Campaigns that sell, and the data to prove it.

The brief

Sell two days of Pride on the Park, Brighton & Hove Pride’s 35th-anniversary festival, headlined by RAYE and Diana Ross, across a six-month campaign.

On paper, that’s a familiar festival job. In practice, Meta disabled the festival’s pixel, and the ticketing platform couldn’t show where buyers came from.

That left £160k of paid media with no reliable way to measure what it was selling.

The challenge wasn’t just selling tickets. It was knowing what was selling them.

The market read

Meta had disabled the festival’s pixel because it classified the website as sensitive due to its association with sexual orientation, so ticket sales never made it back to Ads Manager. The ticketing platform didn’t support UTMs either.

Most of the signals you’d normally use to steer a campaign were gone.

But one useful piece of data remained. Every ticket sold still came with a postcode.

The decision

So I stopped asking which ad sold a ticket, and started asking who wasn’t buying.

Every day I compared sales against campaign activity and historical data, using AI to help surface patterns across the different datasets.

Three months in, one stood out.

London sales were down 22% against the same point the previous year.

One of the festival’s biggest audiences outside Brighton was quietly slipping away, and nothing in Ads Manager would have shown us.

We shifted paid spend to target London directly.

Once the festival was over, I built a marketing mix dashboard bringing six data sources into one view, so the next campaign wouldn’t have to rebuild the picture from scratch.

By breaking sales and Meta spend down by campaign day, the dashboard can compare performance against the same point in the previous year’s campaign, rather than against arbitrary calendar dates.

That creates the basis for an early warning system: campaigns running ahead or falling behind can be identified quickly, with alerts triggered when sales or media performance moves significantly above or below expectations.

The aim is to move the dashboard beyond reporting what happened, towards showing when action might be needed.

The first time I went to Bugged Out! was to see my mates All Seeing I play live in Liverpool. They booked the DJs I idolised, and seemed to occupy exactly the bit of club culture I loved.

I was at the very first Weekender, at Pontins in Prestatyn in 2000. Later, I DJed for them at The End, and they released the first Gucci Soundsystem 12”.

So when Johnno asked me to help bring the Weekender back to Butlin’s in 2026, I already knew the audience. I’d been part of it for 25 years.

The brief

Bugged Out has been one of UK dance music’s most loved club brands for three decades, and its Butlin’s Weekender ran every year from 2012 to 2016 before going quiet for a decade. In spring 2025 it announced its return: three nights and four arenas at Butlin’s Bognor Regis in March 2026, with a line-up built around artists woven into the brand’s history, including Erol Alkan, Daniel Avery, Helena Hauff and Ivan Smagghe.

I joined with tickets already on sale, to take ownership of the campaign’s organic social and email in-house and carry it through to the event, alongside a separately managed paid Meta campaign.

The market read

The people who made the Weekender what it was between 2012 and 2016 hadn’t gone anywhere, but their lives had changed. Ten years on, many had kids, careers and mortgages, and a three-night rave at Butlin’s is a very different commitment at 40 than at 30: childcare to arrange, time off to book, and a weekend to justify.

They still loved Bugged Out. The challenge was giving them a reason to say yes to it again, and making it feel easy to do. Ticket prices frozen at 2016 levels helped, and so did the thing the organisers put front and centre from day one: a festival without the tents, with a comfy bed waiting at night and a weekend away with old friends. The real work was emotional, reminding people who they were on those weekends and that the party was still theirs.

The decision

I used organic social and email to talk to that original community directly, while paid reached further out. From the autumn onwards I planned them as one continuous story: line-up reveals, on-sale pushes, then the countdown to March, each message building on the one before and keeping momentum going through the long months between announcement and event. I coordinated timing and messaging with the paid team, so the audience saw one consistent push wherever they met the brand.

The club’s 30th anniversary gave that story its richest material. I helped launch It’s Just A Big Disco, the book celebrating 30 years of Bugged Out, which put the brand’s history front and centre just as the Weekender campaign was building. That included filming and editing a video of co-founder Johnno Burgess sharing memories of past Bugged Outs, giving the original crowd a direct line back to the nights they remembered.

The brief

Launch and sell out a brand-new, 4,000-capacity, three-day festival, with Primal Scream, Fat White Family and Hot Chip on the bill.

The campaign ran from the first teaser in September 2020 through to the festival itself in June 2021, almost a year spent selling tickets to an event that could, at any point, be cancelled, postponed or made illegal by the UK's COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.

There was no fixed point at which that risk disappeared. Just days before the festival was due to open, the government was still considering extending restrictions by a further four weeks. Had that decision landed differently, the festival would have been cancelled with the campaign at the finish line.

The challenge wasn't simply to create demand. It was to turn demand into a purchase when nobody could guarantee the product would exist.

The market read

The insight was clear from the campaign's very first post in September 2020:

“More than ever, we're tired of being tied to our screens, the 24hr news cycle bringing all the craziness, locked down, cooped up, cut off from what's important.”

People didn't need convincing that live events mattered. They were already starved of exactly what a festival offered: being outside, seeing friends, discovering music and feeling part of something again.

The barrier wasn't desire. It was risk. Why spend real money, months in advance, on a festival when the next lockdown announcement could make it impossible to attend?

The decision

We didn't try to solve that with reassurance or pretend the outcome was certain. We solved it financially.

From February 2021, we introduced Buy Now, Pay in June, allowing customers to reserve their tickets immediately but defer payment until the festival was only days away, when the situation would be much clearer. It was a simple mechanism with a specific job: remove the financial cost of being wrong.

Community management was equally important in building trust. With uncertainty changing almost daily, customers needed somewhere to ask real questions and get clear, human answers. We treated those conversations as part of the campaign itself, responding openly to concerns around restrictions, refunds and payment.

“What great news yesterday! … we're continuing the 'buy now, pay in June' option, meaning you can book with confidence.”

On top of that financial and practical foundation, we built the emotional case: positioning Bigfoot against the reality people had been living through, rather than against other festivals.

“Less sitting under railway arches or industrial estate carparks, more looking up at the stars and partying amongst the trees.”

A four-tickets-for-the-price-of-three group offer gave “tell your friends” a tangible purchase mechanic, while a steady stream of brewery partnership reveals, headlined by Hill Farmstead, helped establish Bigfoot as a genuinely curated festival. I designed the advertising creative that carried this positioning, wrote the on-sale and social copy, and co-wrote and filmed the founder video, putting co-founder Greg Wells on camera rather than leaving his line as a press quote alone: hope is more convincing when it comes from a real person.

The brief

Tottenham has one of the highest concentrations of fast-food outlets in London, alongside childhood obesity rates well above the national average. The obvious responses already existed and weren't working: healthy-eating campaigns that told people what to do without changing what was actually available nearby, and charity food provision that depended on continuous donations to survive.

Spent two years in R&D before founding Chicken Town, a not-for-profit restaurant delivered through the charity Create, built to offer a genuinely healthier alternative, and to still be there in five years, not just for as long as the funding lasted.

The market read

A campaign can raise awareness. It can't put a healthier meal on the table at a price a family in a food desert can actually pay, week after week, without either running out of money or depending on someone else's goodwill indefinitely.

The read was that this needed a business model, not a message: something that generated its own revenue and used that revenue to subsidise the thing that actually mattered.

The decision

The mechanism was cross-subsidy. Chicken Town ran as a proper evening restaurant (herb-fed, free-range chicken, steamed then flash-fried rather than deep-fried, aimed at foodies and press) and used that evening trade to fund a £2 “Junior Special” for under-18s at lunch and after school. The commercial side had to actually work, on its own merits, for the subsidised side to be sustainable at all.

Getting there took building the funding stack to match. Personally ran the fundraising: launched and drove a Kickstarter that beat its £50,000 goal, then secured further backing from Haringey Council, the Mayor of London's High Street Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies on top of it. Securing that backing meant treating Haringey Council and the Tottenham regeneration team as partners with their own stake in the outcome, not just funders: pledging at least 40 local jobs and 2 apprenticeships within three years as part of the deal, then recruiting the team locally to make good on it. Crowdfunding wasn't just a funding source: it was a public commitment mechanism, asking the community to back the idea before it existed.

The other deliberate call was refusing to let “not-for-profit” mean “looks like a worthy cause.” Brought in Assemble Studio, the Turner Prize-winning collective, to convert a Grade II-listed former fire station on Tottenham Green into the restaurant's home, and brought in Peter & Paul to lead the brand identity, a relationship that later led to a role at the agency. Both choices were about credibility: making Chicken Town a place people wanted to go for its own sake.

Opened in November 2015, and led day-to-day operations for the next 13 months (building a locally recruited team alongside an executive chef, running the Junior Special programme, and delivering community programmes with local primary schools) before handing over a stable, running operation to a General Manager in December 2016.