believe authenticity will define truly effective branded content in the years ahead. It’s a term that’s often overused, but in an era where AI makes content easier than ever to produce, audiences are far quicker to recognise what feels genuine and what doesn’t. The content needs to fit your brand, its morals, its values, and reflect what you actually do - not surface-level storytelling or brand washing. After all, credibility comes from consistency - if Boohoo started to partner with Greenpeace, you would question it.
Key Insights
From where I sit, most brands don’t have a traffic problem, but many do have an acquisition and ownership problem.
Too much emphasis is placed on rented audiences, particularly paid social, and on short-term ROI. Far less attention is given to a harder but more valuable question: how do I grow and own my potential customer base? In the UK especially, brands are operating in an uncertain economy, with tighter purse strings and increasing pressure from the top to deliver immediate results, while still planning for long-term growth.
That pressure often drives an over-focus on bottom-of-funnel activity and partner-level ROI. In many cases, this leads to lower returns overall. Why? Well, the easiest way to boost conversion rates and ensure the sale is attributed to you is to use voucher codes to heavily discount an item. When brands step back and look at the full marketing mix (incremental uplift, lifetime value, and average order value), revenue growth becomes clearer. You only need to compare brands like Fabletics vs Alo Yoga, or Eight Sleep vs other mattress brands, to see the impact of long-term, brand-led acquisition versus short-term performance tactics.
This tension has led to indecision. Many brands default to the same familiar channels, even though those environments are increasingly noisy, competitive and expensive. We continue to see rising CPMs and declining efficiency, not because the creative is weak, but because everyone is fishing in the same overcrowded ponds. Standout performance, by contrast, is increasingly coming from less saturated, more traditional acquisition channels. We’ve seen combined postal and email acquisition strategies deliver ROIs of £6-12.What’s needed now is a shift towards community building and audience ownership. Making the decision easier for consumers means building real connection and trust, not just pushing offers harder. For many brands, the priority shouldn’t be the sale itself, but how they bring people into their ecosystem first, then convert over time. When consumers have limited spend, they need more information and more time to make a decision, and you need to move away from price to quality. It takes a higher number of touchpoints now to convert to a sale, so getting them into your CRM base earlier massively reduces your cost and allows you to control this conversation and journey.
Email has become a critical part of that shift. It’s a stable, permission-based identifier and one of the few channels where brands truly own the relationship. Through our work at esbconnect and Optivo, we regularly see identity match rates of 30–40% on site traffic, with 5–10% of those users converting into opted-in subscribers. When brands engage those users post-visit, we’ve driven conversion rates of over 2% from retargeting emails alone, even in high-competition retail categories.
The bigger opportunity, however, is thinking beyond channels altogether. The brands making progress are those diversifying their acquisition mix, using data to inform when and where to show up, and activating audiences across email, media, and CRM as one connected strategy, not as isolated tactics.Looking ahead, AI and automation will only amplify this divide. The brands that win won’t be the ones with the most tools, but the ones with the strongest first-party data foundations. Ownership, trust, and relevance are no longer “nice to have” - they’re becoming the only sustainable growth levers left.
Signature Work Achievements
Under esbconnect, we have grown the UK’s largest email-based community, enabling brands to use email for acquisition in the same way they would with platforms like they would Meta. We now reach 1 in 3 UK households and have the fortune to work with some of the biggest brands on the UK high street, including AA, RAC, Clarks, Liz Earle, EE, ThreeMobile, British Gas, Hello Fresh, Tails, Clarins, HSBC and many more.
Launched Optivo, which enables brands to retarget anonymous site visitors by email, when they are not on their CRM. This brought a widely-used US retargeting channel to the UK, while still ensuring full GDPR compliance.
Actively involved in the Women in Sales campaign, encouraging more women to consider sales as a career path, and to stay in it.
An advocate for equal parental leave, highlighting the challenges women face when returning to work, particularly balancing rising childcare costs with suppressed wages.
Career Lessons
Top 3 pieces of advice from the perspective of a founder who had no prior leadership experience:
- Separate business from friendshipYou will have to make tough decisions, and sometimes those decisions will negatively affect someone you like and consider a friend. You need to be able to separate your business relationship and what is best for the business, from your personal feelings and friendships. If you can view situations through that lens, you can still have tough conversations while applying the care and empathy that friendship deserves..
- Emotions are your secret weapon, but don’t let them slow you downAt senior levels, emotions often get a bad reputation. The role models we see in the press are portrayed as ruthless CEOs who sleep under their desks, fire people on the spot, and climb over others to reach the top. Women crying or taking things to heart is framed as weakness.
But the reality is different. When you show emotion and vulnerability, people trust you. Look at any world-class sports team - trust and openness between teammates are always key to success.
That said, while emotions matter, don’t let them blur tough decisions. Avoiding a hard call isn’t kindness or trustworthiness.Often, it’s about avoiding the pain it causes you rather than the pain it causes someone else. If you are open and honest about your rationale, you won’t break the trust you’ve built, and in the end you’ll earn respect. - You are your media engineI hate posting on social media, it’s not my wheelhouse, yet I still post on LinkedIn three times a week. While it doesn’t feel natural to me, we live in a world where people check your credibility before deciding whether to spend time speaking with you. In many ways, your business social profile has become your dating profile. Nobody gets a Tinder date with no photos uploaded.So post, but make it authentic to you. When it feels genuine, it becomes much easier to write and share, and it cuts through the noise of AI-generated content.
