One gate everything else has to get through first. "Make sure that subject line is bloody interesting and gives you a reason to open it. That's the first thing, right? People need to know you exist. If they're gonna scroll past the email, everything else is a waste of effort." Every hour your team spends on the message is spent behind a door nobody opened, and the door needs more knocking than it used to. "There's the age-old rule that you gotta get something in front of people 7 times. Well, I think nowadays it's probably 70 times." Why does security comms bounce? Techy people talking to techy people. "An email with a load of techy speak and far too many bullet points, and we ain't gonna read it."

His fix is fewer asks, not louder ones. Amy suggested one campaign a quarter instead of eight messages at once, and Owen agreed with an example for every household in the country. "If she says, 'Look, I just need you to take the bins out,' I'll get up and I'll go take the bins out." Add three more jobs to the list and "it's gonna fail massively." Pick a target, stay focused, achieve that goal. Then the cheapest idea in the episode: "Say, 'Oh, the finance team are beating you by 5%.' Hit this button to see if you can beat them. Suddenly it's, like, fun, right?" Facts are boring. We all want to beat finance.

Ban a tool and he'll route round it. "Blanket bans on WeTransfer... I'll be sending it to myself, or it'll be going on my personal laptop." He'd rather security had the conversation instead, ideally with the people down the corridor who already own every tool the awareness function wishes it had. Fear? He hates horror films, so his household watched one a week for a month. "The first couple of weeks, I was the worst." By the end, nothing. "So you've gotta find another way." His Monday morning advice: "Don't work in silos. Have conversations with marketing." And the reason any of it matters, from a man who came in expecting to be bored: he can't remember a single one of the e-learning modules he's sat through, "but I remember all your props. They stick in your mind. They make you feel something."