The Work
My father was in the British Army. I did not learn about effectiveness from a textbook or a conference stage. I learned it watching someone lead people through situations where the stakes were real and the only thing that mattered was whether everyone in the room trusted each other enough to do the hard work.
Leadership, in his world, was about people. Not systems, not processes, not reporting lines. People. That stayed with me.
I took that belief into marketing. At O2, as Head of Marketing Effectiveness, I discovered something that shaped everything I have done since. The superpower was not analytical brilliance or building a better dashboard. It was understanding everyone's problem: walking into a room, listening to what each person was wrestling with, bringing it all back to the team, and making sure the work tackled those problems. Not the problems on the brief. The real ones.
At Samsung, as European Customer and Marketing Analytics Director, I was part of building an econometric solution for the European marketing team. Proper investment: data, models, the full infrastructure. And some of it was wrong.
Not catastrophically. But enough that we had to stand in front of senior stakeholders and say so. The response surprised me. The honest admission opened a door that all the polished decks and perfect charts never could. People leaned in. They started sharing where their own assumptions had been off. For the first time, the conversation was not about defending positions. It was about getting closer to the truth.
I could not change Samsung's culture. I could not change the process. But I could give people a reason to have a different kind of conversation. And that was enough.
Effectiveness is not measurement. Effectiveness is value creation and how you work to generate that value.
Those two experiences crystallised what I believe and what nobody else in this industry seems willing to say. We have collapsed the entire concept of marketing effectiveness down to dashboards and reporting. Spend more time in the tool. Build a better attribution model. Add another layer to the measurement framework.
But effectiveness is not measurement. Effectiveness is value creation and how you work to generate that value. The outcome and the process. Measurement is the last step in a much longer chain, and the culture around it determines whether anyone acts on what it shows.
Simplicity is not laziness. It is discipline, focus, and being clear-minded about what actually matters.
