Eammon Conaghan

Education | Content | Advertising | Comms | Shenanigans

I’ve worked in education, content, advertising, and PR right around the world. Most of the time, I’ve helped communicate about tricky topics like tech, finance, medicine, and genomics. But I’ve also marketed things like toothpaste, ballet and pig effluent (to worm farms, if you must know). 

Education

2 years designing and creating customer guidance for a fintech SaaS brand, in written and video form. Content drove product outcomes while elevating users’ financial literacy.

Content

8 years as content marketing lead for a global B2B SaaS brand in the accounting and fintech space. Commissioned, edited and published upper-funnel content for myriad business audiences.

Advertising + creative

4 years as a copywriter and associate creative director for a life science and medical devices marketing agency (USA). Ideated, pitched and executed brand and product campaigns. Named products. Wrote corporate taglines. 

PR + comms

7 years as a PR consultant in plant breeding, sustainable farming systems (Australia) and pharmaceuticals, medicine (Ireland). Researched, wrote and placed articles, features and columns. Organised editorial and advisory boards, and medical meetings on core therapeutic areas.

Blogging + shenanigans

For fun, I’ve created a couple of blogs:

  1. ‘The Twelfth Pub’ was a short serial of a round-the-world pub crawl. 
    Covered by Timeout (Chicago), Irish independent, South China Morning Post, The West Australian, and more.
  2. ‘Wait of a Nation’ charted the suffocating pressure of a home world cup for the New Zealand rugby team in 2011. 
    Covered by The BBC (UK), News 24 (South Africa), Sydney Morning Herald, Radio NZ, NZ Herald, and more.

AI experience + philosophy

I designed and led AI authoring experiments at Xero to identify model strengths and weaknesses. Using this insight, my team built editorial processes that mitigated the shortcomings of LLM-driven content in high-stakes content. I’ve also built RAG-based authoring models and prompt libraries, and I’ve worked with design and production AI to streamline video production.

There are good use-cases for AI in the editorial process, but in some contexts it creates unnecessary risk or questionable time savings (by merely moving human resources from authoring to sub-editing, for example). I know from a combination of pleasant and painful experiences where AI genuinely helps and where it hinders.

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