I have known Stu for over 10 years, working most recently with him in his role as the leader of Danone Nutricia’s digital marketing ecosystem. Stu is a fiercely passionate leader that believes deeply in the power of innovation and is a brilliant driver of the organisational change to bring positive new thinking to fruition. He is an incredibly commercially savvy leader, driven by performance results. During his time at Danone he has put a rocket under their programme to transform its digital capabilities to improve both the operational delivery efficiency for digital content and commerce, use of customer data as well as the effectiveness measure across the digital ecosystem. From an agency perspective, Stu is the best kind of client, he is a fair, straight-talker with big ambitions; Stu demands the best but also supports the team and treats his agency partners as genuine business partners.
I was fortunate enough to work alongside Stu over a number of years at Danone Nutricia in my capacity leading marketing teams on a number of brands within the Danone Nutricia portfolio. His strengths and experience in digital span the full remit from content to data, search to eCommerce and everything in between. Stu was a valuable partner in the development and delivery of the annual strategic plans and the development of customer and patient value journeys, through to supporting the execution of those in market. He is adept at stakeholder management, upskilling others and taking them on the journey, whether that be the developing of junior team members or those in senior leadership. Would highly recommend Stu for any leadership role that requires digital transformation and an ability to interface with senior team leadership. His calm demeanour is combined with excellent functional knowledge, and an ability to communicate clearly across the business making him an excellent choice.
I had the pleasure of working with stuart on various consulting projects from when stuart joined Danone in 2018 until January 2021 when my consulting roles were completed. Stuart was a breath of fresh air with his digital knowledge, capabilities, can do attitude and willingness to just get on with the job. Always happy to put his hand up for a task and always keen to have & give an opinion. Danone’s digital & data footprint has certainly evolved and come a long long way under Stuart’s leadership.
I have been fortunate enough to work with, collaborate and most importantly, learn from Stu for over 3 years now - where we he led and enabled a game changing Digital transformation enabling ALL brands to go 100% Digital. Stu’s dedication to top-notch Digital work – in all aspects and disciplines where it’s Customer Journey, Search, Data or Content – has and will continue to fuel his success. From the onset of his start, I particularly admired Stu’s ability to set a very inspiring and bold vision for Digital transformation and staying persistent to achieve it despite many headwinds. One after the other, he continued to introducing new models of working and interventions, linked to clear business outcomes. This was very reassuring for the business and turned many skeptics into believers in the power of Digital and Data!!! He is also a very bold, agile and passionate business leader with an enviable entrepreneurial spirit who doesn’t shy away from test & learn and failing fast. I have always known Stu to make strong contributions to brands and the business... and I have no doubts that he will continue to do so.
"Stu is able to come into difficult projects or client situations, cut through the noise, and achieve clarity and alignment on a way forward. All the while creating endearing relationships and commercial success and getting a win-win outcome for all involved.
If you need help turning around a tough project, difficult client relationship or seeking business process improvement then you should contact Stu."
"I've worked with Stuart both as a colleague, and later as a client and recommend him on both counts.
He is a calm, authoritative presence in the workplace, with an innate ability to hone in on the key issues that need to be addressed to get projects done, to a high quality and within the timeframes required.
I'm a lay person in tech, and Stu was able to break things down into ideas and components I understood so I could make the right decisions.
CanDo was brought in on time, and on budget, largely thanks to Stu's leadership".
"Stu has led the execution of the digital road-map for Creative Holiday's (The Travel Corporation) over 1.5 years, managing the expectations of all levels within our organisation and leading the Ogilvy team to deliver a 'best in class' e-commerce website and system integration project for us.
Stuart is approachable, patient, detailed, tenacious and understands the need for developing integrated digital strategies that feed the long-term growth of our business and that cover a wide range of digital channels each complementing other marketing & development we are planning.
I would highly recommend Stuart for any digital strategy or digital leadership role within an agency setting or within the travel industry in the future.
Stuart has worked with Jacob's Creek and other Pernod Ricard Winemakers brands over the last few and has managed and built a number of websites across our brands.
I found him great to work with due to his passion, energy, honesty, persistence and strategic thinking.
He always managed our expectations well and delivered to time-frames while also not shying away from the difficult conversations along the way that needed to be had to ensure the right results.
I can endorse him as a valuable and trustworthy business director across key projects and relationships for other businesses".
Stuart is the best manager I have ever had.
An extremely capable and professional Project and Team Leader, Stuart is tough but fair and his ability to bring teams together and facilitate cross-team processes is the best I've ever had the pleasure of working with.
His ability to turn ailing projects around, and turn unhappy clients into engaged, happy ones in the process is inspiring. I have never learned so much in such a short time as I did working for Stuart.
I worked with Stu for around 3 years at Ogilvy.
We worked together on a number of large, complex and long running Sitecore development projects including high transactional ecommerce sites, marketing sites and business transformation projects.
He was involved in the projects from initial pitches to go live, working with the Sitecore development team, creatives and others to deliver the projects.
His leadership and business skills helped make these projects successful.
He was also a great person to have on your side going into negotiations.
Stu is also a very easy person to work with, is a great team builder and gets stuck in when things got hard.
I would gladly work with Stu again.
Stu is a true leader.
He inspires teams and motivates them to achieve the best possible outcome for the business and the client. Educating and guiding clients on best practice recommendations. Being a process driven manager,
Stuart encouraged cross-team collaboration between internal and external teams to work better together with a successful outcome. He implemented new technologies and platforms such as Dynamic creative and delivering better outcomes both for productivity and the bottom line.
Agile methodologies and practices were a strong area our team focused on. Stuart instilled the importance of using Agile and an iterative approach.
Stuart is a tough but fair leader. He has the ability to encourage others to step out of their comfort zone, giving them the exact push they needed to achieve more.
I gained a huge amount of confidence in my abilities through his mentor-ship and guidance and learned so much along the way.
I would work for Stuart again in a heartbeat.
He is a truly inspiring mentor and leader.
It is always good to work with people you admire and Stuart is definitely one of them.
I was lucky enough to have him around guiding me with the projects I managed and I can see how much I improved since I first start working for Ogilvy Digital.
He is definitely a team player and great to work with.
Stu is a high energy, strategically led senior digital specialist, who handled the research, planning and implementation of a multi-channel digital strategy for therocks.com and darlingharbour.com tourism destinations.
He also created new world first innovations that connected the unique heritage of the regions to consumers via cutting edge NFC and mobile technologies.
Stuart was an integral member of the Consumer Engagement team, and built a robust and dimensional digital platform integrating mobile, web, rich content facebook,effective twitter, emarketing and Youtube platforms.
He was always there to help and share knowledge with anyone and was always ready to help out in media, brand or tactical activations.
A well liked member of SHFA across all levels and the go-to-guy for anything to do with digital marketing or creative ideas.
If you're after a senior strategic digital guru, highly recommend Stuart to you.
I worked with Stuart in a multi-skilled digital design and development team, at Omnicom.
The impact Stuart had on our digital offering when he came on board was instant and essential.
Immediately identifying areas for improvement, he communicated plans and activated them across multiple teams, with conviction and clarity.
At all times, there was a focus on quality, process and a unified, holistic, creative approach.
Stuart's mastery of Digital, and ability to utilise new technology for purpose, translates across all mediums. Under his leadership, our team was encouraged to challenge everything, consider anything, and always push ourselves.
As a result, we created work that we were proud of. I would consider it an honor to work with Stuart again.
I worked with Stuart in a digital creative and production team at Omnicom.
Stuart has a relentless focus on process to ensure the team delivered high quality work and experiences to our clients.
He was customer obsessed, always thinking holistically and strategically in creative executions that went above and beyond, as witnessed by the remarkable growth in our digital offering to our clients.
The impact of his leadership was immediately felt by the digital team.
Under his leadership, we were more confident and well equipped to tackle difficult challenges with his full support.
To this day, I continue to apply his learning and guidance to my career and day-to-day life.
I would gladly work with Stu again. He is truly an inspiring leader and mentor.
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