Get to know our Head of Strategy, US

As Head of Strategy, US at Lippincott, I sit at the intersection of brand, marketing and experience—bringing those disciplines together in a way that helps our clients meet their most pressing challenges and mandates. I collaborate closely with my counterparts, including our Global Creative Director and our Head of Experience, Innovation & Engineering, to make sure strategy isn’t a standalone workstream, but a connective thread that shapes what we offer and how we deliver.

A big focus for me right now is ensuring our strategy “products” continue to evolve in light of how organizations compete, operate and communicate in today’s landscape. That means developing brand strategy in the context of marketing and experience, so it shows up in the real world, not just in a deck. We’re thinking through how our products need to evolve to not only meet the mandate of the moment, but ensure the brand stays memorable in culture and ultimately achieves iconic status where it can transcend categories.

I also spend a lot of time designing how we collaborate with senior executives. It’s rarely enough to have just marketing in the room; we work to bring leaders across clients’ organizations into the process so alignment and transformation can happen. And I’m equally focused on what this means for Lippincott: continuing to hire the best talent, nurturing and upskilling our teams and creating career paths both for deep subject-matter experts and for strategists who excel at connecting dots across the business.

One of the biggest differences I see today is the level of trust an organization does (or doesn’t have) in marketing. That trust shows up very directly in budgets: year-over-year cuts or tighter scrutiny are landing at the same time leadership is asking marketing to achieve more. Over the last five years, that tension has become increasingly stark.

Because of that, a huge part of my work now is helping CMOs manage the conflict between expectations and investment—showing short-term wins that create real business value while keeping the organization open to longer-term goals that are necessary to drive sustained growth. We can give you the best brand platform in the world, but if the executive team isn’t on board to invest, we haven’t solved the root problem and all the amazing creative and strategy work becomes academic.

I’m not looking at it as a marketing problem first. My first question is always: what are you trying to achieve for the business?

This comes up constantly with AI. CMOs often say, “I need to demonstrate how we’re using AI as a marketing organization,” and we’ll ask: what does “using AI” actually mean in your context? What are the strategic imperatives for the business—and how could AI fuel those? Then we get specific about what AI inside marketing can do to advance those imperatives, including what extra room it can create for strategic thinking.

The same reframing applies in other scenarios, too. If a client says, “We made a bunch of acquisitions and we have to decide what to do with the brands,” I’ll push our teams to look beyond the brands themselves to the categories and markets the business is trying to grow. It has to come back to a bigger “so what” for the business, otherwise these conversations can devolve into subjective debates over marketing decisions.

This is core to what we do and we start from day one. In kickoff, we focus on having the right people in the room sharing their hypotheses and goals—not only for the project, but for how the project serves the business.

A key part of our role is framing brand strategy as something that’s going to show up in the real world, so leaders can engage with it as a business decision and develop a common language around it. And at the same time, we know alignment can’t be purely rational; people need to feel inspired and emotionally connected to where things are headed.

We do this in true partnership with client teams, with a deeply audience-centric view—getting to know who the audience is and what they need, both at the individual level and at the business-unit level. We also recognize that different leaders want to be engaged in different ways: some want to be in the messy middle, some want it buttoned-up and data-backed and some want to be energized by what could be. Ultimately, our approach is highly collaborative, creative and inspirational—but always grounded in helping leaders move from alignment to action.

The CMO who’s “keeping up” with AI will probably use it to meet short-term mandates quickly—and they’ll get value from that—but at some point, they’ll max out on what they’re able to deliver and take credit for.

The CMOs who pull ahead will be the ones who think strategically about integrating AI into their marketing operating model and their broader strategy. A big part of that is how leaders balance performance marketing needs with long-term brand building—and how they translate AI-driven efficiencies into business acceleration.

The question I keep coming back to is: how do those efficiencies help people drive firm priorities faster? How can AI—developed in a way that reflects the brand—fuel customer experience initiatives and goals? And what new workflows does it enable that free up time, surface better insights, or create stronger cross-organization collaboration? That’s where AI becomes a brand multiplier, not just a productivity tool.

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