Media

Media, telecoms & entertainment

Group brand and consumer marketing director BT Group Major changes are afoot at the BT Group. Notable among them is the rebrand of BT Sport, uniting the broadcaster with Eurosport following a joint venture agreement with Warner Bros. Discovery. Pete Jeavons’ marketers worked on the rebrand to TNT Sports – which went live in July – a shift BT regards as central to the “broader transformation” of its consumer business. The ambition being to launch a “new brand” for live sport, the broadcaster claims to be enjoying record viewership in 2023, up year on year. Prior to the rebrand, BT Sport scooped the 2022 Marketing Week Award for data-driven marketing for its ‘The Unseen Stats’ campaign tackling the UK’s online hate epidemic. This work ties into the wider ‘Hope United’ initiative, which seeks to address social media hate through EE’s sponsorship of the UK’s four home nation football associations. The ‘GayVAR’ campaign featured a video series encouraging fans to call out online homophobic abuse. According to Jeavons, the campaign is aimed at helping to build an “inclusive digital society”.■

Pete Jeavons

Global CMO and director of strategic partners Vodafone Business Amanda Jobbins joined Vodafone Business in 2021 in search of an “intellectual challenge”. This challenge involves helping the telecoms giant scale up its B2B division, the ambition for 2023 being to reallocate resources and “rebalance” the organisation to maximise potential. Under Jobbins’ leadership growth is on the agenda, with organic service revenue up 2.6% to €10.33bn (£8.8bn) during its 2023 financial year compared to 2022. Part of the wider marketing push is a focus on partnerships. In April, Vodafone Business announced a tie-up with Extreme E, providing the electric motorsport series with services including 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities. Jobbins claims the Extreme E partnership fits with the Vodafone Business mission to encourage customers to make greener choices through tech, enabling both organisations to “leverage innovation”. The team has also focused on a purpose driven agenda. To date, Vodafone Business has helped more than 230,000 UK SMEs boost their digital skills through its Business.Connected initiative. Designed to help small businesses embrace the digital economy, the goal is to help 800,000 SMEs gain digital skills by 2025.■

Amanda Jobbins

Head of marketing, global business solutions, EUI TikTok Boasting 150 million monthly active users across Europe, TikTok is on a mission to grow its reach among consumers and brands alike. To raise its profile with music fans, the social media network became entertainment partner for the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool. Attracting more than 7.8 billion views for the Eurovision hashtag in the run-up to the event, TikTok hosted exclusive performances and created behind-the-scenes content. From a brand perspective, Trevor Johnson’s team toured the UK, Germany and Southern Europe, educating agencies on how to best use the platform. The #TikTokShowtime tour supports the app’s wider TikTok Academy programme, offering brands and agencies case studies on how to navigate the app. This educational effort was supported in June by a TikTok residency at Cannes Lions, which saw the brand host panel sessions and creative workshops. Aside from the day job, Johnson joined The Marketing Society’s 2023 Marketing Leaders Programme as a speaker, is a member of the Media for All network and an independent non-executive director at the Professional Footballers’ Association.■

Trevor Johnson

Jane Stiller

Dave Stratton

Rachel Swift

Naomi Walkland

Sophie Wheater

CMO Channel 4 Having taken on the government and won in its bid to remain in public ownership, Channel 4 has continued to thrive in 2023. It has pushed ahead with the creation of a single brand uniting the broadcaster’s digital, social and linear channels. Under Zaid Al-Qassab’s direction, streaming service All 4 has repositioned as Channel 4, offering viewers a connected experience across its services and platforms. The brand transformation project spans a “newly defined” brand architecture and “sharpened articulation” of the broadcaster’s tone of voice. This work complements the launch in October of digital-first brand Channel 4.0. Focused on entertaining 13- to 24-year-olds, the Channel 4.0 YouTube and social channels surpassed 25 million views and attracted 104,000 subscribers within six months. The broadcaster is also maintaining its commitment to celebrating diverse voices. This push includes a partnership with Lloyds Bank offering five black entrepreneurs the opportunity to kickstart their business with TV ad airtime worth £100,000, a bespoke advert and six months of tailored marketing and business support.■

Zaid Al-Qassab

Nishma Robb

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Senior director, brand and reputation marketing Google UK 2023 is proving another big year for Google. March saw the launch of conversational generative AI chatbot – and ChatGPT rival – Bard. Meanwhile, during the first quarter the global business notched up $54.55bn (£43.4bn) in revenue from its Google advertising division, including search and YouTube ads. In the UK, the tech giant is working to improve diversity and representation, topics close to Nishma Robb’s heart. Google opened its Accessibility Discovery Centre in London in December, where teams collaborate with accessibility and disability communities on research and product development. The company is also looking to support entrepreneurs through its 2023 Black Founders Fund, which aims to help underrepresented businesspeople access investment to scale their companies via Google Ads support and personalised mentoring. A passionate member of WACL, Robb was promoted from vice-president to president in July – a position she will hold until June 2024. The network for senior female leaders in advertising and communications went live with the ad for its ‘#RepresentMe’ campaign in May, the centrepiece of a wider push highlighting the persistent underrepresentation of women in advertising.■

CMO ITV Under Jane Stiller’s watch ITV embarked on a channel rebrand in preparation for the launch of streaming service ITVX in December. This involved the creation of a unified brand across the ITV portfolio, new idents and a bespoke typeface, all designed to “seamlessly” unite broadcast and streaming. The ITVX launch campaign was described by Stiller as the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of the broadcaster’s use of data and insight. Comic trailers were devised featuring stars such as Helena Bonham Carter and John Boyega auditioning to promote the service. ITVX enjoyed a stellar first six months, delivering a 49% uptick in streaming hours during the first quarter of 2023 alone. Hitting 1 billion streams four months post-launch, the streaming service boasts 85% awareness among UK adults. Beyond streaming, ITV released the latest iteration of its ‘Britain Get Talking’ campaign in May. Supporting young people through exam stress, the ‘No Silence Please’ creative featured radio edits mimicking a foreign language test. 2023 has also proved exciting for Stiller’s career following her acceptance to The Marketing Academy EMEA Fellowship.■

Marketing director Sky Sports and Cinema Dave Stratton has been busy carving out a successful career at Sky since joining the media giant from BT in 2021. In April he swapped leading the marketing of Sky’s £2bn broadband and connectivity business for a promotion to marketing director of Sky Sports and Cinema. Intent on taking inspiration from the world’s best marketing, Stratton has pushed to improve the organisation’s marketing capabilities through the launch last year of Sky’s Marketing Excellence Programme. Intended to provide teams with the skills to deliver highly effective marketing, Stratton regards training and development as the “big tentpole” of the initiative. The Sky Sports marketing boss has also been heavily involved in the creation of the Sky Academy of Marketing foundational training programme. Open to all Sky marketers, the three-day course covers nine modules from strategy and insight to briefing. Stratton is as committed to his own learning and development as that of his team. The marketing boss recently completed an MBA from the Warwick Business School with a dissertation on ageism and social media. ■

Chief customer officer Tesco Mobile Tesco Mobile’s marketers continue to reap the rewards of leaning into the company’s supermarket masterbrand. Under Rachel Swift’s direction, the team has tapped into the “authenticity and credibility” of the Tesco brand via the ‘Supermarket Mobile’ platform. Having delivered the company’s highest ad recall to date, the platform has helped Tesco Mobile grow brand affinity by 3%, trust by 5% and customer acquisition by 4.5%, including attracting 8% more Tesco shoppers. Winner of the 2022 Marketing Week Award for media and telecoms, the brand is now on track to exceed its goal of 15% customer growth by 2025. Buoyed by this success, in April Tesco Mobile launched a new campaign positioning itself as the UK’s ‘most helpful’ network. Featuring the return of the brand’s trolley mascot, Swift wanted the campaign to put a smile on customers’ faces amid the cost crisis. Spanning TV, broadcaster video-on-demand, social media, print, outdoor and radio, the campaign’s release came a month after Tesco Mobile was crowned 2023 Uswitch best network for customer service as voted by the public.■

Vice-president EMEA and APAC marketing Bumble Bumble kicked off 2023 in fine form, notching up a 26% increase in revenue to $194m (£154m) during the first quarter alone. The dating app grew its paying users by 31% over the period to 2.3 million. This year, Naomi Walkland’s team has embarked on several high-profile partnerships, including a tie-up with gymwear brand Gymshark. The ‘For Dates That Workout’ campaign offered Bumble users the chance to add fitness-focused badges to their profiles, while Gymshark hosted speed-dating workout classes at its Regent Street flagship. The company also joined forces with Netflix, inviting daters to play a weekly in-app quiz to test their knowledge of popular shows such as Stranger Things and Selling Sunset. Partnerships have complemented a content push, including the release of season two of podcast series ‘My Love Is’, celebrating love and dating from a black British perspective. Beyond Bumble, Walkland was appointed non-executive director of The Marketing Society in February. She is also a founding member of Chief, the private network for female professionals, and a member of the IPA’s Effectiveness Leadership Group.■

CMO Giffgaff Giffgaff has been striving to help its customers weather the cost of living crisis, committing to freeze prices until the end of 2023 to give mobile users “one less thing to worry about”. This customer focus contributed to Giffgaff being named Uswitch 2023 network of the year, as voted by the public. April marked the unveiling of Giffgaff’s new brand positioning ‘We’re up to good’, marking a fresh strategic direction for the mobile network. The positioning was supported by integrated campaign ‘Ode To Bad’, designed to reflect a desire among consumers for honesty and transparency. The same month, Giffgaff announced it had attained B Corp accreditation, described by Sophie Wheater as probably “the proudest moment” of her career to date. She believes the B Corp commitment to the triple bottom line – people, planet and profit – is the “only way forward” for business. The people element of this commitment has seen Wheater embrace Giffgaff’s fully flexible working policy, supporting the creation of a job share joint head of brand and advertising role within her team.■

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