Case study: CreateFuture
Positioning a consultancy as the go-to voice in financial services AI
Overview
CreateFuture wanted to establish a credible presence in the wealth and pensions sector — a market where McKinsey, Deloitte and KPMG publish regularly and the bar for thought leadership is high. The vehicle was a whitepaper examining the UK pension crisis and the role digital transformation could play in closing the advice gap.
🧰 Role: Lead editor, researcher and content strategist with ownership of competitor research, SME knowledge extraction, editorial direction and campaign copy.
The challenge
The Industry Director for Financial Services had deep expertise but a first draft that read like a sales document — blocky, unreferenced and leaning on trends from 2021. The job was to find an angle the big consultancies hadn’t covered, extract the genuinely useful knowledge, and turn it into something a CTO, COO or Head of CX in financial services would take seriously.
What I delivered
Competitor gap analysis
I downloaded approximately 30 recent whitepapers and industry reports from major consultancies using Google Deep Research and Perplexity, uploaded them into a NotebookLM vault and prompted it to identify oversaturated themes and coverage gaps. The pensions gap — the contrast between 10 million people unable to afford basic lifestyles in retirement and a pensions industry with pots predicted to grow over 400% — emerged as the least covered angle. That became the hook.
SME interview
Before meeting Industry Director Simon Hull, I scraped approximately 30 of his personal blog posts on financial services and loaded them into NotebookLM to understand his existing positions. I used that intelligence to conduct a targeted 90-minute in-person interview in the Edinburgh office, asking questions designed to surface the insights that weren’t already in the public domain.
Editorial restructure
Simon’s initial draft was a 2,000 to 3,000 word brain dump — unstructured, heavy on sales language and lacking citations. I used ChatGPT Canvas to rewrite for clarity and active voice, retroactively sourced credible academic papers and industry statistics to substantiate his claims, and restructured the document around a Three E’s Framework — Engagement, Empowerment and Empathy — to give readers a practical takeaway rather than a market overview.
Hooks and headlines
I wrote the provocative headlines and LinkedIn hooks designed to stop scrollers — anchoring the narrative in the tension between the scale of the crisis and the scale of the opportunity.
Campaign copy
I wrote supporting SEO blog posts and FAQs, and the whitepaper was launched via LinkedIn Document Ads, gated landing pages and an un-gated content series to drive traffic.
Outcome
📈 Impact
- Whitepaper researched, restructured and edited from brain dump to published asset
- 30 competitor reports analysed to identify an underserved angle
- Three E’s Framework developed to give the whitepaper a distinctive structural identity
- Supporting blog, FAQ and LinkedIn ad copy written and deployed
- Process established as a repeatable AI-assisted whitepaper model for other Industry Directors