The head of marketing tells Tim Healey why charity marketers must think like commercial brands, embrace risk and never lose sight of their audience.
You’ve gone from breaking news and sports reporting to senior marketing roles in software, The Prince’s Trust, your own venture Fives, and now head of marketing at Teenage Cancer Trust. Can you walk us through your career journey?
I started out in journalism in the mid-2000s when publications still had decent-sized teams. I’ve always been interested in people, storytelling and communicating to an audience.
I was thrown into a sports role where I did a bit of everything: writing, editing and laying out pages. That mix sparked my passion for marketing. Alongside sport, I covered news and entertainment too.
I really wanted to work for a charity, so I volunteered for Oxfam on its Oxjam initiative – promoting around 10 gigs in my hometown of Crawley.
I then secured a role at The Prince’s Trust in the comms team. Moving from a local newspaper to a national charity was a steep learning curve.
I worked on digital campaigns, including one for the Trust’s business program for young people – a multi-channel campaign across YouTube, social and PR that probably pushed creative boundaries for us at the time.
Later I worked on events, including developing the Prince’s Trust Awards, learning how to craft narratives across different media.
After a stint at an agency, I returned to the Trust in a more senior partnerships role. That’s where I really got into brand work, leading a brand update and bringing teams and stakeholders along on the journey.
Three and a half years ago, I joined Teenage Cancer Trust as head of marketing. This role feels like the culmination of everything I’ve learned over the last 20 years.
More recently, I launched Fives, a side project exploring the world of marketing through a podcast and blog. It taps into my journalist instincts, curiosity and passion for learning. I’m a big admirer of Jon Evans’s Uncensored CMO podcast—it’s inspired me, though I won’t be at that level of course.
Launched in 1990, the Teenage Cancer Trust provides specialized care for young people with cancer.
For the benefit of our readers: what is the Teenage Cancer Trust?
We are an organisation that’s been running for 35 years. We provide specialised care for young people with cancer: nurses, youth support workers, and entire units that are all specifically suited for young people.
The charity’s founders realized that young people were having to sit in wards with older cancer patients or children. There seemed to be no provision for teenagers. The needs of young people with cancer, both biologically and psychologically, are very different.
Our teenage years are formative: you are forging your identity, developing relationships, considering careers. We provide funding for these services for young people. We have 28 units in different hospitals around the UK – equipped with amazing nurses and support workers that help young people to get through cancer.
What have been the big achievements for Teenage Cancer Trust over the last year?
We had our most successful Royal Albert Hall gigs. We hold a whole week of gigs every year which are incredible. Last year was our biggest ever in terms of fundraising.
We also launched our brand campaign: “Cancer Care Made for Young People”. The point of the campaign was to simply position what we’re about. We realized that we needed to hammer home ‘who we are’ externally, even to people that were close to us and maybe have even been helped by us in the past. Strategically, we want to increase salience and familiarity with audiences as we know that’s what will make the difference in terms of support for the charity, which will in turn make the biggest difference for young people.
We realized that we needed to double down on the message defining what we do as a charity, and it’s something that we’ll continue over the next couple of years. We also secured a partnership with Newsquest, which includes a donation of £2.5m worth of advertising space across its titles, which will be really central to marketing our brand.
In these tough economic times, and with the general public having less disposable income or being less sure about spending, it has been harder to raise money. Despite these circumstances, our fundraising team have been doing incredible work that allows us to continue to provide our services for young people.
A series of concerts held at London’s Royal Albert Hall each year raise money and increase awareness for the Teenage Cancer Trust.
Please tell us how your marketing team is structured?
We’ve got a creative team that do our graphic design, copywriting, videography as well as conceptualizing our campaigns. We’ve got a press team who work tirelessly to secure media coverage to increase support for us. In the marketing team, we place research and insights at the heart of our approach to brand and campaigns. We’re also currently exploring how AI can benefit the team and help us to work more efficiently.
We’ve a digital marketing manager and executive as well. So they’re focused on paid media, social media and email. A part of our team runs our media partnerships. We have a great relationship with Clear Channel, Open Media and Newsquest and our team have to ensure that all our media choices maximize each opportunity. With low budgets and resources, it makes an incredible difference to us in our media and marketing planning.
Drawing on your leadership expertise, what has your career taught you that helps you to lead a great marketing team?
Curiosity is something I am really passionate about. The marketing team needs to be constantly curious about people and our audience, what they are into, and what’s of interest to them.
Being cooperative, collaborative and managing relationships is also really important. Learning to work effectively with teams across organizations is one of the most critical skills that you need to master in order to be an effective marketer. You can have the best strategy in the world for a particular product or for your brand, but if you can’t take people on the journey with you, then your ideas won’t go anywhere.
And you need courage. You need to take some risks. To put your head above the parapet, go through with your ideas and see what happens. You also need the courage to say when things aren’t right, too.
I am lucky in that I think I have the best marketing team in the business, and the charity sector in general has some of the best marketers out there. They have to have a unique skillset. I believe charity marketing should be held up alongside commercial brands. Why couldn’t a charity win Brand of the Year, for instance? There are some incredible charity brands out there, and I want people in my team to feel like they could quite easily move to a commercial marketing team as their next move, as well as a not-for-profit.
Claire Lewis-Norman – one of the Teenage Cancer Trust’s specialist nurses.
AI in marketing: what are the pros and cons?
The positives that I see are that AI allows us to be more creative and strategic: you can take out the mundane and do things more quickly, like market research and data analysis. We can test ideas at speed. We are also exploring systems that help us work more efficiently as a team and save time as we build really good marketing campaigns, plans and strategies.
I am a ‘glass-half-full’ type of person, so I see the positives, but we need to be wary of AI too. Right now, AI is the buzzword, a bit like ‘digital’ was 25 years ago. As an industry, we’re still learning how we trust AI, and how we need to check AI-generated work.
Overall, I think AI gives us more space and time to think. And certainly in terms of career choices and progress, if you get fully on board with AI, I think you are more of an asset to a future employer. I don’t believe AI takes anything away from a marketing job; I think it enhances it.
Could you tell us about a customer research discovery that you’ve made that you found surprising?
It didn’t necessarily surprise me but one that hit home and meant we really needed to up our game came from a focus group that we did.
The research stated that although we’re a great cause, there’s only so much money to go around in terms of donations from the public. That may sound like an obvious statement but when you’re at your desk day-to-day and in your own teams, sometimes you need to hear this from someone on the outside to give you a sense of perspective, which is why listening to donors and supporters is so important.
This really played into our thoughts around ensuring we were being even more audience-focused, really reaching and speaking to those people with whom our message will resonate, and ensuring that we make our creative and message as clear and compelling as we can for them.
We needed to better display what we do and champion the impact that our support has on young people with cancer. You don’t want to read too much into one comment, but the research and the way it influenced our thinking is a great example of how feedback and insight can lead you to better work. Context with all these things is important.
Could you tell us about a marketing mistake you may have made and what you learned from it?
We ran a campaign a few years ago where we tried to make it ‘do everything’ in one go across all media, both brand and fundraising, to tell the story of who we are as a brand and also raise money for us at the same time.
On the brand side, it did the things it needed to do in terms of coverage and awareness. But it wasn’t a quick win in terms of fundraising. My take-out was to trust my gut and experience as a marketeer. The data can help make those decisions, but there is still room to trust your gut feeling. That was a big lesson and it has served me well. It’s about balance. Keep objectives simple for campaigns and focused on what you want them to achieve.
The Teenage Cancer Trust continues its essential work thanks to donations from the public.
What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?
Marketing isn’t just advertising. It isn’t just placing some ads and expecting miracles. It’s more holistic than that: you have the 4Ps – product, price, place, promotion. At the Teenage Cancer Trust, our marketing team’s remit goes way beyond just advertising.
Alongside our research, planning and usual activities, our brilliant music team is working on exciting new music merchandise. We are helping to bring these products to market and will have the 4Ps very much at the heart of the approach.
LGC: What advice might you give your younger self if you could go back in time?
I think in my career everything happened as it should have and one experience organically led to another. So no real advice other than this: I don’t think I needed to worry as much as I did. So trust in yourself and enjoy the journey. Some of the best fun is learning along the way.
There are highs and lows in any career. You just need to get through the lows. To do that you need a certain amount of resilience. I would advise myself to worry less and persevere.
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer that I interview?
Describe the role and responsibilities of a CMO in the future.
Your question from a senior marketer is: what is your favorite advert from your youth that triggers nostalgia?
It would have to be Guinness’s ‘Surfer’ advert from 1999. Those horses coming out of the sea. It’s just glorious, it’s a piece of art. I think they used it for years.
In that advert, so many elements come together. It’s astonishing. The whole idea, the choice of actor for the surfer (Dino Ching), the poetry “tick follows tock,” the white horses representing Guinness and then, let’s not forget the music: ‘Phat Planet’ by Leftfield.
It’s timeless, isn’t it? And it just ‘feels’ like Guinness.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is?
You are not the customer. I’ve been saying this over and over again lately. It’s so easy to fall into the trap and forget that you’re not your customer. And if you do, whatever influences your decision-making around your marketing: be it planning or creative – may not be optimal. You have to keep your customer in mind at all times: it is fundamental to all great marketing.
If anyone is interested in learning more about Teenage Cancer Trust or donating visit teenagecancertust.org
You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.
This interview has already appeared in The Drum. Discover the best campaigns, industry insights and interviews from world-leading marketers, creatives and more.
