VCCP’s advocacy marketing specialist arm, inevidence, has today announced the promotion of Melissa Talbot to CEO and Kate Hickson to Managing Director as they spearhead a new supercharged offering.
inevidence’s strategic business pivot will enable greater customer-powered growth for its clients and is backed by shifting market dynamics. Recent industry data indicates that 51% of B2B buyers have already encountered misleading or inaccurate information from GenAI tools during procurement research, prompting 69% of buyers to demand real human validation before signing off on purchasing decisions.
Inevidence’s new proposition centres on delivering events, insight, communities enabling revenue growth for its clients, built around a framework of four interconnected pillars:
- Voice of the customer: Creating continuous listening loops that capture real-world customer insights.
- Customer advocacy: Identifying and recruiting a brand’s biggest fans to turn happy customers into sales champions.
- Authentic storytelling: Deploying experienced journalists and producers to produce content that bypasses generic AI algorithms.
- Loyalty and communities: Designing private, trusted spaces where customers connect.
Founded in the UK in 1991, inevidence has spent the past 35 years helping clients take transformative technology and ideas into the mainstream, from Industry 4.0 to remote working to agentic AI. With a global presence now covering the US, UK, Singapore and South Africa, the consultancy works across live events, awards, and content production with some of the biggest names in tech, including Cisco, Qlik, Red Hat, Salesforce and ServiceNow.
Talbot and Hickson will lead the global relaunch of inevidence, bringing their unparalleled institutional knowledge to their new roles. Talbot has been with inevidence since 1996 and Hickson since 2005. This continuity is a hallmark of the business for both of their talent and their clients: inevidence’s ten largest clients have been with the agency for an average of 14 years.
Julian Douglas, Group CEO at VCCP, said: “True innovation requires exceptional leadership to scale it. Melissa and Kate have been instrumental in building inevidence into a global powerhouse, and there are no two executives better equipped to lead this next chapter. As enterprise tech buyers demand authentic human proof over automated noise, inevidence’s repositioning under Melissa and Kate’s leadership offers the exact antidote the market is crying out for.”
In a world increasingly saturated with automated marketing and generic AI-generated content, inevidence is making a powerful bet on the opposite: real customer voices, genuine peer credibility, and authentic storytelling told by experienced journalists.
“AI can be a great productivity tool, but it cannot replace genuine human connection or creativity,” said Melissa Talbot, CEO of inevidence. “Customers are fatigued by sales pitches and generic algorithms; they demand real, honest proof from their peers. Clients recognise that customer insight is business-critical, which means advocacy can no longer exist as a standalone department. Customers aren’t just the result of a growth strategy, they are the engine that drives it.”
