We hosted two leading events at Advertising Week Europe 2026. Here Rachel Letham shares all the key insights you need to know.
Session two: Marketers Who Mean Business, Conversation Circle
This intimate, peer-led conversation circle hosted by Sophie Devonshire explored what it means to be a marketer who drives business growth. Featuring Kate Mackie, Chief Marketing Strategy & Operations Officer and Partner, EY and Naomi Walkland, Chief Marketing Officer, Motorway who shared their own respective perspectives covering everything from commercial accountability to the tension between short and long-term thinking, breaking internal silos and how to feed yourself as a leader in a fast-moving landscape.
5 key insights from the session
The defining career shift: from functional leader to general manager
Naomi shared the most important feedback she ever received: stop thinking of yourself as a functional leader and start thinking like a general manager. It reframed everything. The best marketing leaders think of their organisation as a whole system – product, customer, brand, growth and revenue working together – rather than seeing their role as campaign delivery. That shift in perspective is where real commercial influence begins.
Measure impact, not output
Kate’s challenge to the room was direct: too many marketers are buried in their to-do lists rather than asking what difference their work is actually making. She offered four dimensions worth measuring: brand, reputation, revenue and relationships. Getting through your task list is not a strategy. The question to ask is not what am I doing, but what am I achieving and for whom.
When making the case to the board, show the trade-offs
Naomi’s most practical piece of advice for board conversations: do not just present the case for brand investment – present what happens if you do not make it. Show the trade-offs. If you do not replenish the top of the funnel now, next year’s position will look like this. It removes defensiveness from the conversation and puts the strategic question back to the board where it belongs. Framing it as “here are your options” rather than “here is what I need” lands far more effectively.
AI is a structural shift, and the barrier is confidence, not willingness
For Naomi at Motorway, embedding AI culturally across the business is a leadership priority, not an IT one. A survey she ran revealed that the barrier is not reluctance – it is a confidence gap. The work is about psychological safety, upskilling, and creating space for experimentation. Leaders have to model it themselves. Kate added that the more important question now is understanding where AI plays its role and where the human plays theirs – including thinking about LLMs and agents as a second audience that marketers need to reach.
Break silos by rallying everyone around the customer
The customer is the unifying principle that cuts across organisational politics. When teams have different goals and incentives, they fragment. When you anchor everyone to what a great customer experience looks like, you have a shared language. Brand alignment is not a once-a-year internal event – it requires consistent reinforcement, because people get busy and revert to short-term delivery. Every person in the organisation is part of the brand, whether they know it or not.
