My working life
During my career I’ve spent time at agencies and in-house. I’ve worked on complex strategic problems and been hands-on to deliver. I’ve promoted well-known brands and I’ve created new categories from scratch. Here is an illustrated overview of my career.
GoodLove // Strategy Director // 2021 – Present
GoodLove is a creative brand consultancy that specialises in working across the European tech ecosystem. As Strategy Director, I lead the early stages of our clients’ projects – from discovery to brand framework – before partnering with our creative team on visual & verbal identity. Before joining GoodLove I was an independent brand consultant for almost a year, working with a range of tech companies including Tractable, the UK’s first computer vision unicorn.
>> Led the brand strategy, tone of voice, and copywriting for Atomico’s State of European Tech 2021 report
>> Renamed and rebranded the crypto-broker Aplo, winning a Silver Brand Impact Award for how it “set itself apart” from the category
>> Developed strategies for dozens of investors, startups, and corporates, from London to Amsterdam to Helsinki
>> Helped Tractable position themselves for significant new business & organisational growth, as they secured Series D funding
Home // Joint Chief Childcare Officer // 2020
With my 3 year-old son unable to go to nursery because of COVID restrictions, and a second baby born during lockdown, I spent six months at home focussing on my family while the pandemic wrought its havoc on 'normal' life. It's one of the best decisions I've ever made.
>> Learned to craft Avengers outfits from cardboard boxes (repertoire includes Thor, Hulk, and Iron Man)
>> Memorised the names, types, and evolutions of 400+ Pokemon
>> Was able to change a Size 1 nappy in under 8 seconds
Entrepreneur First // Marketing Lead // 2018-2020
EF is a tech scale-up which brings together incredibly smart, incredibly ambitious individuals and helps them start a technology company from scratch. It runs programmes across three continents, and as the most senior Marketing person in the business, I was fully responsible for our output at a global level. I reported directly into Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck.
>> Led a full rebrand and implemented it across the business, including everything from strategy to visual identity, a new website to a global roadshow
>> Devised a PR strategy which got 120+ pieces of coverage, including the Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, WIRED, the Guardian, Fast Company
>> Modernised the approach to social and content, creating fewer higher-quality pieces more effectively distributed
>> With the new brand in place, PR and content became #1 and #3 drivers of new applications
BBH // Senior Account Director // 2014-2018
BBH has been one of the most creative advertising agencies in London since 1980, and is known for its famous mantra that guides its approach to work: “when the world zigs, zag”. I was there for four years, rising to Senior Account Director, where I led the Audi and Google teams, as well as departmental recruitment.
>> Won the IPA Effectiveness Grand Prix for the consistent commercial effectiveness of Audi from 2014-2018, generating a huge £1.6bn in incremental sales
>> Developed Audi campaigns such as Birth, Eye, Spin, Department Store, React & Clowns, which won at Cannes, D&AD, Campaign BIG, etc
>> Ran 3 successful Google pitches in 18 months, including the Pixel 2 launch – at the time the largest UK campaign Google had ever run
>> Responsible for departmental recruitment at BBH, promoted under the banner “The power of difference to make a difference”
adam&eveDDB // Account Manager // 2010-2014
adam&eveDDB is arguably the most successful advertising agency of the past fifteen years. I began my career there as a graduate on a comprehensive training programme that stands me in good stead to this day.
>> Sold in and produced a VW radio ad with Professor Stephen Hawking, which won a Radio Lion and was picked in Campaign’s ‘Ads of the year’
>> (Unbelievably, that same commercial is also one of the most complained about ads of all time.)
>> Won 3 Film Lions in 2014 for our new Volkswagen Value campaign, helping a&eDDB win Cannes Agency of the Year
Audi
I worked on Audi from my first day at BBH to my last, a total of four years. In that time, I was a key part of a close-knit team that produced some of the best and most commercially effective work for the brand in recent history. I was the Senior Account Director, overseeing and leading the work that came out of the brand side of the business. That included product launches (sometimes at global scale) for cars like the Q7, R8, and TT, and a growing focus on brand-building mass-awareness activity.
In 2015 we helped convince Audi to make a strategic shift from chasing volume targets to prioritising higher margin sales. This had a simple but important effect on our approach to communications; hero the profit-makers (mainly Sport models, high-end SUVs, and in-car tech) in ads that drive fame for the brand, and then use conversion channels to turn that increased demand into sales.
The output of this was some of the most famous work done for Audi in a long time - the likes of Spin, Department Store, and Clowns, to name just three - and a truly huge commercial impact, estimated at £1.6bn of directly attributable sales. As well as numerous creative awards, this won Audi the coveted IPA Long Term Effectiveness Grand Prix award, which was a career highlight. You can read the Executive Summary of the case study below.
In my last 18 months at BBH I ran five Google projects, three of which we won in pitches I led. By far the largest was the UK launch of Pixel 2 with a truly enormous campaign that spanned every conceivable channel. The Digital Outdoor element was particularly complex, with media placements served in a hyper-contextual way via a real-time decision tree.
What the hell does that mean? Well, it meant automatically showing an ad for long battery life at train stations when we knew there were delays. It meant showing ads for one feature during the day, and switching to promote the low-light camera after nightfall. It meant more than 2,400 permutations, across 104 formats, in 405 locations nationally.
The outdoor plan also included a number of ‘media firsts’, such as buses that serve specific messaging based on the time of day and where they are on their route — for example displaying “Can I take as many dinosaur pics as I want? The Google Pixel 2 with unlimited storage” when outside the National History Museum. You can watch a short case study of how it worked below.
The Black Sheep Programme
During my final year at BBH I became jointly responsible for recruitment for the Account Management department. On top of that, I developed, obtained funding for, and ran The Black Sheep Programme – an entry-level recruitment & training initiative with the aim of getting a more diverse group of talent into the industry. To help counteract unconscious biases, we removed all personal information from applications (even names), and made sure each of the 400+ applications was double-marked. I’m proud to have made some effort to diversify the talent pool in the industry, and it was rewarding to personally help train them up. This is the film we used to promote the programme.
Entrepreneur First
I joined EF as the most senior marketing person in the company, reporting directly into the founders and responsible for our output across all six sites; London, Paris, Berlin, Singapore, Bangalore and Toronto. I was responsible for a broad marketing mix that ranged from brand strategy to PR to SEO. One of the most impactful and most wide-reaching projects I ran was a full rebrand of the company.
It was an in-depth exploration of where the brand had come from, its aims for the future, and how we could set it up for success. Working with select partners, I led everything from long-term strategy to visual identity; a new website to new document templates; an alumni reveal to shiny new swag. I had to get buy-in from across the organisation with a global roadshow, then roll out internationally in a synchronised fashion.
I also modernised how we used social media. I prioritised the paid distribution of few, high-level pieces of film (like this one) and reused lots of excellent pre-existing content that barely anyone had seen further down the funnel, where it was more relevant. And through our content and social channels we began to focus on telling the human stories of our founders — what made them so impressive, and how they started their journeys. To celebrate the launch of our $115m Global Fund, which would allow us to invest in 2,000+ talented individuals over three years, we told the incredible backstories of founders from each of our locations, like Lebanese biologist Joanne, and banker-turned-CEO Rohit.
PR also became a huge part of what we did at EF. I devised an international PR strategy working with partner agencies across all six of our territories, which proved very successful. It got us 120+ pieces of coverage in our first year, including the Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, WIRED, the Guardian, Fast Company, the FT, TechCrunch, etc, as well as high-quality coverage across the top dailies in France, Hong Kong, India and Singapore — and even repeated interviews on French breakfast TV news. Importantly, it didn’t just grow our awareness; PR became the second highest driver of organic applications to the programme.