I close it. Twenty years across energy, financial services, and media — in the industries where this gap is most expensive.
"Most regulated industries don't have an innovation problem. They have a translator problem."
No one in the room can hold creative ambition and analytical rigour at the same time. The result: creative teams produce work that can't be measured. Data teams produce insights that can't be felt. Leadership funds neither properly because they can't reconcile them.
I've spent twenty years watching this play out across four continents, in South Africa, The UK, Australian markets, North America, and New Zealand. The industries are different. The regulators are different. The cultures are completely different. The translator gap is identical every time.
That pattern isn't a coincidence. Regulated industries share a structural problem: the commercial constraints are so specific and so rigid that most creative thinkers disengage, and most analytical thinkers never develop the instinct to build something worth feeling. The translator — someone genuinely fluent in both — is the rarest hire in these categories, and the most valuable one.
This site is where I work that thesis out loud — through writing, experiments, and the occasional uncomfortable observation.
Organisations call me in when their digital marketing function is broken, siloed, or hasn't kept pace. I've rebuilt or unified digital capabilities at Barclays Bank, Standard Bank, Microsoft, and MultiChoice — transitioning teams, restructuring functions, and leaving them with the infrastructure to keep evolving without me.
Most digital performance work fails because the tools go in before the culture does. My approach starts by getting the business to think in performance terms — then instrumenting it, then optimising. The data is always messy. That's not an obstacle, that's the job.
Not campaigns — commercial ideas that have never been done before and drive measurable results. When South Africa's load-shedding crisis hit, we turned it into a consumer engine for DStv. #ShedHappens drove app downloads and usage, and won a Promax award. The brief was a crisis. The output was growth.
I have strong ideas, but I know they need a strong team to land. My focus is building marketing and digital functions where the capability stays when people move on — through clear process, genuine development, and teams that understand both the creative and commercial sides of what they're building.
Things I'm actively building, breaking, and learning from. Some ship. Most don't. All of them change how I think.
I'm open to conversations about senior marketing and digital leadership roles, advisory work, and the occasional project that sits awkwardly between strategy and execution. That's usually where the interesting problems live.