Twenty-five years building brands. Putting AI to work since 2017. Both measured in outcomes.
The proof is in the results: a New York office co-built from $0 to ~$10M, part of the leadership team that grew Intent HQ’s revenue ~3X in two years, the strategy behind a $91M world-record sale at Christie’s, and a full rebrand and AI‑native marketing engine at Actual (formerly Microblink Commerce), run as its sole marketing leader.
Background
Agency-trained at Ogilvy, BBH, JWT, BBDO, R/GA and M&C Saatchi, then in-house as a CMO and as founder of GARPco, the brand and growth consultancy I started in 2014. Global brands for SAP and ExxonMobil (seventeen countries), investment and wealth from T. Rowe Price to Christie’s, plus technology, telecoms, CPG and QSR (Microsoft, Verizon, Nestlé, Pepsi, Starbucks, Pizza Hut). A psychology degree still shapes how I read the room.
Two threads run through this work: brand, and marketing innovation. Choose a lens and the work re-sorts to follow it.
Selected work, in sequence
The problem. A global enterprise technology brand needed to show up as one company in every market it served, across very different languages and cultures. Straight translation flattened the idea, and central review of every local ad could never scale.
The approach. Replace translation with transliteration, adapting the idea for cultural meaning in each market, and build a modular brand-asset system with explicit rules for what holds and what flexes. Local teams assembled their own ads inside those limits, and the brand stayed unmistakable without a central team signing off on each one.
Helped create the tagline “The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP” and the global brand-asset system behind it.
Rolled out across SAP’s global footprint, in every market the company operates in.
A platform SAP has built on ever since, a rare kind of longevity for a campaign line.
BrandMarketing Innovation
The problem. At the nadir of the 2009 crisis, T. Rowe Price needed to keep frightened investors from panic-selling and argue for disciplined active management to serious, skeptical readers of the financial press.
The approach. JWT’s celebrated “Ink” platform had established that the firm’s value lay beyond the surface numbers, in rigorous in-the-field research. I led the strategy carrying that television idea into a Wall Street Journal print campaign, translating a fluid, emotional film concept into a stark, evidence-forward “Truth” series for readers who wanted proof, not reassurance.
Ran in The Wall Street Journal and other premium financial titles at the depth of the crisis.
Extended a campaign widely regarded as a landmark in financial-services advertising.
Brand
The problem. Microsoft's enterprise buyers make multimillion-dollar technology bets and distrust advertising; straight promotion erodes credibility with exactly the people it's meant to persuade.
The approach. Reframe the brand from advertiser to publisher. The agency became an ongoing information network of 40+ developers, analysts and enthusiasts running a real-time loop and producing genuine editorial (interviews, live chats, analyst roundtables) distributed into the communities the audience already trusted.
300+ posts published; 1.4M+ total page views; one of the most popular Microsoft blogs.
around 9 million user engagements across the network over seven months.
Recognised with a Bronze Integrated Lion (Cannes Lions) and a One Show Interactive Merit (2010).
An early example of native content and real-time reactive messaging, years before either was standard.
BrandMarketing Innovation
The problem. ExxonMobil ran four lines of business (brand, retail, lubricants and chemicals), each speaking to different audiences in different markets, with no shared story holding them together.
The approach. Reposition every line of business under one harmonized campaign platform, a master idea each business could live inside, then coordinate its localization across a multi-agency, multi-country planning network so the platform held while each market made it its own.
Four lines of business repositioned under a single global campaign, “Energy lives here.”
Localized across seventeen countries through a two-agency network (BBDO and DDB).
Strategy leadership across 25 planners in multiple offices and markets.
BrandOperator & Outcomes
The problem. M&C Saatchi's CRM agency (LIDA, out of London) needed a New York presence from scratch: no office, no US clients, no team.
The approach. Sourced an external data-science firm (Davis & Partners) and pioneered its AI/NLP suite for CRM: enriching profiles with social data and using embeddings to power more complete, personalised campaigns. Partnered with the CEO to build the office around that capability end-to-end (team, positioning and new-business engine) and won its first major client, a global luxury wine & spirits group.
NY office co-built from $0 to roughly $10M in revenue with the anchor account.
Ran strategy globally across New York and London over a team of around 40.
An AI-led CRM offering in market from 2017: machine learning, social signal and embeddings on an enterprise martech stack.
Marketing InnovationOperator & Outcomes
The problem. Get a tiny pool of the world's wealthiest collectors to bid higher than ever on one work, while those buyers were kept anonymous, even from the agency. No CRM, no direct outreach; the usual luxury playbook was off the table.
The approach. Invert the model to one-to-many-to-few: build mass cultural hype so owning the piece became the ultimate status signal to the few who could buy it. Mined the body of contradictory commentary about Rabbit and made contradiction itself the medium, selling the outrage, not the object.
1.5B+ impressions (around 1.1B social); engagement ran 200% over CTR benchmark.
Against that backdrop of attention, Rabbit sold for $91,075,000, a world record for a work by a living artist.
Recognised with an Effie for business effectiveness.
BrandOperator & Outcomes
The problem. A genuinely powerful AI/NLP asset was being sold narrowly, as an implementation shop. The capability far outstripped how it was taken to market.
The approach. Repositioned the firm from implementer to AI-enabled marketing-solutions company and productised its engine into two market-facing offerings, owning concept and go-to-market for each.
Media Asset Analyzer: near-real-time sentiment-and-impact measurement for major media events; deployed for a major faith‑based organisation.
Fuel.AI: a multilingual trend-scoring engine, taken to market with Leo Burnett (2021).
Both products ultimately sold as licensed IP; retained as a board advisor.
Marketing InnovationOperator & Outcomes
The problem. Intent HQ had landed its first major contract but was scaling without a spine: no clear positioning, no defensible differentiation, and a sprawl of products that muddied the story for customers and investors.
The approach. Defined the North Star positioning and rebuilt the brand end-to-end; rationalised the portfolio into a focused two-pronged strategy and shaped the case for a third, enabled by the Anagog merger; partnered with the CEO on investor relations through fundraising.
Part of the leadership team that grew revenue roughly 3× in two years, with continued backing from existing investors.
Named AI Company of the Year at the British Data Awards 2024 (321 nominations, judged by a panel of CDOs).
Featured on the FT1000 (fastest-growing European companies) in 2022 and 2023.
BrandMarketing InnovationOperator & Outcomes
The problem. Customer-experience measurement leans on surveys: people answering when asked, inside the frame the question sets. The richer signal is what people say unprompted, but it’s unstructured, noisy, and hard to compare across a journey.
The approach. I designed CxFI in two halves and oversaw its build with the research and AI team. Frictions: an NLP/ML pipeline reads 2+ years of unprompted public conversation, isolates the discrete experiences along a customer journey (from 31 micro-steps to 14 macro-experiences), and scores each by net sentiment weighted by reach, normalised into a comparable index. Fources: four forces of experience design (See, Say, Think, Do) that became XDFources™ translate the emotion discovered at each step into a counteracting design response. Measure the friction with data; design the fix.
Deployed for household-name brands across QSR and CPG/beverage (anonymised).
Delivered root-cause friction insight clients described as something they’d always wanted but had no other way to obtain.
Reads the truths people share when no one is asking, unlike survey-based CX indices.
Marketing InnovationBrand
The problem. A commerce arm was being spun out of its parent and needed to become a standalone brand, with its own identity, positioning and go-to-market, and a sharp reason to exist in a post-cookie market.
The approach. Ran a BrandLens™ process with the leadership team and identified the positioning (real, consented, receipt-derived purchase data as the replacement for the third-party cookie) and created the brand "Actual," the name carrying the argument. Architected the brand fast, built the GTM and marketing engines, and executed AI-natively: on-brand tooling, AI-generated reporting, and a unified-customer-intelligence architecture across the funnel.
A complete standalone brand, GTM engine and marketing engine, AI-native from day one.
Live in-market as "the Permissioned Purchase Data Platform," with named partners including DoorDash, Instacart, Amazon, General Mills, Ibotta and Upside.
Sole marketing leader across brand, demand gen, ABM and sales enablement: rebuilt every piece of sales material and built an agentic plug-in that gave every seller on-brand tools.
BrandMarketing InnovationOperator & Outcomes
Original thinking
The GARPco toolkit
The tools I bring to any marketing team, full-time or fractional, from GARPco, my brand and growth consultancy. Each one has its own paper. Together they define a brand, map how people experience it, govern how it flexes and deliver the results.
01Define
BrandLens™
GARPco · 2014
Four filters (who, what, how and why) that each give a team something to use right away, and together produce one positioning north star. It is also where the genome behind Parametric Branding comes from.
The four forces of experience design: what people see, say, think and do, planned moment by moment across a journey, not once per campaign. Each force is briefed from the brand’s lens and given its own scoreboard.
Brand identity is the last static surface in a personalized world. This is the governed, AI-driven architecture that lets one brand flex across markets and business lines while its core holds, as I first did by hand for SAP.
My AI-native operating system for delivering outcomes. One outcome, worked back to the signals that predict it, then run every week in three steps: Baseline, Fix, Report.
AI as an orchestration layer over a unified customer-intelligence base, choosing the right motion per customer, per moment. Its discipline, knowing when not to act, with compliance designed in rather than bolted on, suits premium, regulated businesses where trust is the product.
A peer-published article on turning an advertiser into a publisher, built on a real-time listen-and-respond loop for Microsoft years before the tooling existed. That loop is a manual ancestor of today’s AI orchestration layer, and an early sign of the same line of thinking.
