Career
Building things that give ideas a fuller voice
Shimmr AI — 2022 to present
As Founder and CEO of Shimmr AI, I'm working with an extraordinary team of experts across 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. We're starting with book publishing, where 95% of titles have never received digital marketing support before. With our product, they're psychologically matched to receptive audiences, and this drives e-commerce to everyone's benefit: publisher, author, reader. Shimmr AI has worked with over 200 publishers worldwide.
In late 2023, Shimmr raised funding from a group of investors including co-founders of M&C Saatchi. We were named AI Startup of the Year at the London StartUp Awards (2024), Startup of the Year at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2024), and Startup of the Year at The Bookseller's FutureBook conference (2025).
I curated the inaugural BolognaBookPlus AI Summit at the Bologna Children's Book Fair in 2025, in partnership with Shimmr AI, and returned as curator and keynote speaker for the second edition in 2026. I've also spoken at Oxford Talks, the London Book Fair, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the National Film and Television School, and the Chennai International Book Fair. After speaking at Oxford Talks in 2022, I was invited to become one of their Brand Ambassadors.
In 2023, I submitted written evidence to the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee during its inquiry into large language models.
ProQuo AI — 2012 to 2022
I founded the brand management consultancy TransgressiveX in 2012, launching it publicly in 2015. Marketing Week named it one of their 100 Disruptive Brands in 2016. We rebranded as ProQuo AI in 2019: an AI-driven brand management platform that was a radical democratisation of everything I'd learned about brands over thirty-five years. Instead of selling high-fee consultancy projects, I focused on making all our collective wisdom about marketing, science and technology come together at a price point that was unprecedented. I was honoured to be named Performance Pioneer at the Performance Marketing World Awards. Forbes covered the journey. ProQuo AI was sold in 2022.
WPP / Millward Brown / Research International — 2003 to 2012
Within WPP, I became Global Leader of Millward Brown's Qualitative Network for three years, bringing together many of the group's acquisitions into a coherent network offering common standards across a wide geography. I then took up the role of Worldwide Commercial and Strategy Director at Research International, a company operating in 52 countries, joining its worldwide management board. 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 both roles. I learnt, all the same, that I'm an originator, not an administrator.
I was also chairman of Tryangle, a social enterprise providing job training and facilitation, during this period.
Sadek Wynberg Research — 1993 to 2003
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 become the UK's largest qualitative agency, as Campaign magazine independently confirmed, before its acquisition by WPP in 2003. WPP described SWR as 'one of the UK's most innovative and best respected qualitative research agencies'.
The beginning — 1985 to 1993
After reading Moral and 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 was ready to build something of my own.