Marketing Week September 2020

SEPTEMBER 2020

marketingweek.com

Marketing Week TOP 100 This year’s list of the most effective marketers in the UK revealed in partnership with Salesforce R E C O V E R Y Mark Ritson on the importance of market orientation 12

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A new era of effectiveness 16

S P E C I A L

The role of modelling 20

Getting more from less 24

The future for agency partnerships 27

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Time to take stock and offer inspiration for the future o, how has your year been? Pretty uneventful? For those of you this magazine has reached, we’re back in print after a five-month hiatus.

We, like you, were forced to think differently. With most of you working from home, we decided to take time out and focus our efforts on serving the considerable need you had to make sense of the past few months online at marketingweek.com. As the world creeps back to a version of where we left off in March, we thought it time to return to offer your monthly compendium of marketing insight.

Lots has happened since we last met here. I will spare you the summary, you have all being living it. In the wake of disruption, there’s a tendency among some in marketing to make predictions of seismic change to the job of marketing, and the role of the marketer. The old way of serving customers and your company is redundant amid the new normal, according to many. Some predict dramatic shifts, others forecast life will quickly return to normal. The long-term impact of the year to date is open to debate. One thing I am sure of is marketers are facing up to a future of having to do more with less. Tackling big challenges with fewer people and less money. Faced with this, you need insight and inspiration.

This issue intends to offer both.

From page 29, we offer you inspiration in the form of the 100 most effective marketers in the UK, selected from a long-list by a jury of marketing luminaries.

Their inclusion is acknowledgment of their achievements in trying times, as well as an illustration of what effective marketing leadership looks like. Elsewhere, we take a deep dive into what will be the key challenge for marketers as they look to recover from the shock of 2020 – balancing efficiency and effectiveness.

Across four features we look at the need to control costs without sacrificing meaningful and lasting impact, the enhanced role econometrics can play, how to extract more value from your media investment and how to work more productively with agency partners. Regardless of the size or type of your organisation, we hope it is useful and offers some help in navigating the difficult months ahead.

Indulge me a quick plug. Equipping you with the tools to face up to an uncertain future is also the aim of this year’s Festival of Marketing. Over five days, the virtual event will tackle a different challenge each day with sessions featuring some of the biggest names in marketing. For more go to festivalofmarketing.com.

As much as the near future is going to be bloody hard, take solace in everything you’ve come through and learnt over the past few months. I am sure you have all had to reacquaint yourselves with some fundamentals or had to act and think differently. The need for, and importance of, pulling all tactical levers when robbed of the P for promotion, the necessity of necessary innovation and the importance of collaboration – all things you can take strength from.

Don’t forget all you can be, and all that you can offer; all the job of marketing from strategy through to execution is, and the value it can add to a company.

You’ve got this.

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GET IN TOUCH WITH OUR EDITORIAL TEAM email firstname.surname@centaurmedia.com Editor-in-chief Russell Parsons Managing editor Sarah Vizard Features editor Lucy Tesseras (on maternity) Acting features editor Charlotte Rogers Writer Matt Barker Writer Matthew Valentine Reporter Molly Fleming Digital content producer Torera George Commercial content editor Michael Barnett Creative lead Lex Guerra Editorial production PA Media Ad production Wendy Goodbun Managing director Richard Breeden Group managing director, Xeim Steve Newbold

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Russell Parsons, editor-in-chief - russell.parsons@centaurmedia.com SEPTEMBER 2020 MARKETINGWEEK.COM 3

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CONTENTS

SEPTEMBER 2020

20

6 INSIGHT Marketers underestimate the role of creativity in effectiveness; KFC and John Lewis drop slogans; Channel 4 challenges brands to authentically represent BAME culture; Brand love up at Ben & Jerry’s after Home Office fight; Almost half of marketers plan budget cuts

8 DIGITAL THINKING Content design breeds user confidence, says Ben Davis

10 HELEN EDWARDS Your employer brand means just as much to consumers as it does to staff

12 MARK RITSON Begging customers won’t keep brands alive

27

14 OPINION Andrew Geoghegan Foresight is about actions, not just trends Tanya Joseph Brands must stop funding lies and hate Colin Lewis A ‘career strategy’ requires diagnosing the challenge first

16 EFFECTIVENESS IN THE AGE OF COVID-19 Is marketing entering a ‘healthier era’ for effectiveness?

20 BRINGING MODELLING INTO THE EQUATION The role for econometrics in the post-lockdown recovery

24 CASHING IN Getting more bang for your advertising buck

27 AGENCY REVOLUTION The new client-agency relationships

29

29 TOP 100 MOST EFFECTIVE MARKETERS Marketing Week’s annual list celebrates 100 marketers across 10 sectors

66 THREE QUESTIONS I WISH I’D ASKED Mastercard’s chief marketing and communications officer Raja Rajamannar on achieving work/life balance and marketing as a force for good

68 STORY OF MY CV Chief marketing and communications officer for Diriyah Gate Development Authority, Danielle Atkins

70 THE INSIDE STORY How BT got the nation talking with a little help from Bob Hoskins 4 MARKETINGWEEK.COM SEPTEMBER 2020

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IN THIS ISSUE

SAVE THE DATE

17 September 2020 Marketing Week Masters Winners revealed

ANN CONSTANTINE

LES BINET

Head of insight and marketing effectiveness, Direct Line

Group head of effectiveness,

“Effectiveness and efficiency for us are different because you are trying to be effective for your brand.”

“What we need is somebody to produce a method that unites both kinds of analysis - attribution modelling and econometrics.”

p16

Adam&EveDDB

p20

marketingweek.com/event/ marketing-week-masters

22 September 2020 Marketing Week Mini MBA Next course begins mba.marketingweek.com

5-9 October 2020 Festival of Marketing festivalofmarketing.com

HANNAH KEHOE

TIM CLYDE

Head of brand and marketing, BOL Foods

Co-founder, The Future Partnership

“It’s assumed that TV entry costs are too high, but Covid-19 is making it clear that small brands can advertise.”

p24

“Unless you’re a client that really does need a huge number of hands on deck, the sense of having a large agency, and the overheads that come with it, is much less desirable now.”

p27

September 2020 Cover illustration: Peter Crowther/Début Art

RAJA RAJAMANNAR

DANIELLE ATKINS

Chief marketing and communications officer, Mastercard

Chief marketing and communications officer, Diriyah Gate Development Authority

“It is a privilege to be a CMO, we are sitting on billions of dollars of budget. But that privilege should come with a responsibility to think beyond just your company.”

“Some of the best marketing is that combination of a strong in-house team and working with boutique agencies, directly with creatives.”

p66

p68

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INSIGHT

September MARKETERS UNDERESTIMATE THE ROLE OF CREATIVITY IN EFFECTIVENESS

KFC SAYS ITS SLOGAN IS INAPPROPRIATE WHILE COVID-19 IS WITH US

Marketers are underestimating the importance of factors including creativity and brand size, and overestimating the role of brand versus performance and multimedia when it comes to marketing effectiveness.

New research by Kantar, which surveyed 7,000 marketers globally, found marketers believe ‘multimedia’ is the biggest driver of brand profit followed by ‘brand versus performance’ strategies. They place ‘target audience’ in third and ‘creative quality’ fourth.

By comparison, they placed ‘budget setting across variants’ at the bottom of the list of 10 options, just behind ‘budget setting across geographies’ and ‘laydown/phasing’.

Kantar contrasted these results with a 2014 study into profit drivers. It found that ‘size and strength’ of brand was the most important factor in marketing effectiveness, followed by the creative quality of the advertising and budget setting across geographies. But marketers rank these fifth, fourth and ninth respectively.

Kantar’s global brand director of media Duncan Southgate says: “Everyone is thinking about their day-to-day – if you’re working on a campaign it’s about making your ads as good as they can be and optimising your media spend. I hope this allows people to stake stock and ask, ‘Are people doing the right things?’.”

JOHN LEWIS AND KFC SET TO DO AWAY WITH LONG-STANDING SLOGANS John Lewis is poised to axe its ‘Never

proposition that “signifies being fair to

its ‘Finger lickin’ good’ slogan, admitting it

society”. However, she confirmed the retailer

is “inappropriate” given the current focus on

is now reviewing how to “improve it”.

hygiene and hand-washing.

Under the price promise, which has been

It has used the tagline for more than six

Knowingly Undersold’ price-matching pledge

in place since 1925, John Lewis commits to

decades but is changing focus for a new

and switch the focus to “shouting more” about

refund the difference in price to any shopper

campaign – its first global work – that

its values as a socially responsible retailer.

who can find an item cheaper elsewhere

features images of advertising posters and

within 28 days. The retailer has, however,

packaging with the words blurred out.

Speaking to The Sunday Times, the John Lewis Partnership’s chairman Sharon White,

been under increasing pressure after being

who joined at the start of the year, described

consistently undercut by online rivals.

Never Knowingly Undersold as an important

KFC, meanwhile, is temporarily dropping

KFC UK and Ireland head of retail and advertising Kate Wall says: “This year has thrown everyone – all brands – and we took

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r

77% of people do at least some grocery shopping online, up from 61% a year ago Source: Waitrose

The average piece of direct mail was interacted with

Programmatic trading channels account for 41% of global digital media investment

4.58

Source: World Federation of Advertisers

times in Q2 2020 Source: Jicmail

PLANS FOR MARKETING BUDGET COMMITMENTS IN THE SECOND HALF OF 2020

a bit of a global stance that actually right now our slogan is probably the most inappropriate slogan out there, so we need to stop saying it.”

BRAND LOVE MOVES UP AT BEN & JERRY’S AFTER HOME OFFICE FIGHT Ben & Jerry’s decision to directly take on the Government over migrant boats appears

CHANNEL 4’S NEW DIVERSITY COMPETITION FOCUSES ON BAME COMMUNITIES

to have paid off, with data showing it has led

Channel 4 is challenging advertisers to

key brand health metrics.

authentically represent black, Asian and

The ice-cream maker challenged home

minority ethnic (BAME) groups as it launches

secretary Priti Patel on Twitter over the

its diversity award.

government’s strategy to stop the flow

For 2020, the broadcaster’s Diversity

the “lack of humanity” shown to those

is focused on tackling racial stereotypes in

making the perilous journey across the

advertising. The brand that best responds

Channel, and then tweeted a thread with

to Channel 4’s brief will receive £1m of

links to articles about the issue.

The focus on BAME culture comes amid

According to data from YouGov BrandIndex, consumers have responded positively to Ben & Jerry’s message. In the week after the tweets,

surveyed 1,000 people (500 BAME and

its consideration score (whether someone

500 white). It reveals that more than half

would consider purchasing from the brand in

(51%) of BAME people say current TV

future) increased by a statistically significant

advertising does not represent different

10.6 points. Purchase intent (whether a brand is

cultures well, while 10% say there is

someone’s first choice to purchase from)

no representation at all.

increased by 3.5 points.

Ben & Jerry’s also saw an uptick in people

say that current TV advertising does not

talking about its brand. Buzz, which is a net

represent black and brown culture well (vs

measure of whether consumers have heard

41% of white people), with 12% saying there

anything positive or negative about the brand

is no representation at all.

in the past fortnight, increased by 9.9 points.

This year’s competition is part of Channel 4’s six-point commitment to drive antiracism in the creative industries and improve black and minority ethnic representation.

Channel 4’s sales director Matt Salmon

Attention – the sum of positive or negative buzz – increased by 19.3 points.

YouGov UK head of data products Amelia Brophy says: “While there will be many who think that it’s inappropriate for a

says: “We know the term BAME is imperfect,

confectionery brand to offer a public rebuke

covering a range of different experiences,

of government policy on social media, YouGov

and that the issues of representation and

data shows that Ben & Jerry’s tweet has in fact

inclusion for different BAME communities

improved its brand health among Britons.”

are not homogenous.

“However, the lack of authenticity and cultures in TV advertising is universal and our

ALMOST HALF OF MARKETERS PLAN BUDGET CUTS IN THE SECOND HALF

research shows that the industry isn’t moving

Almost half of marketers are planning to cut

fast enough on this issue.”

their budget commitments, a third to cut

misrepresentation in the portrayal of BAME

DECREASE 44%

NO CHANGE

Source: Marketing Week/Econsultancy

new research from the broadcaster that

Almost two-thirds (62%) of BAME people

14%

29%

of migrants. In particular, the brand criticised

in Advertising Award, now in its fifth year,

free airtime.

INCREASE

to an increase in purchase consideration and

marketing campaigns and half to reduce hiring in the second half of the year, suggesting the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown is not easing.

A survey of 500 UK-based marketers, conducted by Marketing Week and sister title Econsultancy, found that 44% are planning to reduce their marketing budget commitments in the second half of the year compared to the first six months. Just 14% are planning to increase them and 29% plan no change, meaning a net 30% of marketers are planning to reduce budgets.

The proportion who said they would cut the number of marketing campaigns in the second half was 31.2%, with 27.5% leaving them the same and 30.9% increasing them.

On new hires, 47.4% say they plan to reduce hires and just 9.8% to increase, leaving a net decrease of 37.6%.

The figures are a stark contrast to predictions for ad spend in the second half, with many expecting a rebound. Brands including McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Adidas have all said they will reinvest in marketing to boost their businesses as lockdowns loosen.

However, this data suggests many are still concerned about the pandemic’s impact on the economy and consumer spending, as well as uncertainty over a second wave.

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DIGITAL THINKING

BY BEN DAVIS

Editor, Econsultancy

Content design breeds user confidence he past few months may not have seemed like a great time for design in general. Though many businesses have shown ingenuity in serving customers in new ways, it’s perhaps easier to recall the Government’s beleaguered test-and-trace efforts, ambiguous messaging, and a chancellor (right) with his own brand complete with strange kerning. But there are many examples of great content design.

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‘SEAMLESSLY’ HELPING CONSUMERS If you go back to tech investor Mary Meeker’s coronavirus trends report, published in April, Meeker suggested that when we were to look back on spring, we would see successful businesses as those that had: l Cloud-based business functions 2 Products always in demand, but especially so in uncertain times (food, water, shelter – and also entertainment) 3 An easily discoverable online presence that seamlessly helps consumers 4 Efficient ways to distribute products to consumers in limited-contact ways 5 Products that make businesses more digitally efficient 6 Broad (or emerging) social media presence Points 3 and 4 in particular bring to mind Amazon – one company that has been a big beneficiary of lockdown. But there are many companies large and small trying to help consumers as ‘seamlessly’ as possible, and here content design plays its part.

Content design comes in when businesses are designing new products or services, or need to provide information to users. The aim is to communicate clearly and meet user needs, and it’s a discipline that is synonymous with the Government Digital Service (GDS), where it was defined in the early 2010s and which has since published its content design guidance.

In June, GDS published an enlightening blog post detailing how it designed the Gov.uk coronavirus page (working remotely) in under five days. As dictated in GDS style guidelines, the page is accessible and mobilefirst (with strict prioritisation of content). It uses elements such as an ‘accordion’ pattern, particularly useful when incorporating lots of information as it lets users show and hide information as they wish.

CHANCELLOR RISHI SUNAK’S BIZARRE BRANDING IS A FAILURE OF CONTENT DESIGN

SO WHAT ABOUT CONTENT DESIGN FOR THE AVERAGE BUSINESS? Though lots of businesses may have had to design new services in the pandemic, or at least some sort of coronavirus help page or amendments to existing pages, it’s important to point out that content design doesn’t mean businesses should go mad and start publishing to try to take advantage of continued interest in coronavirus.

As Sarah Richards, founder of Content Design London and leader of the Gov.uk content team from 2010 to 2014, explained in a blog post in March: “The first question is always: ‘do we need this at all?’ If you are selling trainers, you do not need to publish what the [Covid] symptoms are. It is much better to link to authoritative sources.”

Richards highlights that there are ethical reasons to avoid publishing this sort of content, as well as practical ones, given that authoritative sources are more likely to keep information up to date. “Only publish if you can add value for your audience,” she opines.

For most businesses, content design would have come into play in routine ways, such as updating contact or customer service pages, or communicating plans for reopening. And, just as when GDPR came into force in 2018, I’ve been surprised by the number of businesses that haven’t done as well as they could when communicating with customers.

For example, the coronavirus pages on the websites of the big four UK banks were not

the most elegant in their early iterations. The word ‘iteration’ is key, of course. These companies have improved these pages over time, which is inevitable when marketers and digital professionals have been under such time pressure.

At the root of meeting user needs is often the ‘don’t make me think’ idea written about by computer programmer and author Steve Krug. While I would advise any marketer to read up on the GDS content design guidelines, the discipline of communicating clearly is summed up by Richards, who writes: “We have a 20-second rule. If I can’t listen [with a screen reader] or see and work out what I am going to get from a page in that time, the page could be improved.”

WHY NOW FOR CONTENT DESIGN? With many users likely to be in a state of stress at the moment, content design is more important than ever. There are also new users – those exploring online services they haven’t used before. Perhaps older users, too, some of whom may not have built up an ‘intuition’ for digital services (intuition is indeed learned over time online, as a consequence of consistency in design).

Content design is also a discipline that can be helpful to the development of other roles.

Employers should snap up those out of work with content design experience and who understand its ethos. Communicating clearly has never been more important.

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“Your employer brand means just as much to consumers” ity your peers in HR. They spend years enhancing the organisation’s employer brand, with the aim of attracting, motivating and keeping the best people, only to find that they now need to wish swathes of those people well for the future, as they manage their redundancies.

Perhaps, in the days before the crisis changed everything, you and your opposite number in HR engaged in some friendly, and occasionally less friendly, rivalry.

Even in good times, corporate resources are finite. Where you both fought for budget to be spent on activity incorporating the word ‘brand’, then surely, you argued, it was marketing rather than HR that should always be the driving force.

You might have cited the research that shows how employee talent is disproportionately attracted to working for ‘famous brands’. Well, fame is something that’s created in the open marketplace, by the brands the corporation puts out there and gets behind. And those brands carry meaning, values and a certain undefinable ‘way’. Does there really need to be a separate ‘employer value proposition’? And if there does, shouldn’t marketing, with its understanding of the importance of cohesion, be the ones to influence it?

And your opposite number in HR might have cited the much-admired employer brand of the US casual dining chain, &Pizza. It makes rectangular-shaped pizzas and is famous for it. But what does that say to the gifted and ambitious people it needs to work there? How does ‘oblong pizza’ and ‘my future’ come together in the same sentence?

Instead, the business built its employer brand around its ‘no ceiling’ policy: a person could climb as high as their talent would take them. Only HR, with its unique feel for people, would get the human psychology behind that.

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HELEN EDWARDS Former BSME and PPA business columnist of the year, and co-founder of Passionbrand

COMMON GROUND As so often in corporate life, this is one of those exchanges where you’d both have been right. Employees are consumers, too, and the

organisation’s brands are its first clarion call.

And the employer brand should certainly not contradict anything those consumer brands portray. But deciding where to work is a bigger decision than choosing a cola or even a car, and a sense of what the organisation is about deep down, and how its values might be manifested for those on the inside, needs separate articulation. Fame will only get you so far.

Right now, though, any traditional marketing-HR rivalry is likely to be muted.

With unemployment set to hit three million

by November, the competition for talent is acquiring the characteristics of a buyer’s market. You might feel that nourishing the employer brand is a luxury in a crisis, at a time when the business needs its paying customers more than ever – and your esteemed HR equivalent might reluctantly agree with you.

This time you’d both be wrong. Counterintuitive though it may seem, even more of those scarce corporate resources should be devoted to the employer brand right now – both its communication and its honouring.

There are three reasons for this.

The first is the simple, human one: if your business is in the unfortunate position of needing to lay people off, then for their sake it needs to stay true to all those sumptuous values it used to entice them in the first place.

This is the ‘unemployer brand’, for want of a better expression, and it needs to have generosity at its core.

The second reason is all about the people who remain, in every part of the organisation – R&D, production, finance, service, distribution, contact centre, PR, sales. Many of them will have direct influence on the customer experience.

A call centre professional whose mood following weeks of worry and internal chaos is flat to the point of surliness, will send customers scurrying to competitors. But even those in ‘background’ roles will have some kind of indirect consumer influence.

Reinvigorating the employer brand,

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l Helen Edwards will be speaking at the Festival of Marketing, running online

from 5 to 9 October. Visit festivalofmarketing.com to buy your pass

be surprised to hear consumers talk the language of permanent boycott for brands, like Wetherspoons and Boohoo, that have publicly revealed their hardness of heart.

In that sense, reason three is a reversal of the classic argument that the strength of a corporation’s brands influences its attractiveness as an employer. Now, the strength of a corporation’s reputation as an employer – which includes how it says goodbye to surplus people – influences the way its consumer brands are perceived.

That makes the employer brand a more complex, nuanced asset to devise and manage.

It argues for its communication beyond the immediate target of prospective talent.

Is that why Amazon now spends big bucks on TV showing how rewarding it is to work there? Is that prime-time investment all about attracting employees, or is it more a reassurance to consumers that purchasing through Amazon is not funding exploitation?

PLEAS NOT TO CUT BUDGET

letting survivors know they are valued, and motivating through shared values and optimism are all vital to keeping up the standards that constitute the substantive product and service offer.

If the expenditure required for that HR activity entails a temporary reduction in marketing budgets, it is a sensible sacrifice.

ETHICAL CONSUMPTION Reason number three is the hardest to spot and hits hardest when the business gets it wrong. Consumers take an ethical interest in how a business treats its employees, and shift their consumption patterns accordingly. This might have been a niche theme before Covid struck but it has become a surge since. Don’t

It has become a cliché in our industry that great brands are the ones that keep spending through a recession. It has not always been obvious that the reasons given to support the contention stand up to scrutiny – coming, as they have, from those with the most to gain.

But even if we take that contention at face value, and buy into the case studies cited, it is also not obvious why the past should be an infallible guide to the present. Expenditure on what? Every recession is different. When all instincts inside a business are to cut cost, who is to say how the precious budget that remains should be best spent?

Maybe you and your opposite number in HR should sit down and work out how to pool resources and seek the best of both worlds.

Sustain the outward-facing brands by nourishing the one that’s all about the people on the inside.

That might have seemed like vapid introspection a recession or two ago, but today, customers and employees behave a lot less like strangers than peers.

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MARK RITSON

Three-time PPA business columnist of the year

“Begging customers won’t keep brands alive” here’s a mistaken belief that there is some form of equality between supplier and customer.

That both deserve equal amounts of respect. That we meet as equals in the form of exchange and should respect each other accordingly. I will cook for you. You will enjoy it and pay for it. We part as equals.

But marketing does not work that way. No matter how wonderful your restaurant looks or how buoyant the soufflé might be, the demands of market orientation mean that customers are always in the driving seat. And those who serve them must recognise that fact and then act accordingly.

It’s a cliché to say that the customer is king, but when you boil down the three-decades-long literature on building a successful market orientation in any company, it inevitably starts with that recognition and then everything flows from it.

The entry point to our profession is not creativity or strategy or a love of design – it is the humility of marketing. No matter how good, experienced or successful you are, everything hinges not on your objective assessment of your offering, but on the perception of the customer.

With that realisation comes a host of tangential insights. The realisation that expertise gets in the way of seeing things the way the customer does. That your brand is a very small, unimportant thing.

That competitors are not competitors but actually alternatives that come from all over the place, not just the category.

And that you make your money not from selling power drills, but from

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enabling customers to put small, precise holes in the side of their houses.

These and a hundred other benefits are bestowed on a manager who adopts a proper, humble market orientation and maintains it.

And top of that list of benefits is an appreciation that the customer is always correct. Even when – especially when – they are clearly in the wrong.

That can be hard to grasp at the best of times. But it gets harder when coronavirus is making everyone extremely nervous. All the more reason, however, not to blame customers for ‘letting you down’ but to recognise their primacy over everything. We serve them, not the other way round.

And, in times of great stress, we must serve them with even more humility and understanding. Suck it the fuck up – as the Greeks used to say.

People should be lovely, reliable and filled with respect for their brothers and sisters serving them. But they aren’t.

BRANDS CREATE VALUE FOR CUSTOMERS It’s a lesson that Airbnb should have applied to its business. It is an organisation struggling mightily in these strange Covidafflicted times. Busy preparing for a multibillion-dollar IPO at the start of this year, the company has seen half its value wiped from its balance sheet. Meanwhile, many of its hosts, who took out extra mortgages on new apartments and serviced them using a stream of Airbnb rental income, are now facing financial disaster.

It’s a horrendous situation but one that does not disrupt the traditional predominance of customers over everything. Airbnb lost track of this fact and emailed its guests a few months ago asking them to send a virtual thank you card to former hosts expressing support and also, get this, suggesting they add a “voluntary financial contribution” to help hosts in their time of need.

Clearly these cards are a lunatic idea.

I could waste a whole paragraph explaining why asking guests to send charitable donations to people they have already paid makes no marketing sense. Instead, I will rely on the expert analysis of Rosaleen, an Airbnb customer from Hackney. She received one

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of the requests asking her to send a “kindness card” along with a small financial gift to her former host. “Airbnb has lost its fucking head,” was Rosaleen’s sage assessment of the new tactic on Twitter. “Why would I donate to my host? I can’t even afford one house.”

Again, the mistake all comes down to market orientation. If you think there is some kind of equality between customer and supplier then it makes perfect sense to ask guests to help overstretched hosts through a very difficult time. But that is not how this exchange works.

The host made money from the guest by lending them their property. Inherent in that loan is the risk and reward of buying property and renting it out for a profit. Having paid their money, the guest owes the host nothing.

That’s not a heartless state of affairs, it’s the nature of the relationship that Airbnb has created and monetised but failed to understand, now that the economic tables have been turned by coronavirus.

It’s a little-known fact that for decades the American Marketing Association (AMA) – kind of like the Vatican for marketers – has invited five noted marketing scholars to converge on its Chicago HQ every three years to review, redefine and reapprove the official definition of marketing. It’s a gorgeous little tradition that makes me love my discipline all the more, even if the subsequent definition is usually a massive mouthful of commas and sub-clauses that renders it almost total wank. The latest definition,

“This Covid crisis is all about value.

But it’s not about a rearrangement in which customers give some of it back to the organisations that they patronise as a thank you ”

Mark Ritson will be speaking at the Festival of Marketing, running online from 5 to 9 October. Visit festivalofmarketing.com to buy your pass

produced in 2017 by legendary thinkers like Linda Price and Rich Lutz, runs as follows: “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

As you can see from this definition, the crux of our profession is value. It has been the central concept ever since definitions began. Indeed, at several top business schools the whole marketing part of the MBA is predicated on a coherent argument that value is the core concept behind everything we do. Understanding it, creating it, pricing it, and communicating and delivering it are the main challenges of our profession. And handily the V in value reminds us that one prong sits with the customer and the other with the organisation. If we deliver value for customers, we generate it for our organisations.

Look again at the AMA definition above, however, and it becomes apparent that this is not an egalitarian arrangement – some kind of gay see-saw ride in which customer and organisation rock back and forward gleefully making each other happy. Marketers first have to generate the value for the customer, and then the customer gives us the value back in monetary form. We work for

them. Not the other way round.

When a big crisis like Covid-19 hits, it’s easy to think that this causality can be reversed and the customers should temporarily return some of this value to help companies survive.

Chefs think their customers have a duty to turn up. Property companies think customers should pay a little more to keep their exlandlords afloat. Media companies plaintively ask advertisers to maintain their support.

Lambs lop off a leg and offer it, gratefully, to a starving lion.

This Covid crisis is all about value. But it’s not about a rearrangement in which customers give some of it back to the organisations that they patronise as a thank you. It is about customers changing their value expectations and companies, the good ones at least, seeing this change and adapting accordingly. Rather than balancing things out, the current crisis bends the value equation even further towards the customer.

If you and your company are marketoriented you know this is not the time to blame or beg from customers. It is a time to exhibit the humility of marketing even more. Over the coming months we must listen, respond and bend even further to serve our target markets. Only the humble will survive.

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OPINION

We’ve all read articles proclaiming that nothing will be the same again, and also those that claim everything will return to normal.

The truth is, of course, that the notion of things being normal or constant is always an illusion – even Andrew in years not as monumental as 2020. The forces Geoghegan shaping businesses and brands are always evolving to a greater or lesser extent.

At Diageo, we’ve really ramped up our foresight work in the last couple of years. There are always unpredictable forces that may come into play, but it’s helping us to make choices about the business we want to be and leading to exciting opportunities, such as in low and no alcohol – as evidenced by the nurturing and acquisition of Seedlip, the non-alcoholic spirit brand. Thinking to the future is also why we announced in July that we have created a 100% plastic-free, paper-based spirits bottle, which will debut with Johnnie Walker in early 2021.

So what have we learnt about looking to the future?

Think outside-in, not inside-out: A good marker of how well you are doing this is the extent to which everyday conversations focus on the external environment, competitors and customers, versus things going on inside the business. You also need to make it something everyone does – being externally attentive, curious and taking actions based on what you discover should be core leadership behaviours.

Take the long view: Though we are a young company, many of our brands are centuries old, and by looking backwards it’s possible to see how the present was shaped and how the brands have been sustained over the years. This longitudinal view makes future scenarios and their implications easier to imagine - future thinking is part detective work, part history and part imagination.

Foresight is about actions, not just trends

Colin Lewis

A ‘career strategy’ requires diagnosing the challenge first

If you’re interested in creating a strategy for your career, I recommend you take a look at Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. It’s a great framework – particularly if you’ve been hit by the pandemic layoffs. Rumelt describes strategy in simple terms: “designing a way to deal with a challenge”. The core of a good strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy and a set of coherent actions.

A diagnosis defines and frames the challenge, and suggests a potential series of actions. In business and in careers, the biggest problem is incorrect diagnosis, and it’s even more problematic when the product is ourselves. Diagnosis should start with knowing your strengths, your unique abilities and the skills that make you a great product in the market. But you must also diagnose your weaknesses.

Use simple frameworks: We use a straightforward approach to scan, frame and plan, using increasingly automated structured and unstructured data, alongside more qualitative insight, and expert opinion. We map the drivers that we uncover against their potential business impact, versus the level of certainty, challenging ourselves on things like status-quo bias or group-think, which can affect the work.

Make connections: The freshest thinking will come from crossfertilising different perspectives and inputs. Draw together micro- and macro-level perspectives, and merge consumer and cultural trends with category forecasts and your understanding of economic, environmental, socio-cultural, political, technological and other relevant forces of change. An agnostic approach enables people to spot patterns, to connect ideas to their part of the business, and inspires bolder outcomes.

Strive for sticky language: To create a common change agenda, it’s critical to make the drivers we uncover memorable and the action we should be taking against each one clear. It’s worth recognising that, while trends might be interesting for some, for most people it’s too time-consuming to draw the line from a trend to the behaviours consumers might adopt, and the opportunity and actions your business should take to harness them. Devote as much time to bringing to life the implications as you do the future opportunities.

Focus on uncertainty: At the moment, all businesses are thinking about opportunities arising from accelerated digital living, such as ecommerce, but smart ones are also thinking beyond the obvious, as that’s where the sources of competitive advantage can be found. Think back to 2008, which created the conditions for category-redefining innovation, such as in financial services, with new fintech banking brands. What will be the equivalents in the years ahead?

It should be self-evident, but foresight work is about taking actions to shape your future business, not about trends and better predictions.

Andrew Geoghegan is global consumer planning director at Diageo

The next step is a guiding policy – an overall approach to dealing with the diagnosed problem. It points you in a direction of travel but does not list specific actions. A good guiding policy also addresses the obstacles identified in the diagnosis phase and aims to create advantages by anticipating the actions and reactions of others. For your career, this is all things you could do in a role, including specific assets and advantages you have, such as relationships, knowledge or deep expertise.

Finally, coherent actions are designed to carry out the guiding policy. The actions should coordinate and support each other.

For your career, identify threads that run through your diagnosis and the guiding policies to create a specific plan that captures the best of your varied skills, training, experiences and past choices.

A major distinction Rumelt makes is what represents bad strategy. He believes it starts with confusing strategy with goals. It can manifest in lists of highsounding sentiments, objectives, desirable outcomes and words like ‘desire’, ‘drive’ or ‘determination’.

Annoyingly, there’s no way to prove a chosen strategy is the ‘best’ or ‘right’ one. So Rumelt recommends considering your strategy to be a hypothesis that can be tested and refined over

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Disinformation and hate: they have been with us since time immemorial, but social media is now providing a rich breeding ground for their perniciousness. Every day we are exposed to articles which spew lies, which inflame intolerance. Over the past few months alone we have seen the Intelligence Tanya and Security Committee confirm what many have Joseph long suspected about the UK being a clear target of Russian disinformation; white supremacists exploit the killing of George Floyd to spread hate; and some extraordinary crackpot theories about the origins of Covid-19.

And we can expect it to get worse.

The US presidential election is set to generate millions of pages of mendacity and nastiness. Within minutes of Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s announcement of Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential pick, deeply unpleasant lies about her were being spread. It is going to be a dirty campaign. And as we near the production of a Covid-19 vaccine (keeping everything crossed here) we can expect the anti-vaxxers to flood the internet with their nonsense.

An Oxford University report published last year found evidence of organised social media manipulation campaigns in 70 countries, with at least one political party or government agency using social media to shape public attitudes domestically or in other states. Whether to gain power, hold on to it, or destabilise a government or a political movement, they are actively spreading disinformation and division.

For a long time, the focus has been on the platforms. We have looked to Facebook and Google to get their houses in order, to take responsibility for brand safety. I absolutely have placed a huge onus on the platforms and am not going to apologise for it. But surely the twin evils of lies and hate are as problematic – actually, more so – for brands? As we saw

time. With this hypothesis, you should listen for signs that the strategy is or is not working, and change tack accordingly.

When making career choices, the best option to choose is the one that gives you more options. This is where the current ‘wave of change’ that Covid-19 is causing might give you a guiding policy for the future. Changes in technology, law and consumer tastes are beyond the control of you and me, but we can harness them to our advantage. An industry that is on an upward trajectory will carry you along – and a long way.

Tanya Joseph is managing director at H+K Strategies

MARKETOONIST.COM @MARKETOONIST

PHOTO: REHAN JAMIL

Brands must stop funding lies and hate

when the whole brand safety furore broke a few years ago, no one wants to have their ads next to unsavoury content.

I know some brands decided to boycott Facebook in July in an effort to encourage the platform to address online hate. But all brands need to look at their own actions. The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) estimates that every year brands unwittingly provide an estimated quarter of a billion dollars to disinformation sites through online ads served on them. Now is the time for brands to step up.

Brands need to take a more discriminating approach to their brand safety controls. I would encourage them to stop using blanket bans on strings of words like ‘Black Lives Matter’, because there is no evidence of damage to your brand if it appears next to a hard news story – indeed, it might benefit you because the reader is likely to stay on the page longer.

But the same is not the case if your brand appears next to dodgy content. There is a lot of it out there so I understand that it might seem easier to create a list of unacceptable words to avoid trouble, but that might mean you miss out on audiences you really want to target (for example, legitimate reporting of Black Lives Matter was consumed by large numbers of people often regarded as ‘hard to reach’).

So what do you do? Well, the GDI has made the task easier. It produces an index which provides disinformation risk ratings for news sites in media markets across the world. The risk ratings are neutral, independent and transparent, and are done at site level. The process has identified over 20,000 monetised disinformation sites which spread deliberate deception, often malicious.

So the one thing all brands could do is put these sites on their blocked lists. You really don’t want to give any money to climate change deniers, white supremacists, or conspiracy theorists. And you really don’t want to lend your brand, which you have invested so much in building, to those who would undermine our democracy.

Colin Lewis is CMO at OpenJaw Technologies SEPTEMBER 2020 MARKETINGWEEK.COM 15

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A M O R E E F F E C T I V E W A Y F O R W A R D ?

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AS BRANDS ADJUST TO T HE PO ST - LO CK D O W N RE A LI T Y W IT H A RECES S ION LOOM ING, W I LL MA RK E T E RS RE J ECT A N O BS ESSION WIT H ROI AND ENT ER A ‘ HEA LT HI ER ERA’ FO R E F F ECT I V E N ESS?

BY CHARLOTTE ROGERS

he coronavirus crisis has put unprecedented strain on brands across the UK. From introducing emergency KPIs and struggling to maintain supply chains to simply keeping the wheels of business turning, the challenges have been extensive.

Now, as we emerge from lockdown and companies fight for survival, could marketing effectiveness play a vital role in the recovery?

Crucially, will marketers resist the urge to return to the ROI-driven mentality that characterised the 2008 recession?

At the onset of the pandemic, brands were forced to manage their expectations.

Head of insight, research, planning and performance at TSB, Justin Bell, saw sales targets shift in line with the consumer response, which he recognised was down to the context and not marketing being any less effective.

“We were thinking ‘the goalposts have moved’ and we thought about it less in terms of sales and more about brand behaviours.

Customer care trumps sales targets in the thick of a crisis. We weren’t alone, lots of banks came out with reassuring messages for their customers,” says Bell.

The lockdown period will be remembered for a slew of Zoom-style adverts, which Bell argues were the right medium to reassure customers.

While, unlike the global financial crisis, the pandemic was not instigated by the financial sector, given the history it was important for banks to display empathy, he says. TSB’s first advert during lockdown, for example, promoted the bank’s fraud refund guarantee.

“What’s the marketing effectiveness of reassuring customers about how they’ll be guaranteed if they are victims of fraud? Is it acquiring customers? We’ve not really seen that, but we do see customer sentiment go up considerably when they see our fraud refund guarantee advertising,” Bell points out.

By tracking consumers’ real-time exposure across the banking category, TSB was able to

T

“It was much more about mood and sentiment than it was about flogging product for us. Social listening and more targeted qualitative interventions became much more important” Rhea Fox, Aviva

score sentiment around persuasion and positivity. The analysis showed these Zoomstyle ads were having a positive effect.

“As a measurement, did we even look at ROI? No. Did we look at sales numbers? Yes. Of course we tracked them forensically and we saw them decline massively, but we didn’t reflect that as a marketing effectiveness issue.

We were much more interested in brand health and reputation,” says Bell.

“We looked at YouGov BrandIndex scores to track how our customers were perceiving the brand through the crisis. We’ve measured how our customers have been affected by Covid-19 to understand how we can best serve their needs.”

Head of marketing strategy, effectiveness and insight at Aviva, Rhea Fox, noticed that during lockdown more emotion-based decision-making was taking place. Her marketers worked hard to stay in tune with the consumer mood, which was changing almost daily. With decisions becoming more reactive, there wasn’t time to put in a media mix model and wait weeks for the results.

“It was much more about mood and sentiment than it was about flogging product for us. Social listening and more targeted qualitative interventions became much more important in terms of week-on-week planning,” Fox explains.

“How we measured the success of those things was a lot more social listening and closely listening to our consumer panels.”

During lockdown, Aviva’s trading KPIs remained the same, although minor tweaks were made to the brand tracker. The team also kept a close eye on NPS (net promoter score) and TNPS (transactional NPS), and put more emphasis on social sentiment and reputation.

It makes sense that in the early stages of lockdown some businesses would focus on KPIs related to adapting to the new working environment, says marketing effectiveness expert and consultant Peter Field. However, he believes now is the time to re-engage

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with business-focused metrics and move forward with a “positive business agenda”.

He advises any company at this point in a recession to focus on the brand metrics that will see them through to recovery.

“If you’re chasing ROI, that will feed short-term bad behaviours. You need to be focused on the longer-term metrics that relate to long-term ROI. “You need metrics that will lead you to having a damn good recovery and they are going to be around the strength of your brand and the extent to which it has high mental availability,” says Field.

“That’s what you’re trying to build now while media is cheap and your competitors are probably sitting this one out. Take advantage.”

MORE WITH LESS During the lockdown phase, conversations around brand investment were very much top of mind. The team at Direct Line did not let effectiveness slip down the agenda, explains head of insight and marketing effectiveness Ann Constantine, although the nature of the conversation did change.

“The initial conversation was, ‘Is it still right to invest in any type of media spend and activity during Covid?’ From all the brand research we’d done previously and what was currently out there, the answer was yes,” she states.

“We’re over the crisis point now, so the read we’re getting back for our effectiveness is the thing we’re looking at. We’re trying to pull it apart. The search market properly tanked for

a while, it was pretty much on its knees but has since recovered. It looks like we’ve stood up pretty well during that time.”

Questions about effectiveness are becoming even sharper as budgets are squeezed in the Covid-19 world, agrees group head of effectiveness at Adam&EveDDB, Les Binet.

He appreciates that in a crisis standard metrics can become difficult to interpret. If sales suddenly go through the roof, for example, it might be as a result of panic buying and therefore they could collapse tomorrow.

Binet points to the fact Covid-19 sparked a humanitarian crisis and so in those early days to approach it like a recession would have been “short-sighted, inhuman and dumb”. He likens the pandemic more to a war than a recession, when the normal rules are suspended.

The next phase will be about steadying the ship and improving acquisitions, sales and market share, which Binet admits may mean putting some of the “normal metrics slightly on the backburner”.

A good start, he advises, would be to ditch the dream of ‘doing more with less’. “The answer to the question, ‘How can we do more with less?’ is mostly you can’t. What it mostly means is, ‘How can we do less with less?’,” he explains.

“There are clients who are going, ‘Can we spend a bit more and do more?’ and there are some clients who are saying, ‘We’ve got less, so we’re going to have to do less.’ And then there are a few idiots who think they can do more with less.”

MAKING A CREATIVE COMMITMENT The importance of creativity during a crisis like Covid-19 cannot be overstated. Binet argues that while creativity has a role to play at any time, the pandemic means people are much less tolerant of bad advertising, meaning the stakes are “higher than normal”.

In fact, creative commitment “heavily influences” a campaign’s effectiveness, according to Field and his fellow marketing effectiveness expert James Hurman. Creative commitment is defined as a measure of media budget, duration and the number of media channels applied to a creative campaign.

“The point about creativity is you have to put some commitment behind it if you really want to get the most out of it,” argues Field.

“It’s the commitment that’s lacking, as well as the marketing models, which are all data-led. Lots of companies have clearly abandoned brand marketing or put it on the backburner in order to put more money into performance marketing. That’s the enemy of creativity.”

Direct Line only went live with its ‘We’re on it’ campaign in early March, after retiring its award-winning ‘The Fixer’ creative.

Constantine admits that the team still has “a big job” to do to fully embed the creative in consumers’ minds, but the advantage is the company fundamentally believes that brand investment drives revenue.

“Sometimes it’s about holding your nerve as well,” she notes. “There will be people out there looking at the financials and being quite panicky about whether it’s the right thing to

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continue to invest in brand when they need to drive short-term profits. It’s about how robust and well embedded your measurement is within an organisation.”

She anticipates some companies may invest more in direct response and focus on PPC (pay-per-click) marketing based on their financial position and brand strategy. And while Direct Line has no intention of pulling away from brand, the team will continue to optimise and analyse the value for money of the creative going forward.

RECOVERY PHASE As we enter the fight for recovery, Field urges marketers to resist any return to the ROI obsession of the 2008 recession. During this next phase it is crucial, he says, to present CFOs and CEOs with an evidence-based argument explaining the importance of balancing short-term activation with longterm brand building.

Bell thinks brands are entering a “healthier era for effectiveness” as the focus is less on ROI and more on showing the myriad ways marketing contributes to brand health. He says marketers are also getting sharper with the tools they use to measure effectiveness and their ability to evidence their contribution to both hard and soft measures.

Fox firmly believes marketers won’t adopt an ROI-driven mentality, in part because performance marketing has become much more competitive. She suggests coronavirus has shown brands the need to demonstrate their purpose meaningfully, something CEOs are well aware of. Furthermore, compared to

you possibly can rather than always looking through the financial lens,” Constantine

“There will be people

out there quite panicky about whether it’s the right thing to continue to invest in brand when they need to drive short-term profits” Ann Constantine, Direct Line

2008, above-the-line (ATL) advertising has become much more nuanced. “It was all quite binary in those days. It was TV and radio, or it was the digital slot machine and actually those distinctions are very blurred now,” says Fox. “What we used to call ATL is much more trackable and targetable and has more demonstrable ROI if you choose to measure it.

I don’t think we will go back to those days. If anything, the environment should favour, for the brands that can afford it, more fully rounded campaigns.”

Constantine credits the leadership team at Direct Line for believing wholeheartedly in brand investment and points to an internal shift away from short-termism over the past six years. To make a success of it, understanding the difference between effectiveness and efficiency is essential.

“Effectiveness and efficiency for us are different because you are trying to be effective for your brand. You’re trying to do as much as

explains. “In 2008, even up to possibly 2012, people were looking at it very much through the efficiency lens.”

While ROI and cost per acquisition are KPIs at Direct Line, Constantine does not expect the focus on these metrics to grow. In fact, she advises brands to hold their nerve and not lose their long-term perspective, even if things don’t fully return to how they were pre-crisis.

STRONGER BRANDS Field hopes that marketers will take advantage of the recession and commit budget to strengthening their brands. What is the point, he asks, of investing in activity that involves “slugging it out” in a diminished sales environment?

Instead, he encourages brands to put their energy into campaigns that create the conditions for a fantastic recovery in six to 12 months’ time and take advantage of the current “bargain prices of brand-building media”.

“I’m not saying for a moment that people can’t make savings. There are big savings to be made by even resilient brands because everything has become so much cheaper. I’m not one of those people who says, ‘Just find the money’,” explains Field. “We can all make savings, but we can still drive growth as long as we don’t get too panicky. Do not panic would be my three-word advice to everyone.” l Ann Constantine will be speaking about effectiveness at The Festival of Marketing in October. For more details, visit festivalofmarketing.com

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W H A T R O L E C A N M O D E L L I N G P L A Y I N R E C O V E RY F R O M C OV I D - 1 9 ECO NOMETRIC S CA N HE L P MA RK E T E RS ST E E R A COURSE TO POST- LO C K D OWN SUCC E SS A N D TA K IN G A LO NG - T ERM, IT E RAT IVE A PPROAC H WIL L HE L P THEM R E MA IN O N T HE F RO N T F O OT

BY CHARLOTTE ROGERS

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hinking long term amid the current climate of deepening economic uncertainty can feel like a real challenge. While some brands will rely on their use of modelling to guide them to recovery, others will be concerned about the data to input and many may not even have any models to refer to.

The post-lockdown phase will be defined by effectiveness and ensuring every £1 of investment counts to the “greatest extent”, says O2 CMO Nina Bibby. With budgets being scrutinised and marketers under pressure to justify spend, modelling could play an important part in driving growth in the long term.

“Econometrics can appear daunting but it really is the only way of understanding on a large scale all the various drivers of business growth – brand strength, competitiveness, products, positioning, media investment – that impact sales, as well as the macroeconomic environment,” says Bibby.

“In the post-Covid world it’s going to be really important to understand and optimise what drives value in the short and long term.

We use modelling to optimise our media investment strategically and we use it for each quarter and each campaign.”

Bibby explains that while econometrics will suggest where to invest in the short term, it can also analyse the long-term brand effects, which in O2’s case helps the team accelerate media investment profitability.

She also acknowledges that as modelling is often “backwards facing”, when you experience something like the recent crisis it is important not to rely solely on models.

“When we were looking at how to respond to Covid-19 we went back to 2008 and the financial crash, because that was the last major significant dip. In general, our models do a very good job, but we are always looking for ways to improve them and what’s important is, if necessary, to go back even further,” says Bibby.

When it comes to dealing with disruption, TSB was put on a crash course back in 2018 thanks to a failed IT migration that ended up costing the bank £250m.

Head of insight, research, planning and performance, Justin Bell, explains that for a few months the team did not have highquality sales data and without that continuity it was difficult to model.

“The journey back to recovering consideration, recovering intent to purchase and sales is a gradual one, and for those reasons we did pull back for at least a year in terms of modelling. Then we decided to go to

T

“I’m confident that for us this period won’t be a data discontinuity that the modelling can’t handle” Justin Bell, TSB

a methodology that is more responsive to short-term data sets and data changes,” Bell explains.

“I’m confident that for us this period won’t be a data discontinuity that the modelling can’t handle. I’m confident that what we have with the Bayesian-based modelling will continue to provide us with the insight we need about what’s working well and where. That will be invaluable in terms of the media mix and choice of activity we invest in.”

Bell can appreciate that the situation might be different for marketers who use “traditional regression-based modelling”, but he believes the Bayesian approach of analysing probability will ensure TSB is not affected by any loss of data caused by the pandemic. He explains that the team is still receiving data on a monthly basis that is “fair and accurate” in relation to sales.

“We have built a variable for Covid-19, which is fitting well within the model and you can see as an explanatory variable it is a good variable. In terms of the longer term, we have a number of different scenarios of how long it will take for things to recover and we’ll have to see how that journey goes, but the modelling itself is robust,” says Bell.

“We won’t be pulling back from econometrics. I can understand why others would and we did after the migration in 2018.

It becomes a bit circumspect with the data gaps you have, which leads to uncertainty about how accurate it is for predictive and future-scaping.”

STAYING ON THE OFFENSIVE At Aviva, the team is attempting to maintain all the normal internal metrics, as well as introducing a standard set of Covid-19 metrics. It is using modelling to better understand the impact of the pandemic and where to place future investment, but approaching with caution.

“You wouldn’t necessarily want to make any assumptions about next year’s plan based

on Q2 results,” says head of marketing strategy, effectiveness and insight Rhea Fox. “Do we think there will be more TV viewing? Absolutely. Do we think there will be more video-on-demand? Sure. Some of the assumptions will hold true. We certainly won’t be basing next year’s campaigns on Q2 MMM [media mix modelling] or TNPS [transactional net promoter score].”

Fox appreciates that econometric modelling is expensive and in a world where cuts are inevitable, it will be a struggle for marketers to make the case if modelling was not an integral part of a business prepandemic. However, for brands that have already demonstrated “well-established ROI benefits” through modelling, it will be business as usual.

“We had two months where we were all having to make decisions on the fly with limited information and different tools, but that was in crisis time. God willing, we’re not back in crisis time and even if we were, we’ll know more how to deal with it,” says Fox. “But if you haven’t been an enthusiastic user of econometrics and planning tools already, I can’t see many brands suddenly being converted to the spend and effort it takes to put that machine in motion.”

Bibby believes modelling is only half the story and that successful econometrics is the result of effective teamwork, both internally and with agency partners. The real value, she says, comes from the objective interpretation of the data insights. O2 has adopted a test and learn programme to complement the use of econometrics, the recommendations of which are implemented in a progressive way.

“If the testing shows something works then we scale it up in a step-wise way. Doing that test and learn also means we’re able to collect live data and a very up-to-date view of the current situation, which we can then feed into the future econometrics,” she adds.

STARTING WITH A CLEAN SLATE O2 is already using modelling to determine its budget for 2021, as well as set targets and KPIs for the team and agencies. The marketers are using the modelling framework to develop various scenarios for the coming year.

While it is not an approach taken at O2, Bibby can see that some brands may gravitate towards zero-based budgeting (ZBB) in response to the crisis. With ZBB, marketers start with a clean slate each year rather than taking last year’s advertising spend as a benchmark.

Bibby, who has used ZBB previously, appreciates this method of budgeting can be

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PICTURE: ASHIM D SILVA FOR ADIDAS

Sportswear giant Adidas has previously admitted over-investing in digital at the expense of brand building

useful as it forces marketers to question their assumptions.

However, she believes it is important to adopt a “robust and systematic approach” to the long term and often ZBB decisions are based on the short-term impact. Bibby argues this is not sufficient as an “always on” level of investment is needed to maintain performance.

“There’s always the risk that when you do a pure ZBB you don’t adequately consider you need a minimum level of investment to just keep that core stable demand in place and to ensure the multiplier effect you get from that long-term, accumulated spend,” she notes. “Focusing purely on the short term, at the expense of brand building, ultimately can reduce marketing possibility.”

Brands looking for excuses to cut budgets may well gravitate towards ZBB, suggests marketing effectiveness expert and consultant Peter Field, who describes this approach as a “dangerous and flawed way of setting budgets”.

In the post-pandemic world he urges marketers not to abandon long-term models, although he is critical of market mix models. “They’re about driving click-throughs. The metrics are short, so the conclusions are short and they’re immensely damaging,” says Field.

“If what we’re seeing is the abandonment of short-term market mix models then I’ll be the first one cheering from the ramparts because it’s time we moved on. They’ve killed effectiveness.”

Field admits that the aftermath of a nationwide lockdown might not feel like the smartest time to build a model, so it is inevitable that this kind of work may take “a bit of a back-seat”. For this reason, it is

“Focusing purely on the short term, at the expense of brand building, ultimately can reduce marketing possibility” Nina Bibby, O2

important for marketers to work on trading through the next six to 12 months.

“We don’t need to go away and do huge amounts of special analysis,” Field adds.

“We know the principles; all that matters is the extent to which a company has the resources and the wisdom to follow its principles, and that would be my primary focus if I were a CMO.”

TIME FOR CHANGE? As brands wrestle with budgets, gleaning the right data and the lure of ZBB, the Covid-19 crisis could lead to greater interest in hybrid forms of modelling.

As far back as 2017, Google econometrics lead Matt Taylor advised marketers to escape the measurement silos and map “three types” of metrics – media, brand and business. He urged them to combine all three metrics and sync their econometrics with randomised controlled experiments and digital attribution.

Les Binet, group head of effectiveness at Adam&EveDDB, agrees that it is becoming harder to justify decisions in business without having the numbers to back up the thinking. In

the choice between econometric modelling, attribution modelling or controlled tests, Binet believes smart businesses will run all three.

The challenge, however, is finding a way to unify attribution modelling and econometric modelling. “The two sets of techniques tend to give a very different perspective on the world.

One’s long term and one’s short term. One’s direct and one’s indirect. One’s good for brand, one’s good for activation,” Binet explains.

“Attribution models will tell you that poster advertising doesn’t work because no one ever clicks on a poster, whereas econometric models will tell you that poster advertising is highly effective but it’s almost impossible to see the effects of paid search.

What we need is somebody to produce a method that unites both kinds of analysis.”

He cites the admission from Adidas global media director Simon Peel at the IPA Effectiveness Week 2019 that the sports giant had over-invested in digital due to a focus on ROI and performance marketing, at the expense of brand building.

Peel explained that until four years ago the company did not have any econometrics. The brand focused on efficiency over effectiveness, leading it to look at specific KPIs and how to reduce their cost, rather than what was in the best interests of its brands.

Thinking back to the current crisis, Binet admits that while a hybrid model could well solve a lot of problems, most marketers don’t yet know they need it. He does, however, believe an “awakening” is happening about the limitations of digital metrics and the need to put them into a more well-rounded context. l Nina Bibby will be speaking at The Festival of Marketing in October. For more go to festivalofmarketing.com

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HOW BRANDS ARE GETTING MORE BANG FOR THEIR ADVERTISING BUCK T HE PANDEM IC MAY HAV E CAU S ED MA J O R D I S RU PT I O N TO THE AD MARKE T AS GLO BA L BRA N D S PU LLED S PEN D, B UT CHEAPER M EDIA PRI CES O F F ER A N O PPO RT U N I T Y FO R SAVVY COMPA N I ES TO D O MO RE W I T H LES S

BY MATTHEW VALENTINE

ith audiences displaced, consumer behaviour altered and advertiser budgets constrained, now is a challenging time for media owners.

Over the past couple of months, several global brands have pulled back on advertising in a bid to save money. In April, Coca-Cola paused marketing spend across its business, citing a lack of ROI caused by the coronavirus outbreak, and only ended its ad spend hiatus in August.

Likewise, McDonald’s cut investments in most markets during the first half of the

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year, with marketing spend down 70% in the US alone. The fast-food giant only recently felt ready to “reinvest” in marketing, although it is working with an incremental $200m saved during the lockdown – equivalent to one additional month of media in every owned market.

PepsiCo also made fundamental changes to the way it runs ads. CEO Ramon Laguarta said in July that the group had reined in marketing in many countries as they went into lockdown – but that this exercise had made the company better at marketing.

While this has undoubtedly been a time of disruption and changing priorities, the past few months have created opportunities for some brands to get more bang for their buck and try out marketing tactics not open to them just a few months ago.

Group head of effectiveness at Adam&EveDDB, Les Binet, says the current environment is a “tremendous media buying opportunity”, as ad spend has contracted, but media consumption has expanded.

“We have a situation now where less advertising money is chasing more advertising

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eyeballs, so the cost-per-view has plummeted,” Binet states. “Buying eyeballs has never been cheaper than it is right now.”

BOL Foods has a clear mission to persuade consumers to eat more plants.

Head of brand and marketing, Hannah Kehoe, had been using various channels, including paid social and PR, to highlight the brand’s message. However, as BOL has become more established, it has started to broaden its media horizons.

In January, for example, the brand made its biggest marketing investment to date, with an out-of-home campaign across major UK cities and a takeover of the London Underground. Since then, media costs have plummeted.

“On paid social, our cost per 1,000 [impressions] is a quarter of what it used to be,” says Kehoe. The combination of Covid-19, and a subsequent reduction in demand for ads courtesy of the Facebook advertising boycott, has meant costs “lower than I have ever seen”, she adds.

Ultimately, falling media costs across multiple channels have allowed BOL to experiment with new tactics as it takes stock of the rapidly changing media landscape.

Most obvious among these has been TV ads, which the brand has screened via the SME250 scheme from Sky. The broadcaster has invested £2.5m in the scheme, which offers 250 businesses £10,000 in AdSmart campaign funding and full support on the creative process.

“It’s assumed that TV entry costs are too high, but this is making it clear that small brands can advertise,” says Kehoe.

After being accepted onto Sky’s scheme, BOL created an ad using footage from Shutterstock. The brand refrained from showing specific products, in part to avoid including elements that could age or require updating. “You can do a really nice piece without having to go out into the world and spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on production,” says Kehoe.

“It was a five-week turnaround, and actually the cost of the asset was £11,000 all in. And the cost of the media was £10,000.

It’s quite something to shout about.”

While TV advertising is something the brand would have explored eventually, it is unlikely it would have done so this summer had the media landscape not seen such dramatic changes.

TV OPENS UP Lighting brand Anglepoise is another to take part in the SME250 scheme. Head of marketing Tajinder Leonard says the lamp

brand has benefited from the lockdown trend for consumers sprucing up their homes.

However, it remains keen to make its marketing budget work as hard as possible and while Anglepoise is a well-known brand, it sits firmly in SME territory.

“We are still as penny-pinching as we have ever been. We are just trying to use our budgets very smartly,” says Leonard.

The company launched a new brandpositioning project earlier this year, highlighting the lifetime guarantee that now applies to its products. It had been analysing its media spend, and was keen to try TV ads, but budget concerns held it back. In fact, Anglepoise had never aired a TV ad in its 88-year history.

“TV has always been outside of our reach in terms of spend and budget,” says Leonard, who joined the company in January. “Then Covid happened.”

Anglepoise acted quickly, capitalising on cheaper media prices with a print campaign, before taking the plunge and aiming for the small screen.

“We have a situation now where less advertising money is chasing more advertising eyeballs, so the cost-per-view has plummeted ” Les Binet, Adam&EveDDB

An edited version of an existing branded film was used as creative, coupled with a discount offer to drive traffic and help maximise the ad's impact. The SME250 scheme couldn’t have come at a better time, says Leonard.

“We made quite a tactical play with this one. It has given us the confidence to think we can do other stuff,” she adds.

Brands in other sectors have found their media budgets stretching further. Freixenet Copestick-owned alcohol brand I Heart Wines returned to TV advertising after a short break – booking slots during Channel 4 show Gogglebox using a modified version of the creative it ran last year.

Senior brand manager Dani McDonald says that the I Heart Wines media budget has stretched further in 2020. “We had a similar budget to last year, but we have basically been able to get a few more spots than we got

last year,” she explains.

As an alcohol brand, I Heart Wines has missed out on sales at bars, restaurants and festivals, where it would typically have a strong presence. Reaching customers at home has, therefore, taken on a new importance.

“We will be running on-air from now until the end of August. And then we intend to run the creative throughout different channels and make sure we’re heroing those core products at the end of those ads, and our retailers where possible,” says McDonald.

“Social is a key one for us, because that’s where we can be really reactive. We’ll be doing lots of competitions and echoing that creative as well. We’ve seen a massive increase in traffic on our social channels over lockdown.”

CULTIVATING A COMMUNITY Beauty brand Avon has always had an unconventional structure, which may well have been an advantage during the Covid-19 crisis.

“Our media budget per se is quite modest, [but] the money goes further in this time frame,” explains executive director of commercial marketing Stephen Rendu.

Avon’s USP is its network of self-employed representatives, who distribute products to their customers at a local level. As well as creating a sense of community that has been enjoyed by customers during lockdown, they also account for a large proportion of Avon’s media activity.

“We have two ways of getting information out there: the paid and the shared,” says Rendu. With more consumers at home, Avon has seen a substantial increase in engagement via social channels. This is in part due to the representatives, who have received additional training to help them make the most of social media to keep in touch with customers while the traditional doorbell approach was unavailable.

The messages that have resonated most strongly with customers during the pandemic have been those allied to a cause. For example, Avon raised more than £150,000 for charities during this time, from initiatives such as making a donation for every hand sanitiser product sold.

The brand has also seen a marked growth in consumption of long-form content and has invested in it accordingly.

Avon representatives have been sharing content such as a promotional film for Protinol, an advanced skincare product that has become a bestseller.

“We did a Protinol video a few weeks ago where we shared it on a Friday and by

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The reduced cost of media is opening up TV advertising for smaller brands

Saturday we’d had over 4,000 shares on Facebook, and something similar on Instagram,” says Rendu.

“It was a minute-long, but people were watching and sharing.”

For brands and media owners, the big question is around whether these changes to consumer behaviour and media pricing will stick.

Rendu sees clear evidence consumers have enjoyed these new methods of engaging with the brand and, while some traditional behaviours will return, many of the changes around media consumption will remain.

“Where you’ve found another route to market, where you have invested in different channels and had positive experiences – whether that be your money going further, or finding more brand engagement, that will remain,” says Rendu.

“It is going to be interesting to see how media channels compete for spend going forward, because the landscape has changed.”

NEXT PHASE Looking ahead, the possibility of a second wave of Covid-19 infections, the unpredictability of the government response and public confusion over how to

“It is going to be interesting to see how media channels compete for spend going forward, because the landscape has changed” Stephen Rendu, Avon

change their lifestyles, make it hard to accurately forecast how the media landscape may develop.

GroupM predicts that out-of-home media will see a 35% decline in advertising in 2020, followed by growth of 23% in 2021. The expectation is that cinema advertising will make a slow recovery after the enforced closure, while TV advertising will experience a 15% drop in 2020, followed by 13% growth in 2021.

However, GroupM estimates ecommercerelated advertising will grow by 45% this year, and by a further 66% in 2021. More broadly, after seven years of mid-to-high

single-digit growth, the advertising market is expected to contract by 13% in 2020, followed by growth of 13% next year. In the wake of the global financial crisis in 2009, the ad market dipped by 12%.

The latest Advertising Association/WARC Expenditure Report is more pessimistic. It predicts that UK ad spend in 2020 will decline 15.6% on 2019. These numbers are a revision from an even gloomier forecast made in March, in response to efforts by the UK Government to stimulate demand.

With high unemployment levels expected well into next year, alongside the real possibility of a second wave of coronavirus infections, year-on-year ad spend is not predicted to grow before the second quarter of 2021.

Yet, despite the uncertainty of 2020, there is some light on the horizon. Ad spend in 2021 is forecast to grow by 16.6%, assuming there is a successful vaccine in place.

That being said, AA/WARC does not expect pre-Covid levels of ad spend to return until at least 2022. With ad spend set to be depressed at least into next year, brands will need to be savvy and find ways to capitalise on the opportunity presented by cheaper media if they are to thrive in the next phase of Covid recovery.

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AGENCY REVOLUTION

BY MATT BARKER

With brands increasingly looking to do more with less, is the age of the old-school one-stop shop coming to an end? he Covid-19 pandemic has put pressure on brands to capitalise on opportunities and reassess their costs in a bid to survive.

With budgets under the spotlight, what does it mean for agencies? Will relationships become more tactical and less strategic?

Will brands want to work closer or bring specialisms in-house?

Recent research carried out by LinkedIn suggests budget constraints are forcing brands to shift priorities. Some 45% of the 300 B2B and B2C UK marketers questioned say they will be taking a more tactical approach, while 41% believe they need to change the tone, content and messaging of their marketing assets.

Cost-cutting means that brands are increasingly turning to in-house resources for such things as social media strategy and production work, with more than a third of respondents (35%) claiming they will be reassessing their marketing team’s role over the coming months.

There is as much a cultural as an economic shift at play, heightened by the need for brands and agencies to be more flexible and reactive.

And lockdown has shown that you can speed up the creative process and still get results.

Branding consultant and director of Passionbrand Helen Edwards believes agencies should be in permanent high-alert mode, ready to respond rapidly to what is going on in the culture around them.

“I think that’s a good thing,” she says.

“I’ve been seeing that with some of my own clients. They’ve been surprised at how quickly you can do things and still do very good work.”

If agencies are at their best when there’s a problem to solve, this shift in brand relationships could prove to be a shot in the arm. That doesn’t have to mean downscaling,

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“Clients hate spending time in inter-agency meetings, where everyone’s vying for the bloody budget” Tim Clyde, The Future Partnership

although agencies are adapting to meet the challenge of working with brands no longer impressed by big marble lobbies and two-day briefing meetings.

“It’s challenging creative ideas and creative thought and that has to be a good thing; we’re meant to be a creative industry,” Edwards adds.

NEW MODEL One experienced agency veteran who has seen the writing on the wall is Tim Clyde, a co-founder of The Future Partnership. Clyde, who set up creative agency Kitchen in 2003, has hooked up with like-minded industry

colleagues to form a coalition of marketing agencies sharing skillsets and resources to best serve the client.

The 11 partners include Folk (which brings its research and insight expertise), Perfect Day (design), East of Eden (PR) and This Is Digital (digital marketing).

“In the past three or four years we’ve seen a massive sea change from big agencies to small agencies,” says Clyde. “Unless you’re a client that really does need a huge number of hands on deck, the sense of having a large agency, and the overheads that come with it, is much less desirable now.”

The Future Partnership was formed with the intention of offering a more flexible approach to agency work, but keeping hold of the consistency that has always been a large-agency strong suit.

“If you’re a client, you can go, ‘I want a bit of that and a bit of this’, but the big problem is how do they all work together?” Clyde says.

“That was the bit that we wanted to try and tie up ourselves with the partnership, to create a really close understanding and respect.”

Clyde and his co-founders worked out who was best at which discipline and then agreed to stay firmly in their creative lanes.

“Clients hate spending time in inter-agency meetings, where everyone’s vying for the bloody budget. It’s cake-grabbing most of the time,” he explains.

“If the solution is a clever piece of digital marketing or a cool piece of influencer celebrity PR, we’re all behind it. We’ll do that in a way that’s going to have the best success for that particular marketing brief.”

Creating a situation where that can be properly

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achieved is tricky, but Clyde is confident that this is the time for both sides of the agencyclient fence to think differently and embrace a shift away from traditional models.

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL This experience is echoed by Revlon UK senior marketing director Stephanie Ledger, who has been working with a roster of small agencies to develop locally relevant campaigns based on core creative output from the New York office.

She’s been impressed by the swift turnaround, both in terms of getting campaigns up and running, and the way such agencies are able to grasp the nuances of a brief faster.

“What’s different is the account team,” Ledger explains. “With a big agency you don’t usually get access to creatives, whereas with the smaller ones they’re part of the briefing, part of the entire process. Your contacts are creative people.”

It helps too that a lot of the time founders and co-founders are actually creatives themselves. “It’s less transactional, they’re more invested, because normally they own the business,” she adds. “It’s not just a pay cheque for them.”

A more streamlined model means less bureaucracy, but as Ledger points out, the onus should be on larger brands to help out with speeding up creative processes too.

Her work with agency Mr White has been very fruitful, but she readily admits that the corporate nature of life at Revlon probably slowed things up unnecessarily. “Mr White

did exactly what a traditional ad agency would do, but in a far more efficient way,” she says. “It was only a three-month timeline from brief to playout. I think corporates need to be more agile to keep pace with these smaller agencies.”

Mr White prides itself on creating specialist teams from a wider talent pool of 2,000 creatives worldwide. Reflecting on the current situation, executive creative director and founding partner Matt Carroll believes brands are facing a fundamental challenge – the demand for deliverables is going up, as budgets are shrinking. “Frankly, traditional agency models aren’t equipped to meet this challenge,” Carroll adds.

WaterAid mass engagement director Johnty Gray agrees that the old-school agency way of working is starting to look like an avoidable extravagance at a time of tighter scrutiny around efficiency and effectiveness.

“We did a whole pitching process for brand advertising and we had a few large agencies in the mix,” he says. “It’s really clear when you

“I think corporates need to be more agile to keep pace with these smaller agencies” Stephanie Ledger, Revlon UK

go into those agencies that what you’re paying for is overhead.”

SEEKING SPECIALISMS WaterAid uses a broad spectrum of disciplines, including digital marketing, content, engagement and fundraising, working with around 20 different agencies, all of which are notably small in size.

“It allows us to be in control of what we do and to use specialisms properly, to get the most out of them at the lowest cost,” Gray says. “We’re very happy doing that, even on the most intricate campaigns. We model ourselves internally to be able to do that really well.”

WaterAid has been working that way for the past four years, but Gray admits he can see why the one-stop-shop agency could still be of use elsewhere in the sector, with some organisations unable to establish an internal structure or have the luxury of time.

During the Covid-19 lockdown, WaterAid put out two television campaigns working with WPNC and Don’t Panic, both of which were up and running within weeks of the initial planning stage.

“It’s stupid what we managed to do in that space of time,” says Gray. “There’s no way we could have done that with a big agency.

Smaller agencies get what you’re doing and what you’re about so much faster.” l Client/agency relationships will be explored at The Festival of Marketing in October. For more go to festivalofmarketing.com

SINCE THE ONSET OF THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK

23.6% OF MARKETERS HAVE RELIED LESS ON AGENCIES

40.1%

9.9% HAVE CUT THEIR USE OF AGENCIES ENTIRELY

SAY THEIR RELATIONSHIPS WITH AGENCIES ARE THE SAME

5.5%

OF MARKETERS HAVE EXPANDED THEIR USE OF AGENCIES *A SAMPLE OF 496 UK MARKETERS SOURCE: MARKETING WEEK AND ECONSULTANCY

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Charity and not-for-profit ������������������������������36

Food and drink ���������������������������������������������������48

Regulated industries ���������������������������������������60

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Financial services ���������������������������������������������42

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FMCG ��������������������������������������������������������������������45

Media and telecoms �����������������������������������������57

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FOREWORD

RUSSELL PARSONS AT THE RISK OF STATING the blatantly obvious, it’s been a tough year.

The impact of Covid-19 on companies across all sectors has been severe.

The lockdown was indiscriminate. For those tasked with the oversight of marketing, it has been particularly tough. Established ways of doing business changed overnight. The attitude and behaviour of customers was altered, perhaps in some ways forever.

Effective marketing leadership is more important than ever. During such uncertainty, celebration of achievement is important. Marketing Week exists to try and drive effectiveness. Yes, by calling out bad practice but also by highlighting what good looks like. As last year, this is the objective of Marketing Week’s Top 100 – building a picture of what makes an effective marketer. As with the inaugural list from 2019, we are showcasing 100 marketers across 10 sector groupings.

Although the focus is still on the most senior marketer at large companies, we have cast the net wider this year to include verticals such as pharma and professional services. There are lots of new faces alongside the more familiar.

We have again employed the considerable knowledge and wisdom of some of the most authoritative and opinionated people in UK marketing to help determine the final list so all those included can be sure they have earned their place. Read more about our judges and criteria from page 32.

One area where the list does fall short is in ethnic diversity. There are people of colour in the Top 100 but not enough. The fact is, there are not enough black and brown faces in marketing leadership positions in large organisations. Marketing Week will continue to push for change but it requires a wider and more concerted effort by the UK marketing industry.

We look forward to telling the stories of some of the Top 100 over the next 12 months. Amid the chaos and confusion of 2020, they have been severely tested. Look out for illustration of what effective marketing leadership under duress looks like across Marketing Week’s channels over the next year.

Amid the scenario planning, re-strategising and re-budgeting, it is easy to forget how much talent there is in UK marketing marketing. Massive congratulations to all those who made the list. They are shining examples of the innovation, resilience and creativity on display in the industry.

Russell Parsons Editor-in-chief, Marketing Week

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ASHLING KEARNS MARKETERS ARE NO LONGER just a support service to the rest of a business. In 2020, they are a central part of business transformation as companies of all kinds pivot towards the customer and driving growth.

With marketing as an industry in a state of ground-breaking evolution – from access to data to the need for businesses to move faster than ever – an effective marketer is one who brings a sense of curiosity to this brave new world, and is able to master the new tools at their disposal.

Today, customer centricity is the name of the game across all sectors, and that is why technology such as AI is such a huge opportunity for marketers.

Customer interactions are becoming more data-driven, and so those who can tailor personalised engagement based on past interactions will be head and shoulders above the rest.

This list is important because it champions those who are really making an impact on our industry, and it gives the next generation of marketers role models to learn from.

With a panel made up of some of the biggest names in marketing, these are the individuals who are creating lasting change in their organisations.

We are honoured to have partnered with Marketing Week for this project, because it has given me the opportunity to meet with and hear about other marketers across a whole array of industries and the great work they are doing.

A big congratulations to everyone who made it on to the list this year.

I can’t wait to see what you do in the next.

Ashling Kearns Vice-president of EMEA marketing, Salesforce

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JUDGES

JUDE BRIDGE

LINDSEY CLAY

HELEN EDWARDS

Managing partner, Oystercatchers

Chief executive, Thinkbox, and president of The Global TV Group

Partner, Passionbrand, and Marketing Week columnist

Following a 20-year career at ad agencies including McCann Erickson and J Walter Thompson, Lindsey Clay joined Thinkbox, where she has been CEO since 2014. Thinkbox is the UK marketing body for commercial TV in all its forms and on every screen, and helps agencies and advertisers get the best out of today’s TV. Clay is president of The Global TV Group, the grouping of TV broadcasters and sales houses’ trade bodies in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and Latin America, and non-executive director of content agency, Somethin’ Else.

As well as being a trustee of The Rank Foundation, Clay is on the board of its production company, CTVC, and is chair of The Rank Fellowship, its leadership award alumni group.

Helen Edwards has an MBA from London Business School and a PhD in marketing.

An award-winning business columnist, she guest-lectures in brand management at London Business School and is a regular industry judge and speaker. She is co-author of the publication Creating Passion Brands: How to Build Emotional Brand Connection with Customers, and is a partner at strategic brand consultancy Passionbrand.

Edwards is a member of the executive education teaching team for brand management at London Business School and co-teaches the brand management elective for the MBA course at the University of Bath School of Management. She also writes a monthly column for Marketing Week.

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Jude Bridge is managing partner at Oystercatchers and oversees the business both in the UK and internationally. She has a wealth of senior marketing experience both agency and client side. Starting her career with Unilever, Bridge spent time at Publicis before going on to hold roles as marketing communications director at Marks & Spencer, executive director of marketing and communications at Save the Children and global brand and marketing director at Mothercare.

She was chair of the Marketing Group of Great Britain and prior to joining Oystercatchers, ran a private consultancy practice.

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TOM FISHBURNE

KATHRYN JACOB

TANYA JOSEPH

Founder, Marketoonist and author

CEO, Pearl & Dean

Managing director, Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Tom Fishburne started drawing cartoons on the backs of business cases as a Harvard Business School student.

From a cartoon emailed to co-workers, his Marketoonist series grew by word-ofmouth to reach several hundred thousand readers every week and has been featured

by Marketing Week, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Fishburne expanded Marketoonist into a small marketing agency focused on the unique medium of cartoons.

He draws literally and figuratively from 20 years’ experience in the US and European marketing trenches, including roles at HotelTonight, Method, General Mills and Nestlé. Fishburne is the author of Your Ad Ignored Here: Cartoons from 15 Years of Marketing, Business, and Doodling in Meetings.

Kathryn Jacob has extensive experience in many areas of the media industry, including national newspapers, magazines and radio.

She has also turned her hand to running cross-media initiatives that expanded her role into television, posters, radio and cinema.

Now, as CEO of Pearl & Dean, she focuses on film and cinema. Building on the cinema advertising company’s reputation, her team has grown its activities outside of the usual tried-and-tested venues into pop-up cinema, cinemas on luxury ships, film partnerships and product placement.

Previously, Jacob was managing director of SMG Access, commercial director of Virgin Radio and agency sales director of IPC Magazines.

Tanya Joseph is a marketing and communications professional who has a particular expertise in behaviour change.

She is the architect of This Girl Can, a campaign designed to encourage more women and girls to get active.

She has spent her entire professional life in communications, starting as a journalist before becoming a press secretary, initially to the UK’s lord chancellor and then the prime minister, a role she held for more than four years.

In 2003 she left the Civil Service to join the world of consultancy including senior roles at international agency Grayling, in-house at Tesco and Sport England. She is currently managing director at Hill+Knowlton Strategies.

Joseph is a fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and director of Campaigning for Women in Advertising and Communications, London (WACL).

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JUDGES

ASHLING KEARNS

MARK RITSON

SHERILYN SHACKELL

Vice-president of EMEA marketing, Salesforce

Founder, Marketing Week Mini MBA, and Marketing Week columnist

Founder and CEO, The Marketing Academy

Ashling Kearns is the marketing leader at Salesforce covering EMEA. Kearns is responsible for driving marketing awareness and sales pipe generation across both markets. Since joining Salesforce seven years ago, she has been laser focussed on bringing her wealth of knowledge to focus on creating an innovative and high performing marketing team. Kearns thrives on the fast pace of the business but has a passion for promoting wellness among her team, as well as coaching and mentoring younger members of the business and industry both inside and outside of Salesforce.

Kearns currently lives in London after returning from Amsterdam just over two years ago where she led marketing at Salesforce for the Benelux region.

Kearns has spent more than 20 years working in the technology field, having worked at brands including BT Global Services, Microsoft and Avanade. She has a First Class Master’s Degree in Innovation through ICT from University College Dublin.

Mark Ritson is the founder of the Marketing Week Mini MBA in Marketing. He has previously taught on the MBA programmes at London Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management and the University of Minnesota, and was adjunct professor of marketing at Melbourne Business School.

Ritson has worked globally on marketing projects as a consultant. For 13 years, from 2002 to 2015, he served as in-house professor for LVMH, the world’s largest luxury group, working with senior executives from brands such as Louis Vuitton, Dior and Hennessy.

He has written a weekly column on branding for Marketing Week for more than a decade.

On three occasions he has been judged the business columnist of the year at the magazine industry’s flagship PPA Awards. Scholarly publications include articles in MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Advertising and the Journal of Consumer Research.

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Sherilyn Shackell is the founder and CEO of The Marketing Academy, a unique non-profit organisation dedicated to the development of leadership talent in the world of marketing, media and advertising. In the UK, Australia and US, it brings together some of the world’s best-known brands to provide world-class learning for young leaders through to CMOs. When she gets the chance, Shackell writes about talent engagement and development – a particular passion – and all things ‘leadership’, and her many articles have been published in The Sunday Times, Fast Company, The Telegraph, AdNews, Marketing Week, AdWeek and Management Today. Her background includes 25 years spent as a board-level headhunter before selling her company, and she served eight years on the global board of IMD International Search Group. She is currently a board advisor to Grace Blue executive search CMO practice and WeAreFearless.

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PHIL SMITH

SONIA SUDHAKAR

STEPHEN WOODFORD

Director general, ISBA

Principal, FRWD@Bain

CEO, Advertising Association

ISBA is the voice of British advertisers, and Phil Smith’s broad marketing and general management career has spanned packaged goods, grocery retail, consultancy and marketing technology startups.

He spent 10 years at Kraft, latterly as vice-president of strategy for Western Europe.

He was marketing and trading director for Kwiksave before joining the board of Somerfield as group marketing director.

Smith joined National Lottery operator Camelot in 2002, becoming commercial and operations director before being appointed managing director of Musgrave GB in 2007.

He was commercial director for the 1,000-boat Thames diamond jubilee pageant in 2012.

Smith has also worked on a number of early-stage and startup digital businesses, most recently with Ecrebo, the point-of-sale marketing specialist.

Sonia Sudhakar is vice-president for FRWD, Bain’s marketing consultancy arm where she consults for various sectors around modern marketing challenges.

Most recently marketing director at The Guardian, she has more than 20 years’ experience in marketing across the travel, telco and media sectors working for Virgin Media and ITV among others. At The Guardian, she led the team through a three-year plan to return to profit, driving the marketing transition from a reach to a relationship revenue model.

Sudhakar started her career in CRM before ‘big data’ was a thing, moving into digital when it was still its own discipline and now enjoys everything working together beautifully.

Stephen Woodford was appointed CEO of the Advertising Association in September 2016. Its mission is to promote and protect the role, rights and responsibilities of advertising, and all key media owners and trade bodies are members.

Prior to joining, Woodford held management roles in three agencies (Leo Burnett, WCRS/ Engine and adam&eveDDB). He also chairs youth marketing agency Livity, which seeks to transform young people’s lives, especially those from BAME backgrounds. He is a founder and director of U, a digital challenger to conventional banks.

Woodford is a past president of NABS and serves on the board of the History of Advertising Trust. He was also IPA president between 2003 and 2005, where he led the first ethnic diversity initiative. He transformed its professional qualifications for new entrants, which have now been sat and passed by more than 15,000 people.

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CRITERIA AND PROCESS

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The final 100 marketers were chosen on the basis of a number of factors: BUSINESS SUCCESS, which included, but was not limited to, company results, brand health scores and alignment of marketing to business strategy.

INNOVATIVE THINKING, including introduction of new initiatives and new product development.

IMPACT AND INFLUENCE, which included involvement in industry and sector initiatives, as well as evidence of internal influence.

A long list for 10 vertical sector groupings was chosen by senior members of the Marketing Week editorial team.

Names and justifications were then passed to the judges who ranked them according to the previous criteria and a final 10 for each grouping was determined.

Those considered for the long lists were the most senior marketer of their brand, company division or unit.

They must have worked for a UK brand or company, or had responsibility for the UK market and must have achieved against the set criteria in the 12 months to June 2020.

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CHARITY AND NOT FOR PROFIT

CAROLINE ABRAHAMS

PHILIP ALMOND

PHIL BASTABLE

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Charity director, Age UK

Executive director of fundraising and marketing, Cancer Research UK

Deputy director, head of marketing, NHS England

Philip Almond was appointed executive director of fundraising and marketing at Cancer Research UK in December 2019. He is tasked with leading the charity’s brand, marketing and mass fundraising teams, as well as building long-term relationships with its volunteers and donors, and developing innovative fundraising ideas.

It is a tough time to join a charity. CRUK raised £540m in fundraising income in 2018/19, an increase of 2% over the previous financial year and one of its most successful fundraising years so far.

Yet the organisation expects to see its fundraising income decline by up to 25% in the next financial year due to Covid-19.

It has cancelled its 2020 Race for Life events – instead asking people to run 5km on their own or in small socially distanced groups – and in March was forced to temporarily close its 600 high street shops across the UK. Yet that has just refocused the charity on what matters. Almond recently led the launch of a new marketing campaign designed to increase donations and boost the charity’s relevance during Covid-19. He is now looking forward to developing a more digital experience for supporters and fundraisers.

With a number of multi-award-winning, national marketing campaigns under his belt, as well as having managed the marketing and communications for both 101 and 111 contact numbers, Bastable is well-positioned to head up the development and delivery of the NHS’s national behaviour change marketing campaigns.

In September 2019, the NHS worked with MullenLowe UK to launch its ‘We Are Nurses’ campaign, targeted at both teenagers and career switchers in a drive to increase recruitment numbers. The film featured real nurses working in real hospitals and even included footage of a live birth – a first for a TV commercial – and ran across TV, radio, social and outdoor for two months.

The NHS partnered with M&C Saatchi in January 2020, launching a humorous TV advert illustrating overblown movie reactions to minor health concerns, aimed at encouraging people to “take the drama out of minor illnesses” and see their pharmacist. The ‘Help Us, Help You – Get It Seen To’ TV ad campaign was carried through into three dramatic film posters which ran out-of-home.

Bastable said the campaign was designed to “cut through and change behaviour”.

A social scientist and barrister, Caroline Abrahams has spent her career in the voluntary and public sectors. She joined Age UK in 2012 and now oversees a team of more than 60 covering media and PR, charity marketing, public affairs and campaigns, policy and research, and health and care influencing. She is also its lead spokesperson.

Over the past year, Age UK has worked to draw attention to the issue of loneliness, working on a high-profile tie-up with Cadbury to raise awareness of the 225,000 older people who often go a week without speaking to anyone. The partnership launched the ‘Donate Your Words’ campaign, which saw Cadbury remove the words from its Dairy Milk bar packaging and donate 30p from each bar sold to Age UK, as well as encouraging the public to chat to older people in their area.

The charity describes the response to the campaign as “overwhelming”, saying hundreds of thousands got involved.

Age UK has also been busy campaigning this year. Abrahams led its #Switchedoff activity, which urged prime minister Boris Johnson to take back responsibility for funding TV licences for the over-75s. And it has been vocal on the issue of adult social care, especially in light of the impact of coronavirus on care homes.

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SOPHIE CASTELL

CAROLAN DAVIDGE

BEN HAWLEY

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Director of relationships, Royal National Institute of Blind People

Executive director of marketing and engagement, British Heart Foundation

Marketing and communications director, Campaign Against Living Miserably

A research scientist with a PhD in biochemistry, Sophie Castell joined the RNIB in 2017 and leads marketing, fundraising, campaigning and partnership development. A shift in strategy that aims to push for a change in public perception of disability is reaping rewards, leading to a 3% rise in sector awareness. The RNIB has also seen an increase in funds to £85.8m in 2019, with its sight loss advice service reaching more than 55,000 people, exceeding its 48,000 target.

Over the past year, the RNIB has focused on how sight loss impacts on people’s lives. Its ‘See Differently’ campaign in December to mark the United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities showed innovative ways people with sight loss tackle everyday tasks. It included using an afro comb as an aid for slicing vegetables, a hair clip to pair up shoes and a sock which, when combined with a hoover, works for finding small objects.

During the pandemic, the Piccadilly lights displays were turned upside down so that ads from brands including Amazon Alexa, British Gas and Lego were shown the wrong way up to raise awareness of the challenges social distancing poses to those who are blind or partially sighted. The RNIB is also planning its own events, including Marathon Mates where it asks people to pair up to take on the marathon distance, as mass events remain cancelled.

Carolan Davidge joined the British Heart Foundation in 2014 after 10 years as director of communications at Cancer Research UK. She is also a non-executive director at the East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust and a trustee at ASH, Action on Smoking and Health.

In February 2020, the BHF worked with MullenLowe to create a campaign called ‘Swear Jar’ that featured a young boy trying to raise money to cure his grandfather’s vascular dementia. It ran across TV, cinema, VOD, social and outdoor. Davidge said the BHF wanted people to understand that life-saving breakthroughs rely on public support.

February 2020 also saw the BHF launch its first podcast series, The Ticker Tapes, aimed at raising awareness of the gender gap within heart disease diagnosis, treatment and care.

In May 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the BHF’s nurse helpline experienced a tenfold increase in calls, yet the charity was losing around £10m a month. It launched a campaign called ‘Coronavirus on their minds’, encouraging those in need of support to contact BHF’s helpline and inspiring others to donate.

Ben Hawley joined male suicide prevention charity CALM from creative agency Theobald Fox in 2017, tasked with fulfilling the potential for change and growth at the organisation. He says his work is about “breaking down barriers and shifting culture”, which demands creativity and personality.

The charity has focused on brand tie-ups in order to reach new audiences. A partnership with Topshop last year saw it create a ‘Care Sewn In’ clothing label that repurposes the care label inside garments to instead inform people how to look after themselves. Another with Jungle Creations’ fitness media brand Level Fitness led to the creation of a four-part video series featuring people who have used fitness to manage their mental health.

At the height of the coronavirus lockdown, CALM saw record-breaking demand for its helpline, and in May 2020 it launched the ‘CALM Covid Blocker’, a free Google Chrome extension that removes coronavirus-related content and news from a user’s web browser. It claims to have directly prevented 80 suicides in the first two months of lockdown, with its helpline staff answering almost 20,000 calls and web chats.

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CHARITY AND NOT FOR PROFIT

CHRIS MACLEOD

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Director of customer and revenue, Transport for London Chris Macleod has spent more than 13 years at Transport for London, helping the organisation to become more customer-focused by establishing its ‘Every Journey Matters’ promise and delivering a marked shift in the organisation’s customer services. In 2019/20, TfL’s commercial advertising receipts increased to £158.3m, compared to £156m in the prior year, and it is making growing commercial income a key part of its plan to diversify its revenue streams.

Macleod has also spearheaded plans to widen messaging on the network. TfL offered free ad space across its network for creative that could successfully challenge the “sometimes superficial” representation of the capital’s black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. Macleod was on the judging panel which, in February 2020, announced Nubian Skin as the winner. The fashion brand received £500,000 worth of advertising space across the TfL network.

SARAH MATTHEWS

SHEILA MITCHELL

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Marketing director, Public Health England Director of marketing and communications, Battersea With more than 20 years’ experience as a marketer across not-for-profit and commercial sectors, Sarah Matthews joined Battersea in 2017 and hit the ground running, launching the charity’s rebrand in April 2018.

Since then, the focus has been on repositioning rescue positively as the most compelling, responsible and relevant place for those seeking a dog or cat. Using the mantra ‘Rescue is Best’, the charity wants to show why rescue animals are special, while tapping into trends around anti-consumption and ethical sourcing to build its cultural relevance.

This kicked off in May 2020, when Battersea launched its ‘Rescues to the Rescue’ campaign, celebrating the ways that rescue dogs and cats are helping people to cope during lockdown. It aims to address misconceptions about rescues and stem declining rehoming numbers, closing the gap between the 63% of people who say they would rehome a rescue and the 25% who actually do.

After a career in consumer marketing at BT, Sheila Mitchell joined the Department of Health in 2008 before moving to Public Health England upon its creation in 2013. She is responsible for the design and delivery of evidence-based social marketing programmes that help people make healthy lifestyle changes.

PHE launched a digital hub in October 2019, providing NHS-approved advice on anxiety, stress and depression. The campaign was promoted across charities, business and social media while broadcasters ran a roadblock ad across ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky. Mitchell said the hub was intended to create a practical toolkit for people.

By April 2020, more than 1.9 million ‘Mind Plans’ had been completed, giving people simple steps to improve their mental health.

Mitchell’s focus this year has been on launching the government’s response to Covid-19, including its first adult health brand ‘Better Health’. Created and launched in just eight weeks, it aims to take advantage of the “reset moment” coronavirus has created to talk to people about all aspects of their health, starting with obesity.

Mitchell is stepping down from her role at PHE at the end of September to become a consultant.

NICK TERRY

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Chief marketing officer, Recruiting Group (Capita and British Army) Capita missed its target to recruit new soldiers into the Army by an average of 30% every year from 2012 to 2018; yet, in his four years as Capita Recruiting Group’s chief marketing officer, Nick Terry has risen to the challenge, driving a number of campaigns which have shifted the Armed Forces’ comms strategy from “guns and tanks” to the human experience, part of a three-year plan which began in 2017 called ‘This is Belonging’.

The latest iteration, ‘Army confidence lasts a lifetime’, launched in January 2020 and tapped into the unexpected emotional

benefits of military life, focusing on the long-lasting sense of confidence achieved through being in the Army versus the short-term hit of social media, a night out, or a new pair of trainers. Terry said that “there’s something longer-lasting that the Army can give”.

This was followed up, over the summer, with a campaign looking at the role the Army has played in the UK’s response to coronavirus, as it looks to show the breadth and relevance of an Army career.

The MoD said it had met 90% of its recruitment targets for the year to April 2020.

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26/08/2020 09:16

CONSUMER GOODS/TECH/LUXURY

GRAHAM BEDNASH

PAUL BOLT

BENJAMIN BRAUN

Creative consumer marketing director, Google UK

Chief marketing officer, Microsoft UK

Chief marketing officer (Europe), Samsung

Microsoft is experiencing something of a renaissance in 2020. UK CMO Paul Bolt describes the tech giant’s response to the Covid-19 crisis as adopting the role of “digital first responders” enabling the shift to home working and supporting the NHS. While Teams was already showing signs of outperforming competitors such as Slack and Google Hangouts pre-pandemic, three years since the messaging service launched it has notched up daily user figures of 44 million. A staggering 2.7 billion minutes of meeting time were recorded on the platform in a single day in late March, up 200% in usage from earlier in the month.

On Bolt’s watch Microsoft ramped up its global skills initiative, which aims to educate 25 million people in digital skills. It also forged partnerships with McLaren and Ford to develop state-of-the-art ventilators for the NHS. The company claimed third place in the 2020 BrandZ top 100 ranking, growing its value by 30%to $327bn (£249bn). This puts Microsoft ahead of the likes of Google, Facebook and Visa, and makes it the second fastest-growing brand in the top 10 behind Amazon.

Former Audi UK marketing and digital director Benjamin Braun joined Samsung in early 2019, tasked with making complicated things easier for people to grasp.

On joining, he set out a 90-day plan consisting of four elements: creating a clear vision; setting clear goals that were measurable and time-bound; shutting down so-called “zombie projects” which had lost relevance; and enhancing Samsung’s internal organisation and agency network.

October 2019 saw the launch of Samsung’s first marketing campaign under Braun – the ‘SpaceSelfie’. Selfies were transmitted from Earth and layered over real-time shots of the planet to promote its Galaxy smartphones and coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing.

Sales of 5G phones were much better than Samsung expected in 2019, with 6.7 million phones sold, including the Galaxy S10 5G – the phone used

by Cara Delevingne to send her SpaceSelfie into the stratosphere at the launch event.

Braun is now on a mission to increase personalisation and is working on three ‘top secret’ innovations this year.

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Graham Bednash has been at Google for seven years, taking responsibility for delivering creative strategy and ideas across brand, search, Pixel, Google Home and Assistant, as well as the company’s nationwide digital training programme.

Bednash has led many of Google’s acclaimed creative projects across social, experience, TV and content, including the 2019 campaign for Google’s Chromebook and Google Home.

In January, Chromebook partnered with Netflix Original series Sex Education to mark the show’s second season. The collaboration featured a series of mini-films called ‘Wouldn’t Happen with a Chromebook’, positioning the laptop as the solution to tech disasters at work, school and home. Bednash said it was a great way for Google to reach its student audience and shine a light on the Chromebook features.

In 2020, 20 million Chromebooks are forecast to be shipped globally, an increase of 17% on 2019, growth partly fuelled by the shift to homeworking amid Covid-19. Revenue at Google UK hit £1.6bn for the year to 30 June 2019, up by £193m on the previous year.

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CONSUMER GOODS/TECH/LUXURY

DARAIN FARAZ

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ANDREW GARRIHY

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MARIAN HOLTIES

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Global chief brand officer, Huawei Director of brand marketing EMEA and LATAM, LinkedIn Darain Faraz was promoted to director of brand marketing EMEA and LATAM for LinkedIn in April this year, after nine years at the company.

Faraz oversaw the launch of LinkedIn’s biggest UK campaign and first foray into TV advertising in 2019, which showcased the human side of the brand by using the stories of real people who have found new roles via the platform. The work is part of LinkedIn’s broader ‘In It Together’ positioning, with Faraz’s team responsible for ensuring that the marketing is relevant in local markets.

After seeing content sharing rise 50% year-onyear on the platform during the pandemic, Faraz was inspired to develop new UK campaign ‘Working It Out’. The campaign follows three stories of adapting to the ‘new normal’ – a virtual job interview, starting a new job remotely and delivering an important presentation from home.

In February 2020, Faraz co-founded People Like Us, a quarterly networking event for BAME media and marcomms professionals. He is also a mentor in the BME Mentoring Scheme from BME PR Pros.

Promoted to global chief brand officer in July 2019, Andrew Garrihy said in October last year that Huawei’s marketing must be as innovative as its R&D, an area in which the company invests billions.

When the annual Mobile World Congress was cancelled due to Covid-19, Huawei staged a virtual launch where it unveiled a variety of 5G products and discussed its wider strategy, communicating the strength and depth of the portfolio.

Now in its fourth year, Huawei’s Next-Image photography contest has become the world’s largest smartphone photography and videography competition, attracting over 520,000 entries last year. Garrihy is one of the judges for 2020.

Despite challenges presented by the government’s decision to remove Huawei from the UK 5G network, the Chinese tech giant continues to grow. Huawei was second in the 2019 global smartphone market claiming a 17.6% share, trailing Samsung with 21.8% and above Apple with 14.5%.

Garrihy has gone on record saying that while the company has experienced some “unique challenges”, Huawei remains committed to the UK and will focus on communicating all it is doing to prioritise privacy.

Marketing director, international, Peloton Interactive With a career spanning gaming, fashion and travel, Marian Holties joined Peloton Interactive as UK marketing director in July 2018. Her task was to launch the bike and fitness-streaming company into the UK, a market where the company has invested £50m, including £7m in advertising.

Holties recruited a team of three, with the company carrying out a lot of marketing in-house, and was promoted to marketing director of international in December 2018.

Ahead of its flotation in September 2019, Peloton expanded its offering beyond the bike to sell treadmills, as well as streaming yoga, strength training and meditation classes. Then, in November last year, Peloton launched a UK Christmas campaign featuring a 30-second TV ad which transports the viewer into a Peloton class. Holties said it was designed to “hero” the class experience.

Revenue rose 66% year-on-year to $524.6m (£413m) during the third quarter of 2020 as Covid-19 drove demand for home fitness, suggesting Peloton’s work establishing its reputation prior to the pandemic is paying off. In April 2020, the company held its largest-ever virtual class, with more than 23,000 people streaming it from home.

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ALISON ORSI

MICHELLE ROBERTS

NISHMA ROBB

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Marketing director, BMW Group UK Vice-president and CMO, IBM Europe

Marketing director, Google UK

After spending three years in New York, Alison Orsi returned to London in January 2019 to lead marketing for IBM Europe. With 27 years at the company under her belt, she now heads up a large international team responsible for marketing strategy and delivery of IBM’s brand and reputation, as well as its sales pipeline development.

Orsi has been heavily involved in IBM Europe’s journey to adopt agile as a marketing function, saying that the approach is a crucial part of the company’s goal to become truly customer-centric.

Around 5,000 marketers have now been instructed in agile principles.

In October 2019, IBM released the ‘Every Second Counts’ campaign, which demonstrated the dangers of cybercrime to customers. The work used real-time experiences that brought to life the pressures of a cyberattack. Videos, GIFs and social posts were shared on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, targeting CIOs and IT leaders. Orsi is a member of the IBM global marketing leadership team and a marketing ambassador. She is also a fellow of The Marketing Society UK and The Marketing Academy.

Nishma Robb was promoted from Google’s ads marketing director UK to marketing director in September 2019. She assumed responsibility for the tech company’s brand and reputation, as well as leading advertising and industry marketing for Google and YouTube.

In July 2019, YouTube launched a campaign aimed at giving the advertising industry a glimpse into celebrities’ favourite videos. Rolled out across YouTube, LinkedIn, print and experiential, the creative featured the likes Sara Cox, David Walliams and DJ Yoda.

Robb said the campaign intended to communicate the magic of YouTube by bringing it to life in a personal way and she hoped the creative would inspire adland to appreciate “what YouTube means to different people”.

Despite the impact of the pandemic on marketing budgets, YouTube ad revenue rose to $3.8bn (£2.9bn) during the second quarter of 2020.

A champion for diversity and equality, including mentoring diverse talent, Robb previously served as chair of Women@Google.

2019 was a record year for BMW, which sold 2.52 million cars, a 1.2% increase on 2018 fuelled in part by the company’s Plug-in Hybrid (PHEV) range.

Hybrid tech is just one of many innovations Michelle Roberts has seen in her 20 years at BMW, where she started as a graduate and now leads a team of more than 70 people.

In March, she developed an integrated campaign communicating how PHEVs combine the performance of petrol with the efficiency of electric. The resulting strap line – ‘Sometimes electric. Always BMW’ – featured on a cinematic film which ran across TV, social media, digital and outdoor across Europe.

Roberts also oversaw the launch of a new 10-episode podcast series #PlayNext in August, exploring pioneering new music and featuring industry legends such as composer Hans Zimmer.

In March, Roberts appeared at British Vogue’s first Forces For Change event at the Women Of The World Festival, run in partnership with BMW and AB InBev. It gave inspiring leaders and rising stars a platform to discuss issues supporting positive cultural change.

REBECCA SNELL

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Vice-president global marketing, The Lego Group Promoted from head of marketing for Central Europe to vicepresident of global marketing in June 2019, Rebecca Snell is in the hot seat at an exciting time as Lego continues to invest and innovate.

Last year saw the launch of ‘Rebuild the World’, Lego’s first integrated global brand advertising campaign in more than 30 years. The campaign was designed to fire up children’s creativity and provide them with the skills to succeed in the future job market. In late 2019, Lego also acquired BrickLink, the world’s

largest digital platform for adult fans of Lego, which has more than a million members. After notching up 5.6% global consumer sales growth in 2019, Lego had planned pre-lockdown to upgrade its ecommerce site and open 150 branded shops globally in 2020.

Since the implementation of lockdowns worldwide, Lego has launched a series of creative challenges – known as Small Builds for Big Conversations – offering parents and children a guided method to engage in conversations about the importance of online safety. The company also paused all paid social media spend during July in a bid to create an “inclusive digital environment free from hate speech”.

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FINANCIAL SERVICES

SARA BENNISON

LEANNE CUTTS

MARK EVANS

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Chief product and marketing officer, Nationwide

Group chief marketing officer, HSBC

Sara Bennison was promoted in 2019, adding responsibilities for product and proposition to her role at Nationwide. She chose not to “shout about” the new job, saying it “shouldn’t be a surprise that a senior marketer should have responsibility for price, product and proposition as well as all the other things”. She’s also a fierce defender of a function she loves, urging marketers to stand up for its role in business.

Bennison has had to manage through the coronavirus crisis, which has seen the building society’s profits tumble. In May, the organisation promised that no mortgage member would lose their home over the next 12 months via a support package that is also helping those in rented accommodation.

Before that, Nationwide was named Which?

Banking Brand of the Year in 2019 and number one for customer satisfaction among its peers earlier in 2020. The building society attracted an extra £5.7bn in deposits in 2019, helped by its ‘Pay Day Save Day’ campaign, and across its 2019 financial year it also reached its long-term target of achieving a 10% share of the current account market.

Leanne Cutts is cutting her teeth in a tough market for banking, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. Despite a tricky time for the bank, with a reduction in senior roles earlier this year, HSBC’s retail banking and wealth management arm grew its customer base by 100,000 in 2020’s first quarter.

Cutts believes the pandemic will change marketing, but this can be for the better. “This is a real reset moment for our role as marketers, as guardians of our brands, for our teams, for our organisations. We want to have stronger brands, to be useful and relevant to our customers, to foster creativity, deepen customer relationships, contribute to the communities that we serve,” she told an audience at Cannes Lions Live over the summer.

At HSBC, this has involved a rapid pivot to working from home and the quick introduction of new services such as mortgage payment holidays and calls to vulnerable customers. HSBC has a coronavirus framework in place, called the three Rs, that aims to help the company react, respond and rebuild.

Managing director of marketing and digital, Direct Line Group In 2019, Mark Evans was promoted to Direct Line Group’s executive committee, stepping up from marketing director to managing director of marketing and digital, as part of a company push to simplify its operating model and work in a more agile way. He’s responsible for brands including Churchill, Green Flag and power brand Direct Line.

Over 2019, the business saw “great gains” in its net promoter score (NPS), which was up 20% on the Direct Line brand, and a 23% reduction in complaints for the first half of 2019 versus 2018.

There is also a keen focus on marketing effectiveness, with the company running 77 econometric models for its marketing spend, meaning Evans can drive down the cost of acquiring customers while maximising ROI. The company decided to divert its new business budget towards existing customers during the coronavirus pandemic and also upped its monitoring of employees’ mental health. Evans also oversaw the decision to retire brand personality Winston ‘the Wolf’ Wolfe earlier in 2020, replacing him with famous animated characters as part of a shift in marketing activity.

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ZOE HARRIS

EMMA ISAAC

CATHERINE KEHOE

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Chief marketing officer, GoCompare; Chief executive officer, AutoSave at GoCo Group

Brand marketing director, NatWest Group

Chief customer officer, Lloyds Banking Group

Emma Isaac oversees marketing for NatWest Group brands including NatWest, Ulster Bank and Coutts, and in February led on a campaign for NatWest that promoted the ‘MoneySense’ lessons it runs in schools, showing a girl swaggering through a car park as she collects a £1 coin from a supermarket trolley. In 2019, staff taught more than 3,000 MoneySense workshops, and it’s a way for the bank to walk the talk, according to Isaac.

As the coronavirus pandemic hit, NatWest quickly moved to provide support to NHS workers and those aged over 70, communications for which Isaac said represented “fast and decisive action to give extra support to those who need it most”. Isaac was also behind a campaign that took “an active stand” in tackling the “patronising” way women are spoken to by banks – noting that women “have a preference” for NatWest, and defending the move as “courageous” in the face of polarised views.

While the banking sector sometimes sees a mixed reception from consumers, the NatWest brand saw improvements in annual rankings published by the Competition and Markets Authority in 2019.

Promoted to chief customer officer in January 2020, Catherine Kehoe oversees functions including brand and customer strategy, insights, marketing and communications for group companies including Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Scottish Widows. And it’s been a busy year or so for the group, with Halifax relaunching its brand with an updated visual identity and marketing campaign in 2019, and Lloyds creating a money advice series called Save Well, Spend Better on Channel 4, among other initiatives.

In 2019, the number of digitally active customers went up to 16.4 million from 15.7 million the previous year across the group’s brands. The group also exceeded its goal of adding 1 million pension customers, ahead of target, and now has more than 5 million people able to access a single customer view of their finances across the different brands.

Net promoter score (NPS) for group branches went up 5%, while overall complaints (excluding PPI) went down 13%.

Growth and transformation specialist Zoe Harris overhauled the GoCompare brand in 2019, repositioning its famous opera-singing character, Gio Compario, to build on the brand’s high awareness. It has an awareness score of 87.9%, according to YouGov’s BrandIndex tracker, but Harris wanted to add “depth” to the character. She also switched marketing away from paid search and towards above-the-line advertising, to build the brand over the long term.

Across the GoCo Group’s price comparison services, marketing spend hit £73.4m in 2019, and its ‘marketing margin’ (the difference between revenue and marketing expenditure, divided by revenue) increased to 47.1% from 46.4% the previous year, “reflecting the disciplined approach to customer acquisition”, according to its annual report.

Harris is also CEO of GoCo’s AutoSave group, which has around half a million customers, and, according to its company statement in June, has been growing at an annualised rate of 100%, and allowed switchers to achieve “record levels of savings”.

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FINANCIAL SERVICES

RAJ KUMAR

PETE MARKEY

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LLOYD PAGE

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Chief marketing officer, TSB Group brand and reputation director, Aviva Raj Kumar is spearheading Aviva’s focus on the customer and is pushing for the company to represent that customer with a more diverse workforce. He’s a firm believer that brand and communications must be aligned – because a company’s reputation is built on actions, not words – and knows that building human relationships is a key driver of trust. Kumar is also a board trustee of The Prince’s Teaching Institute, a charity that trains teachers at all stages of their career.

Aviva delivered some “great customer outcomes” last year, according to its latest annual report. These included a 10-point increase in transactional net promoter score (NPS) from +33 to +43, as well as encouraging scores from a newly introduced Net Trust Index showing the brand was above the sector benchmark. The business also saw a 21% reduction in complaint volumes in 2019 compared to 2018. AvivaPlus also launched last year, a product that offers existing car or home insurance customers the same deals as new ones, aiming to rebuild trust in insurance.

Pete Markey has a long list of responsibilities. Along with his position as chief marketing officer at TSB, he is an executive sponsor for LGBT within the business and took up the role of ISBA vice-president in July 2019. He also decided to learn improvised comedy and put on a show for Comic Relief that raised £30,000 for the charity via The Marketing Academy in March 2020.

In his day job, he’s responsible for all of TSB’s marketing and digital sales activity, including brand, analytics, research, effectiveness, strategy and social media, managing more than 100 people. He’s steered the brand through rather a rollercoaster time after an IT failure locked customers out of their accounts in 2018. In January 2020, the business announced £46m in pre-tax profits for 2019 after losing £105.4m the year before. It also increased deposits by 3.7% to £1.1bn, with a 20.7% uptick in business banking deposits, as well as an 18% increase in mobile app users.

Marketing director, Moneysupermarket Lloyd Page became Moneysupermarket’s marketing director in March 2019, after a consultancy stint. He launched the comparison website’s ‘Get money calm’ proposition, which aimed to help people to save money on their bills, quickly adapting the messaging when the coronavirus pandemic hit the UK. In the space of two days, Page worked with his team to try to understand how customers felt and what they needed, launching with messaging that showed how people could save up to 50% on energy bills – at a time when they were likely to be using more energy, owing to increased time spent at home.

He also has a strong emphasis on personalisation at scale, and last year launched a campaign that promoted the brand’s credit monitor product, which allows each customer to understand their own credit score and switch to the best products. It did well, with engagement click-through going up from 20% in 2016-2018 to 39% in 2019, and CRM revenue up 30%.

TRISTAN THOMAS

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Vice-president, marketing, Monzo Tristan Thomas was promoted to vice-president of marketing at app-based bank Monzo in November 2019, and leads marketing, communications, policy and financial inclusion.

Last year, Thomas oversaw the brand’s first TV commercial – watched more than 20 million times on YouTube – worked on the launch of the brand in the US and helped to oversee a funding round that raised £113m, valuing the bank at around £2bn. While the startup is yet to be profitable, more people joined Monzo than

any other bank between July and September 2019 – a total of 22,800 customers. By the end of 2019, the bank had more than 3.6 million customers and was the UK’s most recommended brand in a YouGov poll, although it has taken a hit due to the pandemic.

If his day job wasn’t enough, Thomas is also a fan of the side hustle, launching both PrintStamp – a service that prints and sends documents – and wine subscription service Winepost during the coronavirus lockdown. Thomas plans to leave Monzo at the end of the year to take a break and then “try something new”.

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FMCG

ORI BEN SHAI

CONNY BRAAMS

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Vice-president and managing director UK and Ireland, Kimberly-Clark

Chief digital and marketing officer, Unilever

Ori Ben Shai has crossed the globe working for some of the world’s biggest brand-centric FMCG groups over the past two decades.

His CV includes spells at Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and Domino’s Pizza, working across markets including the UK, Israel, Switzerland and the US. He joined Kimberly-Clark in January 2017, taking up his current role in May 2019.

At Kimberly-Clark – which celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2022 – Ben Shai is responsible for a roster of brands that includes household names such as Kleenex and Andrex. He says he believes in trust-based leadership, as it creates better organisations, stronger people, better processes and more efficient structures.

The group’s ‘K-C Strategy 2022’ is based on a two-channel approach to elevate core brands in established markets such as the UK, while accelerating category growth in developing and emerging locations. The group saw net sales of $18.5bn (£15bn) in 2019.

LEX BRADSHAWZANGER

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Conny Braams is a 30-year veteran at Unilever, who took over the top marketing role at the FMCG giant from Keith Weed at the beginning of the year.

A new title of chief digital and marketing officer was created for her, to align with the company’s ambition to become a “future-fit, fully digitised organisation”.

Braams began her Unilever career as a product manager for soup brands in the Netherlands in 1990 and has impressed many in the company with her leadership skills since then. Unilever chief executive officer Alan Jope called Braams “one of our most successful and talented leaders, as well as a highly effective driver of change”.

Developing new ways to promote its brands and advertise online is key to Unilever’s future, and the group had introduced a number of initiatives to achieve this before Braams took up her role.

Her extensive operational experience coupled with strong knowledge of local markets from her earlier Unilever roles are seen as key assets in tackling the challenge and getting the company in shape for the future.

Chief marketing officer, L’Oréal UK and Ireland Lex Bradshaw-Zanger seeks to balance the adoption of new technology with a love of techniques and standards from the past.

With marketing beliefs rooted in traditional theory, and a self-confessed fondness for British TV adverts of the 1980s, Bradshaw-Zanger says he misses the quality and humour of television from the last millennium.

His commitment to employee welfare, however, is certainly up to date. He helped to ensure as much stability and continuity as possible for the cosmetics giant’s marketing teams when they were all forced to work remotely during the Covid-19 crisis.

Bradshaw-Zanger’s CV gives some insight into his knowledge of marketing’s back pages. A veteran of agencies – including WPP and Leo Burnett – he held senior client-side roles at Facebook and McDonald’s before joining L’Oréal. And an education that spanned Spain, France, the UK and the US means he has a truly international outlook.

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FMCG

NICOLA CORONADO

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LESLEY CROWTHER

HANNAH FRENCH

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Senior vice-president of global marketing, La Mer

Marketing director Northern Europe, Johnson & Johnson

Lesley Crowther has worked at Estée Lauder Companies for the past seven years, taking on her current role as senior vice-president of skincare brand La Mer in July. Prior to this she was vicepresident of consumer engagement and retail for Estée Lauder in the UK. Despite the diversity of its brand portfolio, she believes the company still has a family feel. “As a family-run company, the warmth and the heart that has existed since our inception remains at our core,” she says.

She has played a key role in ensuring a more open dialogue between brands. It was Crowther who set up Estée Lauder’s Consumer Engagement Centre of Excellence in 2016, to help the company collate and share consumer learning and insight from sales, focus groups and social listening activity. The results are used to fuel innovation across the group.

“It’s all about driving capability and understanding the consumer,” says Crowther.

In her current role, Hannah French is at the heart of a pharmaceutical industry that is working to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.

French started in the sector in 2002 when she joined Pfizer as group marketing manager, working across a portfolio of over the counter products.

A marketing director role at McNeil Consumer Healthcare followed, before she moved to GlaxoSmithKline as category marketing director for Oral Care. French took on her current role in November 2019.

Pharmaceutical sales make up slightly more than half of Johnson & Johnson’s revenues, with the remainder coming from consumer healthcare treatments and devices. The global giant has more than 132,000 employees worldwide, and saw revenues of $82bn (£67bn) in 2019. In March, the company created a $50m support package for frontline health workers battling Covid-19.

Regional marketing director, Essity Health and hygiene group Essity is among the companies that have encouraged consumers to consider their behaviour during the Covid-19 crisis by signing up to the ‘Shop Responsibly’ campaign created by Publicis Groupe UK. Regional marketing director Nicola Coronado was behind the decision to join the campaign, in order to demonstrate the purpose of the Essity group, which owns a portfolio of brands including Cushelle, Plenty, Bodyform and Tena.

“We aim to drive heightened consciousness among consumers about the potential impact of their behaviours on others, and, in turn, ensure that everyone – particularly the most vulnerable in our society, as well as our courageous and committed key workers – is able to access the products they need,” she says.

She has held several marketing roles at Essity, formerly known as SCA Hygiene Products, where she has worked for nearly two decades.

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KATE HUANG

SARA MENDEZ BERMUDEZ

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KATHARINE NEWBY GRANT

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Vice-president, Beauty Care, Northern Europe, Procter & Gamble

CMO, Callaly Kate Huang joined Callaly in 2017, before its launch, to lead on brand strategy and develop its creative and content. She heads a team of designers and marketers with responsibility for sales and marketing strategies that drive growth and hit revenue targets.

This year, the brand launched its first major marketing campaign showing how little innovation there has been in the tampon sector compared to categories such as condoms and contraceptives.

The campaign’s aim was to promote Callaly’s signature ‘tampliner’ – a tampon with a built-in mini-liner – which aims to shake up the sector.

With Callaly still early in its brand journey, Huang sees advertising as a way to raise awareness and drive up talkability rather than push sales. She is also hoping to bust the taboos around menstruation and encourage people to talk more about periods.

Callaly’s latest campaign, ‘The Whole Bloody Truth’, aims to showcase the experiences of all people with periods.

Global chief marketing officer, Method Products Sara Mendez Bermudez joined People Against Dirty (known as Method Products in the US) in 2016 as European head of brand experience in charge of the Method and Ecover brands. In July, she was promoted to global CMO, giving her an international remit and reporting into the CEO. In her new role, she is responsible for a bigger brand portfolio, which covers Mrs Meyers and Babyganics (brands not yet in the UK) as well as Method and Ecover. Mendez Bermudez describes all the Method Products brands as mission-driven and challengers. Its brands aim to “change the world” by creating cleaning products that are environmentally friendly, tapping into a shift to more sustainable business.

Mendez Bermudez has a wealth of FMCG experience, from early roles in Spain with Danone and household brands in the RB stable to more senior positions at Johnson & Johnson and Avon.

More recently, she spent five years as innovation marketing director at Bacardi. She describes her strengths as international brand building, innovation and building high-performance teams.

Katharine Newby Grant has spent the bulk of her career at Procter & Gamble, joining the company in a brand management role in 2001 and quickly rising through the ranks. In July this year, she was promoted from marketing director for Northern Europe to vice-president of its Beauty Care division.

Newby Grant’s work has seen P&G work with the Football Association to promote women’s sports, sparking a ‘Join the Pride’ campaign to showcase women. “If you want to inspire future generations, they need to see their role models; they need to say, ‘that’s me, and I can do that’. It’s a really important moment, and there’s a lot more social consciousness. As a brand, we felt compelled to take a stance on that,” she says.

Last year, P&G chief brand officer Marc Pritchard said the company would focus more on measuring the reach of its advertising rather than spend, by reducing the frequency of many of its ads, particularly online.

TAMARA ROGERS

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Global CMO, consumer healthcare, GlaxoSmithKline As a science-led corporation, GlaxoSmithKline is pushing to foster a sense of agility and startup-style thinking. In her role as global CMO for consumer healthcare, Tamara Rogers is behind a strategy to shun the fear of failure, experiment with new approaches and “fail fast” to help GSK to fight back against dynamic direct-to-consumer rivals.

“You have to set yourself up to not invest the whole business in

those experiments, but instead have lots of experiments and pour gasoline on the ones that work,” says Rogers.

The company is making design marketing’s strategic partner in order to create stronger brands and clearer communications, by working as a “creative steward” for GSK’s brand experience.

Rogers joined GSK in 2018 as region head EMEA after five years at Unilever. She extends her try-hard approach to her management style, expecting marketers in her department to shape their own careers and seize opportunities. She believes people, like companies, can be held back by a self-limiting mindset.

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FOOD AND DRINK

MATT BARWELL

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CRISTINA DIEZHANDINO

YILMAZ ERCEYES

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Chief marketing officer, Diageo

Chief marketing officer, Premier Foods

Stepping into the shoes of a chief marketing officer who has 35 years of experience in marketing, has spent 21 years at the company and has bagged a CBE in the Queen’s 2020 Honours List can be daunting, but Cristina Diezhandino seems unfazed.

Formerly global category director for Scotch and managing director for Reserve, Diageo’s luxury brands business, Diezhandino is taking over the top role at a difficult time for the alcohol industry as it grapples with the fallout from coronavirus. The company paused marketing during the pandemic, saying it was ineffective, but is now preparing to increase it again as demand recovers.

Under Diezhandino’s leadership, Diageo’s Reserve brands division rose from third to first in luxury market share. She has also overseen Diageo’s biggest single investment in Scotch whisky tourism, including the creation of a state-of-the-art immersive Johnnie Walker visitor experience in Edinburgh, now due to open in 2021, as well as the transformation of its visitor centres across Scotland. She aims to continue what she describes as Syl Saller’s “tremendous legacy”.

A marketer with 18 years’ experience in FMCG, Yilmaz Erceyes was appointed CMO of Premier Foods in November 2019, after the business decided to eliminate the role of managing director in favour of a CMO and chief customer officer.

Erceyes’ promotion from marketing director was a statement of intent from Premier Foods, which elevated marketing to the executive leadership team in a bid to turbocharge growth. The restructure was implemented after the company notched up nine consecutive quarters of growth.

As CMO, Erceyes has responsibility for marketing, consumer insights, R&D and analytics, as well as international marketing. His strategy is focused on “innovation, brand building and brilliant in-store execution”. Erceyes, for example, oversaw the relaunch of the Mr Kipling brand, a product line which has grown by 22% over the past two years.

During the first quarter of 2020, Premier Foods’ UK sales of branded products increased by 28% and online sales grew 115%. The company credited its success with the decision to ramp up TV advertising during lockdown, with Mr Kipling alone being supported by eight weeks of airtime for its ‘Little Thief’ ad.

Chief marketing officer, Britvic Matt Barwell is responsible for all aspects of Britvic’s global brand strategy and execution, innovation, corporate affairs and the company’s sustainability agenda.

Having led the company’s charge to reduce sugar, Britvic surpassed its 2020 goal to reduce average calories per serve by 20% a year early, and has set a new 2020 target of at least 73% of drinks volume sold being low/no-calorie drinks. To support this, it launched three sugar-free flavours of Tango in 2019 and became the first company to introduce colour-coded nutrition labelling.

Britvic started 2020 well. Fruit Shoot sales had been increasing prior to Covid-19, following its ‘Fruit Shoot for the Moon’ campaign and its Christmaslimited edition flavour, Merrylicious. In March 2020, Fruit Shoot also launched a £1m media campaign to educate parents and consumers about the product’s real fruit content and no added sugar.

Last year, Britvic won the Grand Prix at the Marketing Week Masters Awards following the successful revitalisation of its Robinsons brand, work that Barwell said grew the category and boosted brand penetration.

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MICHAEL GILLANE

SARAH KOPPENS

JOHN LUCK

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UK marketing director, Heineken

Marketing director, Birds Eye UK & IE

Chief marketing officer, Intercarabao

Michael Gillane was promoted to UK marketing director at Heineken at the start of 2020, charged with developing a no/low-alcohol portfolio and driving its digital transformation.

Gillane says Heineken is “leading the way” in the first, using its James Bond tie-up to push its zero alcohol beer Heineken 0.0%. It is launching new low-alcohol options, including Old Mout Alchohol-Free and Birra Moretti Zero, as well as Strongbow Dark Fruit Ultra Low Alcohol cider.

Heineken is also looking to grow its Strongbow and Red Stripe brands through a sponsorship of the BRIT Awards and repositioning of Red Stripe around a new brand platform ‘Good Things To Come’ that aims to champion cultural diversity.

Gillane leads a team of more than 100 marketers covering consumer brands marketing, media, innovation and insights, as well as category strategy and channel activation. He is responsible for brands including Strongbow, Foster’s, Birra Moretti and, of course, Heineken.

It has been a baptism of fire for Sarah Koppens, who joined Birds Eye in January 2020, having previously worked at Coca-Cola and Cadbury before taking a career break. Tasked with sustaining three successful years of growth for the brand, Koppens said she looked forward to continuing the progression “with some fantastic initiatives and products”.

She wasn’t cowed by the global pandemic that took hold in March 2020. Rather than choosing to freeze its marketing activity, Birds Eye launched its ‘What’s for Tea?’ campaign in early April. Turned around in just 18 days, the TV adverts featured snapshots of consumers living in lockdown.

Koppens said she wanted to tell consumers: “You’re there for each other, we’re here for you.”

While Birds Eye has made moves to keep up with new trends, in particular with its launch of vegetarian range Green Cuisine, it has also been focused on its classics. The ‘Birds Eye Butties 2020’ activity invited people to make their own fish-finger sandwich and upload a recipe to social channels.

More recently, it has run a competition to find a new Captain Birds Eye to appear on limited-edition packs, picking 24-year-old Charlotte Carter-Dunn – the first time the captain has been a woman.

After time in the marketing teams of Coca-Cola and Time Out, John Luck joined energy drinks company Intercarabao in 2016, tasked with launching the brand in the UK market. In mid-2019, it was the seventh biggest energy drinks company in Britain and Luck is aiming to make Carabao the market leader, as it is in its native Thailand.

Sports sponsorship has played an important role, with Carabao announcing a two-year extension of its partnership with the English Football League (EFL) Cup last year. This means the brand will continue as the title sponsor of the competition for the 2020/21 and 2021/22 seasons. The deal marks the biggestever commercial sponsorship of the Cup. It is familiar territory – Carabao has sponsored several football clubs including Chelsea FC and Chelsea Women. Luck said “football remains an important asset to help us achieve our growth plans”.

On Luck’s watch Carabao went live with a ‘for everyone’ positioning to drive category growth and launched its ‘Half the sugar of Red Bull’ campaign in a bid to challenge consumer perceptions of energy drinks.

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FOOD AND DRINK

SOPHIE MORE

LIAM NEWTON

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MICHELE OLIVER

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Vice-president, marketing, Carlsberg Group Marketing director, BrewDog Sophie More joined what is now the largest craft brewer in Europe as marketing director in August 2017, having previously working for brands including Jack Daniel’s and Red Bull.

She has continued BrewDog’s irreverent advertising, launching a campaign for its non-alcoholic Punk AF beer with text that read: “Sober as a motherfu”. The Advertising Standards Authority duly banned the outdoor ad for alluding to a swear word.

However, BrewDog has found renewed purpose during coronavirus and was one of the first brewers to open its distilleries to make hand sanitiser, which was given away for free by charities to those in need. In May, it launched a kickstart collective, supporting independent bars, pubs and bottle shops with both financial and operational aid including £250 to restock, online training and guidance on reopening.

But it would not be BrewDog without some irreverence and so, in May, it launched a limited edition ‘Barnard Castle eye test’ beer, following the Dominic Cummings controversy. Profits went towards funding free hand sanitiser for the NHS and healthcare charities.

Liam Newton was at the forefront of last April’s relaunch of Carlsberg Group’s eponymous beer.

The brand was upgraded through the launch of its “most ambitious and honest” marketing campaign ever, where it admitted it was “probably not the best beer in the world”.

The launch was backed by an integrated communications campaign and included a social media push called ‘Mean Tweets’, which reached 6 million people in the UK. The campaign won Marketing Week’s Campaign of the Year 2019, and the activity prompted a “significant” uptick in sales in bars and pubs, although off-trade sales still need some work.

In March 2020, the second-phase of its reinvention launched across TV, social, broadcast, out-of-home and digital, this time promoting ‘Keen Tweets’. Videos showed employees guessing the missing words, such as: “The new Carlsberg is a******* c****” (‘actually class’). Newton says keeping the “honesty” of the original campaign is key to the new work.

Following the outbreak of Covid-19, it launched a free digital platform, ‘Love My Local’, enabling pubs, bars, restaurants and cafes to safely sell takeaway and delivery food and drink.

Global corporate brand and purpose director, Mars Michele Oliver heads the department responsible for Mars’ marketing mix budget. She also has global brand responsibilities and leads the board’s focus on diversity and inclusion.

She has been central to setting the strategic direction of the business, with the past two years seeing strong financial results and exceeding targets, at both the top and bottom line.

Last year, the company rolled out its global rebrand and purpose statement, with Oliver stating that it is more important than ever for brands to stand for something and urging marketers to act as cheerleaders for creativity. Mars created the tagline ‘The world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today’, a commitment to do business in a way that positively contributes to society.

Oliver won The Marketing Society’s Bravest Marketing Leader of 2019 for her “socially conscious, taboo-busting and yet funny” campaigns, producing advertising that tackles issues such as sexuality, disability, race, age and gender.

NICK ROBINSON

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Managing director of brands and CMO, Kerry Foods Nick Robinson joined Kerry Group’s consumer foods division, Kerry Foods, as chief marketing officer in 2017, before becoming managing director of brands and CMO in January 2019.

In September 2019, Kerry Foods worked with Accenture Interactive on a £2.5m campaign for Strings & Things. The master brand includes the range of Cheestrings and other shaped children’s cheese products. The work included two TV adverts – based on the power of Cheestrings to fire a child’s

imagination, seeing them glide across a fantastical computergenerated universe – and radio content.

The growing flexitarian sector has also presented an opportunity for Kerry Foods. It has launched a meat-free brand called Naked Glory – which includes meat-free quarter pounders, sausages, ‘no-meat balls’ and mince – appointing The&Partnership as creative agency of record. Social and digital work launched in phases from October 2019, with a £2.5m budget planned for 2020 campaign work.

In July, Robinson was named CEO of Kerry Foods. He is transitioning into the role and will take it up fully this month.

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FOOD AND DRINK RETAIL

MATT ATKINSON

ALESSANDRA BELLINI

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Chief membership officer, The Co-operative Group

Chief customer officer, Tesco

With a seat on The Co-operative Group’s executive committee in his role as chief membership officer, Matt Atkinson describes himself as a “new world” CMO driving “change, growth and innovation in a highly challenged market”.

Last year, for the first time, the group united its food, insurance and funeral care marketing with a £10m ad campaign that launched a new line: “It’s what we do”.

The activity aimed to show how The Co-op invests in local communities and benefits members, “not just a small group of institutional investors”.

According to its annual report, the group returned a total of £76m to members and local causes in its 2019 financial year. Last year, the group had 4.6 million active members, but said its focus on attracting younger people drove a 36% increase in new members aged 35 or under.

When the coronavirus hit in the spring, The Co-op decided to pull its Easter ad campaign and switch to a message encouraging customers to support food banks. Alongside setting up a phone-ordering service, the grocer donated food worth £1.5m via charity partner FareShare to help those most at risk.

SHARRY CRAMOND

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Alessandra Bellini knew she “had arrived” when she posed for a photo at a Tesco checkout after joining the supermarket in 2017. Since then, she’s gone from strength to strength, being named Marketing Week Masters Marketer of the Year in 2019 and pushing on further with a relentless focus on understanding customers.

Part of that involved helping to rebuild Tesco’s reputation with a campaign celebrating its centenary, aiming to put its “great value” to the forefront. Bellini also masterminded an overhaul of Clubcard, which now includes a subscription element designed to drive loyalty.

In its annual report, Tesco said its value perception had increased 14.9 points to 21 over the past five years, with NPS rising 19 points to 29 during the same period.

Like other supermarkets, Tesco had a boost during the coronavirus outbreak, with sales rising 11.7% in the 12 weeks to 16 May, after expanding its online offering during lockdown. Bellini revamped Tesco’s ‘Food Love Stories’ ads, asking customers to film their own cookery dedications to family and friends in a campaign that was turned around in under 10 days.

Marketing director (food and hospitality), Marks & Spencer Sharry Cramond has the plum role of running marketing for M&S Food. The past year has seen her launch a co-branded range with Marmite, introduce a new ‘re-Marks-able’ value positioning and celebrate M&S Simply Food being named the UK’s favourite retailer in a study by consultancy OC&C in December 2019.

While other supermarkets have been in the ecommerce game for a while, M&S was quick to strike a deal with Deliveroo at the onset of the Covid-19 lockdown, enabling customers to order essentials such as a Made Without Wheat food box.

The company has an ambition to double the size of its food business, which will be aided by the launch of its Ocado partnership this month, making thousands of M&S products available for delivery.

In its annual report, the retailer said its food business had “outperformed the market” as sales increased by 2.1%. M&S credits this growth to changes in the range, better value and customer communications, including its sponsorship of ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent.

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FOOD AND DRINK RETAIL

KATIE EVANS

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Chief marketing officer, Burger King UK Welcoming creativity, wherever it comes from, has been key to Burger King’s popular marketing while Katie Evans has been UK CMO. From avoiding formal processes to welcoming creative pitches from its agencies, the approach has led to work that reaches consumers across different channels and looks outside the fast-food sector.

“There is no doubt creativity makes marketing more effective. It makes a campaign much more memorable, much more disruptive and it connects with consumers on a different level,” says Evans.

She credits this creative stance with allowing marketing to help solve wider problems than just attracting customers. ‘The Meltdown’ campaign, for example, saw Burger King calling on customers to donate unwanted plastic meal deal toys – from any brand – so that it could recycle them into play area facilities in its restaurants..

Evans was also at the heart of Burger King UK’s reopening strategy post-lockdown, using PR, broadcast and social media to communicate the phased opening. Understanding consumers’ desire for a taste of the familiar, she put the Whopper front and centre of the marketing, focusing on the use of fresh ingredients made to order.

CLAIRE FARRANT

MEGHAN FARREN

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Marketing director, Lidl UK

Chief marketing officer, KFC UK and Ireland

Claire Farrant has been marketing director at Lidl UK since 2015, overseeing strong growth at the discount grocer. She has put the focus firmly on the quality and range of its product, talking less about price in a bid to convince shoppers Lidl can be a destination for the big weekly shop.

“We want to make it really clear that we are big on quality, and it’s a quality that can be found in everything that we sell, the things that people really care about, not just the occasional product,” she says.

Farrant also has a laser focus on understanding customers, employing social anthropology to understand how they feel about Christmas and creating a campaign that tapped into new traditions.

Likewise, in January Lidl removed cartoon characters from cereal packaging to “encourage healthier choices”.

That focus is paying off despite coronavirus and the shift to online grocery shopping. Lidl came third in YouGov BrandIndex’s annual barometer of the top brands in the UK and is seeing some of the fastest growth in the market, with sales up 15.7% in the 12 weeks to 9 August.

A commitment to adopting a growth mindset and taking calculated risks has seen Meghan Farren prosper at KFC. After a period of enforced lockdown, the fast-food chain came back with a bang with a campaign showing customers how much it had “missed them”. The ad featured images from the #RateMyKFC social media campaign, which encouraged people to make their own versions of KFC chicken wings and post them on social for the brand to critique. The social campaign alone garnered hundreds of tweets and an engagement rate of 101% among its followers over a six-week period.

Next, KFC pushed out its ‘Don’t be a tosser’ message, urging consumers to bin their litter, and committed more team members to regular litter picks around its restaurants.

Farren’s modus operandi is sometimes described as brave, but she cautions that fear of failure can itself be the limiting factor, asking “What’s the worst that can happen if you screw up?”

A career that has moved from banking to fast food, via management consultancy, suggests that being open to new challenges may be a liberating professional strategy.

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MARTIN GEORGE

MARK GIVEN

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HANNAH SQUIRRELL

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Customer director, Waitrose Martin George joined the John Lewis Partnership (JLP) in 2017 initially as customer director for the Waitrose brand. He has since worked with his then John Lewis counterpart Craig Inglis on bringing the two brands closer together, including their first joint Christmas campaign featuring Edgar, an excitable dragon who keeps ruining Christmas moments because he can’t control his fire breathing.

When Inglis left the partnership in March, George took on a joint marketing role across the two brands in a restructure that aimed to deduplicate roles.

At Waitrose, he was responsible for campaigns that promoted the quality and provenance of its food, while at John Lewis, marketing was about showing the department store was in tune with modern living.

However, in a slight reversal of that restructuring, JLP is giving more autonomy back to the individual brands. That means George has reverted to his role as customer director of Waitrose, as the grocer prepares to end its 18-year relationship with Ocado and convince shoppers to shop with it, rather staying with Ocado and its new partner Marks & Spencer.

Customer and marketing director, Greggs Chief marketing officer, Sainsbury’s, Argos, Nectar and Tu Mark Given was appointed to the Sainsbury’s board in June after being promoted to chief marketing officer the year before, in a move new chief executive Simon Roberts said would “ensure that we really understand how customers are feeling, what they’re thinking and how this affects the way they shop.”

Given has marketing responsibility across the supermarket, as well as its Argos, Nectar and Tu brands. In October, he celebrated Nectar’s position at number one in the Android and Apple app stores after a proposition revamp. The new platform had more than 3.5 million unique users as of February.

Given also had oversight of Sainsbury’s ‘The Big Night In’ appeal in April, a campaign that was produced in under a week and ran across TV, social, press and outdoor.

Like other supermarkets, Sainsbury’s enjoyed a boost at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, with sales up 11% year-on-year in the 12 weeks to 16 May. The supermarket hired thousands of staff to help deliver online shopping during the period and is rolling out till-free, contactless shopping to more than 100 of its convenience stores.

Given that Greggs was named Brand of the Year at the 2019 Marketing Week Awards, and its marketing was credited with a key role in boosting profits, it’s no surprise to see Hannah Squirrell on the Top 100 list.

In March, Greggs chief executive Roger Whiteside hailed exceptional sales growth of 9.2% and credited innovations, including a new mobile app and vegan menu items, for the performance.

Squirrell says that a tight marketing budget has forced her team to think and behave differently, after she was appointed in 2017 to bring new skills to the Greggs brand. PR messages celebrating the launch of Gregg’s vegan sausage roll in 2019 reached 69% of UK adults, while a whopping 8 million people watched the launch film as the brand boosted social engagement and its share of voice against rivals. Nine out of 10 customers said their perception of Greggs had improved.

Despite its outlets being closed for most of the second quarter due to Covid-19, Greggs has seen sales bounce back to 72% of the 2019 level since re-opening, which it credits to the brand’s “broad customer appeal”.

INÉS URES

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Chief marketing officer, Deliveroo Inés Ures joined Deliveroo as its first chief marketing officer in January last year, overseeing (among other things) brand strategy, acquisition and retention, in-house digital marketing, subscriptions and customer insights for the food delivery app across 13 markets. In Ures’ own words, she’s “helping to deliver the definitive food company”.

Deliveroo has also delivered during the pandemic. The company hit its target to supply 500,000 free meals to NHS keyworkers, teamed up with Visa to announce a support package to help SME restaurants and introduced a new ‘Table Service’

feature, allowing customers to order in restaurants, pubs and cafés via the Deliveroo app.

Ures also led Deliveroo’s ‘Here to deliver’ campaign, a TV ad that reminded people that restaurant kitchens were still open and featured staff holding hand-written signs that they posted on social media.

The business also announced a partnership with Morrisons to deliver essential items during the coronavirus lockdown, which shoppers could receive in as little as 30 minutes. The partnership had the potential to reach 6.8 million of the supermarket’s catchment.

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GENERAL RETAIL

NATHAN ANSELL

KRISTOF FAHY

GARETH JONES

Marketing director, clothing and home, Marks & Spencer

Chief marketing officer, Moonpig

Global chief marketing officer, Farfetch

Kristof Fahy started his role as CMO at Moonpig several months before the Covid-19 outbreak, fresh from a position as interim CMO at Checkatrade.com.

He already had extensive experience of sectors as diverse as gambling, travel and media, but nothing could have prepared him for marketing under lockdown. Moonpig had previously made several changes to its management to drive growth but it was hit by a surge in demand as consumers turned online.

Quick thinking saw the brand introduce eCards and a ‘stay-at-home’ range, which during lockdown made up 10% of sales, as well as simplifying ranges to ease pressure on the supply chain. App downloads tripled, as Fahy’s team capitalised on the significant demand for Moonpig’s range of products.

“The crisis has given us a real energy in the business to try and find ways of getting things done, potentially a bit more simply and quickly than when you have the luxury of thinking time,” he says.

Fahy is now leading the charge for accelerated decision-making and greater collaboration between marketing, operations, product and commercial.

Online luxury fashion platform Farfetch was among brands that saw sales rocket during the Covid-19 lockdown, with year-on-year revenues up 90% to $331m (£267m) as customers sought a fashion fix.

But the group had already been growing strongly throughout 2019.

Farfetch global CMO Gareth Jones started his career as a marketing assistant at Rolls-Royce, with a stint at Royal Mail before progressing through roles at T-Mobile and Capital One. A one-year stint at Best Buy was followed by senior marketing roles at Carphone Warehouse and Compare the Market.

Jones was marketing director and then CMO at eBay before joining Farfetch in March this year.

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Since Nathan Ansell took on the new role as marketing director of clothing and home at Marks & Spencer, he has overseen a dramatic shift in its marketing. The company split its clothing and home and food accounts, with Ansell opting for fashion specialists ODD to run the creative account for its clothing business.

Since then, M&S has adopted more of an always-on approach to marketing that heroes particular collections or pieces. It has launched its first standalone men’s casualwear campaign, as well as the first denim-only campaign in a bid to boost sales. Christmas had a similarly product-focused approach, focusing on its festive jumper range.

Ansell says his main job is to get people to remember the products and drive reappraisal of the brand. “If everyone forgets the advertising but remembers the product then I’ve done a great job in that context.”

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KENYATTE NELSON

HELEN NORMOYLE

CARLY O’BRIEN

Chief brand officer, N Brown Group

Marketing director, Boots UK and Ireland

Chief marketing officer, The Very Group

Some may still think of N Brown as a venerable mail order company – the oldest part of the company was founded in 1859 – but it has a much broader profile.

The appointment last year of Kenyatte Nelson as chief brand officer reflects that; Nelson headed up marketing at Missguided when that brand saw sales jumping by 40% on nights that Love Island, which it sponsored, was airing on ITV2. He described the strategy as providing a new way to talk to customers with “depth, frequency and high levels of engagement”.

However, Nelson only moved into the fashion sector five years ago, via Shop Direct, after a lengthy stint at Procter & Gamble, where he became global communications leader for the group’s Prestige range of fragrance and make-up brands.

Nelson is N Brown’s first chief brand officer. The company has been going through a substantial restructuring, closing physical stores to become an online-only retailer.

Boots marketing director Helen Normoyle has worked for brands that consumers might think of as familiar and comforting – the BBC, Boots and DFS – but she has always sought professional challenges designed to put her outside her own comfort zone.

“You’ve really got to embrace change. It’s important not to become complacent,” she says.

Starting her career in market research at GfK gave Normoyle a grounding in, and a passion for, understanding people. But she keeps one eye on how unreliable people can be when they tell researchers what they want, reflecting on Henry Ford’s observation that what his customers wanted was a faster horse.

“The art of great marketing and great insights and research is a combination of really deep customer insights and data with instinct and intuition,” she says. This is a discipline she seeks to bring to Boots, as it copes with the challenges of changing high streets and the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic.

After holding marketing roles at several banking brands, including Virgin Money and the NatWest Group, in April last year Carly O’Brien was appointed as CMO at online retailer The Very Group, which was formerly known as Shop Direct and incorporates the Littlewoods brand.

Initially joining the group as customer management and performance marketing director, O’Brien was elevated to CMO within a matter of months. Since then, she has appointed Grey London as the group’s creative agency after a pitch – most of which was conducted remotely due to Covid-19 lockdown measures – to replace long-serving incumbent St Luke’s. The first campaigns from the new relationship are expected this autumn across multiple channels.

In an August trading update, Very revealed sales were up 36% and website visits had surged 65% driven by growth in gaming, DIY and garden products, success the retailer credited to its online, multicategory offering and flexible payment structure.

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GENERAL RETAIL

JANE SHIELDS

ED SMITH

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KATHERINE WHITTON

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Global chief marketing officer, Specsavers Group sales and marketing director, Next Retailer Next describes its group sales and marketing director Jane Shields as having a “profound understanding” of the company’s operations, gained from long experience across different parts of the group.

Shields has followed a classic one-company career path from the shop floor upwards, having joined Next in 1985 as a sales assistant. After rising rapidly through store-level management, she was promoted further. By 2000, Shields had been appointed sales director, responsible for all store operations and training. Additional responsibilities were added to her role until she was given a seat on the Next company board in 2013.

Next has seen consistently strong performance, with its last annual results statement before the Covid-19 crisis showing sales up by 3.3%. Future developments are expected to include an onsite marketing system to more accurately target items to online shoppers, as well as the expansion of digital marketing capabilities in overseas markets.

General manager, integrated marketing EU, Amazon Last year, Amazon overtook Apple and Google to become the world’s most valuable brand – worth $315.5bn (£248bn), according to Kantar’s global BrandZ rating. The research group calculated that Amazon’s value had grown by 52% during the preceding year.

Speaking at The Shipping Forecast event last year, Ed Smith, EU general manager of integrated marketing at Amazon since 2017, unveiled a manifesto calling on consumers to have a more conscious relationship with the mobile devices and apps they all carry. “Turn off our notifications, choose when we want to read and reply to messages, put your phone face down when you are with others… and stuff your eyes with wonder… see, smell and touch the world,” he implored them.

When Smith, a former executive at Foxtel, arrived in the UK, the Australian interviewed 500 people in 100 towns and cities to get under the skin of a population that had just voted for Brexit. No doubt he is applying what he learned to ensure Amazon keeps giving consumers what they want.

As Global CMO at Specsavers, the world’s largest privately owned optical group, Katherine Whitton is in charge of marketing for more than 1,800 physical sites across 10 countries. But Whitton is no stranger to big numbers or travel, having extensive experience at Barclaycard, British Airways and American Express.

The optical brand’s humorous ‘Should’ve gone to Specsavers’ campaign has arguably entered the public consciousness, and the tagline is frequently used a joke and internet meme. The company has referred to passing on the ‘baton’ of the campaign to subsequent generations of marketers. Its consistency is also rare in being supported by an in-house creative agency. This was established in 1988, becoming a full-service internal agency in the early 1990s.

Whitton describes Specsavers as having “a unique business model and a truly supportive and empowering culture”.

PETER WRIGHT

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Chief marketing officer/attract and activate manager, Ikea Group With an FMCG background as Diageo marketing director, Peter Wright was responsible for a range of alcohol brands, including Gordon’s Gin, Malibu and Drambuie.

After 11 years with the company, he moved to the retail sector as marketing director of Tesco for eight years, then filled the same role at chocolate brand Thorntons before joining Ikea as

UK country marketing director. He has risen steadily through the ranks at the ubiquitous home furnishings retailer since then, spending two years in its Swedish office as global strategy, planning and insight director. His current role, since 2018, is chief marketing officer/attract and activate manager.

Wright joined Ikea in 2011, when he was thought to be the first British person to lead Ikea’s UK marketing team. He was behind the retailer’s ‘Wonderful Everyday’ campaign and a push for the company to become less secretive with the introduction of better storytelling.

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MEDIA AND TELECOMS

ZAID AL-QASSAB

NINA BIBBY

KERRIS BRIGHT

CMO, Channel 4

CMO, O2

Chief customer officer, BBC

Formerly BT Group’s chief brand and marketing officer, Zaid Al-Qassab joined Channel 4 in September 2019 as CMO to lead marketing and brand strategy across the channel, with responsibility for developing a data-led digital marketing programme.

Al-Qassab quickly began forging a digital-first identity for Channel 4, assembling a team of diverse talent at the company’s new Leeds headquarters. He is also driving a new marketing phase for the channel centred around its Digital Creative Unit (DCU), which will produce content specifically for the broadcaster’s various social platforms.

The unit is a key component of ‘Maximising Time With 4’, an ongoing digitally focused corporate strategy aimed at understanding how young audiences want to consume content and marketing, and identifying how to be on the appropriate platform. As part of this drive, Channel 4’s first wave of content appeared on streaming service BritBox in April.

In May, the broadcaster activated a ‘Stay Safe’ digital on-screen graphic around Covid-19, and Al-Qassab said Channel 4 would continue to use its reach and trusted relationship with viewers to communicate important public health advice.

Nina Bibby has seen many changes in mobile technology since becoming O2 CMO in 2013. The latest hot topic is 5G, and in June 2020, O2 became the first network provider to join the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN), a voluntary coalition of more than 70 organisations set up to eradicate ad fraud. Bibby said the misinformation around 5G is just one example of the damage fake news can cause.

In October 2019, as part of its sponsorship of the Rugby World Cup in Japan, O2 partnered with ITN to produce the world’s first live TV ad completely powered by 5G. The ad captured live footage of the match-day atmosphere across the UK using 5G ‘bonded’ cameras and was instantly sent to ITN in London using O2’s 5G network before being broadcast live. Bibby said it marked a “huge milestone” in demonstrating the possibilities of 5G for sport fans.

In March this year, O2 launched its sonic identity, which revolves around human breath. The sound can be heard in its apps and stores, as well as in O2 venues.

Kerris Bright joined the BBC from Virgin Media in June 2018, taking on the role of chief customer officer, with responsibility for developing a “closer, more personal” relationship with BBC viewers and licence fee payers.

In late 2019, the BBC launched the UK’s first interactive voice news service, enabling people using smart speakers to skip ahead to specific stories by saying ‘Give me BBC News’ to an Alexa-enabled device. In November 2019, the BBC launched UK streaming service BritBox with broadcast partner ITV. To demonstrate its importance as a public service broadcaster during the Covid-19 crisis, the BBC launched a film featuring a montage of news footage accompanied by the voice of Idris Elba reading Edgar Guest’s poem Don’t Quit. Bright said the film was designed to highlight the things that “connect us in these difficult times”.

The archives have also proved valuable, with the BBC creating a series of ‘Stay at Home’ public information films during lockdown, using clips from classic episodes of Miranda, The Thick of It and The Mighty Boosh to help relay public health messages.

Bright said she wanted it to raise a smile during tough times.

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MEDIA AND TELECOMS

PETER JEAVONS /

Director of marketing communications, BT Last year, Peter Jeavons launched ‘Beyond Limits’, BT’s biggest brand campaign in 20 years, which is designed to help the public recognise the company’s future potential. Then in April it started a “public service education exercise” to teach people vital digital skills via a series of short films that ran on ITV. The spots formed part of BT’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Jeavons and his team went through an “intense” period of working remotely to script, find talent and create the videos.

Jeavons also helped the BT brand return to the British high street “loud and proud” for the first time in 25 years in October. The company transformed EE stores with BT co-branding and introduced help desks and services across its broadband and mobile ranges. This resulted in a “significant upturn” in corporate and individual customers who would recommend BT to their peers, and the company also celebrated 15 consecutive quarters of improved net promoter scores (NPS). Jeavons is also responsible for BT’s FA sponsorship, through which the company hopes to create real change in access to the sport.

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Group chief marketing, corporate affairs and people officer, Sky Debbie Klein joined Sky from creative agency Engine in February 2018 in what was a newly created role.

She is responsible for Sky’s overall brand and marketing development, as well as leading corporate affairs and Sky’s ‘Bigger Picture’ corporate responsibility programme. More recently she extended her remit to include Sky’s people.

Klein said it would be impossible to do her job without making diversity and inclusion a top priority, and she is focused on levelling the playing field for women and addressing imbalances across the business. As part of this drive, Sky has tripled paid paternity leave to six weeks for all employees.

Meanwhile, in June 2020, Sky published its 2019 Bigger Impact report. Achievements included reducing its carbon emissions by a further 7%, cutting 5,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from its operations, achieving a 4% increase in renewable energy generated on its own sites and a 15% reduction in total waste.

The report also stated that the development of Sky Studios Elstree, due to open in 2022, will lead to the creation of 2,000 new creative jobs.

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Chief communications and marketing officer, Financial Times ‘Capitalism: Time for a reset’ is the new brand message from the Financial Times. It was introduced by chief communications and marketing officer Finola McDonnell in September 2019, with the aim of encouraging people to “get a grip” on the worst of capitalism.

The message is part of ‘The New Agenda’, the FT’s biggest brand campaign since the 2008 financial crisis and is a strong concept for a media company with a business focus, but the idea is to cast a more critical eye on enterprise models. McDonnell said: “[Company directors] need to stop overpaying themselves. They need to start giving people pay rises.”

A member of the FT’s executive board, McDonnell is pushing to better understand customer lifetime value and is having tech and marketing teams work together to do so. She is also conducting market research to learn how readers understand its “better business” message. During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, she spearheaded a campaign to make some content free “as a public service”, as well as providing complementary 30-day access to the paper’s coronavirus business updates.

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SIMON MICHAELIDES

RUFUS RADCLIFFE

CILESTA VAN DOORN

Chief marketing and innovation officer, UKTV

CMO and director of direct to consumer, ITV

Simon Michaelides was promoted to the newly created role of chief marketing and innovation officer at UKTV in December 2019. He is part of the company’s management board and reports to CEO Marcus Arthur, who on appointing him praised Michaelides’s depth and breadth of experience.

Michaelides’s role encompasses consumer communications, social, online, media, creative and innovation for the broadcaster’s seven-channel brands and its video-on-demand service UKTV Play.

He also leads on new revenue streams and partnerships, as well as running commercial innovation for the BBC Studios distribution arm, which acquired UKTV in June 2019.

A firm believer in brand building, Michaelides kicked off a major repositioning project in May that is intended to revitalise UKTV’s challenger mindset, sharpen and strengthen the brand positioning of each channel, and realign the whole company behind each brand.

Michaelides has also led the development of a new 360-degree campaign planning process.

Launched in June, the toolkit spans everything from writing campaign briefs to new campaign, publicity and social tiering, and an 18-month training programme.

Rufus Radcliffe has been on ITV’s management board since 2017, overseeing marketing. In June 2019, he took on additional responsibility for its direct-to-consumer division, including the brand’s premium streaming service ITV Hub+, which now has more than 400,000 paid-up users.

He is also a director of BritBox, the streaming venture from ITV and the BBC, which has seen “strong growth” in UK subscribers since launching in November 2019.

In the fiercely competitive world of TV, Radcliffe has helped shift the ITV brand away from its “cosy” image towards something more culturally relevant, especially among lighter viewers. He’s ramped up the company’s marketing capabilities by hiring a director of consumer marketing and a director of media to “get people to watch our stuff and spend time with us”, as well as creating an econometric model to understand media effectiveness.

Radcliffe is also passionate about integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into the business, and is using AI to build complex ad products for the ITV Hub. He also managed to poach Sanjeevan Bala from Channel 4 as ITV’s new group chief data and AI officer at the start of the year.

Executive director, brand and marketing, Virgin Media

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Cilesta van Doorn was promoted to executive director of brand and marketing at Virgin Media in May, after a consolidated refocus on brand building over sales, and a goal to become the most recommended telecoms brand by staff and customers. A new marketing platform, ‘Unlimiting’, helped it improve consumers’ understanding of its messages around TV, mobile data and broadband speed, with a 20-point uplift on message takeout.

It also added a record number of mobile subscribers during the first quarter of the year.

In March, the brand had to cancel a commercial shoot just ahead of the UK lockdown, instead opting for a tear-jerking user-generated ad showing people helping each other. “I want us to help lift the spirit of the nation and give them a little bit of our love,” Van Doorn said of the campaign brief.

Instead of a sales-led strapline, the message was simply ‘Stay home, stay safe, stay connected’. The brand followed this with a heart-warming home video-style commercial featuring children singing into their hairbrushes to Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.

SOPHIE WHEATER

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CMO, Giffgaff Sophie Wheater has been candid about work-life balance, taking a career break to spend time with her children before stepping into the Giffgaff CMO position, a prospect she says was “terrifying”.

She’s keen to make sure her kids “see they have a mum who works and has a job that is just as important as their dad’s”. That role includes pushing the brand into the next phase of its development from a “David versus Goliath” disruptor that had SIM-only deals and no contracts, to one that focuses on its community.

She created the company’s ‘Pioneers’ programme, which gives Giffgaff fans a first look at new developments, and has helped the business tap into the circular economy trend. Wheater had customers pledge to reduce the amount of new stuff they buy via a pop-up shop the mobile network opened around Black Friday in 2019, which aimed to educate people that refurbished phones can provide good quality.

In March, Wheater’s team brought forward the launch of an ad campaign Giffgaff was planning to run later in the year in a bid to “put something positive out in the world” amid Covid-19.

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REGULATED INDUSTRIES

GRAHAM ADDISON

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JOHN BERNARD

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SARAH BOOTH

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EMEA marketing director, Dexcom Global marketing director, AstraZeneca Global marketing director Graham Addison took on his current role at AstraZeneca in September 2018, after holding a number of brand management and leadership positions at the firm.

Addison works as part of a team responsible for defining global brand strategy and growth opportunities for medicines in AstraZeneca’s cardiovascular portfolio.

Over the past few months he has led a global cross-functional team to define and drive a launch strategy for a new medicine, from the creation of a new promotional campaign to engaging markets.

Patient centricity and digital have also been key areas of focus for Addison this year. Driven by the pandemic he piloted the use of virtual reality to enable more engaging internal collaboration with his team and is in the early stages of exploring the use of AI to support patient adherence to their medicine.

Most recently, Addison’s time has been spent focusing on AstraZeneca’s presence at the European Society of Cardiology congress, which is fully virtual for the first time and has therefore required a completely new approach.

John Bernard is marketing director EMEA at Dexcom, a specialist brand that develops products to help diabetics monitor their glucose levels.

His role at the firm is focused on building brand awareness and increasing adoption of the company’s products among both healthcare professionals and their patients. He was hire number one in Europe and is currently building out Dexcom’s marketing team, hiring new members despite the coronavirus pandemic.

The company just launched its first TV ad campaign in EMEA, which will also run in digital, radio and print in multiple European countries. It promotes Dexcom’s G6 glucose monitoring system, which offers a wearable sensor and a smartphone app that tracks levels for those with diabetes.

Based in Edinburgh, in 2019 Bernard was recently crowned the Marketing Society in Scotland’s Inspirational Marketing Leader of the year.

Director of brand and marketing, Ovo Energy Sarah Booth, director of brand and marketing at Ovo Energy, has been behind the brand’s communication of a new sustainability strategy that sees it committing to ‘walking the walk’ when it comes to green credentials.

Judging by the energy company’s net promoter scores (NPS), the efforts may be paying off. A 2019 UK Consumer Study by Bain & Company found Ovo Energy to be the highest-rated energy supplier, with an NPS of 27. Booth moved to Ovo Energy from Asos, where she was head of brand and communications strategy. She previously worked at a number of agencies, including BBH London and McCann Manchester.

Booth explains that she became passionate about sustainability in fashion while at Asos and that moving to a sustainable energy brand was the next step in following that passion. “It’s remarkable how much consciousness there is around climate change, or the climate crisis, but how little we consider some of the easiest steps we can take to make a difference,” she said.

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SAMANTHA BURNS

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RUSSELL DAVIES

MARGARET JOBLING

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For her work as group CMO, Centrica Director of marketing, KPMG UK

Vice-president of marketing, Bulb

A degree in drama and theatre arts might not be the most conventional preparation for a career in marketing at global accountancy and consultancy firms, but it has worked well for Samantha Burns.

As director of marketing at KPMG UK, Burns is part of a truly international group that operates in 154 countries and is celebrating 150 years of operation in the UK this year. She has a strong track record at KPMG, and at her former employer EY where she was brand director and then marketing director.

KPMG has been at the heart of the economic fallout from Covid-19, leading on the administration of brands like Byron and footwear brand Hotter, as well as producing reports on the future of retail and the downturn in recruitment activity.

Burns says she enjoys leading and inspiring large dispersed teams to act with a challenger brand mindset and has a focus on delivering strong ROI and real business outcomes. She joined KPMG in 2013.

For someone who says they “relentlessly muck about on the internet” Bulb’s Russell Davies has managed to fit in a lot of work while doing so.

A writer and strategist who specialises in “what happens when organisations and services meet the internet”, Davies has been director of strategy for the Government Digital Service, director of digital strategy for the Co-op, and CEO of Doteveryone.

He has also worked on communications and digital strategies for brands including Nike, Honda, Microsoft and Apple.

Under his marketing leadership, Bulb has experienced rapid growth. It is the fastest growing private company in the UK and has added 1.7 million members in less than five years, meaning it supplies energy to 6% of UK households. It has focused its marketing on its commitment to make energy ‘simpler, cheaper, greener’ and has a score on Trustpilot of 4.8 out of five.

Davies was recently made vice-president of marketing, reporting into Lis Blair who is set to join in October as chief growth and marketing officer.

Margaret Jobling joined Centrica in 2014 as director of brand marketing at British Gas before taking on the group CMO role in 2018. Before leaving the company as part of a restructure earlier this year, Jobling was responsible for transforming the firm’s marketing capabilities across all regions.

In the past year, she has overhauled how Centrica works with agencies, bringing together creative, media, CRM, data, content and PR for the first time under WPP in a bespoke agency team called Nucleus. Jobling has been clear that this is not an attempt to cut costs but to make its marketing more aligned.

British Gas has since overhauled its marketing, saying goodbye to its brand mascot Wilbur the penguin in favour of a new brand positioning ‘Here to Solve’ that aims to promote its products and services, and reinforce that it offers “more than just energy”.

Jobling is set to join NatWest Group as CMO in September, a board-level position that sees her reporting directly to CEO Alison Rose.

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REGULATED INDUSTRIES

CONOR MCKECHNIE

BELINDA MOORE

PETER THOMAS

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Vice-president of marketing, Cytiva

For her work as director of marketing and communications, E.ON UK

Cytiva was created on 1 April this year following the sale of GE Healthcare Life Sciences’ biotech business to Danaher Corporation. It meant that vice-president of marketing Conor McKechnie launched an entirely new health sector brand during the biggest global pandemic in living memory.

McKechnie describes himself as “a futurist at the convergence of biology, data science and engineering – three fields that are changing our world in the 21st century as dramatically as advances in physics and electronics did in the 20th century”.

He originally joined GE Healthcare in 2006, working through a series of roles in PR and communications before being appointed as CMO for life sciences in 2016.

According to Cytiva, more than three-quarters of the biological therapies approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rely on its technologies. The group seeks to collaborate on research that will drive forward knowledge of life sciences.

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Belinda Moore, director of marketing and communications at gas and electricity provider E.ON, encourages her team to be commercially focused and aware of the company’s wider performance. She is irritated when marketing is viewed as a “fluffy” discipline and believes that being better informed about the bottom line means marketers are included in key financial conversations.

If senior management recognises the value of marketing, it benefits the whole company. “It can be lonely if you feel like you are the sole voice in the organisation championing the customer and championing marketing,” she states.

Throughout her time at the energy firm, Moore has been working to change the perception of E.ON and reposition it as an innovative, environmentally conscious business that takes a different approach from traditional utility companies.

She has borrowed from her time working at big brands including Britvic, Whitbread and TUI to bring an FMCG mindset to the sector, while roles at BMI Healthcare and Care UK before joining the energy company broadened her experience further.

She is leaving E.ON to pursue other opportunities.

Managing director, integrated marketing, Accenture Europe Peter Thomas is responsible for the integration of all marketing programmes across Europe at Accenture, as well as day-to-day leadership in the UK and Ireland. His role covers client relationship marketing, digital marketing, media relations, sponsorship and hospitality, internal communications, recruitment marketing and executive communications.

This is Thomas’s second stint at Accenture, having first joined as marketing and communications director for the UK and Ireland in 2004. He left to become director of corporate communications for the Rugby Football Union and then took on the position of head of EMEA communications at Bloomberg before rejoining Accenture in 2012.

Thomas has spent the bulk of his 30-year career in pan-European or global communication roles, including a seven-year stint at communications agency Hill & Knowlton – where he headed its technology practice for EMEA markets – and a first job at GCI Sterling.

ANTONIA WADE

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Chief marketing officer, Capita As CMO at professional services firm Capita, Antonia Wade has sought to bring elements of creativity, storytelling and emotion to B2B marketing, to help make the company stand out.

“To differentiate in the B2B market you have to be relevant, personal and memorable. That only comes through telling stories,” says Wade.

As Capita’s first CMO, she is tasked with building a robust marketing function to replace a range of siloed business units.

That challenge is complicated by the diversity of sectors in which Capita operates. The business was recently appointed to transform customer service centres for Irish Water, to simplify payment processes at Westward Housing Group, and to run the Electronic Monitoring Service for the Ministry of Justice.

Wade’s career has seen her move from HM Treasury, where she was a policy advisor on marketing, strategy and change, via Accenture and Thomson Reuters to Capita, which she joined in February 2019.

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TRAVEL/LEISURE/HOSPITALITY

PAUL GAMBRILL

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Managing director of marketing, Paddy Power Betfair Flutter Entertainment Paddy Power’s attention-grabbing campaigns, such as the ‘Don’t think you’re special’ tie-up with Tottenham Hotspur manager José Mourinho and the #SaveOurShirt anti-football shirt sponsorship campaign, helped the brand boost its customer base by 12% during 2019. For both Paddy Power and Betfair combined, online revenues rose 6% to just over £1bn across the year.

Overseeing two bookmaker brands during a pandemic that forced all sport to shut down can’t have been easy, but a strong focus on content helped.

Paddy Power increased its volume of video content by 300%, launching online comedy series The Mascot and introducing all-star darts matches that were viewed more than 20 million times across 20 countries. During the first 20 days of April, Paddy Power’s share of voice had risen to 74% on Twitter and 65% on Facebook.

Meanwhile, Betfair shifted its ad spend online after the ‘whistle-to-whistle’ ad ban meant bookies could no longer advertise during live sport on TV. In response, it created 40 different ads to explain the peer-to-peer betting process that runs on its Betfair Exchange.

OMAR GURNAH

SARA HOLT

/

/

Head of marketing, Uber and Uber Eats UK and Ireland

UK sales and marketing director, Merlin Entertainments

Omar Gurnah describes his CV as “unconventional”, having been a Channel 4 presenter before working in various tech companies until he was appointed head of marketing at Uber in the UK and Ireland in April 2019.

He runs brand strategy, Uber’s creative studio, insights, social, paid media and CRM for the company, and in February 2020 launched the ‘Bring It’ campaign for Uber Eats, featuring comedian Guz Khan as a charismatic courier.

Like other businesses, Uber was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and had to make thousands of people redundant. But it published details of those who had lost their jobs on a talent directory, in the hope that other employers would hire them, a move Gurnah shared on LinkedIn. The company also made trips free to NHS workers and called for passengers to contribute to a short film to say thank you to those who drove them. In July 2019, Gurnah pushed forward an initiative to celebrate Pride, adding the rainbow flag to its Jump bike brand, and telling the stories of LGBTQIA+ employees and customers, to give visibility to different orientations and identities.

Sara Holt joined leisure operator Merlin Entertainments as its sales and marketing director last June and as part of the leadership team, oversees marketing for UK attractions such as The London Eye, Madame Tussauds and Sea Life.

She makes sure Madame Tussauds stays in the headlines, removing waxworks of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle from a royal family set when the couple stepped away from public life in January, a stunt she called “one of the greatest accomplishments of my team in my career”.

Tussauds also kept itself in the news during the coronavirus pandemic by updating prime minister Boris Johnson’s waxwork with a baby carrier when his son arrived in May, and tapped into a conversation about gender neutrality by not assigning a new penguin chick a biological sex when it was born at Sea Life London last year. The business also showed solidarity by lighting the London Eye in blue in support of health workers.

Net promoter scores for the Merlin group are over 50%, and in 2019 there were around 500,000 online reviews of its properties that averaged over four stars.

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TRAVEL/LEISURE/HOSPITALITY

KATIE MCALISTER

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Chief marketing officer, TUI UK and Ireland Katie McAlister is on the board of tour operator TUI, responsible for its customer and brand strategy, advertising, CRM, insights and PR, as well as ecommerce and contact centres for the group’s brands, which also include First Choice and Marella Cruises.

In November, McAlister launched the latest iteration of TUI’s brand campaign, showing customers how it “crosses the ‘Ts’, dots the ‘Is’ and puts ‘U’ in the middle”, emphasising the full range of holidays and services. She has also championed marketing at the company, introducing an academy last year that aims to give marketers a broader set of skills to help progress their careers, and encourages young women to “be authentic” as they move up the ladder.

As the pandemic hit, TUI temporarily closed its operations, but in May said that UK bookings for winter 2020/21 were up 6%, adding that its “trusted brand” was a clear USP. Then in July, McAlister oversaw the launch of a multi-million pound campaign welcoming customers back after “four months of hibernation”.

KEITH MOOR

ELLIE NORMAN

/

/

Chief marketing officer, Camelot

Director of marketing and communications, Formula One, Liberty Media

Keith Moor joined Camelot as chief marketing officer in September 2019 after more than two decades at Santander. His goal is to take the National Lottery’s purpose – making extraordinary happen for everyone – to the “next level”.

The National Lottery almost doubled its Buzz score year-on-year, according to YouGov’s BrandIndex, in part as a result of its ‘The Magic Number’ campaign developed to mark its 25th anniversary year in 2019.

In the year to 31 March, National Lottery sales rose 10% to £7.9bn, while the amount of money given to good causes increased by 12% to £1.85bn, a core metric of success for the team. During the period, online sales also rose 34% to £2.45bn, with mobile sales hitting an all-time high of £1.6bn.

Then when the coronavirus crisis hit, the brand “very quickly” turned around an ad campaign to highlight the beneficiaries of the National Lottery’s £600m Covid-19 relief fund. Managing the tricky job of making Camelot’s products stand out in a competitive market, Moor is on a mission to grow sales as the brand heads towards licence renewal in 2023.

Ellie Norman is on a mission to improve diversity in Formula One and “make it as relevant to as many people as possible”. Since joining in 2017, she has pushed to remove ‘grid girls’ from the sport and worked with younger influencers such as Millie Bobby Brown from Netflix’s Stranger Things.

In January, Norman represented F1 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, speaking on a panel covering brands as changemakers. A month later, F1 announced it was in profit for the first time since 2016, making $17m (£13.7m) in 2019.

When the coronavirus struck and the Australian Grand Prix was cancelled in March, F1 got rival UK motor racing teams to collaborate to make medical equipment, producing 10,000 continuous positive airway pressure devices in six weeks, and to agree to manufacture 15,000 Penlon ventilators.

Norman also oversaw the launch of a virtual racing series in late March, attracting more than 30 million viewers, and then in June unveiled F1’s ‘#WeRaceAsOne’ campaign, celebrating diversity and inclusivity in the sport.

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ANGELA PORTER

TAMARA STRAUSS

KATHRYN SWARBRICK

/

/

/

Marketing director, Ladbrokes Coral, GVC Holdings

Global brand marketing director, Premier Inn

Commercial and marketing director, The Football Association

Angela Porter joined GVC-owned Ladbrokes Coral in January and found herself straight into a pitch process that saw BBH London appointed to relaunch both brands – with several ads being produced in just a few months.

Porter’s background at Dunelm, Tesco and Vodafone has given her a head start when it comes to creating ads in a sector that’s new to her. Both brand relaunch projects sought to shift away from the ‘disposable advertising’ typical to the gambling sector and focus instead on entertainment, with a view to building brand affinity.

Coral’s tagline ‘For the passion of the bet’ aims to tap into the emotion created when having a flutter; while Ladbrokes’ ‘For the nation’ positioning is a way of showing the variety of people wanting to bet with the brand.

As the coronavirus pandemic hit, Porter had to contend with a lack of sport for people to bet on, at a time when European regulators were tightening rules around gambling advertising. However, in 2019 net gaming revenue across both brands rose 12%, so she has a good base to work from.

Tamara Strauss joined Premier Inn from an interim role at Hilton Hotels in November 2019. She was tasked with managing marketing for the brand, which operates more than 800 hotels in the UK and Ireland, and helping it expand overseas.

Her team is also responsible for extra revenue streams such as partnerships with gym pass provider Hussle and luggage-storage company Stasher. Premier Inn boosted its scores in YouGov’s Hotel BrandIndex study in the year to the end of February, ranking in first place for satisfaction, impression, value and likelihood to recommend.

Like all travel industry marketers, Strauss had to deal with a huge blow in the form of the coronavirus outbreak. In June, she launched the company’s CleanProtect promise as properties prepared to reopen, detailing Premier Inn’s increased hygiene measures and directly employed housekeeping team. The idea was to reassure guests of a warm – as well as safe – welcome. Strauss has also promoted the company’s programme to eliminate unnecessary single-use plastics by 2025.

Kathryn Swarbrick joined The Football Association as its commercial and marketing director from PepsiCo in October 2019. She oversees a portfolio that includes 29 England teams, Wembley Stadium and the Women’s FA Cup. Hailed as a “world-class” marketer, she sits on the FA’s senior management team, reporting to chief executive Mark Bullingham. On her appointment, Swarbrick insisted that the FA’s commercial gains should be re-invested in grassroots initiatives.

In January, she was part of a drive to highlight mental health issues via the FA’s ‘Heads Up’ campaign, stating on LinkedIn: “In life, as in football, everyone has ups and downs.”

Then in March, Swarbrick oversaw the FA’s ‘Football’s Staying Home’ campaign, encouraging footie fans to stay put during lockdown.

A key player in Project Restart, in April Swarbrick helped stage the Football’s Staying Home Cup, which saw 16 international players take part in a FIFA 20 tournament watched by 3 million people.

YALE VARTY

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Chief marketing officer, Hostelworld Group Yale Varty was appointed chief marketing officer at online travel agent Hostelworld in October 2019, joining from Asos. Tasked with “supporting a fresh strategy” for the brand as it celebrated its 20th anniversary, Varty’s role is to tap into what travellers want. Hostelworld describes these travellers as “not your average tourists”, but people who want to avoid the well-trodden path and are prepared to spend longer in fewer places.

Brand is likely to become especially important for the group as it looks for merger or acquisition opportunities, and to tap into the needs of its customers who might be looking for experiences as well as a place to stay.

As the coronavirus pandemic hit, travel brands had to react fast. Hostelworld created a website, Virtuallyahostel.com, to bring travellers together. Featuring five video chatrooms hosted by different hostels, visitors to the site can take a cocktail-making class, learn salsa or do a sushi-making workshop, and can choose to make a donation to support the host property.

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3

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Questions I wish I had asked

BY SARAH VIZARD

FROM FINDING THE RIGHT WORK/LIFE BALANCE TO SEEING THE POSITIVE IMPACT MARKETING CAN HAVE BEYOND DRIVING BUSINESS GROWTH, THERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS MASTERCARD’S RAJA RAJAMANNAR WISHES HE HAD ASKED EARLIER IN HIS CAREER

M

astercard chief marketing and communications officer Raja Rajamannar has had a hugely varied career. After starting out 35 years ago at Asian Paints in India, he has moved across countries, industries and roles to end up where he is today.

That has included stints at Unilever, Citibank and Humana in industries such as consumer goods, FMCG, finance and healthcare. He has worked in India, Dubai, London, Cincinnati and New York, with roles from product management to business and transformation, CEO and CMO. Rajamannar admits opportunities have tended to find him rather than him actively pursuing them. Each one, however, has helped him grow as a marketer by offering new experiences and the ability to learn.

“Fortunately for me, every move added something substantially to me either by way of learning, exposure, international postings or financial rewards. There have been a whole bunch of positives every single time I moved,” he says.

Despite his success, Rajamannar also believes he might have had even more job satisfaction had he been able to achieve a better work and life balance earlier in his career and really understand the role marketing can play in doing good in the world.

reaching my goals need 1. Does to follow a specific path?

Rajamannar describes his career as: “A little all over the place, although thankfully everything has worked out beautifully.”

However, when he started out he recalls thinking that he would stay working in one industry – if not one company – and build his career that way. That he has not is partly because Rajamannar has been open to new opportunities. Despite moving around, he has only switched jobs when he felt roles added something.

“Every time I went to take a role at the beginning of my career, I thought I would continue there for a long time – in the

“I pursued a path across industries, across geographies, and it has made for a very rich experience”

industry or company. But, of course, that is absolutely not how it went.”

With hindsight, he believes this breadth of experience has made him a better marketer than he might have been had he stayed in one company or industry his whole life.

“I pursued a path across industries, across geographies, and it has made for a very rich experience – I can integrate those experiences into all the roles I have. I always call myself advantaged because of all the experiences I have had,” he adds.

I have to give my all 24/7 2. Do in order to be successful?

At the start of his career, Rajamannar admits to working almost 24/7. He recalls feeling “stupidly proud” if he worked for three days straight and didn’t sleep, admitting to a “misplaced sense of accomplishment”.

“I was working very hard, travelling all the time, constantly on the run. You assume the results will come when you work like that,” he says.

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Rajamannar believes now that how he defined success back then was “very tactical”, describing some of his priorities as “stupid”. And he admits to being a little one-dimensional because he was so focused on work to the detriment of everything else.

He believes this focus on work came about because he was trying to climb the ladder as fast as possible. However, he has since realised that non-stop work is not the only route to success.

Rajamannar describes how in the second part of his career he has shifted the balance, finding time to read books, attend seminars, exercise, meditate, listen to music and travel “not for work”.

“It hasn’t slowed me down as a result,” he says. “More big breakthroughs have happened in the second half of my career than in the first. It was not like you had to work like a donkey to the exclusion of everything else to be successful. And what you define as success in itself needs to be thought through.”

I make the world a better 3. Can place through marketing?

Another realisation Rajamannar has had in the second half of his career is that marketing can be about more than chasing profit.

He is president of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) – a community of companies that collectively spend more than $1trn a year on advertising and marketing.

His work with the WFA has made him realise advertising should be using its position to have a positive impact on society.

“This realisation happened a few years into my career that marketing is not just about pushing your company’s product and services or gaining market share, or having better brand ratings. Marketing actually can make a significant difference to society at large,” says Rajamannar.

He points to the example of stereotyping, saying it is easy for marketers to follow expected norms and perpetuate them. But Rajamannar now believes marketing has a role to play in addressing such issues.

“It is a privilege to be a CMO, we are sitting on billions of dollars of budget.

But that privilege should come with a responsibility to think beyond just your company, just your products, services and brands, and think about the community and society,” he says.

Rajamannar admits he did not see the link between the corporate world and benefitting society early in his career. However, he has since come to a realisation that there is joint satisfaction in doing something good for society that also benefits the business.

He explains: “Early on, success was all about how much faster can I grow than my peers, how many awards can we win, how fast can we grow the business, what business recognition can we get? But there is a different level of happiness when you are trying to make a difference.” l Raja Rajamannar will be speaking about leading change and setting strategy at The Festival of Marketing in October. For more details, visit festivalofmarketing.com

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CAREER DEVELOPMENT

STORY OF MY CV

A THIRST FOR NEW EXPERIENCES HAS INSPIRED DANIELLE ATKINS TO TRAVEL THE WORLD FROM RUSSIA TO SAUDI ARABIA IN SEARCH OF THE NEXT BIG CHALLENGE

Danielle Atkins

BY CHARLOTTE ROGERS

rowing up in Cornwall, Danielle Atkins remembers her father’s advice as clearly as if it were yesterday: “Pin your colours to the mast.”

Inspired by her dad – a surfer and filmmaker who invited the Sex Pistols to play at his club in Penzance in the 1970s – Atkins grew up tenacious and with a taste for travel.

After studying for a degree in the history of art and medieval archaeology, she travelled alone to Mexico. During her year there she met a woman who had given up her job as an account director to travel the world. Inspired by her success, Atkins decided to pivot from the arts to business. Flying back to the UK she joined emerging digital agency Presco, hitting the ground running with a crash course in early online marketing, before making the switch to the corporate world at consulting giant PwC. Next came a move back to Cornwall and the challenge of attracting investment into the county, before going freelance as she travelled the world with her four-year-old son.

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After a period of consulting, Atkins was recruited by wireless broadband company Yota, a role that involved bringing a dose of creativity to Russia’s tech sector, before helping put on a show for the London 2012 Olympics as director of entertainment at experience agency Innovision.

Next, Atkins joined the in-house creative team at Nokia, running global events and product launches, before becoming one of the first major hires outside LA for headphone brand Beats by Dre. Working at the company when it was sold to Apple, Atkins was a key part of the brand’s 2014 FIFA World Cup campaign.

She left Beats to spearhead the reinvention of camera company Kodak, helping the brand reconnect with a young creative audience. Now in her role leading cultural transformation as CMO of Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah Gate Development Authority, Atkins believes she has uncovered the challenge of a lifetime. “It’s like the dream job because it takes me right back to my degree,” she explains. “This role has real purpose and authenticity in a way nowhere else has. To be inspiring young women to be the next leaders of the Kingdom is a phenomenal opportunity.”

1994-1999

1999-2002

2003-2006

ACCOUNT MANAGER

EMEA E-BUSINESS MARKETING

HEAD OF INWARD INVESTMENT

PRESCO/WHEEL

PWC

CORNWALL ENTERPRISE Presco/Wheel Confidence building “When I joined, it was a below-the-line agency doing results presentations mainly for the City, with teams developing early digital content on CD-Rom and on the internet. We won the Marks & Spencer website, which was massive for us as an agency. I was 21 and in front of the executive team at M&S. “I worked crazy hours, from 8am to midnight. It was an amazing training ground. I was in front of senior people in the business, which was great exposure and gave me a level of confidence.

“My director asked me to do some competitor analysis and I saw the big players in consulting moving into the space. I decided to go into management consultancy and then the dotcom bubble burst.

Luckily, I found myself in a very solid job when a lot of my friends were made redundant.”

2008-2010

2010-2011

MARKETING AND MARKETING DIRECTOR YOTA GROUP COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR/CONSULTANCY EVERYTHING WORKS

Yota Group Creative expression “Yota was a Russian wireless broadband provider, which at the time was completely new. The branding was developed in Europe and the strategy was to have a senior marcomms team based in the UK. “I put on a big digital interactive arts festival in St Petersburg. I remember there were six metres of snow and it was -20°C. We did the first projection -mapping ever in Russia on the Mikhailovsky Palace.

“The festival was one of the high points of my career.

“Then we brought all the mobile providers in Russia to our office and aligned them on a shared network, so Yota went from being a consumer brand to a network brand overnight.”

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Eastman Kodak Company Modernising an icon “A lot of people said ‘Why would you leave Beats to join Kodak?’ and I replied ‘Because Kodak is one of the world’s biggest brands’. I went in as brand director and was promoted to chief brand and marketing officer.

“We took the brand back to where it started, because it had this incredible heritage that had almost been forgotten. We modernised the icon, which enabled us to do contemporary things in fashion and consumer products. We ended up doing four collections with Opening Ceremony because the first one sold out so quickly. I had people messaging me saying ‘I’ve just seen Gigi Hadid wearing Kodak, is that you?’.

“I had a strong in-house creative team, rather than working with big agencies. That was an effective approach when you’re challenged from a budget perspective but still want to put out great creative work.”

Diriyah Gate Development Authority Challenge of a lifetime “When the brief for this role landed in my inbox I was like ‘Wow’. The idea of coming to Saudi and being part of the significant social and economic transformation taking place under Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman’s Vision 2030 was too much of an amazing opportunity to pass up.

“We say it’s the largest cultural historic development in the world.

At its heart is the UNESCO world heritage site At-Turaif, the world’s largest mud city and the seat of the first Saudi kingdom. There’s a

2011-2012

DIRECTOR OF ENTERTAINMENT INNOVISION

2012-2013

seven square kilometre city development being built in the traditional Najd architecture. There’s a natural wadi, where we’re replanting hundreds of thousands of historic palm trees, and Diriyah Square, a retail district larger than the Mall of the Emirates.

“The grand opening will be in 2024 and I’m building a bottom-up strategy. I’ve got this vision to take Diriyah on the road, working with young Saudi creatives. It’s really exciting to create a brand for a place and I want it to be a lifestyle brand rather than a typical destination brand.”

2013-2015

EMEA MARKETING DIRECTOR OF DIRECTOR CREATIVE EXPRESSION NOKIA

Nokia Bringing products to life “Steven Overman, my long-term friend and mentor, had a vision to set up an in-house creative team. He hired three of us with the same job title. One had been a creative director, another was more strategy-based and I found my groove picking up the events and product launches.

“At Mobile World Congress we had a big kinetic light installation, that played the Nokia ringtone and a café – it was like building a mini-hotel.

“We had 40 different meeting rooms and demo spaces.

Although we had no major announcements, we were the most talked-about brand at the show.

“I did a lot of product launches, which was all about bringing the product features to life in an authentic way and creating content people could share. Some of the best marketing is that combination of a strong in-house team and working with boutique agencies, directly with creatives.”

BEATS BY DRE

2015-2019

2019- PRESENT

VARIOUS ROLES

CHIEF MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER

EASTMAN KODAK COMPANY

DIRIYAH GATE DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY, SAUDI ARABIA

Beats by Dre Innovative mindset “When I resigned from Nokia, the CMO asked ‘Why would you go to Beats, they’re really small compared to us?’ and I said ‘Because they’re doing some of the most innovative marketing in the world right now’.

“I was one of the first hires outside LA and reported directly to the CFO, as well as the CMO Omar Johnson. I joined as we started doing our first adverts; the pinnacle was the ad for the 2014 Brazil World Cup. In the backroom chat we discovered all the players had their own rituals. Then Neymar played us the message from his father, which begins the whole ad.

“It was an amazing experience. Johnson was really tough to work with but brilliant and a genius. I wouldn’t be where I am now without my time at Beats. It really shaped my thinking in terms of how I approach marketing and put the story at the heart.”

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BY MATTHEW VALENTINE

Big ideas, human truths and Bob Hoskins came together in 1994 for ‘It’s Good to Talk’, an IPA award-winning campaign to help BT put itself at the heart of communication

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here was a big idea at the heart of the ‘It’s Good to Talk’ campaign from BT. At a tactical level, the telecoms brand, which in 1994 was a clear market leader, wanted to grow the size of its overall market by encouraging customers to make more, and longer, telephone calls.

Yet, at its heart the campaign was trying to achieve something far more ambitious.

Essentially, BT needed to redefine itself.

“At the time it wasn’t a much-loved brand,” explains Adrian Hosford, then BT director of customer communication and brand marketing.

The company had a reputation for poor service and out-of-order telephone boxes, which it had worked hard to solve.

Updating its image to reflect that work was the next step.

“We’d had other successful callstimulation campaigns, like Maureen Lipman and the ‘Beattie’ campaign. But the difference was with this one we were trying not just to do call stimulation on its own, but to build a stronger brand and have every piece of communication working together to build something that was really meaningful to the customer,” Hosford explains.

Brand consultant and former political advisor Norman Strauss was brought in to share his brand-positioning matrix.

“Communication is infinite – in content, purpose, execution and effect. So how does

one brand an infinite concept? The key is to raise the level of conceptual abstraction to embrace that complexity of possibilities by the practice of meta-analysis,” says Strauss.

BT was really in the business of enabling confidences between customers – the idea that eventually boiled down to the campaign’s popular tagline.

Put simply, the main concept – that human communication is vital – could be broken down in numerous ways to create stories that spoke to customers. Owned by BT, the idea could be applied to create a bigger commercial impact.

“We were looking to remake the BT brand based on a very big idea with lots of legs, that could run and run. To associate BT with the best of human communication, where real contact took place, and make it associated with the benefits,” recalls Hosford.

CAMPAIGNING MINDSET He issued a brief to ad agencies, challenging them to pitch “the best campaign in the UK”. AMV (Abbott Mead Vickers) won the contest “pretty comprehensively” after understanding the depth of the brief and BT’s strategy.

A substantial internal marketing campaign kicked off at BT to ensure the company was fully on board with the group’s new direction. To achieve this, Hosford requested a video version of AMV’s pitch to be distributed. “Clearly the decision-

Actor Bob Hoskins was the star of BT’s award winning campaign

making group had to be small. We only had a small team in the room, but we had a larger team involved. For them the video was a critical means of explaining the whole approach,” says Hosford.

The presentation by the late David Abbott gave not only a masterclass in pitching, but a concise breakdown of the campaign.

In the pitch, Abbott explains how film star Bob Hoskins will move through various scenarios delivering nudges about behaviour and communication.

NUDGING BEHAVIOUR Much of the idea hinged on pushing male characters away from complaining about the inconvenience and cost of their wives and girlfriends spending so much time on the phone.

“We tried to dismantle the barrier of price, but we also tried to dismantle the barrier of men’s resistance to seeing their womenfolk use the phone a lot,” says Hosford.

“There were still a lot of barriers that were stopping people from reaching out and contacting each other.”

The casting of Hoskins, best known for playing a vicious London gangster in The Long Good Friday, was considered crucial to the campaign’s success. In the ads he encourages men to talk more to their friends or colleagues, showing why this can be beneficial. He signs off with the tagline: “It’s good to talk.”

The campaign was awarded a Gold Grand Prix by the IPA in 1996. Describing it as “a piece of social engineering”, the IPA found It’s Good to Talk helped BT change perceptions around the cost of calls and promote longer calls, with a payback calculated at £297m.

Now, in an era of smartphones, the products advertised in the BT campaign – fax machines and call waiting – can seem old-fashioned, although the basic concept is as important as ever.

Hosford is happy that Hoskins’ line still pops up in conversation: “It was the essence of what we were trying to do. It’s good to talk. It really did boil down to that idea.

If you make contact it really is very good for both parties.”

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