I find the thing that’s slowing people down and build a better path around it. The industries changed — media, gaming, trading — but the work never really did.
Essence / WPP
Nearly a decade running Google and YouTube’s paid media. Joining the team in a single room in a shared office, shortly thereafter acquiring a couple smaller shops and then we were the ones being bought when WPP/GroupM acquired us. From there we truly scaled and I was there through every phase, helping build the foundation while the org, strategies and the budgets grew faster than anyone planned.
Activision / Call of Duty
From there I went in-house to work on Call of Duty’s growth engine. The mission changed constantly — that’s not a turn of phrase, that’s the actual rhythm of a live-service franchise with hundreds of millions of players across dozens of regions. My job was building the measurement and operations structures that let the team move fast without losing rigour.
Now
I went from trading media at “Google and Activision” scale to trading financial markets for my own account. Very different assets, same muscle: find the signal, build the system, remove the friction. Trading is a brutal teacher. If your systems are wrong, you lose money immediately. That focus sharpens everything.
Now I’m circling back to where I started. The same approach — find the friction, remove it, build the system — applies to the problems I used to solve at Essence and Call of Duty. Just with better tools and a decade more context. Small business operations, marketing strategy, brand consulting — rebuilt for a world where the rules have changed.
Built the media-planning and programmatic engine that tied Essence/WPP’s Google work to consistent measurement. I led cross-disciplinary teams, introduced the analytics frameworks they still use today, and made sure every launch had a playbook for what to do when performance diverged from the plan.
Moved into Activision to co-lead the strategic transition of the Call of Duty media stack. Designed the governance, tooling, and feedback loops that let the internal growth team test creative, plan spend, and report outcomes without waiting for agency cycles.
Today I build capital-market systems: data pipelines, execution layers, and decision tools that keep the leverage within acceptable bounds while exposing the edges worth exploring. Everything still starts with a hypothesis and ends with observable signals.