Russell took up the role this week, several months after leaving Paddy Power. He spent a year at the bookmaker as its first insight director, and in his time there he established a new brand equity tracker for the UK and Italian operations, and undertook an attitudinal segmentation study, among other things.

Prior to Paddy Power, Russell spent almost 14 years at BSkyB, latterly as marketing strategy director for the satellite broadcaster.

He joins O2 soon after the departure of Matt Taylor, the company’s head of social insight, who left to take up an EMEA research role at Twitter.