Darren S.

“The greatest endorsement I can give Darren is that I look forward to working with him again as a team member, a peer or a client. Darren combines an analytical mind and practical communication skills. He explores business challenges by prompting others to think and consider what we must know before we can deal with questions posed by the challenge. This approach is thorough and leads to practical and implementable recommendations built from framing the challenge against valid market understanding, not just gut feel or organisational lore. The resulting advice is credible, sometimes provocative, but always practical and useful. His leadership approach uses a calm, consistent encouragement and patient mentoring. This improves the effectiveness of those who work within teams he leads and, more broadly, those who work with those teams.”

“I had the honour of working with Darren as my CEO at Cadreon which started when he appointed me to help create the new Cadreon Consulting practice in response to a broader mission of what he saw as the changing needs of marketing clients to demonstrate their impact on business outcomes. This mission was part of a change management plan that Darren began in 2016 with the integration of 2 distinctly different business units - the programmatic media trading team (Cadreon) and the non-media research, analytics and platform development professional services team (Anomaly). This ‘new’ integrated Cadreon business unit was now a local and global leader in providing multi-disciplinary services to clients. The low churn rate, internal satisfaction ratings, and integrated projects for several clients were a testimony to Darren’s personal leadership style. As a ‘servant leader’, he is able to manage high performance talent with empathy, and apply learnings from the feedback from them across the business and to adjacent partners, to advocate mutually beneficial outcomes. With his prior client-side and publisher experience, his understanding and management of stakeholders provides safety and comfort for teams in his charge, as well as delivering confidence in business outcomes & client satisfaction that are the focus of the group’s senior leadership team. His broad experience across marketing functions and hands-on management of client operations and process improvement lends an unique and credible capability as a group level operations executive. His analytical mindset enables internal business insights to develop meaningful plans to address internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats. In 2018, he enhanced his technical understanding of marketing and advertising technology systems, through his custodianship and development of the Consulting team’s data and technology audit practice. Darren is not averse to engaging in a hands on fashion with specific client engagements or internal operations, and provide a personal touch by lending his expertise. He was the client lead for successful projects which examined the business use cases for tech systems, from understanding the impact of legacy platforms and the future risk of potential commitments to licensing of new platforms in the absence of efficient integration access points. The feedback from the marketing leadership of one of Australia’s leading Retail brands was that the work was exemplary, particularly in the exercise's work in communicating the technical outcomes to the broader business teams. Darren is the complete executive leader – he possesses an analytical mindset, an empathetic leadership style, is an experienced stakeholder manager, and a technically capable operational conductor.”