About me
The personal stuff…
I’m an Aussie a long way from home.
I live in Brighton with my partner and two wonderful daughters (5 and 8).
I’m a music obsessive, I live for the perfect gif and I have an unexplainable obsession with tiny espresso cups.
I used to dress up as a giraffe for charity as a favour to my mum (not joking).
One of my first (and favourite) jobs was fixing go-karts with my best mate.
I doodle on post-its a lot. It helps me think.
I’m a natural introvert trapped in the role of an extrovert.
I care aggressively about fairness.
And I feel incredibly uncomfortable writing about myself.
The professional stuff…
Over the last 4 years, I built up a Transformation practice for Anomaly across Europe
Helping them to deliver on their mission to be a change agent for their clients.
Mission / Ambition
I believe that many of the challenges facing modern businesses - disconnected ecosystems, fragmented customer experiences, the widening chasm between product and marketing, poor adoption and applications of new technologies and more - can be uniquely tackled by a combination of brand strategy, people-first thinking and ecosystem design.
Brand strategy is much more than positioning, design and logo. It is about defining what you need to mean to people to take a competitive advantage and then delivering on it in every single interaction.
People-first thinking challenges us to consider the needs of the people we are serving - be it customers, employees or stakeholders. Working back from how we create the greatest value for them is a good way to keep making money.
Ecosystem thinking forces us to think about the big picture while also enabling us to zoom in to a specific place and study it in great detail. Modern businesses are connected businesses, and connected businesses need strategy to hold them together.
I’m at my best when stretching across lots of different areas to bring coherence to chaos with smart strategy, compelling stories and empathy. Using my broad set of skills and tools to help lead diverse teams of equally stretchy people to places we didn’t think possible. I love connecting the dots and finding clarity in complexity, changing where our creativity can take us. This is why I prefer sandpits over ivory towers. It’s why I’m not interested in being the hero - I’m more about winning together better. And it’s why I know that being a generalist thinker isn’t enough. You have to be able to DO as well. It’s important to understand the whole, and then be able to go deep on a part of it and follow it through.
I want to do work that expands the scope of business by serving people’s needs - Bringing humanity to digital experiences, telling stories that travel in culture and helping the best brands to their futures, faster. And I want to do that with people that share my view that optimising for creativity and putting people first is the best business strategy.
Let’s go back to the beginning…
19 years ago…
2004 - 2009
I cut my teeth in the media agency, MEC (now called Wavemaker after a merger with Maxus), as a Connections Planner over 5 years. Exploring how culture is formed and transferred and learning the power of context for creativity. Helping build relevance for brands like Canon, Colgate Palmolive, Arnott’s Campbells, Schick Energizer, Activision and Red Bull.
2009 - 2013
I then moved into a wonderful little full-service agency called JOY. Where I spent a little over 4 years building a bridge between the creative and media arm of the business to make work for local broadcaster SBS, NIKE and TRESemmé.
2007 - 2013
I also spent over 6 years teaching advertising at the University of Technology Sydney. Applying the practical knowledge from my day-job to the training of the next generation of marketers and creatives. I loved this so much and it was an incredibly formative experience for how I worked with teams and clients during the day.
2013 - 2014
Before heading to the UK, I did a short contract at News Ltd helping bring strategic rigour to their products and sales functions. I worked closely with the head of data to create new products and services for brands and ran a company-wide make-day to accelerate their Christmas strategy to drive new revenue streams.
2014 - July 2020
Then, in 2014, I packed up and headed to LDN to join R/GA where I was allowed to run around the business for the last 6-and-bit years doing everything on the bingo card and helping to make R/GA Campaign’s Digital Agency of the decade.
2018
While still at R/GA, I also served as the Global CSO of Rufus, the agency set up by Initiative to service the global Amazon media account. For the whole of 2018, I consulted senior leaders of the global Amazon marketing team on brand strategy, creative integration and process to help to shape the global approach for a bunch of verticals including Home, Softlines and Alexa, including writing the brief for the 2019 Super Bowl spot.
2020 - 2021
At the very start of the pandemic I made the heartbreaking decision to take a voluntary redundancy at R/GA to try and protect the team we’d built. I used the time to really think about the sort of work I wanted to do next and helped founders, CEOs and people thrown into the turbulent waters of the pandemic find a path forwards. By using a brand POV to expand the scope of businesses I managed to help Get Licensed increase both its revenue and value, help Tuune secure a 4.5M round of funding to get them to market. And founded, designed and launched Adcademy, an online course for previously excluded talent with Brixton Finishing School. I’d reignited my passion for showing what creativity can do and how people-centric thinking can unleash the full potential of a brand and business.
2021 - 2025
With my new found ambition - to change how a business grows through brand, I found a new home with Anomaly, as their head of Transformation across Europe. Here I worked with brands like Expedia Group, LVMH, Lidl, Speedo and helped to create a whole new business - Novonesis, building new success models to open new growth. The function grew rapidly with propositions around connected content, membership, band experience and employee experience. I spent a lot of time in this role working directly with the C-suite to help bring about change and learned a huge amount about stakeholder management and the power of a compelling story to inspire change.
2025 - now
At the beginning of the year I made the decision to step away from Anomaly to build my own practice. I could see a big shift in the sorts of questions the agency was being asked and the work seemed to be drifting down-stream, not up. I am currently working with a handful of start-ups to define their brand and develop GMT strategies that will get them to the next funding gateways. I’m also consulting to a small group of Executives as they grapple with the futures of their businesses, teams and technology.
I’m also using this period of more dynamic working to go on what I’ve decided to call a ‘professional safari’ - where I’m going to travel across the professional networks and see the sights, taking note of what I see and making a plan for the future. I have a bunch of hypothesis for service offerings and I wanted to see which ones resonate the best with business leaders.
And here we are, all caught up.
If you’re up for a chat about what’s next, please get in touch