How I got here

I spent 16 years at agencies like Leo Burnett and M&C Saatchi, working on campaigns for brands like McDonald's, Betfair, AXA and Public Health England. My job was to make the work, but I was always more interested in why certain strategies clicked in culture and others never quite landed, even when the creative was good.

Somewhere between McDonald's weather-reactive posters, Betfair's £20m football platform, and a lot of half-finished decks, it became obvious: most brand problems aren't "creative problems" at all. They're assumption problems.

So I went back to university, completed an MA in Cultural Studies (USYD, High Distinction), and shifted upstream. Now I spend my time mapping the gap between how brands imagine their audiences and how those people actually live.

What interests me

I'm particularly interested in moments where the old systems stop working:

• Women's sport outgrowing tired sponsorship models

• Brands still selling empowerment when the ground has clearly shifted

• Organisations holding onto customer archetypes that no longer exist

In practice

That's shown up as:

• Partnering with TAL to build authentic platforms for women's sport participation

• Shaping Betfair and McDonald's creative strategies around actual behaviour, not category clichés

• Working hands-on with L'Oréal, GHD and Connect2Perform on cultural repositioning

How I work

My background means I'm comfortable in the mess between strategy, research and creative: close enough to execution to know what's realistic, close enough to theory to spot patterns the brief doesn't name.

I like working with people willing to examine their own assumptions, not just their competitors' campaigns.

Right now I'm most interested in brand strategy, cultural insight and advisory work. If you've ever had that nagging sense that something isn't quite landing but can't say why, that's usually where I start.