situation is right but the timing is not, we say so and route to the right starting point.
The next step is the Diagnosis.
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