Get to know our Managing Director of Europe, Middle East and Africa

First of all, it's insanely fun. We're still a relatively small team of around 30 people, spread across our London and Dubai offices, which means I get to spend most of my time doing what I enjoy most: working with our teams and clients on projects. Of course, I'm responsible for the overall business across EMEA, but the brilliant thing is that I still get to be involved in the work itself.

And then there's the geographic spread. Our work takes us well beyond the UK, across Europe to markets like France, Italy and Poland, through the Middle East to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, and increasingly into Africa, with some particularly exciting projects recently in South Africa and Côte d'Ivoire. The variety of businesses, cultures and challenges we get to work with is pretty extraordinary.

I didn't start my career in brand. In fact, I was more of a growth and proposition guy. But with every passing year, I've become more convinced that brand is the secret ingredient. You can have all the innovation and growth ambition in the world, but without a clear brand to guide it, you're essentially innovating without direction.

And I think this becomes even more important in a world of AI, where the barriers to building a business are falling dramatically. When two people can potentially build something that previously required hundreds, what makes one business meaningfully different from another?

For me, brand is increasingly the answer. Some people argue that AI will be the death of brand. I think quite the opposite. It's going to make brand more important than ever. But ultimately, brand needs to be a vehicle for growth, not something we build for its own sake.

This might sound slightly controversial, but I think what the Middle East has that Europe sometimes lacks is an almost unbridled courage to think big.

Of course, ambition doesn't automatically translate into success. But when you look at how much the region has progressed over the past few decades, it's difficult to imagine that happening with a more cautious, dare I say European, approach. That's not to say one is necessarily better than the other. But I do think European businesses could learn something from that confidence and willingness to think on a completely different scale.

The other way around is perhaps a slightly different story. Brand as a discipline is still maturing in the Middle East, albeit incredibly quickly. And I think there's something to learn from the strategic rigor and long-term thinking that European businesses have developed over time.

One piece of advice I often give to leaders we work with in the Middle East is to take a longer-term view. There's a tendency to create new brands for almost every new initiative or opportunity. I'd rather see that energy and investment go into building fewer, stronger brands designed to last.

Ultimately, the opportunity is to combine the best of both worlds: the ambition of the Middle East with the strategic discipline and longer-term perspective of Europe.

There's an interesting tension in the role of the CMO at the moment. Marketing leaders have spent years trying to earn their place at the top table. And in doing so, I think some have become too focused on giving CEOs and CFOs what they think they want to hear, particularly when it comes to short-term metrics, KPIs and demonstrating immediate returns.

But I suspect what many CEOs actually want is someone who's prepared to be brave. Someone who will make the case for bigger brand ideas and long-term growth, even when that's difficult to measure. This was one of the interesting findings from our recent CMO Outlook report: in trying to build credibility internally, CMOs can end up losing sight of the brands they're there to build.

And I think that's part of a bigger problem. We're spending so much time talking about AI and technology, when arguably the bigger challenge is getting the rest of the business behind a long-term vision for growth. That requires CMOs to have the courage to challenge the C-suite, not just speak its language.

I recently spent a few days at Paradigms, a relatively small but incredibly inspiring brand and design conference, bringing together around 200 leaders from across the industry on an island off the Croatian coast. Having the space to properly think about and challenge where our industry is heading, alongside people grappling with many of the same questions, was genuinely thought-provoking.

One thing that really struck me was hearing from people at the forefront of AI about just how much they still rely on human designers, with the taste, creativity and judgment to produce truly original work. I'd expected to see a much more AI-driven, agentic approach. But what I saw was quite the opposite. It reinforced something I've believed for a while but perhaps hadn't fully appreciated: as AI makes it easier to produce more of the same, the value of genuinely original human creativity is only going to increase. I found that incredibly encouraging.

There's a fundamental tension in how our industry approaches creativity. To build a business that's strategically rigorous, you need people who are structured, analytical and good at thinking in a linear way. But true creativity never fits inside a box. Some of the most interesting thinkers approach problems tangentially and make unexpected connections. And a highly structured environment doesn't always give that kind of creativity the space to flourish.

Throughout my career, I've often seen one type of thinking dominate the other. In creative agencies, creativity tends to take the lead. In consultancies, it's usually strategy. What makes the culture at Lippincott unique, both here in EMEA and across the wider business, is that we've managed to create an environment where both types of thinkers are equally valued. There's a genuine mutual respect between the two. Our strategists look at what our creatives do with a sense of awe and wonder, and vice versa.

I think that's pretty special.

Right now, it's probably the potential of AI to liberate us to do fundamentally better work. I have no idea what it will look like in three years, and I'm as worried as anyone about what it might mean on a global level. But as it relates to our business, I'm genuinely excited. Not because it allows us to do the same work faster or cheaper, but because it enables us to do deeper, more thoughtful, and more original work.

I think AI has the potential to be a springboard for creativity and imagination, pushing us to come up with things we genuinely haven't seen before. That's far more exciting than simply making everything more efficient.

That, and surfing in Portugal next month.