“I no longer need to be a performance marketing expert”

When Morten Undseth was head of marketing at Det frivillige Skyttervesen — the Norwegian civilian marksmanship association — he was responsible for the marketing of one of Norway’s largest volunteer organizations: around 136,000 members across more than 800 local clubs, with Landsskytterstevnet, Norway’s second-largest sporting event, as the annual highlight.

It is the kind of organization where control of your own channels is not a nice-to-have. The budgets are the members’ money, the activity is spread across the entire country, and the distance between what gets published and what actually works has to be as short as possible.

It was in that role Undseth got to know M51 AI — early, while the system was still under development. He has given input along the way, tested functionality before it was finished, and watched the platform grow from idea to daily operation.

From head of marketing to his own company

Today Undseth runs his own company, Undseth Consulting. The transition from having an apparatus around you to standing alone with the marketing is where most people bring in an agency. Undseth did the opposite.

I don’t need an agency. I’m more self-directed, and I have full insight into all my marketing activities without having to be an expert in performance marketing, SEO or conversion optimization.

His point is not that the expertise is unnecessary. It is that it no longer has to live in his head for the work to be done right.

— The system is built to teach. It gives me everything I need to know in a clear and digestible way.

The toolbox that shrank

Undseth is not one to wait for someone else to find the solution.

— I’m a curious soul who tries out different tools to make everyday work easier, he says.

That makes his experience more interesting than the usual before-and-after story. He has tested most of what is out there, and after M51 AI was in place he replaced his standard tools for both SEO and for analytics and dashboards. He also no longer sees the need for a dedicated AI visibility tool.

It is not an argument that each individual tool was bad. It is an argument about what happens when the insight is gathered in one place: the subscriptions that existed to cover their own corner each lose their reason to exist.

Three channels, one overview

LinkedIn, Google Ads and Meta are managed from the same place. Undseth describes the main gain as a combination of three things that rarely come together: it takes little time, he gets all the insight he needs about the results, and he is self-directed — which in turn cuts the cost of external help.

For a one-person company, that last part is not a detail. Agency fees are often the single largest line in a marketing budget, and they are paid regardless of whether the month’s work hit or missed.

The numbers he dares to base a decision on

One objection keeps coming up when marketers are asked to act on numbers from AI: how do you know they are right? Undseth recognizes it — and points to the difference between asking a chatbot directly and reading a report from m51.ai. He is more confident in the numbers and calculations he gets in the reports than in what a chatbot computes on the fly.

That is no coincidence. In m51.ai, the language model does not do the math. Every KPI is calculated by fixed formulas in a dedicated engine, and every number carries the source, the period and the field path it came from — with a separate control that rejects numbers without an approved source before the content is released.

How it is built: “The numbers the AI is not allowed to invent”

The difference in practice: a chatbot gives you a number that looks right. A report from m51.ai gives you a number you can verify.

The competitor monitoring he has never seen the like of

One area Undseth singles out. He used to spend a lot of time monitoring what others were doing in paid channels — manually, sporadically and with an incomplete picture of how things developed over time.

In M51 AI this is collected automatically. The system continuously gathers competitors’ advertising and builds it into something more than snapshots.

The system generates the competitors’ marketing plan over time. It is absolutely stunning, and nothing like anything I have seen in all my years in marketing and communications.

It is an observation from someone who has been in the field long enough to know what already exists.

“Someone has actually been thinking”

Undseth has followed M51 for longer than the platform has existed.

— I also knew M51 back when they were primarily a traditional agency. I can tell that someone has actually been thinking when they built this system — for heads of marketing, managing directors and larger marketing departments.

That is perhaps the most important difference between a tool made by developers and a tool made by people who have delivered marketing for clients themselves: who it is built for, and which questions it answers without you having to ask them.