The Challenge
Standard Chartered's marketing team sat at an interesting intersection: they were working closely with digital marketing vendors on a daily basis, yet the rapid evolution of the discipline meant there were gaps in their ability to evaluate, challenge, and direct that work with confidence. As AI tools began reshaping how campaigns are planned, executed, and optimised, those gaps became harder to ignore.
The team needed two things at once: a solid grounding in digital marketing fundamentals that would make them sharper clients and collaborators, and a practical look ahead at the AI tools now entering the marketing workflow. The challenge was finding a programme that could deliver both without losing relevance to their real-world context.
Why Heicoders Academy
Standard Chartered chose Heicoders Academy for our ability to bridge technical depth with business relevance. Our DM100 programme was built precisely for professionals who need to work alongside digital marketing practitioners and vendors intelligently, not just consume outputs. The curriculum weaves AI fluency directly into the marketing context rather than treating it as a separate topic.
Our instructors bring hands-on experience from both the technology and marketing industries, which means the conversation in the room stays grounded in what actually works. Standard Chartered's team wanted practical tools and frameworks they could apply immediately, and that is exactly the standard we hold ourselves to.
The Solution
Heicoders Academy designed and delivered a customised run of DM100: Performance-Driven Digital Marketing with AI for Standard Chartered's marketing team. The programme combined foundational digital marketing knowledge with forward-looking AI applications, giving participants the context to better manage their vendor relationships and the tools to start integrating AI into their own workflows.
The curriculum covered:
- Digital Marketing Fundamentals: A practical overview of how modern digital marketing works, covering the channels, metrics, and frameworks that underpin effective campaigns, giving participants the vocabulary and context to engage their vendors with greater confidence.
- Prompt Engineering for Marketing: Hands-on training in crafting effective prompts for marketing tasks, including prompt engineering frameworks participants could apply immediately to their day-to-day work.
- Safe Prompt Construction: Techniques for building prompts that produce reliable, on-brand outputs, including data grounding, mandatory citations, and the use of negative constraints to reduce AI hallucinations.
- Managing AI Outputs in a Business Context: Practical strategies for evaluating and quality-checking AI-generated marketing content, ensuring it meets professional standards before it goes anywhere near a campaign.
- AI Tools in the Marketing Workflow: A look at the AI tools now available to marketing teams, how they are being used in the industry today, and how participants can begin weaving them into their own processes.
Results
The session landed exactly as intended. Participants arrived with sharp questions about both the fundamentals and the future of the discipline, and they left with practical answers. The live practice component, where participants built and tested prompts in real time on their own laptops, made the learning immediate and tangible rather than theoretical.
The energy throughout the session was high, and the feedback reflected a team that came in curious and left genuinely better equipped. These were professionals who could see the direct relevance of what they were learning to the vendor conversations they would be having the very next week.
What's Next
The partnership with Standard Chartered is continuing. Following the success of this first run, we are working together on subsequent sessions to extend this learning further across the team. We look forward to deepening the engagement and supporting Standard Chartered as AI becomes an even more integral part of how their marketing function operates.
