Providing consulting, strategy and narrative services for a range of strategy, marketing, advertising and media companies of all sizes.

There were broadly 2 parts to my role at Twitter, both of which I loved.1) Helping Twitter to grow commercially. My role broadly involved high level strategic conversations with our clients and partners about what they were trying to achieve while at the same time outlining Twitter’s own strategy and the thinking behind what we were trying to do. Ultimately this helped customers feel confident embedding Twitter into their comms strategies. One of the things we used to pride ourselves on was creating genuinely useful insight and delivering it in an engaging way. My role worked closely with Twitter’s excellent XFN teams including Research & Insight, Audience Data, Business Marketing & Twitter Next and we produced work such as #HistoryInTheTweeting which looked at Tweet data & insights during lockdown to predict how our behaviour would change afterwards as well as projects such as #Flocks & #TwitterIs to help customers to understand Twitter better. During lockdown I hosted #CouchConference which was a series of 12 weekly live streamed broadcasts on Twitter sharing insights on what we were seeing play out on Twitter. In normal times, in-person events were a cornerstone of how we delivered Twitter’s message to customers and I loved fronting those up and helping people to tell their own Twitter stories. In late 2021 I set up and developed Twitter UK’s new Strategic Sales Team - working with 9 superstars and our Ops team to identify where strategic growth for Twitter was most likely to come from and adopting an agile approach to how we delivered it. The team was held up as a big success story internally and exceeded target every quarter, mostly because they are great at what they do and were empowered to do it in the way they saw best.For details on the second part of my role please see Twitter role below (LinkedIn has a character limit for these things it seems!)

The second part of my role at Twitter can probably best be described as “everything else”. We had specialist teams working across Partnerships, Policy, Product, Enforcement, Curation, Trends, Comms & Consumer Marketing and as a senior member of the UK team I was able to work with each of them to try to help ensure that people understood why Twitter made the decisions it did and use what soft influence I had to help ensure that Twitter was “doing the right thing”. We would be the first to admit that Twitter wasn’t perfect but we were proud of the progress we were able to make. Highlights included helping to develop partnerships with brilliant organisations like Women in Football to help to increase the visibility of women in the football industry, working on ways to tackle racist abuse targeted at UK footballers and representing Twitter in national media including on BBC Breakfast, R4 Today, Sky News Election night coverage. Twitter taught me so much about a lot of different things including practical things such as commercial reality & running a team but more fundamentally that the culture of a company really matters. A Tweet from a customer after the initial round of Musk layoffs captured it perfectly; “Every single person I've ever worked with at Twitter has been lovely, knowledgeable, enthusiastic and just an absolute gem. And it was like a happy little cult, they all LOVED it”. I feel incredibly lucky to have had a chance to be part of it all.

I spent 5 fantastic years as Head of Planning at PHD UK. The brief was to oversee PHD’s planning product and to make it as good and as famous as it could be and I got to work on brands such as Sainsbury’s, Warner Bros, Mondelez, YouTube and the BHF to try to deliver this. PHD was recognised as Agency of the Year by Campaign, Media Week and Marketing magazines during my time there and I was Included in Campaign’s Top 10 Media Planners for 4 consecutive years. Importantly the work itself was recognised with several awards including the Grand Prix at the 2013 Campaign Media Awards for overall body of work, Grand Prix at the Thinkbox TV Planning Awards for the BHF and two Gold Lions at Cannes, the Mediaweek Awards Grand Prix and Campaign's Campaign of the Year for our work creating the world's first Lego ad break, celebrating the launch of The Lego Movie for Warner Bros. Making the Lego movie ad break was a real career highlight and I loved being part of making something that we knew would make a lot of people smile and get widely talked about. PHD was a dream job and a great agency. I learned to be as ambitious as possible with the work and the importance of being concise, cutting things out, editing and bringing people with you.

I joined Mindshare as a Press planner/buyer because I wanted to work on Nike and in my time there moved first to the Planning team and then became a founder member of the newly formed Mindshare Strategy team. Highlights included working on the launch of Run London for Nike, creating an evening edition of Metro for Nike’s ‘Run London Goes Nocturnal’ campaign, planning Nike’s Joga Bonito World Cup campaign and helping create Britain’s Biggest Break for KitKat. I also worked on ITV for 4 years. This was a fascinating account with a brilliant marketing team and it helped me to develop a passion for content marketing. I worked with a huge number of really smart and generous people and learned a lot from all of them.

I started my career at Zenith Media working on brands including Kraft, Halifax, BMW, Columbia Tristar and BT. I’ll admit I didn’t really know what media planning and buying was when I interviewed for the role but I quickly found out and quickly loved the pace of the role and the precision and creativity it required and the fun we had while we were doing it.