Tell me about your market research background.

I used to work for Mesh Experience, a brand tracking, brand analysis agency based in Camden, where we used live-recorded experience data to understand how people engage with different brands and different marketplaces. It was a great baptism into the research world because it measured across the full spectrum of brand touch-points, not just paid ones, but owned and earned ones as well.

Prior to that, I worked at Dynata, [then known as Research Now], probably the biggest data collection business in the industry, where it was all about making quant surveys happen, field work, online research, surveys.

What appealed about moving from market research specialists to a large advertising agency?

I joined IPG in 2014. My logic was that in market research agencies, I noticed that often you would present your debrief say every quarter or every six months – an all-singing, all-dancing, affair that, if you're lucky, the clients love. They might even give you a round of applause. But then that debrief gets filed away in some godforsaken lost folder on the shared drive, rarely accessed, and you might not see the clients for another three or six months.

[But] the nature of working with research clients in the context of a media agency is that you're in touch with them the whole time. Many of them actually work from our offices one or two days a week, so it’s just a much more continuous kind of relationship, because we're a retained partner to our clients as a media agency.

My team – who are brilliant and all basically ex-analysts from the likes of Kantar, TNS and Ipsos – have all got full-service research experience. We're like a mini research agency within a big multinational media network.

How large is your team?

Here in London, we've got about 10 researchers. More broadly – I look after the specialism across Europe, Middle East and Africa – we’ve got dozens of people across the markets with a dotted line to me. My purpose is to help to disseminate good practice, connect people, just support wherever I can.

What is a typical day?

Generally speaking, what I do either needs to benefit my team or my clients. That’s how I try to prioritise things, because otherwise there are just endless requests and things floating around in a big business like ours.

Increasingly, there are lots of external invitations that are really exciting – to speak at events or chair a panel, or whatever it might be. But my two priorities will always be to make sure my team are happy and focused and feeling supported, and that my clients are getting lots of my time.

With clients, I definitely stay close to the research process in terms of delivering projects… it could be tracking, for example. But also, on a personal level, it’s really important to me to have quite close relationships with our clients.

That must be a challenge given the number of clients on IPG Mediabrands’ books.

We don't work with every single one of them from a research capacity but we do work with most of them. But there’s a handful in particular that we have a very close collaborative relationship with.

It’s often quoted that CMOs tend to move on in 18 months, but thankfully, it’s not the case with our clients, which is great, because you can really go on a long-haul journey of focusing on a client and impacting a brand.

For example, for one of our big financial services clients, we've been doing all of their tracking for five years now. It’s really gratifying because we've got this vast amount of data that makes us quite informed when it comes to spotting different changes in their marketplace. Long-term, deep relationships – that’s very much what I'm most motivated by.

How do you juggle WFH and working from the office?

It does vary quite a bit. I tend to be in the office most days, but I don't expect the same of my team. I think doing research is really conducive to being at home – making progress on a report, for example, or getting your head into a dataset.

Forcing people into an open-plan office for the sake of it, and squandering that top-and-tail commuting time of the day when you could just be getting straight into analysis, is not really my philosophy on things.

We do have anchor days once a week, when the whole team makes the effort to come in and spend time together, which is, frankly, as much of a social benefit as it is a workflow benefit. And we expect people to be in two-and-a-half days a week. You could do two days one week and then three days the next week, but it allows a certain margin of flexibility that suits people best.

How would you describe your leadership style?

Being very open and approachable is extremely important. I think that’s quite a contemporary trait of modern leadership.

Before, it was about cultivating this alter-ego as a boss, where you have this quite serious persona. I can see the merits of that, theoretically, about making it easier to have difficult conversations with people about feedback, for example; having some sort of dissociation psychologically from work.

But that somewhat detached approach is not for you?

To be honest, I've got no interest in being dissociated from work. It’s one of my favourite parts of my life, and it energises me. A lot of my work is quite fused with my social life and including people in the research industry through communities like MRSpride. So I wouldn't want to dissociate from it. If anything, I'm really happy to be fully present in it.

Finding my way towards that had been quite a difficult process for me from a sexuality point of view, because for a long time I wasn't ‘out’ at work… I was about 26 when I finally came out at work.

It’s not that my previous environments hadn't been right, but at UM it was a combination of both the environment being safe, happy, welcoming and supportive enough, combined with simply me just being ready to share that part of me.

That was a real sea-change moment in my working life. Before, I spent a huge amount of energy and mental battery power just worrying about being discovered, or not really living as who I am, and just the kind of heaviness that comes with hiding an important part of yourself. So that obviously dissipated, and I was able to not just share, but then ultimately, eventually, through MRSpride, revel in that part of my identity. 

I also recognise that for many other people it could be other things, like looking after a kid with a disability or neurodiversity, or being from a poorer background, or not having gone to uni, or any of the hidden lives that people don't always feel able to fully share at work.

I think it’s important that people [feel comfortable sharing certain aspects of their personal lives, should they choose], because if it’s anything like my experience, it’s quite a liberation from all the heaviness, stress and distraction of having to hide who you are. So it’s important to cultivate an atmosphere and culture that is open, where people can share.

[Equally], if you've got a very transactional relationship with a client where you're just volleying emails around and just ping-ponging information, two-dimensional relationships are the enemy of doing proper partnership business.

How do you handle grief at work?

I’m very keen to think about grief in the conventional sense, in the context of a loss that I experienced nearly four years ago, which was that of my dad – it was relatively sudden, he got cancer and passed away in about six months.

It was a very, very rocky road. I wanted to mention it because it’s become really clear to me, as I look back on that chapter, that one of the biggest things, one of the most powerful forces that kept me moving forward was my professional community and my network.

Even as I say the words ‘my network', I don't think it will ever not be a cheesy toe-curling term, because it feels quite transactional. But that community of people in both the research and media industries that rallied around me and – either through texts or checking in or looking after me in all sorts of other ways – it was the emphatic evidence that just showed me that actually a network is so much more than a business community. It can be something that has a profound importance.

I mention it because grief is a topic that is still enshrouded by a lot of awkwardness at best and also perhaps stigma at worst. I think as British people in our culture, we're not the very best at talking about some of the more awkward aspects of being a person.

Tell me about DEI and your involvement with MRSpride. 

DEI is a topic that I'm really, really passionate about. So yes, those platforms are important in terms of just visibility and keeping conversations going, but I think there’s been a certain over-exposure to some of the different themes and conversations around DEI, and my personal feeling is that the focus should be more on action.

That’s why with MRSpride – organising and working with the MRS and the steering group to make that a thriving community, along with other commitments I've got with the IPA and United Nations Women and CALM (the mental health charity) – my focus is very much on action and doing the actual work, rather than endless panels and that kind of thing.

What hobbies do you have?

Well, as a gay friend you end up having the good fortune of gathering godchildren, a fair few of them. So spending time with my godchildren is something I love to do.

I love cinema. That is my great passion. Fitness has also been a big project for me. I've invested in the gym membership and do spinning and things like that, which has been quite transformative, and especially, I think, stepping into more senior levels of leadership, it’s been something that’s been quite essential in making sure that I can keep my energy positive, along with a couple of years of therapy, which I did a couple of years ago.

What advice would you give to others looking to balance competing priorities at work and manage their workload?

Consider what is going to make you feel grounded and positive. It can look very different for different people.

It should be a given that people can adapt their week according to the things that are going to make them happy. Flexing the week has [traditionally] been the preserve of parents, hasn't it? It should be that people use that flexibility whatever they need it for, whether they have children or not.

One other thing that I think is really important is making time for face-to-face contact, not just with clients, but with the team, and then also time for fun. It can feel like quite an archaic, anachronistic word, from a different era, when fun at work used to be going to the pub to have three or four pints every lunch.

Obviously fun looks quite different nowadays, but I think we need to decode what fun is. What does fun mean to like new talent into the industry? Is it about having the time to go for a walk, or play Uno as a team, or, you know, going to an exhibition together? Of course, sometimes it may very well mean going out for a few drinks or for a nice team lunch. I think making time for those moments to connect people feels really important.

How can we be more positive about AI?

Having a negative disposition to AI isn't really going to help. Sometimes you do have to just take a slightly sober, grounded view. The sooner we can get to a place where we consider AI to be an instrument to help, the better.

For example, in the context of research, we've done things like using a large dataset from a survey to train AI to basically provide a chat functionality where you can speak to somebody who sounds like they are the customer for this particular brand, asking it lots of questions. And because it’s been trained with lots of intelligence from a series of different sources – market intelligence, proprietary surveys, etc – you get very detailed responses back from speaking to it.

Another [application] I love is using AI to create avatars, virtual people from each pen-portrait or segment… basically talking about the different behaviours, characteristics or attitudes that typify that segment. Rather than having that classic slide with a stock photo and a series of bullet points, AI can create these personas, which are far more engaging.

There’s also AI and audio. If your clients don't have the time to take on board a 400-slide presentation, then it might be that they listen to a 20-minute podcast AI, summary of it on their commute the next day, or whatever it might be.

But you don’t see AI as a replacement for human analysis?

Obviously, tools like ChatGPT can produce large amounts of information. The last thing I would ever want to see is things being copied and pasted wholesale from these tools.

If time is freed up, then I want it to be freed up so that my team can get their brains into the assignment even more analytically, or think about how to build the story in a way that’s going to have even more impact.

I always say that half of being a great researcher is technical excellence and analytical instincts and capabilities, but the other half is storytelling; making your clients take on board the story and making them care about it.

• This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. It is published as part of Research Live’s How I Work series featuring insights leaders.