Jungle was built on attention before most brands knew how to earn it. What does winning attention actually mean to you today?

Winning attention today means earning time and making it count. Not just impressions sitting on a dashboard that look great until someone in the boardroom asks what they actually did for the business.

The industry spent a long time celebrating vanity metrics. Likes, views, follower counts. They made for beautiful slide decks. But boards don't run businesses on beautiful slide decks. They run them on growth, and the pressure to prove marketing's contribution to that has well and truly caught up.

When I walk into a boardroom now, nobody is asking how many likes a campaign got. They're asking what moved the needle. That means attention needs to translate into something tangible: market penetration, brand salience, recall, preference. The tricky part is that those signals often aren't sitting in plain sight.

The path to purchase is genuinely messy. Someone might see a creator post, encounter the brand again three weeks later, hear about it from a friend, and only then decide to buy. That journey rarely announces itself in a single tidy conversion event. It's actually one of the things I love most about working in this space. People discover brands in unpredictable ways, and understanding that complexity is where the interesting work begins.

At Jungle, winning attention has always started with understanding audiences first. We operate publishing brands reaching more than 150 million people globally, which means we're learning from real behaviour every day rather than theorising about it.

Winning attention isn't about generating applause. It's about creating engagement that ultimately drives real commercial outcomes.

How do you decide where Jungle’s marketing should lead with brand versus lead with performance?

The starting point is always the business objective. Everything else flows from there.

For a long time, the industry treated brand and performance as two separate disciplines. Different teams, different budgets, different KPIs, often barely speaking to each other. Brand built awareness. Performance drove sales. But consumers don't experience brands that way. They move across a non-linear journey where a creator post, a retargeted ad, and a word-of-mouth recommendation can all contribute to the same eventual purchase.

The smarter framing is this: brand creates demand, performance captures it. One makes people want you. The other makes it easy to buy you. You need both working in the same direction, not competing across a spreadsheet.

At Jungle, we sit in an interesting position because we come from publishing. Our brands build cultural relevance and community at real scale. Our agency work takes that attention and turns it into commercial outcomes for clients. That combination means we're not choosing between brand and performance, we're thinking about how they reinforce each other from the start.

Which one leads depends entirely on where the brand is in its journey and what the business actually needs right now. Sometimes the gap is awareness. Sometimes it's conversion. Often it's both at once, which is exactly why the two can't operate in separate rooms.

Your role sits between strategy, creativity, and data. When those three disagree, which one gets the final call — and why?

In reality, the best work happens when strategy, creativity, and data are all in conversation.

But water pistol to the head… strategy gets the final call. Though if the three are genuinely in conflict, something has usually already gone wrong earlier in the process.

Data tells you what's happening. Creativity is what makes people care. Strategy connects both to a real business objective. Without it, you risk brilliant creative that entertains everyone but moves nothing, or perfectly optimised campaigns that are completely forgettable. Neither outcome is useful.

My relationship with data has evolved a lot over the years. I was the kid who found maths genuinely hard but wrote stories, poems, and songs instinctively, and spent most of my time in performing arts. The idea that I'd end up slightly obsessed with data would have surprised my fifteen-year-old self enormously.

What I've come to understand is that data isn't just numbers, it's insight. It shows how people actually behave, what resonates, and where real opportunities exist. It gives you the confidence to push bigger ideas and back creative instincts with something more solid than a gut feeling.

That said, creative instinct can spot where culture is heading before the numbers have caught up. When that happens, strategy decides whether you follow the data or back the gut, and then owns whatever comes next.

Data informs. Creativity excites. Strategy decides.

Jungle’s publisher-to-agency model generates huge cultural signals. How do you turn those signals into clear marketing direction beyond insight decks?

This is genuinely one of the things that excites me most about Jungle, because most organisations are very good at producing insight and considerably less good at doing anything meaningful with it.

Our publisher-powered model means we're watching culture unfold in real time. Across our brands, we can see what people watch, save, share, comment on, and act on every single day. That's actual behaviour, not a survey result telling us what people think they might do.

A lot of that intelligence is powered through JungleIQ, our audience intelligence platform. It analyses billions of signals across social platforms to surface emerging behaviours, creator patterns, and content trends before they fully break. It gives us a read on culture grounded in what people are actually doing rather than what the industry thinks is coming.

But the signal on its own isn't the value. The value is in what happens next. Those signals feed directly into creative briefs, influencer partnerships, and campaign strategy. Instead of starting with 'here is the trend', we start with 'here is how audiences are behaving and here is where the brand should show up'. That shift in framing changes the quality of the work considerably.

Sometimes that means content. Sometimes, creator partnerships. And increasingly it means bringing online communities together in the real world, like our sell-out SPORF event where we brought more than 150 creators, agencies, and brand partners together to watch five Premier League games under one roof. Digital communities are showing up in person more and more, and the brands building real relevance are the ones paying attention to that shift.

The goal is always the same: move from cultural insight to creative action when it genuinely matters. JungleIQ helps us separate the signals worth acting on from the ones that are just noise.

In your marketing approach, which channels or tactics have consistently punched above their weight for Jungle?

Creative designed around how platforms actually work, rather than how we report on them. That consistently delivers.

For too long, social success was measured by the metrics that are easiest to capture. Likes, reach, engagement rate. They describe activity. What actually determines whether content grows are the behavioural signals platforms genuinely care about: retention, shares, saves, and whether content is attracting new audiences. Get those right early, and the platform amplifies the work. Get them wrong, and it simply stops. Understanding those mechanics is where the real edge sits.

Creator-led ideas also consistently outperform, but only when creators are involved from the beginning. Bringing a creator in at the end of a brief is a very different thing. Creators understand their platforms and communities at a depth no brief can fully capture, and when the idea is shaped around how their audience actually behaves, that difference is visible in the results.

And then there is community. Probably our favourite word at Jungle. Because we come from publishing, we think about audiences as communities built around shared interests rather than segments to target and move on from. When brands genuinely tap into those communities, the impact extends well beyond any single campaign.

We are increasingly seeing that translate into real life, too. When online communities meet in person, the relationship between brand and audience deepens in a way that no digital touchpoint alone can achieve.

How do you design influencer strategies that feel native to platforms, but still ladder up to long-term brand building?

A lot has changed in influencer marketing, but the fundamentals of why it works haven’t. It still comes down to culture and community. I’ll happily die on that hill.

Long before creators existed as a term, brands partnered with people who had influence over audiences. A celebrity in a TV campaign, someone fronting a billboard. The principle was identical. You were borrowing trust and relevance from someone whose audience already listened to them. What has changed is the platforms, the formats, and the speed at which everything moves. Creators now have direct, ongoing relationships with their communities and a depth of understanding about how those audiences behave that no media plan can replicate.

Designing strategies that feel native starts with genuinely respecting that relationship. It is not primarily about audience size. It is about understanding what that community cares about and how they respond to specific topics and formats. Audience size without audience trust is just a number.

This is where JungleIQ becomes really valuable in practice. It lets us analyse sentiment, audience behaviour, and topic affinity around a creator's content before we commit to a partnership. If we are working with a gut health brand, we can look at how that creator's audience has historically responded to conversations around health and nutrition. That intelligence is the difference between a partnership that feels credible and one that simply feels convenient.

Platforms will evolve. Algorithms will keep changing. But when creative genuinely resonates with the audience it was built for, that connection travels. And that is what allows influencer work to build real long-term brand value.

What role should paid media play in influencer-led campaigns without turning them into just another ad unit?

Paid media should amplify creator content, not replace the role creators play. The moment you strip out what made something feel native and rebuild it as a sales message, you have lost the thing that made it worth distributing in the first place.

The reason influencer marketing works is because it feels natural to the platform and is trusted by the community. Over-engineering content for paid distribution tends to produce something that looks like an ad, performs like an ad, and gets treated like an ad.

We also know that the best-performing paid social is increasingly the work that feels most organic. That has become a genuine craft, and it is consistently underestimated. Boosting a post is not a strategy. It is what happens when there is no strategy.

The starting point has to be organic performance. If creator content earns strong engagement signals naturally, that is a strong indicator that it will scale well with paid support. Paid should function as an accelerator for content that is already working, not a substitute for content that isn't.

I would also push back on paid being treated purely as a short-term performance lever. Brands that only activate paid when the numbers look uncomfortable are not building a relationship with their audience. The brands that do this well have paid embedded in their longer-term approach, using it to build genuine brand affinity over time.

When the balance is right, paid lets great creator content travel further and faster. That is exactly the role it should play.

Where has technology genuinely sharpened Jungle’s marketing execution — and where has it added noise?

The clearest example of technology sharpening execution is JungleIQ. It analyses billions of signals across social platforms, covering creator sentiment, emerging audience behaviours, and how communities are responding to different topics in real time. Intelligence that would have taken months to gather manually a few years ago now informs briefs and shapes partnerships at real speed.

But the technology is only part of the picture. We have dedicated teams across data, insight, and technology whose job is to turn those signals into something genuinely useful for brands. Tools are only as good as the thinking applied to them.

Technology has also changed how we produce work. Some of the most effective content today starts on the device already in your pocket. Alongside that, we have built Jungle Studios, our in-house production space with podcast studios, beauty studios, kitchen sets, and full editing facilities. Idea to finished campaign under one roof. In social, where speed matters, that is a meaningful advantage.

Where technology adds noise is when people treat it as a replacement for the fundamentals. The growth of AI tools has made it easier than ever to produce a lot of content quickly. But great marketing has never been about volume. It has always been about the strength of the idea and the precision of where it lands.

The real skill is knowing where to focus. Technology should help strong ideas travel further and faster. That is what it is for.

As Jungle scales globally, what has to stay tightly controlled in the brand and what can safely evolve?

The philosophy stays fixed. How it shows up can move.

We were born from publishing. Everything we do starts with audiences, culture, and community. Being genuinely plugged into how people behave online, what they care about, and how that shifts is the mindset that cannot be diluted as the business grows internationally. It is the foundation on which the work is built.

The other non-negotiable is the belief that social is not simply a channel. It is the connective tissue linking brand building, creator partnerships, content, and real-world experience. That thinking has to travel intact into every market.

What can and should evolve is how all of that shows up in practice. Culture looks different everywhere. The platforms, creators, and communities that matter will vary by market. Formats adapt. New platforms emerge. The content will naturally look different in different contexts, and that is as it should be.

The brand can flex considerably without losing its identity, as long as the core thinking stays rooted in understanding audiences and building communities around genuine shared interests. Consistency of philosophy. Flexibility of expression.

The ambition stays simple: keep building work that connects people online and increasingly brings them together in person. Because that shift from digital community to real-world moment is where brands stop being something people scroll past and start being something they actually care about.