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Honestly, it's the moment as much as the mission. Synamedia has spent 30 years building deep technical credibility with some of the biggest names in media and telco, that's a rare foundation. But the business is now at an inflection point: new leadership, a broader and more modern portfolio with Senza, Go, Iris, Gravity and ContentArmor, and an industry that's genuinely being redrawn as streaming, advertising and broadband converge. That combination of real substance under the hood, but a narrative and go to market motion that hasn't yet caught up to it, is exactly the kind of challenge I look for. I'm not interested in polishing a brand that's already finished; I'm interested in building the commercial engine that turns technical strength into pipeline and growth. This felt like a company where marketing could genuinely move the business, not just support it, and I feel privileged to lead the marketing function and position it well for growth.

You start by refusing to market five products, you market one outcome, delivered by five capabilities. My first move is always the same: get underneath the product marketing and find the single commercial thread that connects everything, then build persona based, pain point driven messaging on top of that spine rather than five parallel campaigns. Once that's clear, every persona from CTO, CCO, CEO to Head of Advertising, Head of Ops, gets messaging tailored to their world, but it all ladders up to the same narrative to help drive conversations with Synamedia and, ultimately, result in pipeline outcomes.

Everyone in this category says "scale," "personalisation" and "monetisation", those words have stopped meaning anything. Where I think Synamedia earns the right to be different is ownership. Most platforms in this space quietly take a cut of your revenue, your data, or your customer relationship in exchange for convenience, app stores, ad tech intermediaries, device OS vendors. Synamedia's whole architecture is built the opposite way: you keep the brand, the data and the economics, and Synamedia gives you the infrastructure to make that ownership actually deliverable at scale. That's not just a feature, it's a different philosophy about who this industry should ultimately serve. I want the market to feel that Synamedia is the partner that makes you stronger, more competitive and more independent, not one more layer taking a slice of your business.

Great marketing today meets buyers where they're already forming opinions, analyst commentary, peer communities, trusted press, LinkedIn conversations with people they respect, and it earns its way into those conversations with a genuinely useful point of view, not a sales pitch dressed up as content. It's specific: tailored messaging for a CTO evaluating architecture risk looks nothing like messaging for a Head of Advertising chasing yield, even if it's the same product underneath. And critically, it's measurable. Every creative, every message, every channel, every piece of content should be traceable to pipeline influence, not vanity engagement. In a considered, multi stakeholder B2B sale like this one, the buyer's journey is long and mostly happens away from your website, so marketing's job is to be present by listening to intent signals from the market to serve up timely and relevant content, be discoverable, be credible and relevant in those rooms, then convert that trust into pipeline when they finally do come looking.

What it absolutely doesn't look like is generic thought leadership for its own sake, a homepage full of buzzwords no competitor would disagree with, or activity that can't be tied back to a commercial outcome.

Communities like OTTRED are one of the few remaining channels where senior decision makers let their guard down because they're not there to be sold to, they're there to trade real experience with peers. That makes it incredibly valuable, but only if you treat it as a trust building channel rather than a lead gen tool. My approach will be to show up genuinely useful, sharing perspective, supporting the conversations that matter to that community, and let the commercial relationship follow from credibility. Done well, it does real pipeline work indirectly: it keeps Synamedia front of mind with exactly the buying committee we're targeting, well before an RFP ever gets written. It also gives us an honest read on what's keeping streaming and media leaders up at night, which will fuel the iteration of our pain point driven messaging to become even more meaningful to our target audience.

I'd call it less a piece of wisdom and more a discipline I've built up over years of iterating, getting it wrong, and learning from that. In particular, the "so what" test. If I hear a message and my first honest reaction is "so what," we stop and start again. That sounds simple, but it's ruthless in practice, because it forces you to articulate the "why" behind every message before you spend a single pound putting it in market. If we can't answer why a prospect should care, in plain language, then we have no right to expect that prospect to ever have a real conversation with us, no channel or budget fixes a message that fails that test.

The other half of this is to keep evolving. Martech and buyer research habits change so quickly. That clarity of message now has to travel across far more surfaces than it used to, LLMs, search, communities, social, analyst commentary, peer recommendations, retargeting, review sites, often in a different order for every buyer. So it's not enough to nail the message once for a homepage or a deck; you have to be genuinely present, with that same clear "why," wherever your buyer happens to be doing their research at that moment. That's not a one time insight, it's a practice: test the message, watch where it lands or dies across channels, cut what fails the "so what" test, keep looking at performance data, as well as being present where buyers are searching. Nobody hands you that as a playbook, you only get good at it by doing it, failing a good few times and iterating. I have seen this play out and result in closed deals through marketing generated sources.

The lines between broadcaster, telco, ISP and pure streaming player are dissolving, everyone's becoming a media and advertising business, and that's creating genuinely new demand for the kind of solutions Synamedia provides. What excites me is that this isn't a mature, slow moving category anymore; it's being reshaped by AI driven personalisation, addressable advertising, and a new generation of viewing behaviour, all at once. Marketing's biggest role in that is to turn fast moving technical capability into a commercial story that CTOs, CCOs and CFOs can all say yes to, and then proving, with real pipeline and revenue data, that the story holds up. If I do my job well over the next three years, marketing won't just be telling Synamedia's growth story, it will be one of the reasons that growth happens.