His achievements also include multiple IPA Effectiveness Gold Awards, showcasing his ability to merge creativity with impactful results.

In addition, Mark plays a crucial role in shaping the marketing landscape through his involvement with The Marketing Society, where he supports the strategic growth of this global community of marketers. Thank you, Mark, for coming and joining us today.

Oh, great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Thank you. Mark, to kick us off, could you give us an overview of your career and the journey you've taken to date?

Yes, sure. Twenty-five years in a couple of sentences. So I never intended to work in marketing. Actually, as a graduate, I did economics and was intending to go into banking and things.

So I had a graduate job in corporate finance, and I deferred that for a year to do a sports president role, like a sabbatical role in the students' union. And during that year, my graduate job disappeared in a puff of smoke. I was made redundant before I'd even started my career.

That's impressive.

It's a bit of a kick in the teeth, but I was probably saved from quite a poor career in finance, to be fair.

Right.

And then I joined Mars for a decade, and that was where I cut my teeth and learned my way around marketing.

Then I was subsequently made redundant another three times in my career.

Wow.

So I suppose, in a nutshell, my career has been quite a lot of chance, circumstance, and serendipity.

Yeah.

But through it all, I've been fortunate to have some great marketing roles. And then the last decade was at Direct Line Group. I was on the exec there through the IPO and a digital turnaround and transformation.

About eighteen months ago, I decided that I would leave the corporate world behind, well, kind of, and move into a portfolio space. We can get into it in a bit more detail, but ultimately I decided I wanted to have more fun, more learning, and more impact, using the skills I'd gained from my career to do a number of other things, which I call a fruit salad.

So I've gone from redundancy to redundancy to redundancy, a couple of great chapters at Mars and Direct Line, and now using all of that experience to try and help more people in the world.

Fantastic. So I'm interested in hearing about those. It sounds like Mars and Direct Line were the two big chunky parts, shall we say.

Could you give us an overview of what you were working on, the things you're most proud of in your time at each of those?

Yeah, for sure. So I think Mars is a thoroughbred marketing-led organisation. All the senior leaders have come up through marketing. It really rules the roost.

In my graduate time, I worked in sales and manufacturing, and then I moved to Greece to do marketing. Amazing experience. Very privileged to do it.

Then I spent most of my time in European pet care, working on some of the biggest brands in the world like Pedigree, Whiskas, and so on, which most people are still familiar with. That involved launching new products and running big communication campaigns.

Then I moved into a European role working for Cesar Small Dogs.

Who knew?

Right.

Yeah. It's such a profitable and successful brand.

Similarly, I had a European brand leader role. So it was in-market, local and global responsibilities — all facets of a classical marketing schooling.

And then at Direct Line, almost the opposite of that. By this stage I'm now on the exec. I'm responsible for marketing and other things.

This is an organisation where marketing doesn't rule the roost. That's not the case in financial services. It's not the strategic leadership function.

So really building capability and some of the things I'm most proud of, which I'm sure we'll get into, is the turnaround of the Direct Line brand itself in 2014, the Fixer campaign, which went on to win a number of IPA awards.

And really galvanising a marketing team which had lost its voice for a golden decade, where we replicated a lot of the success I had at Mars but in a very, very different and probably more challenging context.

So I had two fantastic decades across those organisations.

They're such vastly different businesses, going from Mars — which I'm presuming is very marketing-led — into financial services at Direct Line, which is very different. When you first came into the role at Direct Line, what was your to-do list, so to speak?

Well, they are chalk and cheese, you're right in saying that.

In service-based organisations, marketing does not have pre-eminence. But in contrast, in consumer goods or FMCG, it's often a bit more of a sausage factory, proverbially speaking. It's just the next NPD to get through to retailers. It's very cyclical and stable.

Actually, as a marketer, you're not really involved in the organism of the business — the culture. There is no service aspect, the messiness of the operating model itself.

Whereas in services, the brand is everything the customer experiences, including operations and technology. So whilst you don't rule the roost strategically, you're much more involved in the culture and the organism, as I like to call it. So they are chalk and cheese.

Going into Direct Line, I joined just as we were going into an IPO process. As part of the package that saved Royal Bank of Scotland in the early 2010s after the financial crisis, it was mandated that Direct Line would go through an IPO process and separate, with the proceeds going back to the government.

I'd never been through an IPO process before, but I was on the front-bench team to sell this business to the markets.

So there was a huge capability build programme, which was very nascent, to present a business that was attractive for sale and then go and deliver the plans we put into the IPO.

That meant a huge turnaround transformation: lots of cost out, lots of new agency relationships, lots of new people, and building talent and capabilities. It was a big established business, but we needed to reboot and start again.

Fascinating. I'm really keen to pick up on a couple of points you've mentioned. I want to get into the piece you're proud of — the brand transformation campaign.

I understand a little about the digital transformation you went through, but I also want to tie this into the IPA awards.

But before we get to that, in a previous discussion you mentioned how important it is for CMOs to speak the language of the CFO and CEO. Presumably when you came into Direct Line this was a critical piece in outlining your vision.

Can you expand on what you mean by speaking the language of the CEO and CFO and how this helps?

I mean, this runs quite deep. If you remember, I was nearly in finance — nearly a banker.

Saved.

But that commercial mindset has always been to the fore for me, and I really rail against the notion that marketing is a colouring-in function.

Yeah. That's what we hear a lot.

And it's all too present. It might be a cliché, but it's alive and well.

For example, the last face-to-face meeting I had before the pandemic in 2020 was with a graduate who had come into the function from procurement. Smart guy, trained accountant.

My standard question was: what did it feel like when you found out you were coming into marketing?

He went a little white and said, “Well, actually I was quite nervous because I was rubbish at drawing at school.”

His preconception was literally that marketing meant colouring in.

He quickly added how impressed he was with how data-driven and digital it was, but the point had already been made.

And the reality is the job of the lead marketer is to convince the rest of the business that marketing is anything other than the colouring-in function. That job is never done.

So one thing I focused on was speaking the commercial language.

Unless a marketer is proving the ROI on their spend — in the short and long term — they will be lost in conversations about prioritisation.

At Direct Line we invested heavily in econometric modelling. That allowed us to show the short- and long-term return on what we were doing.

That changed the conversation with the CFO completely. It wasn't “Can I have more budget?” It was “Here are the options. Here's the return at different investment levels.”

And suddenly marketing looked like any other investment decision in the business.

The conversation becomes far more rational and strategic.

So marketers need to stop obsessing about showing the creative in the boardroom and instead focus on demonstrating commercial value.

Because without trust, you have nothing.

And there's a statistic I often quote: around 80% of CEOs don’t trust or aren’t impressed by their CMO.

In contrast, only about 10% feel that way about their CFO.

So CMOs are coming from quite a marginalised position. Unless they speak a commercial language, they're just perpetuating the colouring-in cliché.

At the heart of that, as you said, is the effectiveness award. So let's tie that in now because clearly you did speak the language of the relationship with the CEO and CFO at Direct Line. So can we talk about the work there? Let's talk about the brand work first and then get on to the digital transformation and, if we can, weave that into the IPAs.

Yes. So there's two phases. The first phase is straightforwardly the revamp, reboot, reignition of the Direct Line brand.

This was the market leader, created the market for direct insurance. They'd previously been brokers and had had a brilliant run for twenty-odd years.

Then fast forward to 2012, and now it's in terminal decline.

Right.

Which is a problem because it's the name we've chosen to put above the door for the IPO, and it still is really the engine of profitability for the business.

Right.

And yet we'd seen in, I think, three years, quotes had halved. So in real trouble. All the commercial metrics, all the brand metrics are heading south.

So as soon as we got through the IPO process, we initiated a complete strategy review for the brand.

We did all the classic segmentation, consumer research, and so on. The grounding insight for everything was that the core category benefit of insurance had been forgotten for two decades.

The purpose of insurance is to help people in their darkest hour, in their moment of need.

And yet for twenty years everybody had talked about the process of becoming insured — the purchase, the discounts, the buy — not the benefit.

So we had the most simple strategy chart in the world, which had a little moon, which was the point of purchase, and this enormous sun in the background, which was fully eclipsed. And this was the point of need.

Everybody had been blinded. The category insight had been hiding in plain sight.

So that's easy, isn't it? The insight is we just need to go back to what the purpose of the sector is. It's to fix things.

And what else is there? If insurance isn't to fix things, what is it for?

And so we had this brilliant grounding insight with fixers.

That was good, but what the hell are we going to do with that? Because this is a noisy category that is focused on the point of purchase. How are we going to be more benefit-led?

So the short story is that we went through a creative pitch process, and Saatchi & Saatchi came up with the goods, which was the Fixer campaign.

Winston Wolf reprised his role in Pulp Fiction as the daddy of fixers who made very messy problems disappear.

Yeah.

In the case of Pulp Fiction — which just happened coincidentally to be my favourite film — Marvin’s brains were blown out on the back of the Chevy, if you remember the scene.

So it's slightly metaphorical, but he made very messy problems disappear elegantly, and that's what insurance should do.

So the agency came up with a brilliant metaphor for our intent, albeit it was probably somewhat incongruous to have a gangster as a metaphor for our intent in what is actually one of the lowest-trust sectors in the world.

Wow. It's brave.

It was brave, but it was well researched and well thought through and worked incredibly well.

The moment of magic came when the creative team suddenly had the idea after a chemistry session where we talked about the fixer insight. One of them was in a lift and just had this mad idea, and it came to be.

So there's a lot, again, of serendipity. But it was a brilliant metaphor.

In research, it had to be Winston Wolf — the daddy of fixers.

And so there was this huge trust moment where the agency had to trust that we were brave enough and skilful enough to sell this internally, which wasn't easy. And we had to trust that they could actually get him.

There were probably between ten and a hundred reasons why it never should have happened or might not have happened.

Wow.

But in the end it did.

So we launched that in August 2014, and immediately we saw the results coming — a big turnaround in all our lead indicators.

The objective had only been to slow the decline, but we went back to growth.

In the next three years, motor insurance grew 85%, home insurance grew 43%.

It was the best marketing moment of my career.

Phenomenal.

And who knew the insight was hiding in plain sight — it just needed to be nailed.

The other impact that doesn't get talked about much was how tremendously galvanising it was for the organisation.

It meant people knew what the brand promise was. It was to be a fixer.

And we had this strange effect where people came to work on Monday doing the same job they were doing the previous Friday, but with newfound pride in what they were doing.

It led to all sorts of positive customer experience moments.

One particular story was someone tweeted from Doncaster saying, “My TV has been stolen. It's been a week. What are you going to do about it? I've told my mates I'm going to watch a boxing fight tonight.”

So the person who happened to handle the Twitter feed at that time was based in Doncaster.

He logged off, drove home, picked up his own TV, and took it to the customer's house so the customer could watch the fight.

The risk police were going apoplectic because we hadn't electrically tested the device or whatever it was.

But when asked why he did it, he said, “Well, that's what Winston Wolf would have done.”

Wow.

Which wasn't by chance because we had these ten-foot posters in all our contact centres: WWWD — What Would Winston Wolf Do?

Brilliant.

So it became such a big lightning rod. And it's no surprise that business metrics, Net Promoter Score, and employee engagement all mirrored each other on an upward trend.

What an absolute masterclass.

It's a good one.

No wonder this won the IPA.

That one was our first IPA Gold. Then in 2018 we won another two.

Slightly different. That was phase two.

That was much more about econometrics and marketing effectiveness.

But 2016 was a golden moment. It was the first time an insurer — and I think maybe still — had won a Gold.

And it was the first time it was a client-written paper.

We had support from Ebiquity, but ultimately it was a client-written paper.

So lots of precedents in there.

For many people — Wendy Moores, Kerry Chilvers, Karl Bratton, Piers Newson-Smith — it was probably the pinnacle moment of our careers.

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