Brand Marketing · Culture · Music · Sport · Fashion · Entertainment · Partnerships · Product · PR · Paid · Earned Media · Content · Social · Digital · Experiential

Most brand marketing buys proximity to culture. A sponsorship badge. A creator post. A moment in the right room.

Proximity is not the same as belonging, and the people you are trying to reach have always known the difference.

Part of why brands settle for proximity is that they are aiming at something that does not exist. There is no such thing as the audience. There are people carrying four or five allegiances at once, a team, a label, a designer, a postcode, and belonging happens in the overlap between them or it does not happen at all. Nobody has ever belonged to a demographic.

Standing inside a culture gets built slowly, through the stretches when none of it is measurable and nobody upstairs is asking for it. It sits underneath the marketing plan and most companies have no line for it, which is why it is the first thing cut and the last thing anyone can buy back. €30m in earned media against €50k of spend is not a media buy. That is a brand being genuinely part of a world for long enough that the world did the work for it. Brands without that standing can still have the moment. They buy it, every time, at whatever the going rate is, from whoever bothered to build it.

Standing is not a substitute for the machine. It is what makes the machine cheaper. It decides whether a paid funnel converts or just buys impressions, whether a product launch is anticipated or explained, whether a market picks up the toolkit or quietly ignores it. So the job runs in both directions: reading the overlap before the research finds it and being honest about whether a brand has any business being there, then building the architecture that turns that read into campaigns, channels, partnerships, product, pricing and a measurement framework that says which part actually worked.

Working at the point where music, sport, fashion and entertainment stopped being separate sectors and became the primary language brands use to reach people who can see a campaign coming.

Hendrick's Gin. BACARDÍ. adidas. Y-3. Hull City AFC. Wilderness Festival. MAMA Group. Warner Music. Endemol.

The Numbers

€30m - Earned media value from adidas Y-3 × Virgin Galactic, against €50k of spend.

6.7bn - BACARDÍ Triangle impressions. 4.63bn earned.

880% - Increase in earned reach at Hendrick's Gin, at 93% positive sentiment.

£182m - NSV, Hendrick's Gin. No.1 premium gin by value, on +34% value and volume growth against a category running at 24-25%.

#15 to #7 - Y-3's move up the Business of Fashion Cool Brands Index.

100+ - Markets governed. Festivals, events and venues led. Campaigns delivered.

The Work

Music, live events, fashion, luxury, sport and entertainment. Always the same problem: how does a brand get in without being shown the door.

One pattern has repeated in every role: most of this was built where nothing existed. A global communications function at adidas. A first global social strategy at Hendrick's. A first consumer app, an OTT platform and a production studio at Hull City. An in-house film studio at MAMA Group. Wilderness itself, from the founding team. The brief is usually some version of there is nothing here yet, and it needs to be credible by the time anyone looks.

Hendrick's Gin. Global Head of Brand Marketing, Communications and Partnerships for the world's leading super-premium gin. Full accountability across brand, marketing, communications, partnerships and digital in 100+ markets, with a central team and a global ambassador network. Led Refreshing Encounters, the largest campaign in the brand's history, from TVC brief through production with The Perlorian Brothers to a complete global operating system, built with a remote core team during Covid. Underneath it, a creative architecture that gave markets a rule rather than a preference: one territory for emotive brand building, one for occasion-led trial, and a stated principle for when to use each. Most global platforms resolve that tension by quietly letting one side win. This one made the choice explicit and governable across every market. The partnership and creator portfolio was rebuilt on cultural credibility rather than audience size, spanning travel and design, deli culture, gaming, cricket, marine conservation and fashion, which were never briefed as one audience because they are not one audience.

Hull City AFC. Recruited to the Senior Leadership Team to lead a full brand and commercial reset. A multidisciplinary team of nineteen across PR, social, content, digital, design and supporter engagement, reporting to the owner. One of the most exposed environments in communications, where every decision is made in public and heritage is non-negotiable. The marketing model moved from entirely match-centric to an even split between performance and brand, so relevance no longer rose and fell with results. A supporter-led crest redesign, run as consultation rather than reveal. Then the infrastructure, most of which did not exist: the EFL Championship's first integrated fan app, an industry-first opt-out from the league's collective streaming service to build a club-owned OTT platform with full ownership of footage and first-party data, a website rebuild, an in-house production studio and a five-tier supporter segmentation model. Heritage does not protect brands. Participation in what that heritage means to the people who hold it does.

adidas. Global PR, content and events across the fashion collaborations and street style division at global HQ. Y-3, adidas by Raf Simons, adidas by Rick Owens, Porsche Design Sport. Promoted to oversee adidas Originals PR and social within eighteen months. The function did not exist before. Building it meant redefining what sportswear could mean culturally, before luxury streetwear had converged in the mainstream, and turning runway shows from press moments into content platforms designed upstream for social, editorial and retail. The influencer model was rebuilt from ad-hoc gifting into a tiered ecosystem of designers, athletes, editors and cultural creators, proved out by an industry-first direct-to-consumer drop released straight off the SS17 catwalk. Who a brand puts product on is a statement about who it thinks it is. Choosing by follower count is a media buy with a person attached. Choosing by standing is a different decision, and the room can always tell which one was made. Y-3 x Virgin Galactic was a cultural read so precise the world amplified it without being asked.

BACARDÍ. Two years running the brand's biggest UK marketing programme, then promoted onto the Global Marketing Excellence Team. The problem was diagnosed in tracking data rather than assumed from brand instinct, and the answer was participation rather than advertising. Spirits brands had been sponsoring music for decades. The bet on BACARDÍ Beginnings was that a brand prepared to be in the room while the music was actually being made would reach something sponsorship never gets near. Rudimental and Bipolar Sunshine walked into a London studio at 7am and performed the finished track live that evening, out the same night on Radio 1. Toddla T and Roses Gabor released a track locked at a single beat, which the audience unlocked the rest of by sharing it. Kele Okereke opened the world's first 3D-printed record store. The platform is credited with helping launch the careers of Jessie Ware and AlunaGeorge.

Then a run of music partnerships built on access rather than fee. Co-hosting the Universal Music BRIT Awards afterparties with Soho House. Three chartered boats carrying artists from the ceremony to the afterparties, negotiated at cost with no sponsorship fee paid to the labels, on relationships rather than budget. A Grandmaster Flash pool party at Shoreditch House. On BACARDÍ Triangle, global project management alongside the UK PR, partnerships and music strategy: 1,862 guests, a number lifted from the founding year, flown to a private island off Puerto Rico for Calvin Harris, Kendrick Lamar and Ellie Goulding, then broadcast into 200m+ homes. A logo on someone else's stage is a transaction, and audiences have always known how to price one. Being part of the reason a thing exists is a different conversation.

Festivals. Festivals were becoming the most interesting branding labs in the world. Alcohol sponsorship, fashion activations, luxury hospitality, influencer culture, experiential installations. The frameworks agencies now package and sell were being built on the ground before the industry had a name for any of it. At MAMA Group, group communications and PR across 100+ festivals, venues and tours including Lovebox, The Great Escape, Vintage by Hemingway, Hammersmith Apollo and the Jazz Cafe, and founding team at Wilderness, Best New Festival. Marketing and communications for GlobalGathering and Godskitchen under Angel Music Group. The portfolio was built by layering identities rather than stacking headliners, with arena hosts anchoring individual stages and onsite curators from food, film and ideas giving people a reason to be there that had nothing to do with the lineup. When GlobalGathering lost its intended headliner to a competitor, the response was to stop selling the festival on a headliner. A £99 general admission ticket to drive volume, real depth across the mid-tier billing, serious investment in production, and an entirely new VIP offering. Fewer people came, spend per head went up, and the year finished close to flat on a materially weaker proposition. Buying a replacement headliner was the obvious move and the expensive one, and it would have left the same dependency in place for the following year.

Before that. Artist and label PR at Warner Music Group. Publicity at Endemol UK. Brand and platform launches at BBC Worldwide, including some of the earliest brand-level channel launches on YouTube and iTunes.

On AI

AI is making it easier than ever to produce content and harder than ever to make it matter. Volume up, trust down. AI platforms are now part of how people find a brand in the first place, and they reward brand knowledge structured well enough to be read correctly rather than the biggest media spend.

The bottleneck is rarely the technology. It is data architecture nobody thought to build a knowledge base on top of, and governance living in a policy document instead of a briefing template. Few brands have audited what their agency partners can actually do against what they say they can do. The brands that get this right will not be the ones with the biggest AI budget. They will be the ones whose marketing leadership can turn a roadmap into behaviour change across a global team. Recent work includes brand strategy, architecture, messaging and CRM from scratch for an early-stage AI business.

Teams

Nineteen people across PR, social, content, paid, events, broadcast, digital, design and supporter engagement, reporting into the owner. A central team and an ambassador network across EMEA, APAC and the Americas at Hendrick's. Agency ecosystems in Europe, Asia and North America at adidas. Small teams, borrowed teams, and a fair amount of work done as the only person on it.

What decides whether work lands is not the strategy document. It is whether the person who has to use it, a market lead in São Paulo or a matchday producer in Hull, can pick it up without asking permission, and whether they want to. Full toolkit adoption inside six months at Hendrick's happened because markets were built into the process rather than sent the output.

Also a mentor and coach to people trying to get into sport and entertainment, which is where a reasonable amount of the actual industry knowledge lives.

The Shape of the Engagement

Teams of two to nineteen, and budgets from four figures to eight. Or the only person in the room. In-house leader, agency partner, consultant, turnaround hire.

PR, earned media, brand strategy, paid, social, content, creator and influencer ecosystems, digital product, partnerships and experiential.

Regulated environments throughout: alcohol marketing across 100+ markets under ABAC, Portman Group, BCAP, CAP, DISCUS and regional equivalents, including dark-market strategy in France, plus broadcast regulation and sponsorship in professional sport.

The sector changes. The problem does not. Drinks, music, entertainment, tech, sportswear, luxury fashion, professional football, festivals, broadcast, and most recently AI, sustainability and ecommerce. Each one was unfamiliar on day one and needed to be useful by the end of the first month.

Agency side: M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment at Director level on Pernod Ricard and Ballantine's, including Boiler Room Stay True Scotland and a dark-market France strategy built entirely inside the regulatory constraints. Cake Group (Havas) across V Festival, Sky HD, Nintendo of Europe, Ben & Jerry's and Sainsbury's. SHIFT and Begin across tech, sustainability, ecommerce and social impact.

What People Have To Say

“Vicky is the new breed of marketer; skilled at creating extraordinary experiences that bring brands to life and engage even the most cynical and discerning of audiences. And that’s just for starters. Where she really stands out is in understanding how to realize brand strategy in the experiential space - how to make the brand vivid and visceral, and how to turn brand experiences into compelling newsworthy content. These are not easy things, and Vicky delivered over and over again in the experiences she created for Bacardi in the U.K.” Kofi Amoo-Gottfried - Global Communications Director, BACARDÍ · Global VP Marketing, Facebook · CMO, DoorDash · Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50

“Vicky was a star on our marketing team. She is a well rounded marketer with a keen expertise on PR, social and digital marketing. She knows how to bring brands and programs to life in a relevant and meaningful way. She had an immediate impact on the dynamics of the team in a positive leadership role. She constantly delivers results even under the most demanding pressure. Her contribution to our Virgin Galactic partnership launch was especially impactful for our brand and set a new standard.” Kimberly Landry Wallengren - Global Marketing Director, adidas

“Vicky was a star player on my team. Filled with passion, dedication, drive, and determination - she turned an event based program into a content based platform with BACARDI Beginnings. She combines years of PR, music and event experience with her innate ability to curate projects to produce outstanding results. Vicky has a thirst for knowledge and her “finger on the pulse”. In the past two years working with her she has taught me the importance of staying true to the vision, the balance between brand push and credibility, and that the impossible can become a reality. I am very proud of the work and results on BACARDI Beginnings - all thanks to Vicky’s relentless passion for the project.” Lisa Jazwinski - Global Marketing Director, BACARDÍ

“I have known Vic in a professional capacity for many years, first working alongside her at M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment and then as part of her core agency team when she moved client-side. Vic is a highly-skilled and incredibly switched on Marketing and Comms professional, bringing both her wealth of experience and sophisticated expertise to every role. She combines high level strategic thinking with a hands-on, can do attitude. She is a true team player; when working as her agency partner she always made us feel that we were a trusted and valued extension of her team. With boundless energy and a true passion for what she does, Vic is an absolute pleasure to work with.” Beth Noonan - Managing Partner, M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment - M&C Fabric

“Vicky is a great partner, as well as a skilled manager and marketer. As my global partner on the Hendrick’s business, Vicky was always very collaborative, solution oriented and was able to provide clarity when dealing with complex programs, and at times, the competing priorities that inevitably arise within global and local market dynamics. Vicky always brought sound thinking and great energy to the team, and is someone who’s opinion I trust. She is a true pleasure to work with.” Michael Giardina - VP Marketing, William Grant & Sons

“Vicky worked in my publicity team at Endemol UK. She is a talented and creative publicist who I would recommend to anyone. She is also great fun to work with and we were all very sad to lose her when she went.” Charlie Gardner - Chief Marketing Officer, Endemol

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