Strategic Thinking
I operate at the intersection of creativity, brand and performance — using insight, audience behaviour and strategic alignment to strengthen creative ideas and support broader business ambition. I care about the intent behind the work, not just the work itself. To me, strategy isn’t separate from creativity. It’s the discipline that sharpens it.
Brand Clarity
Brand Guidelines
As youth culture shifted, Contiki’s social needed to evolve with it. I created the brand’s first global Social Style Guide, giving teams a clearer framework to produce work that was more culturally relevant, creatively consistent and scalable across markets. Alongside this I helped shape broader Brand Guidelines that strengthened how the brand showed up for a new generation of travellers.
BRAND GUARDIAN
Guidelines only matter if they hold up in practice. I acted as a review point across team and influencer output, protecting long-term brand positioning when short-term pressures risked pulling work off course.
The goal wasn’t just consistency, but clarity — making sure the creative reinforced something intentional and strategically meaningful about the brand.
Audience & Culture
Transition to Gen-Z
The shift towards Gen-Z required behavioural change, not just aesthetic change.
We moved from polished promotional travel ads to personality-led, creator-native formats. Editing became faster. Hooks became sharper. The tone loosened.
Social content became less broadcasted and more of an engaging lived experience. We repositioned Contiki as a culturally relevant youth travel brand again through relatable, shareable and searchable social-first content.
As a result we expanded reach with Gen-Z and built deeper audience connections.
The biggest risk wasn’t the creative shift itself, but short-term metrics being used to shut it down. Stakeholders were prepared for a possible dip as we transitioned from an aged-out audience to a Gen-Z one, protecting the strategy long enough for the change to take hold.
Trends & Reactive
The brand had fallen into reacting to trends for the sake of it. I designed a reactive strategy ensuring the brand showed up for cultural relevance, instead of simply showing up. The goal was to humanise the brand and build a stronger connection with a new Gen-Z audience.
I then built the systems behind it: identifying the right trends early and creating a framework to decide when, how or whether the brand should participate at all. Visibility and speed were no longer enough. It became about brand-fit, credibility and having something meaningful to add — using trends to show we were part of the culture, not awkwardly trying to insert ourselves into it.
User Generated Content
In 2023 90% of our most popular posts were UGC. This insight reinforced the importance of community led storytelling.
So we built systems to encourage content sharing, during and after trips. The goal wasn’t just content volume, it was gaining ownership of UGC and amplifying advocacy. Social proof was used as cultural leverage to help drive travel decisions.
QR App
A low-cost app was added to all coaches. Along with other useful info and links for travellers it allowed our marketing team to directly communicate with travellers. We used this run competitions that encouraged UGC sharing through our uploader
Uploader
We created a Contiki Uploader and incentivised our travellers to share images/videos straight from their phones. Prior to this the barriers to supply media from the road at a useable quality made it too difficult.
Coach Cam
Secret Contiki
Taking inspo from how weddings leaving a disposable camera on each table or a photo-booth at events. We gave selected trips a ‘Coach Cam’ they could use however they wanted to document their trip and have fun. Forms were signed before departure and at the end all media would be uploaded for everyone on the trip to view.
Secret Contiki was a content pillar used to surprise and delight our travellers. Something special could happen on any trip, and it was documented by our crew in UGC style.
Contiki Crew
We tapped into our crew, the social leaders of the trip, to encourage and capture UGC with travellers. We made engaging briefs, now possible to receive on the road. The result was a significant increase in authentic UGC. The crew also enjoyed participating in takeovers, trends, stitches, memes, hidden gems, etc and our audiences loved seeing them again on social.
Performance & Growth
Creative Optimisation
Using analytics
While others used analytics for reporting, I used them to inform creative direction. Data helped sharpen ideas, test instincts, reveal weak spots and build a clearer picture of audience behaviour.
As Creative Content Lead, I used those insights to drive continual creative improvement. Hooks, pacing, design and structure were adjusted based on behaviour patterns rather than assumption.
And when the data alone wasn’t persuasive, I looked for other ways to make the point land — like this edit, designed to let others experience the audience behaviour the graph was showing.
Commercial Thinking
In the years following COVID, sales had become too frequent, too prolonged and too dependent on discounting. Price-led messaging had lost impact and weakened our ability to connect on social at a brand level.
After analysing previous sales performance, I reframed the approach around full-funnel thinking and brand narrative. By understanding when to generate demand, when to convince, and when to push conversion, sales content became less about the amount saved and more about why the trip was worth taking — backed by community validation.
This contributed to multiple sales periods, including Black Friday, where organic social drove more sales than paid.
SHARE OF VOICE
Social allowed anyone (paid influencers, travellers and competitors) to broadcast their impression of Coniki. Social search and Contiki mentions made it clear our messaging was being drowned out. We needed to take control the Contiki narrative by influencing those close to us to join the conversation. We upskilled and incentivised our crew, got passengers involved, and collabed with influential people in the social community.
The result? In 2024 the crew created 2,533x bits of content and got 1.2 million views. We increased brand mentions by 9k+ on social. We dominated share of voice (increasing to 33.6%) and most importantly shifted the conversation focus.
SYSTEMS THINKING
Studio Process
An early part of my role (later delegated) I designed the global studio production process for Contiki. During this time I managed the studio workload for 8 regions, including accessing and helping to finalise all briefs, and reviewing all Contiki creative from web, OOH, and social.
Repeatable Formats
The demand for social asset was overwhelming our team. Till strategy was defined everything was made bespoke, one off and very inefficiently. We introduced Repeatable formats aligning to our social strategy. It allowed more efficient delivery of BAU assets that no longer needed to be bespoke and made testing possible for incremental improvements.
Ultimately this gave us the ability to focus on the 20% of our creative that will leave 80% of the brands impression.