What fuels our Agency Director, Ashley?

Introducing agency director, Ashley; with over 10 years of hands-on digital marketing experience, he is the driving element behind our digital team, ensuring great outcomes across all projects.

Ashley heads our digital execution team, delivering innovative strategic and tactical marketing initiatives and campaigns; helping propel our clients’ growth and success.

Let’s take a closer look at what motivates him…

What energises you the most in life?

This one’s easy – in work: it’s all about wins. Whether it’s a new business win, a team member does amazingly, or most importantly a big win for one of my clients. I love to see our process come into fruition – after all, the right strategy & relentless execution really does generate great results! Oh, and it may sound a bit geeky…but seeing the tangible KPI growth in the form of an all-green dashboard, definitely gives me that dopamine hit ha. 

In my spare time, making music & training/fighting Muay Thai are my two passions! They both help me to release and apply a different form of creativity. I always have a spring in my step after a session (albeit sometimes quite a painful step with the latter)

What’s your key to long-lasting collaborations and client relationships?

For me, it’s all about trust, transparency and good communication. That goes for my team, partners & clients. I need my clients to trust that I have their best interests at heart and let me get on with turning them into a success story.  What better way to do that, then to prove it with results and good communication?

Also, I like to think we enjoy what we do and that comes across – clients and partners seem to enjoy working with us, which makes results that much sweeter. 

When do you feel in your element?

I love delivering a project or final piece of work i.e. a strategy, campaign or audit – after all that hard work auditing, brainstorming, researching and/or planning, delivering is always fun! I also love training, whether it’s putting on a workshop or training and developing my team.

The other one is definitely coming up with and implementing solutions – I love it when we set the wheels in motion and see the results.

What’s your go-to productivity hack?

I have to have a task list and someone told me about this nifty little tool called momentum – it’s a Chrome add-on that turns any new browser window into a new home screen with my task list.  It helps me track progress and reach my goals. 

Nitrogen is used as a coolant: how do you keep cool under pressure?

Believing in SeventhElement, our processes, our skills and that we know what we are talking about. If all else fails there’s free beer at WeWork 😉

What’s the nerdiest thing you do outside of work?

Well after working hard, training Muay Thai and making music, there’s only so much time left in the day. But I do like a geeky board game or two. Also, I love Marvel & DC. I was a bit of a comic geek when I was a kid and I don’t think I’ve ever grown out of it. 

What’s your favourite success story you’ve been a part of?

There’s been so many throughout the last 5 years. Working with clients that have been with the agency since before I started has been amazing. The obvious success story was taking Simba mattress from a startup to the beast it is today. Spending millions of pounds on PPC and making critical and key decisions along the way to help them with such rapid growth was definitely thrilling.

I also enjoyed running campaigns for Barcelona FC, it’s not every day you get to strategise and implement campaigns for one of the biggest football clubs in the worldd!

But my favourite, above all else, is working in the Innovation space. While this may not be one single success story I’ve been lucky enough to be part of strategising and delivering ongoing and one-off campaigns for the likes of Innovate UK, UKRI, WMG, High-Value Manufacturing Catapult, Energy Systems Catapult and the European Space Agency. Being involved in these organisations’ digital marketing, whilst learning loads about some really exciting subjects such as Robotics, AI, Space, autonomous vehicles etc, has been amazing!