ABOUT ME
I call myself a strategist but for someone with that label I’ve had quite a varied career working in different roles across agencies and brands and have never focused on just being a brand or comms person, nor have I wanted to be seen as just that.
I’ve spent time in all types of agencies from Leo Burnett and TBWA to ZAK and Gravity Thinking in traditional strategy roles and put the yards in but it’s also my experience in more hands on roles in social and digital agencies before that and a four year stint brand side that have helped shape me into the strategist I am today and made me a better one for it.
I’ve spent time writing social media copy, briefing production partners and overseeing shoots. I even spent time interviewing Will.I.Am for social content and trying to get some jewellery made for a Balmain collab but that’s a story for another day.
I love a good framework and Byron Sharp book as much as the next strategist but sometimes it’s not about the boxes on a page and truth to be told, if the boxes stay on the page and don’t influence work getting made then it’s pretty pointless.
At certain times in my career people would say I wasn’t sticking around for long and building a career within one place and I didn’t mind them saying that, but I was too restless and curious to do just one thing. I felt multiple experiences in different areas of the agency landscape and time spent brand side, while still staying strategically minded was always going to be better for me in the long run. I feel a more balanced strategist for it and the range of experience and skills I offer means I’m comfortable with just about any brief.
I think this is even more crucial now as how we market brands and create advertising is in an interesting place at the moment.
Algorithms are flattening culture and also having a grip on best practices that work is becoming paint by numbers feed fodder. Rigid brand frameworks are not fit for purpose when a brand needs to be and do many things across a year to be in with a chance of grabbing a consumer's attention. Consumers are harder to define in an age of cores & aesthetics, with wide & niche cultural inspiration at their fingertips.
Strategy’s role in this is as crucial as ever and I’m excited that more brands are thinking culture first when it comes to bringing a brand to life and creating output. If you want someone with a culture first background that can mix the traditional strategic ways with the new, I’d love to chat with you.
MY STORY
In Summer 2024 I decided to go freelance in order to double down on the type of brands I enjoy working on and problems to solve.
2022-2024:
Back to agency life
For the last two years I worked as a Senior Strategist at TBWA\London working across adidas, Starbucks and Mobil 1’s motorsports partnerships. I was also a member of the network’s cultural intelligence unit Backslash, contributing towards the yearly Edges reports and more recently Future of Sport series.
2018-2022:
Jumping brand side
I always felt the best way to grow experience in creating brand strategy was to work for a brand and for 4 years I worked on the brand side, first at Chivas Regal as a Senior Brand Manager and then at Jameson as a Marketing Manager for Comms and Content. These were 4 invaluable years as my roles in Comms and Content enabled me to work on both sides of the global and local market coin and collaborate with teams across a brand from product development to brand architecture, on-trade advocacy to off-trade.
My highlights included working on a strategic repositioning for Chivas, product asset creation, development of a global creative platform and content creation across the brands biggest partnerships with Manchester United and Balmain. I also had Andy Cole take a penalty against me. Of course he scored. During my time as the brand I also set up the brands first Culture Marketing team to focus on delivering more culture first work and insight across the brand teams. At Jameson I worked in the UK market to help develop local relevance for the brand’s content and global WIden the Circle campaign.
2014-2018:
Specialising in strategy
During my time at MEC (now Wavemaker) I began to take more interest in strategy as I found what interested me was finding insights that could help shape the work and plan how best the work could come to life across McVities, Vodafone and the Royal Navy.
This led me to moving into a mid-weight planning role at Gravity Thinking and working on Hendricks and Glenfiddich as well as playing a key role in winning the Hyundai social media account against bigger agencies in a pitch. I squeezed a short 7 month contract stint in at Leo Burnett working on UBS where to be honest I knew nothing about how the rich banked but was a good challenge before getting to work on something much closer to home and one of my favourite brands New Balance at ZAK. With a focus on growing their football offering and reaching gen-z, we encouraged the one in eleven that wanted to be different from their adidas or Nike wearing team mates to choose NB’s growing boot range. I also worked on an award winning World Cup campaign called Make it to Moscow.
2008-2013:
Exploring my place
After some random years working at Ordnance Survey and selling classified advertising to used car salesman for the Southampton’s Daily Echo newspaper, I headed to the big smoke for my gig at publishers Redactive in their newly formed digital department, as I helped a traditional publisher adapt to a more digital world. Through working here and my next role at STEAK I saw the rise of search advertising and the impact it could have on commercial success for brands like Currys, Dixon, PC World and Carphone Warehouse.
I always had eyes for this new shiny thing called social media and jumped at the chance to work with friends at an agency called Testify, where startup life saw me wear many hats from client services to email designer, copywriter to community manager as we punched above our weight to work on brands like DB Apparel, Vice and Giff Gaff.