William Paterson tells Tim Healey why authenticity beats perfection, why sometimes a “weird, rough-looking ad” performs best, and how the nutrition brand is shifting from direct response to long-term brand building.
You’ve worked at Deutsche Telekom, M&C Saatchi, AKQA and UDG. Since 2017 you’ve led global marketing at Huel and you also sit on the advisory board at Meta. Can you give us a quick tour of your career so far?
I studied visual communication and advertising at UDK in Berlin. Like most graduates, I dreamed of landing a junior creative role at a top ad agency, but I struggled. I didn’t have the right connections, and the competition was fierce.
Then, by chance, I was offered a role at Deutsche Telekom. I was completely underqualified, but because I was bilingual and a native English speaker, they took a chance on me. It wasn’t a creative job. It was marketing, and it completely changed my trajectory.
That’s where I first got into the nuts and bolts of digital. PPC, SEO, online funnels, campaign analytics. I was fascinated by how it all worked to drive real results. I was hooked. I even studied for a second degree in online marketing while working full-time. That was when I knew this was what I wanted to do.
I still loved the creative side, but what really excited me was performance. Seeing numbers move. Understanding how to scale something. That’s what led me into agency life. I started at M&C Saatchi. I was the only digital person there and probably one of the most junior. But it didn’t matter. I was in the room, and I was learning fast.
These days everything is integrated, but 15 years ago it was different. I was “the digital guy,” so I was across all their social media campaigns, running Facebook fan pages for brands like Kinder Chocolate and Ferrero. I did that for a few years and found I really enjoyed the client services side of things.
Next, I moved to AKQA, where everyone was very digitally savvy. I worked on brands like Nike and Rolls-Royce. The role was much more focused on the technical delivery side of things.
I soon realized that wasn’t creative enough for me. I wanted to do more than just project management. That’s when I joined UDG. I worked solely on Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, creating campaigns for their wearables and smartphone devices. The work was all about localization, adapting central campaigns from China for Western European markets.
Some elements, like beautifying filters, didn’t always translate well for western audiences. Chinese campaigns often had a different design aesthetic, more visually rich and layered, so part of our job was adapting them in a way that resonated locally. We had to identify the USPs of the phones and translate them across western European markets. It was a lot of fun.
I was still in Germany at the time, but I always had the ambition to move client-side. I saw an ad on Indeed for a German country manager role at Huel. My application went through to Julian, the founder of Huel. He was looking for someone to help scale the company.
Julian wanted to launch in Germany, so I planned our strategic launch into the market. I could apply the skills I’d gained working on Huawei, translating campaigns across multiple European markets.
We needed a basic Shopify site and then we could launch in all the markets. Soon we were operating in Sweden, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Austria and Germany.
When we launched in Germany, I was refreshing Shopify on my phone every 10 seconds. I remember hitting 1,000 orders that first weekend. It felt like watching a startup become a real business in real time. Now we’re selling in over 100 countries.
It was quite a change moving from big ad agencies to a business headquartered in a small office in an industrial estate in Aylesbury [a town in England] where Julian was working with five people.
I remember walking into Huel’s first office. It was just a rented office space in an industrial park. Julian was at a desk, surrounded by a few marketing assistants and stacks of boxes. It was the polar opposite of my agency days, and I loved it.
I moved through several roles, first as country manager, then international director. That role was much more commercial than purely marketing. More recently, I got back into the creative side of things and took on responsibility for creative, influencers and retail marketing.
We’ve expanded the team to strengthen our digital and trade capabilities, which has freed me up to go even deeper into marketing strategy – from creative development to brand positioning and high-impact advertising. It’s given me the space to focus on how we show up, cut through, and build long-term brand equity.
I’ve always loved the mix of business and creativity. I’m not the spreadsheet wizard or the best designer in the room, but I know how to bridge both worlds and keep them in sync. That balance is where I bring the most value.
Huel: nutritional powdered food is available in powder, ready-made drinks and meals.
What is the offer at Huel?
Huel solves a problem almost everyone faces: what to eat when you’re busy, unprepared, or just not in the mood to cook. It’s designed for your most inconvenient meal, the one you’d normally skip or replace with something quick but nutritionally poor, like a supermarket meal deal.
A wrap and a snack might feel like a healthy choice, but often they’re low in protein, high in salt, and don’t keep you full. Huel gives you a better option, one that’s nutritionally complete, high in protein (35 grams per serving), and actually satisfying. It’s fast, it tastes good, and you know exactly what you’re putting into your body.
We don’t expect people to live entirely on Huel but having it as your plan B means you’re never forced into a bad food decision. And beyond meals, we offer products like our greens powder to help top up your daily nutrition in a simple, effective way.
Huel is now available to buy in over 25,000 stores.
Huel has grown from £185m to £214m revenue and its retail presence has more than doubled to 25,000 stores in the last year. What does the next year look like for you from a marketing perspective?
We’ve had amazing growth, and we’ve also significantly increased our profit. There’s a lot of uncertainty at the moment. It’s important to grow, but not at the expense of profit. You need both to prove that you’re a sustainable business.
We’ve been fortunate to have growth every year. Now we are expanding into retail while continuing to develop our direct-to-customer offering with new products.
I’m excited by the potential for Huel to be available in more retail outlets. Most people still buy food in stores rather than online.
When our product is only available online, we often see wasted ad spend. But if people see your ad on Instagram and then go into a store, they are more likely to buy the product than someone who has never heard of the brand. So our advertising spend will deliver better returns.
How’s your marketing team structured?
My team looks after creative and creative strategy. We call it the Ad Squad. It’s like an in-house agency at Huel. It’s a big team of project managers, creatives and copywriters.
I also manage the influencer team, because there are a lot of synergies between creators and performance marketing, so it’s better to have them working towards the same goals.
We also have a growth team, along with team members who work on cross-functional projects that don’t sit neatly within any one department. We also have a team focused on retail marketing.
From the Huel Offices: company culture at Huel is considered a key pillar.
Drawing on your leadership expertise, what has your career taught you that helps you to build and maintain a great team?
Two things: hire based on personality, not experience. It’s not that important what university degree you have. For me, it’s more about how logically you respond in the interview and whether you are quick on your feet, entrepreneurial and scrappy and have an interest in digital.
You might not know the route, but you’re finding your way forward. People like that do really well in businesses like Huel. We look for people with that growth mindset, rather than the finished product.
What was your first memory of a marketing success that you were part of, where you felt, this is the role for me?
Relaunching our website. We were integrated with Shopify, but after launching so many products, the website had become confusing and needed an overhaul.
We carried out a lot of user research and stripped the site back to the basics. We reviewed the current product portfolio, rather than the single-product setup we had at launch.
We spoke to many customers, reviewed numerous screen recordings, and redesigned the site to categorize our products clearly and improve the user experience. The feedback was very positive. It’s now much easier for customers to navigate and find what they’re looking for.
Huel’s chocolate drink
How do you avoid silo mentality within organizations?
When a business is small, it doesn’t happen as much. But as you grow, teams get focused on their own KPIs and can develop tunnel vision.
Our growth team has been really helpful in avoiding that. Their function sits across other functions, so they’re able to challenge other teams.
It’s almost like giving a team the autonomy to poke around and challenge others when needed. Tactically, I think it’s about reminding teams to zoom out and see the bigger picture. You might be focused on driving your top-line KPI, but how does that impact another team’s KPI?
Often, increasing one KPI brings down another. For example, if you try to raise AOV, you might lower conversion. So my advice is to be careful. Although teams should focus on their KPIs, they shouldn’t be overly narrow. They need to consider the broader impact on the business.
Can you tell us about a customer research discovery that you found surprising?
One thing that still surprises me is how many people think of Huel as just a gym brand or a protein shake. Despite everything we’ve done to expand our range and reposition the brand, that early perception of being a meal in a shake format has really stuck.
The truth is, most of our customers aren’t bodybuilders or fitness fanatics. They’re busy professionals, parents, students – people who need a convenient, nutritious option that fits into their everyday life. That insight reminded us how critical it is to keep showing up in ways that reflect how people actually use the product.
It’s pushed us to evolve our creative, with more focus on real-life convenience, like grabbing a Huel between meetings or during a hectic school run.
How do you surf the tsunami of rapidly evolving marketing technology?
I love building things in ChatGPT and working with agents, but recently I had to talk to some of my teams about overusing it. If it’s used lazily, it can create a lot of fluff when all you need are some initial bullet points.
As a rule of thumb, ChatGPT is great for summarizing or making presentations shorter. It’s a powerful tool, but we shouldn’t become overly reliant on it. Especially when it’s used to generate long-form copy, it often results in content that no one even reads.
The same applies to advertising scripts. I’ve reviewed scripts and started to notice that they all feel quite similar. The hook is always the same, because AI has learned how to structure it. As a result, everything starts to sound alike. Ads need to stand out, not follow a formula. If you’re a small business and need a new website, ChatGPT might do a great job writing the copy. But when you’re producing hundreds of UGC ads each month, like we do, the surprising finding is that sometimes a weird, rough-looking ad performs best.
Of course, we have guidelines, dos and don’ts, for our creators, but sometimes the one that breaks the rules gets the best results. We believe that’s because people get bored of seeing the same hook. They develop fatigue, so the unusual cuts through. In direct response advertising, it’s not the most creative or polished ad that works. It’s the one that gets a quick message across or solves a problem instantly. You literally have three seconds to hook someone.
We’ve found that on Meta and Instagram, the lower the production quality, if it looks like something your mate shared on WhatsApp, the more likely people are to engage with it.
What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?
Not everything needs to look beautiful and polished. Everything you do needs to be highly tailored and native to the platform, even if it feels uncomfortable.
People don’t view your brand assets all laid out on a piece of paper. If they are on social media, they’re engaging with content natively, so we need to work within the platform where our customers are.
Your communications should feel cohesive from one platform to another, but they can still look very different.
Huel’s drink range includes Iced Coffee and Strawberry and Banana flavors.
What advice would you give your younger self if you could go back in time?
I would say, create a company or a website for the experience. Start a Shopify store and sell some T-shirts. That would be my advice.
I’ve hired people who did that when they were at university or school. They spent their own money and learned through the process. That makes you a better marketer.
Get some experience and play around. The more you work in digital marketing, the more practical knowledge you’ll have when you meet your future employer.
I’m not a theoretical marketer. Given how quickly marketing evolves, I strongly believe that hands-on experience often beats theory.
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer that I interview?
How do they attribute? How do they measure their return on ad spend?
Your question from the last senior marketer I interviewed: what’s your creative ambition and how would you plan to quantifiably track the results?
My creative ambition for Huel is to move up the funnel. Our current marketing is wholly focused on direct response. My ambition is for Huel to build mental awareness and brand desire.
As we move into retail, we can’t rely on the same direct-to-consumer tactics. I want to shift our communications toward broader brand-building.
Rather than just convincing someone that we can solve a problem, we want to make them feel something about the brand.
How do you measure that? I would look at company growth over time. With long-term brand work, you have to accept that you can’t always measure specific impact. Your performance marketing efforts are highly attributable, so ideally, you’d see an uplift there as well.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…
Marketing doesn’t stand still. What works today might be irrelevant in a year.
This interview has already appeared in The Drum. Discover the best campaigns, industry insights and interviews from world-leading marketers, creatives and more.
