media & telecoms
Zaid
Al-Qassab
Chief marketing officer, Channel 4
Formerly BT Group’s chief brand and marketing officer, Zaid Al-Qassab joined Channel 4 in September 2019 as CMO to lead marketing and brand strategy across the channel, with responsibility for developing a data-led digital marketing programme.
Al-Qassab quickly began forging a digital-first identity for Channel 4, assembling a team of diverse talent at the company’s new Leeds headquarters. He is also driving a new marketing phase for the channel centred around its Digital Creative Unit (DCU), which will produce content specifically for the broadcaster’s various social platforms.
The unit is a key component of ‘Maximising Time With 4’, an ongoing digitally focused corporate strategy aimed at understanding how young audiences want to consume content and marketing, and identifying how to be on the appropriate platform. As part of this drive, Channel 4’s first wave of content appeared on streaming service BritBox in April.
In May, the broadcaster activated a ‘Stay Safe’ digital on-screen graphic around Covid-19, and Al-Qassab said Channel 4 would continue to use its reach and trusted relationship with viewers to communicate important public health advice.■
Chief marketing officer, O2
Nina Bibby has seen many changes in mobile technology since becoming O2 CMO in 2013. The latest hot topic is 5G, and in June 2020, O2 became the first network provider to join the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN), a voluntary coalition
of more than 70 organisations set up to eradicate ad fraud. Bibby said the misinformation around 5G is just one example of the damage fake news can cause.
In October 2019, as part of its sponsorship of the Rugby World Cup in Japan, O2 partnered with ITN to produce the world’s first live TV ad completely powered by 5G. The ad captured live footage of the match-day atmosphere across the UK using 5G ‘bonded’ cameras and was instantly sent to ITN in London using O2’s 5G network before being broadcast live. Bibby said it marked a “huge milestone” in demonstrating the possibilities of 5G for sport fans.
In March this year, O2 launched its sonic identity, which revolves around human breath. The sound can be heard in its apps and stores, as well as in O2 venues.■
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Nina
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Kerris
Bright
Chief customer officer, BBC
Kerris Bright joined the BBC from Virgin Media in June 2018, taking on the role of chief customer officer, with responsibility for developing a “closer, more personal” relationship with BBC viewers and licence fee payers.
In late 2019, the BBC launched the UK’s first interactive voice news service, enabling people using smart speakers to skip ahead to specific stories by saying ‘Give me BBC News’ to an Alexa-enabled device. In November 2019, the BBC launched UK streaming service BritBox with broadcast partner ITV.
To demonstrate its importance as a public service broadcaster during the Covid-19 crisis, the BBC launched a film featuring a montage of news footage accompanied by the voice of Idris Elba reading Edgar Guest’s poem Don’t Quit. Bright said the film was designed to highlight the things that “connect us in these difficult times”.
The archives have also proved valuable, with the BBC creating a series of ‘Stay at Home’ public information films during lockdown, using clips from classic episodes of Miranda, The Thick of It and The Mighty Boosh to help relay public health messages. Bright said she wanted it to raise a smile during tough times.■
Director of marketing communications, BT
Last year, Peter Jeavons launched ‘Beyond Limits’, BT’s biggest brand campaign in 20 years, which is designed to help the public recognise the company’s future potential. Then in April it started a “public service education exercise” to teach people vital digital skills via a series of short films that ran on ITV. The spots formed part of BT’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Jeavons and his team went through an “intense” period of working remotely to script, find talent and create the videos. Jeavons also helped the BT brand return to the British high street “loud and proud” for the first time in 25 years in October. The company transformed EE stores with BT co-branding and introduced help desks and services across its broadband and mobile ranges. This resulted in a “significant upturn” in corporate and individual customers who would recommend BT to their peers, and the company also celebrated 15 consecutive quarters of improved net promoter scores (NPS). Jeavons is also responsible for BT’s FA sponsorship, through which the company hopes to create real change in access to the sport.■
Peter
Jeavons
Debbie
Klein
Group chief marketing, corporate affairs and people officer, Sky
Debbie Klein joined Sky from creative agency Engine in February 2018 in what was a newly created role. She is responsible for Sky’s overall brand and marketing development, as well as leading corporate affairs and Sky’s ‘Bigger Picture’ corporate responsibility programme. More recently she extended her remit to include Sky’s people.
Klein said it would be impossible to do her job without making diversity and inclusion a top priority, and she is focused on levelling the playing field for women and addressing imbalances across the business. As part of this drive, Sky has tripled paid paternity leave to six weeks for all employees.
Meanwhile, in June 2020, Sky published its 2019 Bigger Impact report. Achievements included reducing its carbon emissions by a further 7%, cutting 5,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from its operations, achieving a 4% increase in renewable energy generated on its own sites and a 15% reduction in total waste.
The report also stated that the development of Sky Studios Elstree, due to open in 2022, will lead to the creation of 2,000 new creative jobs.■
Chief communications and marketing officer,
Financial Times
‘Capitalism: Time for a reset’ is the new brand message from the Financial Times. It was introduced by chief communications and marketing officer Finola McDonnell in September 2019, with the aim of encouraging people to “get a grip” on the worst of capitalism.
The message is part of ‘The New Agenda’, the FT’s biggest brand campaign since the 2008 financial crisis and is a strong concept for a media company with a business focus, but the idea is to cast a more critical eye on enterprise models. McDonnell said: “[Company directors] need to stop overpaying themselves. They need to start giving people pay rises.”
A member of the FT’s executive board, McDonnell is pushing to better understand customer lifetime value and is having tech and marketing teams work together to do so. She is also conducting market research to learn how readers understand its “better business” message. During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, she spearheaded a campaign to make some content free “as a public service”, as well as providing complementary 30-day access to the paper’s coronavirus business updates.■
Finola McDonnell
Simon
Michaelides
Chief marketing and innovation officer, UKTV
Simon Michaelides was promoted to the newly created role of chief marketing and innovation officer at UKTV in December 2019. He is part of the company’s management board and reports to CEO Marcus Arthur, who on appointing him praised Michaelides’s depth and breadth of experience.
Michaelides’s role encompasses consumer communications, social, online, media, creative and innovation for the broadcaster’s seven-channel brands and its video-on-demand service UKTV Play. He also leads on new revenue streams and partnerships, as well as running commercial innovation for the BBC Studios distribution arm, which acquired UKTV in June 2019.
A firm believer in brand building, Michaelides kicked off a major repositioning project in May that is intended to revitalise UKTV’s challenger mindset, sharpen and strengthen the brand positioning of each channel, and realign the whole company behind each brand.
Michaelides has also led the development of a new 360-degree campaign planning process. Launched in June, the toolkit spans everything from writing campaign briefs to new campaign, publicity and social tiering, and an 18-month
training programme.■
Chief marketing officer and director of direct to consumer, ITV
Rufus Radcliffe has been on ITV’s management board since 2017, overseeing marketing. In June 2019, he took on additional responsibility for its direct-to-consumer division, including the brand’s premium streaming service ITV Hub+, which now has more than 400,000 paid-up users. He is also a director of BritBox, the streaming venture from ITV and the BBC, which has seen “strong growth” in UK subscribers since launching in November 2019.
In the fiercely competitive world of TV, Radcliffe has helped shift the ITV brand away from its “cosy” image towards something more culturally relevant, especially among lighter viewers. He’s ramped up the company’s marketing capabilities by hiring a director of consumer marketing and a director of media to “get people to watch our stuff and spend time with us”, as well as creating an econometric model to understand media effectiveness.
Radcliffe is also passionate about integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into the business, and is using AI to build complex ad products for the ITV Hub. He also managed to poach Sanjeevan Bala from Channel 4 as ITV’s new group chief data and AI officer at the start of the year.■
Rufus Radcliffe
Cilesta
van Doorn
Executive director, brand and marketing,
Virgin Media
Cilesta van Doorn was promoted to executive director of brand and marketing at Virgin Media in May, after a consolidated refocus on brand building over sales, and a goal to become the most recommended telecoms brand by staff and customers. A new marketing platform, ‘Unlimiting’, helped it improve consumers’ understanding of its messages around TV, mobile data and broadband speed, with a 20-point uplift on message takeout. It also added a record number of mobile subscribers during the first quarter of the year.
In March, the brand had to cancel a commercial shoot just ahead of the UK lockdown, instead opting for a tear-jerking user-generated ad showing people helping each other. “I want us to help lift the spirit of the nation and give them a little bit of our love,” Van Doorn said of the campaign brief. Instead of a sales-led strapline, the message was simply ‘Stay home, stay safe, stay connected’. The brand followed this with a heart-warming home video-style commercial featuring children singing into their hairbrushes to Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.■
Chief marketing officer, Giffgaff
Sophie Wheater has been candid about work-life balance, taking a career break to spend time with her children before stepping into the Giffgaff CMO position, a prospect she says was “terrifying”.
She’s keen to make sure her kids “see they have a mum who works and has a job that is just as important as their dad’s”. That role includes pushing the brand into the next phase of its development from a “David versus Goliath” disruptor that had SIM-only deals and no contracts, to one that focuses on its community.
She created the company’s ‘Pioneers’ programme, which gives Giffgaff fans a first look at new developments, and has helped the business tap into the circular economy trend. Wheater had customers pledge to reduce the amount of new stuff they buy via a pop-up shop the mobile network opened around Black Friday in 2019, which aimed to educate people that refurbished phones can provide good quality.
In March, Wheater’s team brought forward the launch of
an ad campaign Giffgaff was planning to run later in the year in a bid to “put something positive out in the world” amid Covid-19.■
Sophie Wheater
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Has the pandemic accelerated a digital shift, or is it a temporary blip?
Why marketing transformation is taking on new urgency
Unified data: the key to understanding post-lockdown consumer trends
Has the pandemic accelerated a digital shift, or is it a temporary blip?
Why marketing transformation is taking on new urgency
Unified data: the key to understanding post-lockdown consumer trends
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