Starting your career? Stay positive.

In 1999 after 18 months of relentlessly trying to find employment and having been rejected by over 100 companies, I finally had a job! dunnhumby, who were “making data make sense” offered me a graduate position in their data team. All the disappointments were suddenly insignificant, just pure excitement to join such an innovative and fast-growing organisation. I was completely inspired by a company who had just surpassed 100 employees, having started in a back bedroom just 10 years earlier.

Sadly, dunnhumby had wrongly assumed that my First-Class degree was a mark of intelligence and as a weapons grade dyslexic, I really struggled with programming. I was more of a hindrance than a help to my ridiculously patient colleagues and should have been fired. The reality of my precarious position was beyond obvious, even to me, but I had been so desperate to work at such an amazing company that I was determined to find ways to add value, even if that was helping my boss get off parking tickets.

One of dunnhumby’s biggest challenges was fuelling their growth, with consistent high standards of talent. With a lot of passion and a heavy seasoning of luck, I managed to land a role overseeing the development of the new website to reflect the new “essential customer genius” branding. It is one of the projects I am most proud about in my career and kept me on the payroll just long enough for project BOBB (Business Opportunity for Big Bucks). BOBB was the commercialisation of Tesco data to help Tesco supplier brands optimise their price and promotions, as well as understand how their new product were performing, as well as explore what else customers bought etc…

Having been involved in the depths of Clubcard data since the beginning of my career, I convinced the senior management to let me help brands offer relevant rewards and incentives to Tesco customers; or put more simply, sell coupons! The “media” business was a completely new world for dunnhumby and it was far too salesly for most of my analytical colleagues. I would be in Wigan for 9am just so I could be back working the M4 corridor by mid-afternoon, I was literally always “in the area”.

Finally doing something I was good at, I couldn’t be matched on results driven by passion or effort. A new intake of talent arrived and with it a somewhat overconfident chap. A man who would quite happily take on our most senior colleagues in a debate about the best way to use our new oil, the Tesco data. I wanted him in my team from our very first encounter and I became best friends with the most concise thinker and best presenter I have ever worked with, Joel Hopwood. We formed an unstoppable partnership of clever thinking, commercial savvy and had a unified passion for our amazing employer and doing brilliant work.

We lived and breathed our jobs almost 24/7, so much so we decided to share a house. We grew the business and we grew ourselves, always honing new ideas together. On one occasion Tesco were close to pulling the ‘Coupon at Till’ scheme due to troubling redemption rates (around 1%). A pre booked record shopping trip to Los Angeles afforded me two 11 hour flights dedicated to solving the problem. On arriving home Joel and I presented “New & Lapsed”, it became a landmark that literally transformed coupon redemption rates to over 10% the very next wave.

Unfortunately, as the business grew, the many media channels had just as many Tesco stakeholders individually targeted on the revenue of their channels, rather than the whole pie, let alone campaign effectiveness. Our jobs started to revolve around justifying why we hadn’t sold x amount of floor graphics of y amounts of mag pages. The magic of doing something brilliantly that made a difference had gone.

Compliance being the largest single barrier to the growth of retail media, we found ourselves spending hour after hour designing a media fulfilment business that would use trusted store colleagues employed for extra time and accountable to the separate business. However, there were just too many barriers to entry, as well as persuading a retailer to hire two guys with an idea and no money or infrastructure. 

Then the idea for Capture was born, first written down in typically crystal clever form by Joel in a notebook while on holiday in Scotland. A business that would design the right campaigns to influence customer behaviour and drive sales, not just in Tesco’s but across the market, opening brand budgets that dunnhumby themselves couldn’t get near. Doing the right thing for brands would translate into doing the right thing for retailers as investment levels would increase. A genuine win, win.

Ten years on, under the Shopper Media Group we have over 100 colleagues across three agencies; Capture, Lobster and Threefold each working in their own distinct way towards the same goal of transforming Shopper Media. There is much work still to do; the measure of success will be when Shopper Media becomes a genuine and effective investment choice for brands.