We're presenting at Webflow Conference 2026

Sam Shrimpton is speaking at Webflow Conf 2026 in Boston. The session is called Kill perfect, and it runs on Wednesday 2 September, 12:45pm to 1:15pm Eastern, Level 2, Stage 4, the Marquee. It sits in the Now track and is aimed at marketers and agencies.

Webflow Conf 2026 runs from 1st to 3rd September at the Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport, with 1,500 people in the room and tens of thousands more online.

You can register for Sam's session here.

The argument

The marketing director role was built on one assumption: being wrong is expensive. The sign off chains, the brand police, the deck about the deck before the deck. None of that exists because marketers enjoy process. It exists because for twenty years a bad idea that shipped could burn a quarter's budget and somebody's reputation with it.

That assumption has gone. AI has collapsed the cost of building, testing and killing an idea. Work Sam used to scope as a quarter of effort, a landing page with the copy, the imagery and a live test against real traffic, now compresses into a day. Teylu has run it that way repeatedly. When testing was expensive, polishing was protection. Now testing is close to free, and polishing is the gamble.

The session puts numbers behind that. System1 and Peter Field's read of the IPA effectiveness data found a dull ad needs around 2.6 times the media spend to land the same impact as an interesting one. In the UK, the extra money spent forcing dull work to perform runs to roughly £13bn a year. Cannes Lions found only 13% of over a thousand marketers surveyed described their company as risk friendly when it comes to creative work. The safe option stopped being the cheap option some time ago, and most boards have not noticed.

Then Sam runs the 1996 comparison, because we have already sat this exam once. Blockbuster passed on Netflix at $50m while turning over $6bn a year. Nobody in that meeting was reckless. That is what makes it worth talking about.

What you take back to the office

The second half of the session is the operating model Teylu uses with clients, which we call proof of concept on repeat. Four steps, and the discipline lives in the verbs.

• Bet. Ring fence a fixed slice of budget. We run 25%. Put deliberately irrational options through it, on purpose. House rule: if every idea in the round is sensible, reject the round.
• Build. Make the ugly version in an afternoon. Understandable and deployable rather than polished, because speed is what makes the next step affordable.
• Expose. Real audience, small money, live inside a week. Reality is the reviewer, not the boardroom.
• Kill or scale. Log what a loser taught you and move on. A clean kill for a few hundred pounds is the cheapest education your team will ever buy, and it goes in the wins file.

Sam also covers the three things leadership has to supply, because the model dies in a real organisation without all three. A ring fenced budget capped per test, with no board approval per idea. A pledge said out loud that failure inside the loop never appears in a performance review. And brand guidelines trained into the tooling, so volume and compliance stop being enemies.

Budget without safety gets you theatre. Safety without guardrails gets you chaos.

Who else is on the bill

The luminary sessions this year are a conversation with Seth Meyers, and Professor Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School, author of Co-Intelligence and director of Wharton's Generative AI Lab, whose research on what AI does to how organisations work sits directly alongside the case Sam is making. Beyond those two there are around a hundred speakers across the three days, covering AI search, content performance, agency delivery and web strategy.

Come and argue with it

Sam will be in Boston for all three days. If you are going, or you want to pressure test the model against your own budget and sign off chain, find him at the session or drop him a line at sam.shrimpton@teyluandpartners.com before the conference and we will get time in the diary.

Register to attend Kill perfect at Webflow Conf 2026