Spark London: October 2019

Mark Ritson is adjunct professor of marketing at Melbourne Business School and a marketing consultant with clients including PepsiCo, De Beers, Unilever and LVMH. He has written a weekly column for Marketing Week for almost a decade and won PPA Business Columnist of the Year three times. He teaches the Marketing Week Mini MBA in marketing.

As the Head of Strategy, Zehra is responsible for the overall strategic output of the agency, with a focus on how communications can have the maximum possible impact on a client’s brand and business performance. Zehra has over 15 years’ experience in the industry, across both clients and media agencies. In that time, she has led award-winning strategies on some of our most iconic brands and causes including Virgin, The Government and Estée Lauder Companies to name a few. Her award highlights include IPA Effectiveness, Thinkbox TV Planning and Cannes.

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.

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

Rob Ratcliff is the Head of Content at Barclays Corporate Banking. He joined Barclays over five years ago in which time he was worked on campaigns across the bank in personal, business and corporate banking. In his current role he is responsible for editorial-led campaigns across a range of media. Rob has worked in content marketing since before it was called ‘content marketing’. Barclays is a diversified transatlantic consumer and wholesale bank, anchored in our two home markets of the UK and US, with global reach.

Sarah is the news editor responsible for all news and analysis coverage, as well as Marketing Week’s social media strategy. She has a particular focus on financial, mobile and telecoms brands, as well as agency relationships and marketing effectiveness. She joined in September 2013 as retail reporter.

Gavin is a multi-award-winning marketing leader, with more than a decade of board-level experience across the full commercial and marketing mix. As CMO at Smart Energy GB, he is ultimately responsible for driving consumer consideration and conversion across this extremely complex £11billion transformation programme.

One of the first appointments to the executive team, he built the marketing function from scratch, oversaw the creation of the proposition and brand and launched it into the UK consumer market. He now leads a team of more than 45 across advertising; performance and direct response marketing; digital; brand partnerships; insight, analytics and evaluation; and consumer PR functions.

Previously marketing director at specialist communications agency, production house, and television broadcaster Media Trust, he had P&L responsibility for the communications services division, which delivered year-on-year growth, as well as full mix marketing across B2B and consumer brands. He has held senior marketing positions at the Chamber of Commerce and St. John Ambulance, where he was responsible for significant commercial growth.

An alumnus of London Business School, Gavin has won broad industry recognition, with more than 25 awards including British Arrows, Campaign Big Awards and Creative Circles. He is a Marketing Week Vision 100 inductee, a mentor for the Marketing Academy, a member of the Marketing Group of Great Britain, and a frequent marketing industry commentator and speaker. He lives in rural Hampshire with a chocolate spaniel.

Katie has 16 years media agency experience, originally working in Publishing before moving into Product, the strategic heartbeat of Amplifi, focused on developing and launching new propositions for the business. Her projects in this role have been varied, spanning Publishing, Mobile, Programmatic, Creative and currently is looking after Dentsu’s global project around Attention for the UK.

Shazia Ginai is the CEO of Neuro-Insight in the UK, managing the growth of the business and overseeing projects across a range of media and industries. A creative and curious insight and marketing professional with a passion for people and leading insight to action. She has a track record of successfully building and leading insight capability and embedding this into organisations to drive action across multiple markets and functions. Prior to working at Neuro-Insight, she worked across the luxury fragrance and skin care brands at P&G after which she created and led the global insight function at ghd. Shazia has a passion for truly actionable insights and the story told through data.

@neuro-insight

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

Darren has 18 years of media experience on both sides of the fence. His career includes nine years print buying and planning at ZenithOptimedia and five years as an integral member of the award-winning Telegraph Create and Spark team, before moving to Dennis in 2016 to launch and lead their creative solutions division.

Dedicated to delivering insight-led ideas for clients, Darren now oversees the Dennis Content Studio and is ultimately responsible for the commercial success of the group's on-platform and white-label content offering.

Cath runs Imagine – Immediate Media’s award-winning creative and content studio, which she co-founded in 2016 to harness the power of Immediate’s scaled, premium, passionate audiences. Imagine delivers rich content partnerships, leveraging unique data and insight, across Immediate’s market-leading brands.

She has spent 20 years in media, starting out at the digital tech start up Silicon Media Group. Subsequently she moved with its sale to giant tech publisher CNET, before joining media start up Magicalia in 2010, which led to the creation of Immediate Media Co in 2011.

Cath’s devoted her time in media to delivering successful and innovative partnerships for clients; whilst building and nurturing best in class, creative teams.

Jane leads the Agency and Client Direct Sales division and is responsible for driving commercial revenues and managing and developing relationships with influential media-buying agencies as well as key clients. Working across 23 brands with multiple touchpoints, the Sales division incorporates specialist print, digital display, programmatic and creative solutions roles and is responsible for maximising revenues across all Hearst Solutions: Display Advertising, Branded Content, Data & Insight, Experiential, Licensing, Accreditation, Commerce, Purpose and Content Marketing.

Jane joined Hearst UK in May 2015 as Head of Commercial Operations, leading optimal commercial delivery across Hearst’s portfolio of print and digital brands. She has also held the position of Director, Hearst Made, where she oversaw the growth strategy of Hearst’s content marketing division.

She joined Hearst from media agency Initiative, where she was Joint Head of Investment looking after the cross-media campaign delivery of Tesco, Amazon and Patek Philippe, among other clients.

Jane’s media experience includes print, digital, TV, out-of-home and cinema both as a Client Director and leading Trading and Activation departments.