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The Coca-Cola Company

Rand Merchant Bank

World Gold Council

ALDO

JaSure

Apple

Ashburton

RYTE

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

Lotus Cars

Robinhood

Inflection

Harrods

Google

Twelve South

Data and Media Director

**✍ Project Overview**

The World Gold Council needed to understand whether their marketing spend was actually working, and if so, then how much, on which channels, and with what lag. Gold is a considered purchase driven by macroeconomic sentiment as much as brand preference, which makes it a uniquely complex environment for marketing effectiveness modelling. I was tasked with building a Marketing Mix Model from the ground up to give WGC the ability to answer these questions with statistical confidence.

**📐 Building the Model**

The model was built in Python on Google Colab, using a multivariate regression framework with adstock transformations to account for the carry-over effect of media exposure over time, and saturation curves to capture diminishing returns at higher spend levels. Each channel was modelled individually before being combined into a unified model, allowing us to isolate the contribution of paid media from baseline sales drivers like macroeconomic conditions, gold price fluctuations, and seasonality.

**📊 The Google Sheets Effectiveness Layer**

Alongside the Python model, I developed a complementary effectiveness multiplier model in Google Sheets, designed to make the outputs accessible and actionable for non-technical stakeholders. This layer translated the regression outputs into channel-level ROI scores, budget scenario planning tools, and spend optimisation recommendations that the client could interrogate directly without needing to touch the underlying code.

**🔍 Benchmarking Against Meridian**

The model's methodology and outputs were benchmarked against Google Meridian, Google's open-source MMM framework. This validation exercise gave WGC confidence that the approach was methodologically sound and comparable to best-in-class industry standards, while also surfacing where the bespoke model offered advantages specific to their business context.

**📚 We Learned**

1. How to build a full MMM pipeline in Python, from raw data ingestion to model output.  
2. How to apply adstock and saturation transformations to media variables in a regression framework.  
3. How to isolate paid media contribution from macroeconomic and seasonal baseline drivers.  
4. How to translate complex statistical outputs into accessible planning tools for non-technical stakeholders.  
5. How to benchmark a bespoke model against an industry-standard framework (Google Meridian).  
6. How modelling for a considered, macro-sensitive category like gold differs from FMCG or direct-response contexts.

Marketing Mix Modelling

**✍ Project Overview**

New Zealand Rugby had built the most successful franchise in sporting history. But of their 280 million fans globally, only 15 million were actively engaged. The remaining 265 million had no meaningful touchpoint with the brand. No direct relationship, no owned channel, no way for NZR to reach them outside of match windows. Revenue was entirely dependent on traditional channels: ticketing, broadcasting, and merchandise. The brief was to change that. AKQA, in partnership with The Laboratory, was tasked with designing an end-to-end DTC strategy to turn a passive global fan base into an owned, monetisable audience.

**👥 Understanding the Fan**

The strategy began with a rigorous segmentation of NZR's global audience. Mapping fans across engagement levels, geographic markets, and relationship to the game. A 22-touchpoint customer journey was developed through a single persona, Marc, a mid-passionate French fan who had never been to a match and never would. Marc became the lens through which every product decision, content moment, and loyalty mechanic was pressure-tested. If it worked for Marc, it worked for the 265 million fans like him.

**📐 Two Propositions, One Platform**

The strategy produced two distinct value propositions for two distinct audience segments, unified under a single All Blacks app experience. Experience Eden brought the match-day atmosphere to the millions who would never set foot in the stadium. Live predictions, personalised commentary layers, fan-captured content, and real-time highlights. Rituals of Excellence gave the 286 million global appreciators with no match-driven entry point a reason to engage year-round. Daily workouts, nutrition and mindset programmes led by players, Māori culture immersion, and sustainable merchandise integrated into the journey.

**🏆 The Caps Loyalty System**

Binding both propositions together was a unified loyalty currency, Caps. Every interaction across the platform, content consumption, match predictions, ritual completions, social sharing, earned Caps redeemable across tickets and merchandise. The system was designed to make engagement feel like progress, turning passive fans into participants with a stake in the brand.

**🗓️ The Roadmap**

The strategy was phased around a defining cultural moment: RWC 2023 in France. Step one launched Experience Eden to build the data foundation and engaged fan base around the tournament. Step two introduced Rituals of Excellence for off-season engagement and new revenue streams, ensuring the platform had a reason to exist long after the final whistle.

New Zealand Rugby

**✍ Project Overview**

Pi, built by Inflection AI, was the world's first emotionally intelligent AI companion. The product was unlike anything that had been launched before, which meant the launch strategy had to be equally unconventional. AKQA was tasked with introducing Pi to the world through social media in a way that felt genuinely human, not like a product announcement. The answer was simple: don't talk about Pi. Let Pi talk.

**💬 The Core Idea**

Rather than broadcasting what Pi could do, the strategy put Pi directly into real conversations across platforms, responding to people the way it would in an actual one-to-one interaction. The launch became a demonstration, not a declaration. Every comment Pi left, every thread it joined, every reply it sent was the product proving its own value in real time.

**📐 A Platform for Every Dimension**

A full channel strategy was developed across seven platforms, each given a distinct role in Pi's social presence. Twitter was Pi's home for cultural moments and real-time wit. Instagram was built around warmth and one-to-one connection. TikTok gave Pi its sense of humour through pop culture video formats. Facebook served as a community resource for people who needed support. LinkedIn positioned Pi as a thinking partner. YouTube hosted longer-form conversations. Tertiary platforms including Reddit, Discord, and Twitch extended Pi's reach into communities where authentic, unfiltered dialogue already happened naturally.

**🎭 Defining Pi's Voice**

A six-dimension tone of voice framework defined how Pi showed up: Curious, Supportive, Humble, Welcoming, Humorous, and Intelligent. Each dimension was calibrated differently per platform, giving Pi a consistent personality that could flex its expression depending on context without ever feeling inconsistent or manufactured.

**🤝 Community and Influence**

Detailed community engagement rules governed how Pi entered and exited conversations: response speed, which threads to join, when to go deeper and when to close, and a clear escalation path from public comment to private one-to-one conversation. An influencer tiering strategy ran from nano to mega, with named targets across each tier, ensuring Pi's reach extended beyond organic discovery from day one.

Hey Pi

**✍ Project Overview**

Twelve South is a Nashville-born tech accessories brand, known for premium Apple-adjacent products like AirFly and Butterfly. Despite strong product recognition, the brand had a fundamental problem: customers knew the products but not the brand behind them. AirFly was outpacing Twelve South itself in search equity. AKQA was engaged to develop a growth strategy to address this, and to position the brand for significant commercial scale.

**🔍 The Core Finding**

Twelve South was competing in the wrong tier. The brand sat uncomfortably between design-forward and disruptive, without owning either position clearly. The strategic opportunity was to move upmarket into the accessible luxury segment occupied by brands like Dyson, Rimowa, and Herman Miller, targeting consumers who care deeply about the objects they use every day. That insight became the foundation of the brand framework: Twelve South as the only tech accessories brand for those who care enough.

**👥 Audience Prioritisation**

Six audience segments were identified and mapped against acquisition efficiency and revenue potential. Frequent Travelers, Apple Consumers, and Luxury Consumers emerged as the highest-value targets. A saturation model sequenced spend across these segments to maximise return at each stage of investment, avoiding the common mistake of spreading budget evenly across audiences with very different conversion economics.

**📐 The Investment Case**

The data revealed a reverse funnel dynamic: weak brand awareness was creating drag on performance media ROI, while owned and retail channels were significantly outperforming. The recommendation was a phased investment approach, sequenced to prove the model at lower spend before committing to a full brand campaign and platform redesign. The strategy gave Twelve South a clear, evidence-led path from where they were to where they needed to be.

Twelve South Growth Strategy

Europe, Middle East & Africa

Middle East & North Africa

North America

South East Asia

United Kingdom

South Africa

Growth Modelling

Training

Consulting

Analytics

Media Strategy

Data Strategy

Paid Media

TikTok

Colgate

Unilever

YoPro

Forever New

GUESS

Steve Madden

Toyota

April Insurance

Schweppes

Assoc. Data & Technology Director

### ✍ **Project Overview**

Unilever had an eCommerce app for wholesalers in their SEA and India markets. Unilever approached my team at AKQA to help them upgrade the existing analytics setup for this app from Firebase Analytics to Google Analytics. I was tasked to lead the project and ensure the client had a successful rollout.

My team and I hosted workshops with the regional development leads to get an understanding of what they needed to track and how they needed their data to be reported. We managed to work compile and work through a set of templates where we mapped the old data and its format to the format we would require for their new reporting tools.

We had initially begun the project with the intention to upgrade to Universal Analytics, but Google had release GA4 around the same time we were making our decision. We opted to switch to GA4 for the entire rollout (App + Website) once we determined the features would be best suited to what we wanted to achieve as an outcome for the project.

We managed to successfully help Unilever upgrade their analytics to GA4, and also managed to get enhanced eCommerce features implemented as well. These were previously left out as the previous team who consulted to Unilever didn't have the right expertise to incorporate the features.

Finally, once GA4 was implemented, we shifted our focus towards integrating external platforms with GA4 to help enhance the reports Unilever were compiling. This included integrating some CRM and personalization tools.

The final piece of the puzzle was to link all data to Unilever's data warehouse, and to create real-time dashboards using popular BI tools. These reports helped increase efficiencies and cut down reporting times for Unilever by a significant amount.

### 📚 **We Learned**

1. How to implement GA4 for SPA's and PWA's.
2. How to integrate popular CRM's with Analytics reporting flows.
3. How to link BigQuery to GA4.
4. How to merge different data sources to create a single source of truth for reporting.
5. How to create real-time dashboard solutions at scale.
6. And much more...

Analytics Upgrade

### ✍ **Project Overview**

Effective digital marketing campaigns are driven by data and insights that are reliable and easy to understand. Marketers need a simple solution which gives them a detailed view of their audiences with actionable insights around how to use them and where to use them. I was tasked to build a solution with my team to cater to this need.

This led to the development of a platform that lets marketers use their website, app, or 1st party data to create easy to understand audiences for reporting and advertising purposes. All within a matter of minutes instead of months - helping marketers make more informed decisions faster.

### 🏃 **Enter Limbic**

Limbic is an intuitive tool that acts as an enabler for complex audience experiences and customer journey reporting. It comes with powerful measurement capabilities that will enable marketers to gain a far deeper understanding of their users, their behaviours, their interests, and their propensity to take meaningful actions. As an AI driven platform that handles all of the heavy lifting on a marketers behalf, it is a turnkey solution that requires very little human involvement to do its job. Limbic lets marketers free up their time so they can focus on making more of an impact in other key areas of the marketing team.

### 🔒 **Privacy First**

Limbic has been built to work with pseudo-anonymised data only. Making it one of the most secure and superior options available. Marketers can rest easy knowing that they're using a system that is compliant with strict data privacy laws. This gives marketers the freedom to create safe, reliable, and rich audience segments for their advertising and reporting needs.

### 📐 **Enabling Personalization At Scale**

With Limbic, marketers can improve your overall marketing customer experience through personalisation and remarketing with all major digital marketing platforms. They'll gain a better understanding of which experiences resonate best with their customers to inform their future personalisation strategies. Marketers use the Limbic API to serve rich customer experiences on their website or app. With the API, marketers can get information about a user’s interests and propensity to convert, and use it to deliver personalised content in real-time.

This means that Limbic gives marketers the power to serve their audiences a specific creative set, and then continue the conversation after they’ve engaged - without losing any of the context between ad and destination. A true enabler for private personalized experiences that help marketers connect with their users in more meaningful ways.

### 📚 **We Learned**

1. How to create a very efficient and cost-effective AI-powered audience platform.
2. How to use more techinical features for popular advertising and analytics platforms.
3. How to distribute 1st-party pseudo-anonymised data to multiple platforms.
4. How to build a web crawler that detects a page or websites affinity by using Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing.
5. How to analyze user behaviours.
6. How to build propensity models.
7. How to categorize interest segmentats.
8. How to carry out personalization at scale.
9. How to create a commercial strategy for an AI-based audience platform.
10. And much more...

Limbic

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Data & Tech Lead

Paid Media Lead

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McDonald's

KIA Motors

Mahindra

Clientèle

Western Union

Bidvest Bank

aha Hotel Group

Digital Operations Manager

### ✍ **Project Overview**

Our client was struggling to convert users with their existing web properties. These web properties included a dedicated mobi website and a dedicated desktop website.

I presented a new wizard-type solution to my team in an effort to modernise the clients web properties, and to help increase web conversions. We identified one of the struggles to be a form which seemed endless when filling out. Our solution was to break this form into guided steps to help with the user experience. We wanted users to feel as though they were going on a journey, and not just filling out a form.

This was the basis for the Clientèle Cares platform.

Clientèle Cares

### ✍ **Project Overview**

KIA South Africa were looking to revamp their existing Parts & Accessories e-commerce website. I built this website as one of my first projects at Freshive. I improved the user experience by breaking the Parts & Accessories into easy to navigate sections. I implemented bundled service kits as well, using popular parts and accessories which were frequently bought by users. I also implemented live chat so users could have their queries attended to in real-time. They could alternatively fill out enquiry forms for parts and accessories. This has helped increase sales via web queries tremendously.

KIA Parts Website

### ✍ **Project Overview**

Peerview is an incredibly versatile reporting tool I developed with my team at Freshive. It users real customer reviews to generate meaningful data which brands can leverage to improve their business. I helped identify new data points which could be incorporated into and analysed with this tool. I also consulted on the user experience and on the designs for the back-end of the reporting system.

Users would purchase a products and be prompted to complete a review after a few weeks of ownership. Once the customer has completed the purchase experience survey, they were then prompted to complete a product survey after they had experienced the product for a period of time. This data would then stream into our platform in real-time, helping us make critical decisions for the brand. As an example of the power of this platform, we were eventually able to track a users entire purchase journey.

We could tell whether they booked a test drive, where they completed the form (Facebook Ads or Web Property), when they completed the form, whether they test drove the vehicle, whether they bought the same vehicle they booked, whether they previously owned a vehicle, which dealer they interacted with, and much much more.

Peerview

Project Management

Web Development

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L'Oréal

Reckitt Benckiser

Sasfin Bank

Under Armour

WCBS

Media & Search Specialist

### ✍ **Project Overview**

My Proactive Ideas Crew and I were working late one evening. We were brainstorming random ideas which we thought would be really fun to execute. This was one of the ideas which sprung up from this late night session. We wanted to increase the blood donor count in the Western Cape using only organic media and our blood donors app. We wanted existing donors to invite their friends to donate blood using a unique code generated by the user. This would be the beginning of their bloodline.

Users would be split into 3 tiers. The first tier was reserved for users you managed to sign up directly. The second tier was reserved for users who your direct affiliates had signed up as blood donors. The third tier was reserved for users who were signed up by your second tier affiliates. This 3 tier system was the basic outline for the bloodline.

Unfortunately this idea was never implemented due to budget constraints.

Bloodlines

### ✍ **Project Overview**

This idea sprung up when the Proactive Ideas Crew went and had a night out on the town. We were walking through the streets of Cape Town at night and were staggered by the homeless situation around us.

Doorways on the streets were filled with sometimes more than 5 people at a time. We decided that we wanted to use our skills to help raise awareness around the situation and get people to start helping out. We wanted to build a property site modeled off of the Airbnb design, where users would browse for a new place to stay. Each property image showcased a different doorway. Each property also had their own unique list of features. All of these properties would be listed for free.

Instead of being able to book a room or rent a home, the user was met with the story of the person who was living in the doorway being advertised. They would also be met with the option to either donate or volunteer.

Homeless

### ✍ **Project Overview**

This campaign was a global campaign which we localised in South Africa. It celebrated Under Armour's female athletes by using visual techniques and poetic odes to elevate their athletic performance. The goal was to elevate Under Armour's athletes and inspire all females to be UNLIKE ANY. We localised this campaign in South Africa and went on a mission to find local ambassadors for the brand. We managed to acquire 3 incredibly strong candidates - Teal Hogg (Winner), Ade van Heerden, and Koinonia Baloyi.

The road here

AKQA

AKQA

Platform5

Platform5

Freshive

NXT\ Agency

NXT\ Digital Innovation

NXT\ Digital Innovation