Training Workshop Refresh: How AI is Transforming the Future of Marketing

Ann is a senior digital marketing professional with excellent experience in developing strategy and implementing communication within the Corporate Sector and SMEs.

She has planned and managed multi-million-pound media campaigns across traditional and digital media, continually optimising campaigns though testing and analysing sales performance against media investment on an ongoing basis.

After a wide-ranging career in corporate marketing for organisations like Tennent Caledonian Breweries, Diageo, RBS, Scottish Widows (Head of Brand and Advertising), and Tesco Bank (Interim Head of Marketing), she set up and ran two digitally enabled businesses.

For the past 10 years, she has specialised in Digital Marketing Training and in 2017 became a Google Partner delivering F2F and Virtual Training for their corporate clients across Europe to help shape their brands by prioritising their customers’ needs and using the most helpful digital tools to reach new markets.

From 2020 to 2023, Ann teamed up with Nigel Sheldon, I fellow Google partner, to develop and deliver their virtual Marketing Excellence Training Programme for Sainsbury’s Argos.

With over 20 years in Digital Marketing, Ann is well placed to examine the constantly changing nature of digital marketing and origins of the discipline in the context of early e-commerce and moving into the current day.

For more on Ann’s background and experience check out her LinkedIn profile

Nigel has extensive experience in advising clients on digital strategy, developing training programmes, facilitating workshops, and delivering digital transformation projects.

For the last 8 years, he has been a Google Partner running and facilitating regular training Labs for Google’s clients globally on Brand Activation, Data-Driven Marketing, AI-Powered Google Ads and Executive Leadership.

Over the past 3 years he has partnered with Ann Robb to co-create and facilitate workshops and webinars for the Sainsbury’s and Argos Marketing Excellence Programme – topics include How Brands Grow, Getting Smarter Through AI and Sustainability Marketing.

Since the beginning of 2022, he has been working on a digital transformation project for the global financial services company, Generali, and devising the launch strategy for the mobile phone marketplace, Mozillion.

In 2021, he spent 6 months providing strategic advice for Entain’s global marketing transformation – including developing an organisational model and transition strategy.

Prior to consultancy, his career at WPP agencies involved managing media strategy for clients, including Amex, Nestle, Kellogg, Boots, Rolex, IBM, and The Telegraph, and setting up the digital functions at JWT and Mindshare.

On the client side, he helped develop and manage Barclays’ global media and digital marketing strategy as part of its One Barclays transformation programme.  As head of global planning at Jaguar’s in-house strategic and creative agency (Spark44), he worked on the development of the global re-positioning of the Jaguar brand and the launch of key models such as the F-TYPE.

In 2019, he was engaged in a year-long strategy project with home improvement retailer, Kingfisher, as part of the core digital transformation team. This involved working with its local operating companies B&Q and Castorama, instituting central processes and developing the content and social media strategy for the launch of new brand GoodHome.

Nigel’s work also includes facilitating sessions for tech businesses such as IBM, Oracle and SAP as well as running digital futures roundtables at the Adobe Summit. Nigel is a founder partner of Gencrea – the new Generative AI marketing service from the Digital Leadership Forum.