About
I am Head of Paid Media at a digital marketing agency in Stockport. I manage a team of three and a client base of 15+ accounts across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Meta. The job title says paid media, but the actual role covers everything from campaign strategy and tracking infrastructure through to commercial positioning and how the agency scopes its work.
Before that, I spent 10 years across agencies in Manchester: Sharp Ahead, McCann, Soap Media, The Hut Group, and a few others. Mostly hands-on PPC work that gradually moved into leadership and then into building the tooling and processes around it. The systems side of what I do now is relatively recent. It came from getting tired of doing the same manual work repeatedly and realising I could build something to handle it instead.
I think about paid media as a systems problem. Individual campaigns matter, but what matters more is whether the team has the right frameworks, tooling, and processes to deliver consistently without depending on one person knowing everything. The Builds page has the detail on what that looks like in practice.
I have a psychology background (MSc Organisational Psychology, Manchester) which was not the obvious route into digital marketing, but it turns out to be useful more often than you would expect.
I have spoken at events in Antwerp, Stockport, and have an upcoming talk in Manchester. The usual topic is attribution and tracking. I am available for speaking engagements and happy to talk to event organisers.
I run a self-hosted home server setup alongside the work infrastructure, mostly because I find the problem-solving interesting and partly because I do not like paying subscriptions for things I can run myself.