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Over 2 decades experience across the areas of Leadership, Marketing, Communications, and Product Development.

I specialise in connecting brands. products and services to people through an audience-led approach.

Chief Marketing Officer

Fergal Kilroy

EdenBase

Head of Marketing

At EdenBase, we inspire, invest in, and transform local and global businesses and society by harnessing the power of emerging technologies. I lead the development of the overarching brand, marketing and communication strategies.

• Developed a full brand architecture for a complex proposition to successfully unlock additional investment
• Implemented an agile approach to marketing and project management to enable a small team to scale delivery and improve engagement across all channels
• Designed a Frontier Tech event proposition to secure £300K of seed funding to support company growth targets

01 Founders is an innovative startup tackling the tech talent crisis by operating a teacherless coding school model which creates full-stack software developers and offers a job guarantee through partnerships and a talent agency.

As Chief Marketing Officer, I picked up the proposition immediately post-launch, delivering 50K website visitors, and reaching over 2M people across the UK with a social-first marketing strategy.

• Successfully secured 130 learners in less than four months from launch, over-indexing diversity targets. The campaign targeted London for the second year and delivered a 158% increase in places offered.
• Delivered contracts worth over £500,000 in revenues providing an additional £300,000 in cost of living grants from Talent & CSR partnerships to develop the diverse talent pipeline. Building partnerships with Marks and Spencer, Snyk, Nominet, Arsenal Football Club, Crisis, and Peloton, among others.

London, UK

01Founders

Elephant and Classy is a creative agency that creates stunning visuals, knowledge experiences and creative campaigns to enrich our world.

As Director, responsible for all client interactions, including brief gathering, budgeting, project management and supporting the Creative Director in idea development and ensuring the creative process meets artistic and commercial objectives.

•	Produced the overarching campaign concepts for the launch of Horse Meat Disco's debut album on Defected Records, including Spotify Canvas's, lyric videos, digital advertising and live-stream visuals for Defecteds Virtual Festival and United We Stream's Homoelectric. The album charted top 3 in the Official Dance Albums Chart in the UK on downloads alone and has also charted in 4 other countries.

Elephant and Classy

Director

UNLEASH produce events, insights, and awards to enable the potential of technology, creating stories and moments that unlock the power of HR in organisations.

Managing Director, as part of company leadership, and tasked with leading a team of 12 covering Marketing, Content, Data, and Digital functions with responsibility for new product development and business process mapping across live events and digital content.

•	Developed the Go-To-Market Strategy for the company's new Digital Content Platform, which launched with a brand video voiced over by Stephen Fry

•	Led the company-wide business process review, which resulted in the implementation of Smartsheets and the embedding of Project Management across the organisation

•	Overhauled content research and programming for live events and digital, which uncovered insights around key personas enabling the business to unlock over €2M of reserved revenue to develop digital content products.

•	Embedded a structured marketing plan and review method for live events and new products. Enabling us to stem the loss of customer data and establish the correct KPIs and marketing tools for the business to continue functioning.

UNLEASH Group

Managing Director, Strategy and Insight

The Bett Show is a global series of education shows organised by Hyve Group promoting EdTech. The flagship show is in London, with satellite events in Kuala Lumpur, Sao Paulo and Dubai.

As Editor and Head of Content, held strategic responsibility for the vision, growth and development of all content and connected revenues associated with the shows in the Portfolio. Including full responsibility for the market and audience research, programme development and delivery of world-class speaker acquisition. 

• Took charge of a show behind its content KPIs and delivered a four-day-must-attend programme of speakers, workshops, and seminars in less than three months. Driving a record 60% of 42,000 visiting education leaders and influencers to engage.

• In the second year, I delivered a record Net Promotor Score of +49 for attendees to content and grew attendance to sponsored sessions by 150% year on year. I  achieved these metrics by redesigning the entire content approach, end to end, to become more focused on the visitor's needs.

• In the first 12 months, revenue for sponsored content at Bett London grew by 63%, from £289,000 to £487,000. In 2019 they rose again to £594,000 (21% YoY).

• The final programme, developed under my leadership, was picked up by the FT, Telegraph, Daily Mail, i Newspaper, Evening Standard, BBC World News, and PM show on BBC Radio 4 for editorial coverage.

• As part of the brand leadership team, held responsibility for over £18M P&L. Working with key accounts and other sales colleagues to manage and close all content-led propositions and develop new offerings to unlock new revenue streams.

Bett Show, (Hyve Group and Ascential)

Editor and Head of Content

Trade body and professional institute for agencies in the UK's advertising, media and marketing communications industry.

Led the Press and Marketing Communications function to support the broader secretariat by providing holistic communications planning and execution across all initiatives for an exacting community.

• Secured a landmark 18 pages of editorial coverage from the industry's leading trade magazine to support gender and ethnic diversity and delivered a cross-industry partnership with Twitter to activate it.

 • Introduced new content streams, including a podcast series which attracted over 25,000 listens for the first 10 episodes and a targeted e-bulletin that delivered double the organisation's standard open rates.

 • Oversaw the association's conferences and special Presidential initiatives, including managing the events, digital, and PR teams to ensure ticket sales, attendance, operations, and media coverage KPIs were met or exceeded.

Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA)

Head of Communications

Superglue produces award-winning events for exceptional companies that attract opinion formers, which results in more significant sales and increased market share.

As Director, led all client digital and stage or show Content or event amplification campaigns. As Co-Founder, took lead responsibility for all marketing and communications, including thought leadership and development of business processes.

• Grew the Institute of Competitive Socialising mailing list for the launch of their brand Swingers, The Crazy Golf Club, from 800 to over 60,000. Delivering 60%+ open rates for the brand's emails.
 
 • Conceived and produced a social media-based, creative campaign for Microsoft's Get Started at Future Decoded event at ExCel. Exceeded audience targets by 140%, attracting over 1200 people to a complex, fast-paced multi-speaker event with a keynote by Microsoft's Chief Envisioning Officer.

• In 12 months, this new agency grew from an idea to attract customers, including The Royal Opera House, Microsoft, LCC, Street Feast and many more, including delivering the campaign to achieve the world's biggest selling iBook for Apple, amongst others.

Superglue Ltd

Co-founding Director

A global educational charity created to promote excellence in design and advertising, most famous for presenting awards represented by an iconic Yellow Pencil trophy.

Over nearly six years at the organisation, I was promoted to the senior leadership team with four years at the Director level. During my time, I held responsibilities across all main functions of the business: this covered Community Management, Communications, Programme Management, Business Strategy, and Product Development.

• Redeveloped the membership offer to become a content-led digital proposition. Resulting in 420% more members with only a 20% increase in costs which I delivered in line with charitable objectives. 

• Achieved 600% growth in press coverage through developing and implementing a new communication strategy for the awards programme. By focusing internal media resources on broadsheet and strategically important outlets and outsourcing other general coverage to a PR agency.

• Led the complete digital transformation of D&AD's flagship education awards programme resulting in 900% growth of institutions entering and adding over 70,000 website registrations of prospective talent globally in two years.

Fergal Kilroy’s posts