About me

I have spent two decades making sure the right advertisement, in the right format, reaches the right page before the deadline. Currently at The Observer.

I started in classified pagination at Midland Auto Trader in 2002, producing display and classified advertising to a weekly deadline. That is where I learned the thing the rest of the career has rested on: a press date does not move, so everything else has to.

From there it was five years controlling classified production and trafficking at Hachette Filipacchi, then a decade at Hearst producing advertising artwork across Esquire, ELLE, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar and Good Housekeeping. Working across that many brands at once teaches you specification discipline quickly, because every title and every printer wants something slightly different.

At Rhapsody I moved further toward account and operations work, delivering advertorial across the Hearst portfolio and leading the onboarding of a new production team in Poland through to independent operation. Handing something over properly, with documented process, turned out to be more satisfying than doing it myself.

Since October 2025 I have been at The Observer, where I established an independent advertising operation following the title’s separation from its previous owner. That meant building the booking-to-page workflow from scratch while the paper continued to go to press every week.

The through-line is that I am as interested in the system as the artefact. Template frameworks, documented workflows and an internal WordPress advertising portal that replaced a paid third-party product have all outlasted any individual advertisement I have produced.

Beyond work

Currently