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Helping clients achieve a better return on their marketing investments. Full details at mattedwardsconsulting.com Applying over 25 years’ experience, including eight years leading a £30m revenue, private equity-owned company with full P&L responsibility. Career highlights include winning the Marketing Society Grand Prix, leading creative agency WCRS to Agency of the Year and working with and learning from some of the best in the business. Along the way, I’ve led many successful teams, which have delivered transformative results for a wide range of brands and businesses.

This was a turnaround task with the brief to revamp and re-energise WCRS. The main objectives were to improve our creative work, secure key clients, win new business and grow revenues and EBITDA. I put in place a completely new management team consisting of a blend of new hires and promotions from within. Together we overhauled everything from the agency positioning to our process for developing ideas. This team delivered for WCRS - we topped the new business league and grew the agency to over £200m in billings. We were named Agency of the Year by a panel of 40 clients at Marketing Week's Festival of Marketing. We won at every major creative awards including Gold at Cannes. Campaign named me in their 'Top Ten Chief Executives' list. During this time I built up personal expertise in the areas of Sport, Media, Entertainment, Gambling, Gaming, FMCG and Alcoholic Drinks and channel expertise across all media with an increasing focus on digital.

I joined Engine in 2005 and worked in three key roles as we grew and developed the business: new business director of our creative agency WCRS, managing director of the Engine Group and then CEO WCRS. I ran WCRS for eight years until in 2018 we restructured the Engine business from 12 separate brands and businesses into three pillars: Engine Transformation, Engine Communications (PR & public affairs) and Engine Creative & Experience Design. In doing so we brought together all our creative expertise across advertising, creative & culture, performance marketing, digital, brand design, sport and entertainment, production and experience design.

In this role I was responsible for a range of Group functions with the most important being to drive growth for the Engine Group through successful business development. This included both growing existing accounts and attracting new ones to Engine. In order to do this successfully I put in place a structure for different Engine companies to work well together and personally led a number of successful cross-Engine pitches. Together with the rest of the Engine management team I developed Engine's model of integration during this period - many of the concepts and ways of working we put in place have become central to how we work today with our most integrated Engine clients.

The WCRS management team had just completed a management buyout, so naturally the partners were hugely keen to win new clients. My role was to be the focused lead on new business, to market the agency, generate opportunities and make sure we converted them. We spent the first year getting our proposition right and making a few mistakes along the way. Then we hit our stride with clear, tight strategies brought to life with bold, vibrant pitch-winning creative, winning Weetabix, The Royal Navy, Churchill, Transport for London, Littlewoods, The Carbon Trust, Kerrygold and Sky. WCRS shot up the UK billings league from 18th to 6th during this period and the success of the agency provided a platform for the creation of Engine, our integrated group of agencies housed all under one roof.

Lowe Lintas was formed from the merger of Lowe Howard-Spink and Ammirati Puris Lintas and I joined just after the merger. Most commentators expected the merger to be a disaster as the cultures of the two agencies were very different but in the first full year as a merged entity Lowe Lintas was named Agency of the Year by Campaign. My contribution was to run the flagship Stella Artois account and working with talented writers, directors and composers we delivered some of the most acclaimed creative work of this era including the films Doctor, Devil's Island, Pilot and Ice-Skating Priests. We also developed an innovative digital campaign called Sable & Shuck, one of the first ever ARGs (Alternate Reality Game) developed to promote a brand. We won the Marketing Society Grand Prix for the effectiveness of the Stella Artois campaign over time. On the back of this success we were invited to compete for the account on a global basis. We pitched and won the business from the global incumbent McCann.

In 1994 Saatchi & Saatchi was the UK's leading ad agency and I was one of 2,000 graduates applying to work there. I fought my way through to be one of six successful applicants and ended up staying for six formative years. During this time I learnt the basics of marketing strategy and campaign development from many major brands including Toyota (launching Avensis and Yaris), Procter & Gamble, Norwich Union and Lloyds TSB. By the end of the millennium the dotcom boom was in full swing. I ran the successful pitch for monster.com and oversaw the development of the multi-award-winning Beware of the Voices campaign.