Career

As Founder & CEO of Shimmr AI, I’m working with an amazing team of experts in advertising, psychology, machine learning, artificial intelligence, technology, media and business modelling. We’ve built a wholly new model of how advertising works, producing AI-generated assets that bring products previously unfeasible to promote, into the limelight. There’s a bit of David and Goliath going on here. I’ve always favoured the innovator over the established, the originator over the iterator. It’s an enormously ambitious business in which we have fun, invent things and pursue huge opportunities to give life to jewels of human creativity that have never been able to sparkle before. We’re starting with Book Publishing, where 95% of Titles have never received digital marketing support before. With our product, they’re now psychologically matched to receptive audiences and this drives e-commerce to everyone’s benefit - the publisher, author and reader. I guess it’s the culmination of a working life’s journey, in which as a psychologist, market researcher, entrepreneur, brand founder and AI innovator, I’ve learned what turns people on and off and how we can best serve great ideas to the world. See us here: https://shimmr.ai/

AI Advertising to bring books into the light

Psychologically-tuned campaigns and optimised marketing assets.

After speaking at the Oxford Union in September, 2022, I was invited by Oxford Talks to become one of their Brand Ambassadors. I like that they are trying to bring ‘Ideas Worth Doing’ to the world and essentially act as a real alternative to TED as a platform for people to bring their ideas to wider attention. It seems I have a fascination with giving people a fuller voice!

Perhaps my greatest thrill, if I’m honest, is being ‘Artist Manager – Shaefri’ at Off The Record, a small music label. I’ve helped Shaefri with her glowing career as a musical artist since the release of her critically praised ‘Cracks EP’ in 2017, and as long as she sees I’m fit for the job, I’ll persist! Signed by Warner, she’s building a fabulous catalogue of hits. If you don’t already, see her work at www.shaefri.com, follow her on Spotify, and give her love. She’s brilliant.

From 2012 till 2022 (when it was sold to Private Equity), I was Founder & CEO of ProQuo AI Ltd. We grew to several million dollars of annually recurring revenues, and I was honoured to be named Performance Marketing Pioneer by the Performance Marketing Awards. My 35 or so years of work taught me that at the heart of every success is the quality of a relationship. Brands have been my focal point and I’m sure that the most successful ones have a better balance of ‘quid pro quo’ than their competitors. The more you get, the more you’re likely to give. ProQuo AI was a radical democratisation of my learnings around brands – instead of selling high-fee consultancy projects, I focused on making all our collective wisdom about marketing, science and technology come together in a Brand Management Platform. The depth of AI-guidance we gave was unparalleled and the price point at which we offered it, unprecedented. It was a true revolution in the marketing services world (though under new ownership it seems to have simply become a brand tracker). My journey with ProQuo AI was covered by Forbes.

Before ProQuo AI came into being, my principal activity was as CEO of TransgressiveX.  We built new measures, new measurement systems and combined them with the best of neuroscience, technology and experience. The launch of our innovative framework for brands resulted in TransgressiveX being nominated as one of Marketing Week’s 100 Disruptive Brands in 2016.

Talking of practising what I preach to brands, I had ‘become a client’ by creating the Inish Turk Beg brand, based on the values of the eponymous island, Inish Turk Beg, off the coast of Ireland which I purchased in 2003. The Inish Turk Beg brand spoke of ‘living life at a tilt’ and encompassed a luxury rental destination, a Connemara Pony Stud, a smoked fish line distributed throughout Ireland and the UK, art residencies and exhibitions, a number-one listed music album The Brilliant Irish Flute, and award-winning ‘Maiden Voyage’, a single malt Irish whiskey.  I was thrilled that we won the ‘best new brand’ in the Global Mobius awards, amongst almost 5,000 entries from 36 countries.

After reading Moral & Mental Science (briefly, Philosophy was way too hard!) then Pure Psychology at Trinity College, Dublin, my career in market research began in 1985 at Lansdowne Market Research in Dublin. Soon, I moved to London with my friend, Brian Pullman, remarking at the time that we were “like generations of other Irish emigrants, catching the boat to the mainland” to seek their fortune. I became a Director of Burns Research Partners, renamed Burns Sadek Research two years later, a boutique qualitative research firm. After seven years there, I founded Sadek Wynberg Research in 1993, with Rebecca Wynberg. SWR conducted research for the development of brands and communications for many of the world's blue-chip companies, including Unilever, Bacardi Global Brands, Kimberly-Clark, Vodafone and Sony Ericsson. The firm grew to be the largest of its kind in the UK by 2000 and the world by 2003, whereupon I sold it to WPP.

Within WPP, I became Global Leader of Millward Brown’s Qualitative Network for the next three years, bringing together many of the group’s acquisitions into a coherent network offering common standards across a wide geography, before taking up the role of Worldwide Commercial & Strategy Director at Research International, a company operating in 52 countries. In this position, my responsibility was to make the organisation more efficient, and renew its intellectual capital base via the innovation and renovation of existing and new services. I learnt hugely from these two roles and am very grateful to the insight industry for giving me some fame and fortune. I learnt, all the same, that I’m an originator, not an administrator, and I know now that having ideas and trying to make them into enterprises is what I’m best at doing.

When I was 10, going to school in Malaysia, I rode my first motorcycle. It’s become a lifelong passion, even addiction. With a group of film-makers I set up Boss Bikes and have happily made about 25 episodes, riding all sorts of motorcycles around the world. Apart from the fun of it all, it teaches me about making communications, working with people on the sales-floor, and how hard motorcycle brands work to bring their products to market. I love doing this! Take a look and get in touch if you’d like us to review your bikes. https://www.youtube.com/@BossBikesClub

I was also honoured to be Chairman of Tryangle, a training and facilitation social-enterprise, whose purpose is to improve the lives of its clients by enabling them to have better job prospects, life coping skills and opportunities for constructive socialisation through sport.