The Mistakes That Shaped Me

In this episode, we chat with the very humble and down to earth Anthony Russell, an accomplished brand strategist and performance marketer with experience across multiple categories, and who is currently the Head of Customer Experience at Sweat, one of the world’s leading fitness platforms. He’s passionate about connecting people with brands through insight driven, meaningful and fully integrated brand experiences and storytelling. Today we talk about the significance of the onboarding process when starting a new company, and the importance of collaboration, vulnerability and egoless leadership. 

Since we recorded this episode with Claire, her role has evolved as she now leads the Product and Experience Functions at Contact Energy. Her claim to fame is doing the impossible – making energy bills understandable to regular people without accountancy diplomas.  Previously she picked up rubbish for a local council the UK (by letting people report local messes thru a chatbot). Prior to that she looked after digital service for the UK’s largest telco (EE), winning a few “best online service” gongs in the process. 

Karen Sheppard, Head of Customer Insights at the amazing Endeavour Group. Karen got her first taste (pun intended) of market research as a student running blind taste tests on potato chips. With over 20 years of experience working in market research and insights on both agency and client side, she has worked across a range of industries from Tobacco to Healthcare.Today we explore how just using the latest and great technology is not enough alone to guarantee success. We also cover T-Shape Leadership which places an increased value on developing your understanding beyond your specialism if you want to successfully lead cross-functional teams.

Kate Young, Executive Manager, Marketing Strategy & Capability at ANZ has deep background in CX spanning financial services, retail, property management, health and wellbeing as well as hospitality and tourism.

Emily Paladino is the Head of Customer Insights at Country Road Group and has the daunting task of feeding her team’s insights directly into the business strategy across all five of their brands (Country Road, Trenery, Witchery, Politix and Mimco). Emily’s 20 plus years experience oscillates between insights, strategy & planning and creative development & execution.This chat will discuss how impactful customer experiences, particularly negative ones can stay with you, in her case for more than 25 years, and how they can leave a lasting impression on whether you end up buying the fancy Italian bag or not….it will make sense in a minute.

Nektarea Cameron-Smith is currently Head of Customer Experience at Up and obsessed with building authentic customer relationships that deliver deliberate and consistent experiences. Combining empathy and analytics, Nektarea has created some industry leading experiences at Up. Up, is a digital bank that's making money easy for over 700,000 Australians. Today we explore how the over use of NPS and over surveying can be as damaging as it can be insightful.

Damian Madden is a creative strategist who works on experience and creative transformation for luxury and fashion brands globally. Currently the Director of Digital Transformation & CX at Pernod Ricard he is also the founder and creative director of ANOTHERSIDE, a Korean/Australian streetwear label promoting youth mental health, and the art collective asinglepiece. As an ardent believer in the power of art to transform, he has worked all over the world to make art more accessible and inclusive through creative storytelling, innovative technology and data-driven strategy,

Why does innovation matter in programmatic advertising? Put simply, without innovation all things wither and fade into obscurity…or die. But how do you remain innovative in the fast-moving world of programmatic? Drawing interesting parallels between the history of the film industry and programmatic, grab 22 mins to find the answer to this question and be thoroughly entertained in the meantime. This series of AshtonCast, Why Innovating Matters In Programmatic Advertising, is proudly brought to you by the Programmatic Summit, the region’s most important programmatic, digital and adtech conference. We’re featuring interviews with Ryan Menezes, Chief Technology and Transformation Officer at GroupM, Natalie Minter, Product Manager - Agencies & Brands at flybuys, and Tim Armstrong, Head of Digital Platforms, Capability and Audience, NOVA Entertainment.