Spark: March 2021

Faris began his career as a strategy consultant for digital businesses during the first dot com explosion. He moved into the agency world, eventually joining Naked Communications as their 20th employee. Faris worked for Naked in London, Sydney and New York, during their heyday, as a communication strategist and later as global head of digital.

Faris went on to be EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson NYC, tasked with ushering in their digital transformation, which led to them wining their first ever Cyber Lion at Cannes. Subsequently he was appointed Chief Innovation Officer of MDC Partners, a network of best in breed agencies, including CPB, Anomaly, 72 & Sunny and kbs+.

Deployed within kbs+, he established a social team and developed the social products and services, helped start the content team, and co-founded creative technology boutique Spies&Assassins.

Faris was a founding member of the IPA Social Committee, is on the global advisory board of Social Media Week, and has judged numerous award shows, including the social category for the Effies. He helped the London International Awards to create and define the NEW category to reflect and highlight innovation in the industry. He has been blogging and involved in the ongoing discussions around social in the industry for almost a decade.

He has written about social media and marketing for Campaign, Fast Company, Forbes, Contagious, Canvas8 and Age of Conversation books. He has spoken on social, digital and innovative marketing all over the world and his thesis on the future of brands won the inaugural IPA President’s Prize.

@Faris

Jan Gooding is known to be one of the UK’s most experienced marketing leaders and is outspoken on a range of subjects from building global brands to inclusive leadership.

She has enjoyed a successful marketing career during which time she has worked with FTSE 100 companies such as BT, British Gas, Diageo and Unilever and, most latterly, as the Group Brand Director at Aviva. In her final role at Aviva, as their first Global Inclusion Director, she was responsible for introducing the ground-breaking policy of equal parental leave.

Jan now pursues a portfolio of interests as an executive coach, non-executive Chair of Given and PAMCo and is President of the Market Research Society. She is on the CMI Race Committee, on the advisory board of Utopia and the former Chair of Stonewall. She is regular columnist for Mediatel and an Honorary Fellow of the Marketing Society.

@jan_gooding

An insight practitioner with sixteen years’ experience spanning start-ups to big agencies, Anna started out as a research executive at Carat before moving onto Rise Communications and then MediaCom.

She now fronts the insight narrative for Magnetic and prides herself on telling compelling stories with all sorts of research, data and evidence. Anna believes insight starts with curiosity but really delivers when it is successfully applied and observation matches up with opportunity.

@annasampson7

Mike Follett is managing director of Lumen, the leading attention technology company. Mike began his career in advertising, working for DDB in London, New York and Mumbai, before starting Lumen in 2013.

@lumenresearch

Jide Sobo is Director, Strategy & Innovation at Ebiquity. He brings a wealth of experience to the role, having previously been Director of Digital at the company. He has worked in digital marketing for the last 15 years, advising clients including

J&J, Danone, Kingfisher, Morrisons, Burger King, and Tesco. He has also partnered with mobile operators where he helped develop early mobile advertising propositions. Before joining Ebiquity, Jide was Head of Mobile for media agency MEC.

@ebiquityglobal

Sue Todd launched Magnetic, the marketing agency for magazine media, in March 2015, to help customers get the very best return from their advertising spend with magazine media. Working with the UK’s largest consumer publishers, Sue and the Magnetic team have a remit to champion the power and vitality of magazine media in all its forms to the marketing and advertising community.

Sue began her career at EMAP in the research team, working through the ranks to become Marketing and People & Culture Director. From there she spent two years as Marketing Director at CBS Outdoor (now Global), before running specialist brand and culture consultancy Wonder for seven years, where her clients included Channel 4, Harrods, MEC, Primesight and Grey.

She is a non-exec Director on the board of The Big Issue and in her spare time enjoys the theatre, podcasts, singing and cycling.

@SueTodd2
@magneticmedia

Katy Leeson is the Managing Director of Social Chain and former head of new Business and Marketing at MediaCom.

Social Chain is a Global Social Media Marketing Agency, working with some of the largest brands in the world including Superdry, Warner Music, Coca Cola and Boohoo. Katy’s impressive career and accomplishments led her to secure the managing director’s position after just six months at Social Chain.

Since her appointment, she has become an IPA women of tomorrow finalist and developed a number of new initiatives within Social Chain’s existing structure, such as Data Chain which has become a key focus for growth and source of revenue since its onset.

Dominic has over a quarter of a century of experience as a business journalist and editor for leading international B2B publishers. Before becoming Editorial Director of Haymarket Business Media in 1998, he was Editor of Campaign.

He wrote a column on advertising and media for the Daily Telegraph for 10 years and these days writes a weekly ‘Mills on Monday’ column for Mediatel.

Julian Thorne is the Chief Customer Officer of Dennis Publishing. He heads up a team in the US and UK responsible for managing and growing a total subscription base of 1.7m print and digital subscribers. Prior to joining Dennis Julian founded The Big Wheel Consultancy which specialised in providing marketing consultancy and data insight services to publishers seeking to maximise their membership and/or subscription revenues. Julian has previously held various senior executive positions including, CEO of Dovetail Services and Marketing Director at Saga. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing and a non executive director of History Today Publishing.

Jess Burney is Managing Director, Direct Marketing and Business Development, at Immediate Media. In this role, Jess runs Immediate’s subscriptions business, alongside other business development strategy projects.

Immediate has over 1 million subscribers to market leading titles including Radio Times, BBC Good Food, BBC Gardeners’ World and BBC History and subscriptions account for around a third of Immediate’s revenues. Subscription revenues have been consistently in growth during Jess’ tenure and in the last year particularly, the business has seen incredible growth. In the last twelve months, Jess led the team to introduce brand new innovative marketing campaigns, at a very rapid pace, amplifying consumer demand for subscriptions. Using analytics, customer data and lifetime value modelling, Jess and team work with stakeholders around the business to refine and increase investment to grow the business.

Prior to Immediate, Jess held very successful direct-to-consumer roles at companies including  BBC Worldwide, Reed Business Information, and IPC Magazines. Jess is a regular speaker at industry events and is a past chair of PPA Customer Direct.

James joined Hearst Magazines UK as its President and CEO in April 2017 and has overall management responsibility for the company. He has worked in the media industry for over twenty years and has a wealth of experience transforming media companies.

James joins Hearst from Trinity Mirror where he was Chief Revenue Officer from 2014 with responsibility for all national advertising revenue across the group. He led the commercial teams through transformational change and Trinity Mirror won Campaign magazine’s ‘Best Newsbrand and Magazine Sales Team’ award in 2016 in recognition of the success delivered.

From 2011, James was Yahoo’s Managing Director, UK & Ireland, responsible for leading Yahoo’s biggest market outside the US. Prior to that, he spent six years as Managing Director of Virgin Media’s television sales house, ids.

Chris is the CEO for UK Publishing at Bauer Media. Prior to joining Bauer in April 2020 Chris spent 12 years at News UK and was Managing Director for the TNL publishing businesses, including The Times, The Sunday Times, The TLS, The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, Times+ and all brand extension businesses.

Mike is dedicated to making good ideas happen. He inspires people to be more ambitious in terms of thinking as he firmly believes that creativity is effectiveness. Mike has also introduced a new planning approach at PHD, called rhythms planning, and is a member of the Cannes Chimera, a ‘super agency’ of creative talent made up of winners of the Cannes Lions Grand Prix. He was named the UK’s top media planner in the 2017, 2018 & 2019 Campaign Annual and won Campaign’s Media Planner of the Year Award in March 2019 & March 2020.

@MrLoFlo

Tamsyn Spires became Publisher of HELLO! Ltd in June 2018 with a clear brief to deliver growth through new opportunities and to move the business forward in a new digital direction.

HELLO! Ltd has seen substantial growth in its digital reach and new platform development, alongside this print has remained at the heart of the business and retains its strong position in the market. Tamsyn worked at Bauer for 4 years heading up Grazia and The Debrief as the commercial head of the brands. Previously to that Tamsyn was at Hearst Magazines for many years where she held Sales Director positions across numerous titles; Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar and Red.

Aarti Suri is a Senior Customer Success Manager at Permutive working across global enterprise publishers to help them define and commercialise their first-party data offering. Aarti has worked in the marketing, advertising and communications space for 8 years, this includes experience working with OOH, Media Owners, Ad-Tech and SaaS businesses. An advocate for a more inclusive industry Aarti is a mentor and member of Bloom.

After successful stints in digital sales at both Haymarket publishing and Mirror Group newspapers, currently known as Reach plc, I worked for several years at Say Media Inc, pioneers of rich media engagement ads before moving to Time Out Plc in 2017.

My background is very much in sales and building out successful revenue generating teams with more recent years focusing on the ownership of the business P&Ls to drive profitability and efficiency. Currently very excited about the full resurgence of Time Out’s media and ecommerce business as once again Time Out becomes the consumer’s bible for what to do in their city, as well as the reopening of our global Time Out markets.

Angie now heads up all content verticals within the Future portfolio covering, Games, Photography & Design, Homes & Gardens, Music, Sports, Women’s Lifestyle, Country Lifestyle, Tech Lifestyle, TV & Film, Marie Claire and GoodtoKnow. Her career started in marketing and brand development prior to joining TI Media in 2001, where she worked as a publishing director across specialist & mainstream brands and also led a company-wide editorial transformation programme. She was appointed to the TI Media Executive team in 2017, becoming Group Managing Director of the Life & Style portfolio. She, along with her MDs, are focused on growing the reach & monetisation of our many iconic brands across the globe.

Lucie is an award-winning editor and journalist with over 12 years’ experience in the media industry. As Editorial Director for heat, Lucie has grown the iconic title to become a multi-platform brand spanning radio, online and print. As Creative Editorial Director for Bauer Media, she uses audience insight and instinct to drive client solutions across leading brands including Grazia, Empire, Kiss and Absolute Radio and she is the driving force behind Bauer Media’s mental health campaign wheresyourheadat.org.

Not just an innovative and talented journalist, Lucie is also an experienced broadcaster. Her first on-screen presenting was on youth channel Trouble and since then has presented and produced for 4music and heatworld.com, as well as hosting her own heat radio show. She is a sought-after media pundit and a regular showbiz correspondent – with slots on This Morning, and NTA’s and E! to name a few.

She is famed for her range of exploits – all in the name of heat – such as becoming Simon Cowell’s most diminutive bodyguard for the day, appearing in The Only Way is Essex and co-writing an Episode of Hollyoaks. Lucie is also the ghostwriter behind several Sunday Times best-selling autobiographies including Joey Essex’s ‘being reel’ and Charlotte Crosby’s ‘me me me’ and Dani Dyer’s ‘What Would Dani do?’. She is also an influencer in her own right with over 47K followers on social media.

Ryan joined Hearst UK in May 2017 as Head of Programmatic with responsibility for providing strategic leadership and driving revenue across Hearst’s programmatic offering. He was promoted to Head of Digital in 2020. In this role, Ryan is responsible for the development and execution of the UK digital commercial strategy, creating new products and innovations that deliver on client KPI’s, programmatic, display, data, social and commerce. Ryan has over 20 years’ experience across multiple media owners including Time Inc. UK, ITV and GCap Media.

Kerin O’Connor joined Dennis Publishing in 1996 as marketing manager, when the company acquired The Week magazine. He became Associate Publisher within a year and Publisher a year later. In 2000, he joined the Executive Board as International Licensing Director, where he took on responsibility for the overseas expansion of Maxim, launching the title successfully in over 30 territories around the world. In 2004, he became Deputy MD of the Consumer Division. In January 2006, his role changed to Executive Director and he renewed his focus on The Week, where he became MD.

O’Connor became Chief Executive of Dennis Publishing’s flagship title, The Week, in 2011; shortly afterwards in 2012 he was awarded the PPA Publisher of the Year award for his work for the magazine. His focus on expanding the brand into the digital format has grown the magazine into the highest-selling quality weekly subscriptions magazine and the biggest paid-for digital magazine in the UK.

Under O’Connor’s watch, The Week has seen 35 consecutive circulation increases in a trying market and has won a range of awards including Consumer Magazine of the Year in both 2012 and 2015. Globally, The Week is one of the fastest growing print magazines of the last decade. The print magazine’s success has been recently matched by the rapid growth of its award winning digital editions and daily news websites, www.theweek.co.uk and www.theweek.com and its digital advertising growth. In 2015, O’Connor launched the first paid-for print brand extension, The Week Junior, aimed at smart and curious 8-14 year olds which was awarded the Launch of the Year Awards at the British Media Awards 2016. He also launched The WeekDay App, delivering users the essential stories for the day free to their phones.

Dennis Publishing brands also include Auto Express, Carbuyer.co.uk, evo, Men’s Fitness, Viz, PC Pro and Knowyourmobile.

Duncan is Chief Revenue Officer at Immediate Media Co the UK’s leading special interest content and platform company. Duncan has extensive leadership experience in digital, print and mobile media and has held, board level, commercial and publishing roles at Dennis Publishing, VNU and Incisive Media before taking on his current role at Immediate Media Co. Duncan has strategic responsibility for digital print and mobile advertising, content marketing, international licensing and business development of the Immediate Media Co.