My conversation with Yiannis Demetriades on why the same pitch fails in Europe and works in the US
When I started these marketer interviews for the industry report, I expected data and a few useful quotes. What I got instead was a run of genuinely great conversations, casual, easy, the kind that make you remember why you got into this in the first place.
The sensitive findings will stay anonymous for the report itself, but the invitees and I agreed the conversations themselves were worth more than that. These recaps aren't the data-gathering side of things, that's for the report. They're the actual conversation, the industry chat that happened around it.
Last week I published the recap with Andrew Grant. This week it's Yiannis Demetriades, who brought great energy to the conversation, so much that I genuinely forgot I was talking to someone I'd never met before!
Yiannis Demetriades is Senior Global Marketing Manager at Bio-Techne, working across the genetics and oncology diagnostics field. He trained as a scientist himself, spent a couple of years as a medical writer before moving client-side, and now sits across product marketing for a genuinely global audience. That combination, scientist first, writer second, and marketer third, is a similar pathway to myself, and made for a properly useful conversation. A few things we covered:
Why sponsored content lands completely differently depending on which side of the Atlantic your audience sits
The real reason named-expert content is harder to pull off than it sounds, even when everyone agrees it works
Whether SEO even matters anymore when your audience is asking AI the question instead of Google
Why individual profiles outperform company pages, and where that gets complicated fast in a regulated industry
The bit I found most useful was regional. His company is US-based, but a large share of his audience sits in Europe, and the two don't respond the same way to the same tactics. US marketers on his team keep pushing for sponsored placements and adverts, which generally work for the American audience, but less so in Europe
"It comes down to the cultural aspect," he said. "European folks are more like, what's the general idea here, what's the point? I want something credible, not something being sold to me."
I've seen the same thing with a pharma client of mine, a company paying to sponsor an industry magazine, watching competitors do the same, and getting essentially zero measurable return from any of it. Everyone stays in because everyone else is in, not because it works.
We talked about named-expert content next, the thing almost every marketer now agrees is the fix for AI scepticism. Yiannis doesn't disagree, but he was honest about how hard it actually is in practice.
"It's not always easy, having to find someone, validate our tool, then advocate for us as well," he said. Finding an external expert or lab willing to trial a product and put their name to it takes time. Getting them to properly validate it takes longer still. And every so often, someone goes through that whole process, validates the tool, then doesn't end up fully adopting it. "How much trust would that convey to people?" he asked, only half rhetorically. It's not a reason not to pursue named, expert-backed content, but it's worth being aware of the challenges.
One thing that came up that I hadn't expected was search itself, or rather, what's replacing it. Yiannis's team is now thinking hard about how content gets found when the search bar isn't Google any more.
"It's not just SEO optimisation any more, it's optimising to be picked up by AI tools too," he told me. His team gets solid, actionable feedback on traditional SEO, how a page ranks against competitors, what's working. AI is a different game entirely. "It's still very much a work in progress, especially with older websites or content that's grown into these huge unwieldy chunks over the years." He's honest that nobody's cracked it yet, least of all the tools claiming to have done so.
His closing tip was one I've heard in different words from most I've spoken to for this project: content posted from a real person's profile outperforms a company page every time. "That's another thing that really worked out, posting stuff from individuals' profiles rather than our company," he said. "That one makes a huge difference." He'd seen it directly, individuals and named experts getting engagement that company pages simply don't. But he was quick to flag where it gets harder. In his world, diagnostics, there's more room to move. In pharma, the same idea runs straight into regulatory constraints on what can and can't be promoted under an individual's name, which is exactly the tension a lot of marketers in this space are working through right now.
Different market, different regulatory pressure, same underlying finding: people trust people. Companies are still working out how much they're allowed to lean into that, and how fast.
Yiannis - thank you for your time!
