About me:
I’m more interested in the why than the what.
Turns out that’s fairly useful.
My career has taken a deliberately non-linear path. I’ve been a senior creative at some of the world’s biggest ad agencies. I spent five years inside the marketing department of one of the UK’s most recognisable high street brands. I’ve seen how businesses grow and how large organisations actually work. As if that’s not enough, I went back to school, mid-career, for an MBA to further enhance my credentials.
Each of those stages taught me something different. The agency years taught me how to make complex ideas land simply. The in-house years taught me how decisions actually get made when there’s a board to answer to. The MBA gave me the commercial and analytical framework to bring it all together.
What I do now is draw on all of it. I work with businesses navigating real strategic questions around brand, positioning, market entry, customer understanding, and help them find answers that are honest, actionable, and built on solid foundations.
2008-2012
Digital agency founder and owner
Built from scratch. Grew from local SMEs to Sony, Microsoft and Virgin. Exited via client roster sale.
Learned first-hand that most marketing problems are business problems in disguise.
Award winning advertising creative - DDB, Grey, Iris, MRM, Analog Folk
Creative lead on global GSK / Excedrin account. Lead copywriter for Glenfiddich. Cannes Lions. Clios. Epicas. TV commercials. Digital and social campaigns. Earned media and PR briefs. And the campaign that gave non-migraine sufferers a migraine — intentionally, using AR, on national TV.
Became increasingly interested in why ideas worked, not just how to make them.
2013-2017
2017-2022
Five years inside Specsavers in-house marketing team
Five years inside one of the UK’s most recognisable retail brands. Built the first branded social content series with the England Cricket Team. Helped reposition the audiology offering through qualitative research.
A formative period that demonstrated how internal assumptions can diverge from real customer behaviour.
2022-2023
MBA (Distinction) — Durham University Business School
Returned to education mid-career to develop a broader toolkit for diagnosing business challenges beyond marketing alone.
Executive Dean's Scholar. BP Innovation Award winner. Highest dissertation mark in the cohort: a 15,000-word qualitative study on disruptive innovation, interviewing startup founders, PE investors and business leaders.
2024-Present
Founder, Rebel Shark + Senior Brand Strategist, Athlon
Today I split my time between independent advisory work and an ongoing strategic role with Athlon.
I help organisations understand customers, sharpen positioning and make better marketing decisions through a combination of behavioural insight, brand strategy and commercial thinking.
A few things about me you might not expect…
I love brands with personality…
One of my favourite strategy questions is: "If your brand was a person, who would it be?" I've been asking it since 2008. It never gets old.
I’m a storyteller…
Before going into advertising, I studied for a Creative Writing MA in the Department of Journalism, City University.
Before selling out and joining the advertising world, I freelanced for various hipster magazines during the indie sleaze era and wrote short stories on manual typewriters which I submitted by hand.
It was the 2000s. We were like that.
I like meeting real people…
I've run focus groups in small town America, sat in research labs listening to nanotechnology scientists, presented go-to-market strategy to PE-backed founders, and pitched work to the boards of global multinationals. Same mindset. Very different coffee.
I have a wicked sense of humour…
…I once had an ad banned off the radio. It was about someone’s exceptionally large clock. 🕰️
I speak creative and commercial. Fluently.
Most strategists sit on one side of the fence. Either they understand brand. Or they understand business. I've lived both.
That means I can walk into an agency and build the brief, then walk into a boardroom and justify the ROI. No translation required.
I’ve seen the view
from both sides of the table.
Agency. Client side. Startup advisor. My own business. I've been the one writing the strategy AND the one being handed it at 9am on a Monday.
Seeing different perspectives gives you greater emotional intelligence and insight, changes the way you work, and enables you to hit the ground running in an interim / fractional role.
Career in brief:
Research isn’t optional.
It’s the job.
Before the frameworks, before the slide decks, there's a conversation to be had.
Data is useful, up to a point. But it’s no substitute for talking to real people. I find insight hiding in plain sight and build strategy around it. My approach always incorporates quant and qual methodologies. Because data only tells half the story.