Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland
With 30 years experience as an award-winning strategic marketer, I am an expert in making big brands even bigger and getting to the core of what defines a business. With an inextinguishable curiosity for pushing ideas and understanding consumers, I’ve mastered advertising across FMCG to brands ranging from Coca-Cola, Disneyland and Philip Morris International. --- Marketing and advertising are industries built on transformation. My work helps transform how brands see themselves, how businesses leverage their brands, and how people discover and relate to a product. I look to shape and anticipate this transformation, to secure the best talent to make it happen, and to be as much of an architect of new solutions and methods, whilst being committed to continuous learning. To be successful in strategic marketing, requires entrepreneurial thinking. It’s essential to be courageous with new ideas, respond to demands for growth and innovation, and understand the ecology of business and product. I’m proud to say I’ve done this throughout my career, whether it’s been forging my own marketing agency with world-class clients, winning at Cannes for cutting-edge digital campaigns, or revolutionizing branding for some of the world’s biggest brands. While leading international creative and planning teams, my approach has been to observe and question how people are driven and the journeys they make to ensure any decisions are built on genuine and practical insights. --- I know how to make businesses and brands become global, and I’m always interested in discovering new opportunities to make this happen. If you’d like to share your ideas or make use of my insights, then please get in touch. --- On a personal level, when I’m not working my time in Switzerland has made me discover what true skiing really is. When I’m not exploring the slopes, I also enjoy trying out new recipes, discovering new cultures, and honing my photography skills.
Leo Burnett is the world’s third largest advertising agency with 85 offices globally and more than 8,000 employees. Some of the market-leading brands in its portfolio include Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nintendo, and Marlboro. As Global Account Director of combustible brands at Philip Morris International, I manage the advertising campaigns and marketing strategies for some of the world’s biggest, fast-moving consumer brands. Our focus has been reinventing brand platforms for a new consumer base and undergoing a digital transformation that offers a deeply integrated approach to marketing. As head of a team of creative experts, we tailor our approach for each individual market and forge human bonds with consumers via emerging digital techniques. My responsibilities include: • Defining a brief and marketing objective that both works across consumer’s journeys and hundreds of global markets. • Providing insights into consumers behavior and using this to lead high-impact advertising campaigns. • Using data-driven marketing techniques that make creative use of packaging, smartphone integrations, and point-of-sale opportunities. • Planning strategies that work to meet clients needs while nurturing ideas and inputs from a wide range of departments and teams. • Reinventing how we think about strategic marketing and working with leading creative and digital agencies to construct a robust toolkit.
Philip Morris International’s international portfolio includes some of the world’s most recognisable brands, including L&M and Parliament. As Global Account Director for the international portfolio, I oversaw the transformation of the L&M and Parliament brand platforms and campaigns with a focus on using digital technologies, point-of-sale marketing strategies, and a new approach to brand packaging. My responsibilities included: • Based on markets insights, reshaping and reframing the brand platform of both brands, delivering a more relevant purpose, clearer role and defined audience within the overall PMI portfolio. • Mapping the customer journey across all touchpoints from digital, packaging, consumer and trade engagement, and retail. • Creating new marketing and advertising campaigns for the international portfolio, in addition to managing ongoing campaigns. • Developing state-of-the-art marketing tools that could be used by departments around the globe and would cater to their specific consumer base.
Malboro is one of the world top 10 fast moving brands and my focus as Global Account Director was reinventing its renowned 50-year-old advertising campaign for a shifting consumer needs base, by constructing a more empowered marketing platform. The reason for the change was a shift in the consumer needs. The challenge was to redefine how to address the brand purpose “Freedom” in a way that was meaningful for all young adults around the world. The new campaign involved the inputs from creative experts around the world in preparation for its deployment in 110 different markets. This was a fundamental transformation on an international level and its strategic implementation needed to work across channels with a robust set of marketing tools and guidelines to support this. My responsibilities included: • Deepening insights into consumer behavior and finding new avenues for our marketing focus. • Developing a new marketing platform and advertising and marketing campaign for the Marlboro brand. • Creating strategies for consumer engagement, communicating product ideas, and creating a new approach for digital marketing and retail. • Coordinating creative teams across five continents to create the global toolboxes. • Influencing and working with the global teams to envision and equip them with the toolboxes.
My move to Deputy Managing Director at Leo Burnett put me in charge of the portfolio of Philip Morris brands for France and Northern Europe. These are internationally popular brands with multi-million Euro budgets and as tobacco products they come with a unique set of creative challenges. The department focused on developing advertising and brand communication strategies that would successfully navigate these challenges and maintain strong connection with consumers using specialised packaging, point-of-sale marketing, retail and trade activation. During this period, Leo Burnett was revolutionising shopper marketing to maximise advertising results between different channels and across a consumer’s entire journey. My success with clients such as Coca-Cola and P&G saw me increasing my role to management of the entire Northern Europe region. My responsibilities included: • Securing new business and brand development assignments for a variety of brands. • Working with PMI’s local and global structure in order to produce complete advertising and marketing tool kits. • Overseeing the planning of shopper and direct marketing. • Managing a team of 13 and overseeing the successful implementation of advertising strategies.
Starcom is a world-renowned media communication agency that produces experience marketing and technology-fuelled creativity for clients such as Visa, P&G, and Samsung. My role as Marketing Director was to create the Marketing Service department for Starcom in France. This saw greater use of digital data and consumer insights on a global scale to create marketing tools to be used with clients such as P&G and VirginMega. Previously, there was a strong division between the marketing approaches of media companies and direct marketing agencies. My department overcame this by combining the use of precision data with emotionally-compelling branding and a greater focus on consumer experience. My responsibilities included: • Developing below-the-line marketing strategies for various clients using innovative approaches and technologies. • Acting as a member of the board of directors and delivering a profitable operation within the first year. • Facilitating creative consensus and input from across different teams and departments to deliver on briefs.
Arc is a global marketing agency that operates as a subsidiary of Leo Burnett. It offers campaign strategies, direct marketing, and communication solutions for clients including Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Kellogg's. As Managing Director, I was responsible for handling international clients such as P&G and Kellogg’s, while maintaining relationships with previous clients such as Disneyland Paris. This role saw the true beginnings of direct online marketing and it was an innovation that needed to be handled with precision and a clear focus on how consumers used technology. Key successes were the use of disruptive technologies such as CD-ROMs for marketing, and the Grand Prix-winning Laughing Cow campaign that bridged the gap between the online world and forming an emotional connection with a brand. My responsibilities included: • Coordinating network communication teams between clients and different departments. • Developing interactive marketing techniques for brands such as Fiat, Philips, and Groupe Accor. • Designing product launches for brands such as the pharmaceutical company Pfizer across several European markets including Germany, France, and the UK. • Managing direct marketing campaigns with insights into the consumer’s journey to improve response rates for clients. • Increasing revenue for agency with a growth from €1.8 million to €3.4 million over a four-year period.