Spark North | February 2020

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

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.

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

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.

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

Laura is the Head of Create Development at Hearst.  Her remit is to oversee the corporate Create strategy as well as support and develop the growing Create team.

Laura joined Hearst UK in June 2007 having just graduated from Lancaster University.  With over 15 years’ experience, Laura has held a number of senior roles at Hearst.  She ran the Partnerships team across the Young Women’s group for 6 years, growing creative solutions revenue on Cosmopolitan by 43% during her tenure.  More recently, Laura ran the Group M Create team – securing partnership deals from the likes of Adidas, DFS, Ann Summers and Tetley.

In her current role, Laura has spearheaded Hearst’s corporate Purpose offering as well as developing high profile commercial propositions including Project Body Love and Hearst’s new sustainability initiative – Getting Greener.