1. Oliver Norton Consulting
Marketing Insights Consultant
It had always been a dream of mine to live a digital nomad existence for a while. Before remote work was as widely adopted as it is in our post COVID world I set about leveraging the contact and experience I had gained with Edge Consultants to bring that dream to reality.
Working across from several remote locations I balanced managing a client base with pursuing my dream of travel. This period of my career taught me a lot about different cultures, managing multiple clients, and maintaining work streams across multiple time zones, but most of all it taught me about myself.
Enabling the right innovation with a core foundation in what customers need
Product innovation is a key driver for continued business success, but for every innovation that catches fire with the customer there are 10 resigned to the annals of history. The process of understanding which product innovations will resonate and which may falter is no simple matter. In combination with a market research company and on behalf of their client a Scandinavian food company, we set about looking to quantify the elements that culminated in product innovation that resonated with the customer. A survey was created to understand the Needs, Cravings, Situation, and I compiled a measurement and reporting structure that helped compile this information to more readily identify product innovation ideas that would most likely succeed. Designing market research questionnaires that get to the heart of what you need to understand in combination with a reporting structure that delivers the exact insights needed goes a long way to cutting through the market research noise. If you’d like to speak about designing Market research questionnaires to limit Ambiguity, and focus on key areas of understanding please reach out to me.
Guided business plans and conducted market feasibility analysis on location
Whilst the internet is a rich resource of information on the market conditions of foreign countries, it can often be difficult to understand on the ground market dynamics of certain industries when you are looking at it from the other side of the world. As a result I was able to position myself to be a source of local knowledge for European companies looking to understand market sizing and the competitive landscape of markets they had no presence in. Many of my freelance contracts came from European and Scandinavian companies looking to understand Australasian markets more acutely. Helping build product launch feasibility studies by identifying market size, economic conditions, local competitive landscape, local distribution points, social trends, and a myriad of qualitative insights that are incredibly hard to gleam from internet research alone. Whilst I had dealt with the impact of cultural differences on product marketing from very early in my career, this was a period where I could help inform product launch specifics and focus.
Making market spend negotiations easier through automated tools
Food marketing is more nuanced than most may understand, and a lot of it happens in coordination with the distribution agents themselves, predominantly supermarkets, they will regularly feature products in their promotions to entice customers to come to their stores but there is obviously a benefit to both parties in these promotions and deciding how the spend for this marketing is balanced between the product manufacturer and the product distributor can become a complex drawn out task. The starting point for each years negotiations is based on the previous years data in correlating increased footfall to store and increased general ticket price that includes specific items, as well as standard product lift levels. What I did was build an excel based calculator that allowed them to input the previous years figures (or any amount of data), and it would calculate the aggregate ROI of each promotional stint and distribute it between the Manufacturer and the Distributor so as to understand how the benefit was distributed between the 2. Whilst there are still many things to discuss when it comes to market spend distribution having the distributed ROI at hand helped expedite the situation significantly and accelerated the standard timeline by 3 weeks. I love talking about unique marketing scenarios across all industries, if you have a problem you are trying to solve please feel free to reach out.
2. Klick Health
Head of Fusion Marketing Analytics
In 2022 I took the marketing analytics lead on the Fusion business, my focus was to modernise the analytics works streams across brands; Takeda, United Therapeutics, and Sobi.
With a core team of 5 analysts I drove the adoption of customer focused measurement frameworks, enabling more actionable marketing strategy recommendations across. This was accompanied by the integration of stage gate learning agendas designed to understand the core components of marketing success. Enabling my clients not just to react, but be proactive in their pursuit of customer insights.
Focusing Measurement on Customer Actions to Produce Impactful Recommendations
Whether you are engaging with a customer directly, through media, or even when a customer is interacting with you, each step on their journey is slightly different. A new customer will likely need a product synopsis with high level buying reasons, a customer considering a purchase may want more details on the product itself, and someone buying is likely looking at pricing and locations. This is largely understood on the strategic side, but all too often our measurement frameworks rely on channel based delivery metrics, with little contextualization as to whether the customer has transitioned from one stage to another in their journey, and whether the content presented to them was effective in doing so. Throughout my career I have pushed for a more customer centric approach to measurement focusing on the transitional elements of success rather than the delivery of impressions or views. Not, did we get in front of someone but, was that interaction beneficial to the customer and result in a transitional event. Good strategy all starts with a customer focused measurement framework, because once you move the conversation from “How many impressions or clicks did we get” to “How many of our customers came closer to purchasing our product” you can start to have more informed conversations about the important part, why. Despite the myriad of “These are the top metrics you must be tracking” articles you will likely read there is no substitute for a tailored customer measurement framework.
Modernizing our approach to 1st party data collection as the power of cookies starts to wane
The amount of potential touch points your brand has with a potential customer in today's world is rather daunting. Ensuring that you understand how all these potential touch points are working together to form a cohesive communication strategy is almost overwhelming. Yet any business professing to be truly data driven needs to have a key understanding of how their customers are navigating 1st party touch points. As cookies have continued to lose their influence, a 1st party data has become even more important, and it is now paramount that any organization has a clear plan in place to centralize and activate on the data they are collecting. Whether that is; implementing centralized taxonomies that ensures you can integrate different systems more readily, Defining FTAs that ensure data is passed from your partners in the way that you require, improving the value exchange of your CRM to ensure richer more detailed data sets, defining segment profiles to enable to graphing of non personal engagement data to the relevant cohorts, etc… There is an almost endless list of systems and moving parts that need to be in place to ensure the perfect foundations for your data eco system. At klick I helped modernize the approach to this, not just focusing on how to get data but ensuring that the data contains the necessary information and is delivered at the right times.
Inspiring a curious culture that goes beyond observational analytics to prescriptive learning
In business curiosity is a powerful tool, having people in your organizations who are driven to understand how and why strategies succeed or fail is what separates those that can continually produce success from those that can’t . However, it can be tricky to achieve this in modern large moving organizations where the focus is on what’s coming next. Codifying the process of business learning goes a long way to ensure that curiosity is part of Marketing Planning. We are not just developing and launching campaigns, we are constantly creating learning opportunities for ourselves. Ensuring that analytics is not just retrospectively looking for answers to undefined questions around success, but that our campaigns are loaded with pre defined questions focused on the performance variables that have been tweaked. New Targets, new timing, new copy, new coloring, each time we change something can we get closer to understanding what it is that drives our customers down the purchase funnel. Ensuring that curiosity is central to the planning process as well as the retrospective evaluation enables organizations to be more direct and prescriptive with their learnings. Going beyond just reacting, to being proactive in their learning plans Ensuring that you hire, retain, and inspire curiosity in your talent is an ongoing balance between getting the job done and entertaining our higher brain function.
How productising our marketing analytics approach helped double our CST Billings
It is a not uncommon view that Performance Analytics is just about identifying deltas in trend lines and defining the reasons for those changes. Find the reason for the changes and you have your strategic insight. This often sees analytics confined to a reporting support group, one that helps identify said deltas and coordinate in identifying their cause. Whilst this ‘coal mine canary’ approach to analytics has it’s role, it is the tip of the ice burg when it comes to the transformational power that marketing analytics can provide. This was the world I stepped into on Fusion analytics side one that was largely just a reporting support team. Over the 2 years I have managed the fusion CST I have productized and brought to bare a myriad of differing capabilities to help improve our client's performance with leveraging modeling, AI, proactive learning strategies, foundational data capabilities. By expanding the boundaries of what “Analytics” was seen to be, by producing internalized productization that sold the What, Why and How of each new capability to a new audience. This lead to a doubling of analytics billings in the last 1.5 years into new areas that previously weren’t being explored. Driving change in organization can be difficult.
3. Klick Health
Director of OCE Marketing Analytics
In 2020 I joined Klick as an Marketing Analytics SME. The focus was to help improve their approach to Marketing Measurement, Strategic Recommendations, and Data Quality.
Managing a 7 person multi capability team with Web Dev, UX, Business Analyst, and PMs across multiple clients. We evolved Klicks engagement with Excellence groups, focusing on capability developments like Taxonomies, Data Strategies, and AI consultation.
Managing cross capability teams to engage with client centers of excellence
As marketing becomes increasingly complicated, the skill sets of the teams we manage take on completely different profiles. In my role as working with the Takeda OCE group, I was required to deliver in capability developments that required a range of skills sets from CX experts, Web Designers, Data Engineers, through to Business Analyst, and Strategists. This required a very different approach to managing a capability centralized team. I enacted a scrum based management system that maintained a wholistic focus on the goal while breaking out itemized work streams to ensure that everyone knew how their contributions benefited and fitted within the holistic delivery. Managing cross capability requires a considerably amount more Empathy, Curiosity, and Patience. An ability to empathize the challenges being faced by a completely different skill set, to enable curiosity in understanding those transitional elements between capabilities to ensure that team members communicate effectively and ensuring that patience is core to the internal workings of a team that doesn’t share a core skill set. Managing cross capability teams requires different structures and approaches to ensure success vs traditional capability management.
Using AI machine Learning to solve long standing market targeting problems
Whilst AI has come into its own recently with most companies looking to leverage its capabilities in any way they can, back in 2021 CHATGPT was yet to be launched and the conversation around Machine Learning was much more muted. It was into this world that I launched Klicks first AI driven product. For those not familiar, pharma relies on a deciling process for customer segmentation. This is the process of ranking their customers based on the how many prescriptions they are handing out into 10 tiers. If you are in tier 1 you are top of the pyramid and receive a Lazer focus from marketing team, tier 10 and you’re not so sought after. The issue is it doesn’t give much insight into trending. If a high value HCP is moving away from the therapy, it will not be identified until they transition between tiers. Even upon this transition the reason they are moving away from the therapy won’t be addressed as the marketing is based on weighting not trending. To bring trending aggregation to the world of pharma, we required a system that could cluster based on trending signs, clustering this amount of information at a speed and cadence needed to leverage the insights would be impossible with traditional statistics. I lead a team that trained machine learning model that allowed us to run the numbers in a matter of hours, meaning we could now market based on the HCPs trending propensity and not just their weight. For the first time in Pharma we could talk to HCPs in a way that showed we understood how they were using our therapies and curate messaging strategies to abate negative behaviors and enforce positive ones. Implementing AI machine learning is not always the right thing to do, but in certain use case can be incredibly powerful .
How Implementing centralized taxonomies leads to faster higher quality insights
The biggest issue companies face today is rarely collecting the data itself, we have a myriad of systems that collect delivery and engagement data across Media, Social, Website, E-mail, SMS, Apps etc.… However, it is not uncommon for these disparate silos to operate on completely different taxonomic languages, and in some cases not have structured language at all. This means that when it comes time to actually use the data to understand omnichannel engagement companies have a massive task in processing the data for use, and in some cases are faced with unusable data because the elements they needed to understand weren’t labelled at all. Leading Klicks 1st Taxonomy development I was able to level up on previous media and marketing activation Taxonomies I’d developed. At Klick I designed a 7 step process that audited current state to establish a baseline, built on that with the feedback from every key stakeholder from brand management to activation, and was delivered via a role out plan that limited frictional impact and maximized adherence. This process became the standard for Klicks approach to designing taxonomies.
4. OMD
Director of Marketing Science
After establishing a blueprint for marketing science adoption on the McDonald’s account, my second phase at OMD focused on scaling that approach across multiple clients. I took on a broader leadership role, managing three teams of marketing scientists and embedding data-driven decision-making principles into a wider range of accounts.
Building on the frameworks for learning codification and insight generation that I helped pioneer on McDonald’s, I guided clients through the transition from observational reporting to structured, hypothesis-driven marketing strategy.
Turning Segmentation into a Strategic Growth Lever
Great creative and clever media placement often get the credit, but segmentation is the unsung hero of effective marketing. Campaigns that aren’t targeted at the right audience, in the right context, often underperform, no matter how strong the execution. At OMD, I led segmentation strategies that fused deep customer insight with actionable media activation. We began with market research to uncover core purchase drivers—whether it was the impulse moments behind QSR decisions or the life-stage triggers preceding a laptop or vehicle purchase. Segments were built on behavioural and situational insight, not just demographics. From there, we activated these segments through tailored media strategies, creating controlled test groups and continuous optimisation loops to refine delivery. Each time we anchored targeting in real customer need states, we significantly improved performance, doubling ROI compared to baseline campaigns, and in one standout case, achieving a sixfold increase. If you're looking to turn customer understanding into measurable marketing performance, I’d be happy to share how we approached it.
Building a High-Performing Team in an Emerging Capability
Bringing marketing science into an organisation where it hasn’t historically existed comes with a unique set of challenges. The biggest is not technical, it’s cultural. Attracting talent and helping them thrive in an environment where they are in the minority, and often misunderstood, was one of the most demanding and rewarding parts of my role at OMD. The foundation was curiosity. While technical skill is important, it’s curiosity that enables people to navigate ambiguity, build bridges across functions, and stay motivated when their value isn't immediately recognised. I made that trait the cornerstone of my hiring process. I also focused on creating community. Marketing science teams were often embedded in individual client accounts and operated in isolation. By establishing regular cross-client integration points, we built a sense of shared identity, one that allowed junior scientists to support each other and celebrate their wins. Equally important was affability. In an emerging discipline, you need team members who can not only do the work but also evangelise it, bringing others along by translating the value of data-driven thinking in relatable, accessible ways. I'm proud to have managed and mentored multiple junior scientists into successful, confident professionals. Many of them remain in touch years later, a testament to the culture we built and the leadership model that supported it.
A Holistic, Data-Driven Design for Performance Marketing
Performance marketing is often treated as a self-contained engine—built for speed, driven by media metrics, and optimised in isolation. But without a structured approach to learning and cross-functional alignment, even the most responsive campaigns risk plateauing. At OMD, I worked to reframe performance marketing as a fully integrated part of the strategic planning process. This began with the introduction of learning agendas that aligned teams around key behavioural questions; what triggers action, what drives repeat engagement, and how message sequencing impacts conversion. We paired these agendas with measurement frameworks that prioritised business outcomes over channel metrics, creating a shared definition of success across client, media, and creative stakeholders. To keep learning loops active, I helped implement feedback cycles that tied results directly to optimisation decisions. This meant performance wasn't just tracked—it was interrogated, understood, and used to inform the next round of activity with greater precision. By embedding structure into a fast-moving function, we created a performance engine that was not only reactive, but reflective. Continuously improving through intentional data-driven design.