The Drum's 50 under 30 UK

Alex Moyet is senior marketing manager at Activision, where she works on one of the world’s most popular video game series, Destiny. She joined the games publisher in March this year from Curve Digital, where she was marketing director and responsible for promoting indie titles including Bomber Crew. Moyet started her career working on the Xbox EMEA advertising account at McCann Erickson before moving on to Sony Interactive Entertainment as a product manager on some of its biggest franchises including SingStar, Uncharted and The Last of Us. She has also previously served as a commercial strategist at Media Molecule and founded Amcade, the specialist PR and marketing consultancy for the video games industry, in 2016. A Bafta member, Moyet was named in the GamesIndustry.Biz 100 for 2018 and was nominated for the 2018 Businesswoman of the Year at the Women in Games Awards.

Alex Rühl is a virtual reality filmmaker and chief executive of Cats Are Not Peas, a VR production studio that specialises in producing branded content and original IP. Formerly a traditional TV producer, Rühl got the bug for VR when she picked up her first 360 camera rig in 2015 and won the Pioneers of Immersive Realities Awards for 2018 for her work in the space. That work includes the Hospice VR initiative, led by Leicester charity LOROS, which aims to bring VR into hospices across the country so patients near the end of their lives get to experience their favourite places again. A keen believer in ‘VR for good’, Rühl has also worked with Sheffield charity Chilypep to create VR experiences for young people with mental health issues and was a workshop leader for the VR Diversity Initiative, teaching production skills to people from disadvantaged or marginalised groups.

Amelie Hunton’s entrepreneurial nature has been evident ever since she left University College London after 12 months to establish her first business, Freshers Fit. Today she runs Brnd Bx, a startup she founded that creates social media competitions for brands. Promoted through the Brnd Bx social channels and by partner influencers, these competitions give followers a chance to win customised boxes of products from their favourite brands. Clients have included The Body Shop and Primark, for which Hunton worked on the launch of beauty brand Holler and Glow. That campaign helped propel Holler and Glow’s Instagram following from 400 to 19,000 overnight and secure 19,000 completed market research forms. Hunton’s interest in the power of social media came to the surface in 2013 when competing in the London marathon. Then, she helped set up the ‘London4Boston’ campaign to promote the wearing of ribbons by runners to honour those who lost their lives in the Boston bomings.

Anna Abrell specialises in marketing in the e-commerce and tech space. Since she started working in this field, she has built out a marketing function from scratch at app commerce startup Poq, launched international marketing programmes at Qubit, and worked to help elevate women in digital through her work as board member at the 10,000-strong community DevelopHer. At Qubit, Abrell leads demand generation efforts throughout Northern Europe, the DACH region and the Nordics, delivering multichannel campaigns that help fuel the company’s new business pipeline. Before that she led marketing for Pog and had spells at Dr Martens and Decoded Fashion. One of Abrell’s biggest passions outside of marketing lies in helping women succeed in the digital industry. She was integral to setting up the DevelopHer 2018 Coaching Programme and currently serves as coaching manager for participants of the programme.

At just 29, Anna-Lee Bridgstock has already held leadership and mentoring roles in Australia, Germany and the UK, taking in positions at Universal McCann, mineMSN and MediaCom Global. Today she is digital performance director at Wunderman UK, the first role of its kind at the agency, and is focused on ensuring creativity and data are combined to create the best campaigns and results. Within a few months, creative work supported by Bridgstock’s team has been presented at Cannes Lions 2018 and she has also been named in the top five for DATAIQ's young talent award for 2018. She's a strong believer in mentoring others and currently has two mentees in the industry. In 2017, she served on the committee for Bloom – a professional network for women in communications and redeveloped its website. In 2016, she was named one of the top millennials in media by M&M global for her professional achievements and for raising over £32,000 for MediaCom's children's charity, Rays of Sunshine.

For Anne Coghlan, a career as a tech consultant in the communications space gave her the experience to break down large problems and ask the right questions in the world of online advertising. Now, she’s a product line manager in EMEA for AppNexus, responsible for the strategy and commercialisation of the AppNexus Programmable Platform, its customisable DSP. In her four years with AppNexus, she has also served in a services role where she supported programmatic partners on both the sell and buy sides of the real-time advertising marketplace. And as co-chair of the EMEA AppNexus Women’s Network, she helps the leadership team drive the conversation on gender equality in the workplace, through events, support and networking. Outside the office, Coghlan is a member of the IAB UK Ad Tech Advisory Group and has led advanced programmatic workshops to educate and inform newer members of the industry. She also helps the next generation of digital talent get a leg up as a mentor of a WhiteHat apprentice.

Antonia Bonello joined BuzzFeed UK in 2014 after an animation she was commissioned to create for the site – ’14 most brutal deaths in game of thrones as 8-bit gifs’ – went viral. In the four years since she has worked her way up from creative designer to associate creative director and now works closely with brands to create content on BuzzFeed’s platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Specialising in retro 8-bit animation, Bonello has reimagined Orange is the New Black, Friends and even her daily commute on the tube network as charming pixel art. She has worked on branded content campaigns for clients including Google, Nike, Netflix, Sky, Amazon, Diageo, and Nestlé; created first-to-market Snapchat games for Aviva, and even trained as a stuntwoman for Churchill Insurance. Bonello’s work has been nominated in The Drum Content Awards 2017 for Best Branded Content Campaign and won Silver at the 2015 Media Week Awards for work with Alzheimer's Society. She has been shortlisted as rising star at the Design Week Awards 2016 and was named one of the 100 Significant Women in Native Advertising 2018 by the Native Advertising Institute.

Having started her career in public relations, Ashley Krupnik found and pursued her passion for digital following her dissertation that explored the impact social media can have on brand building and experience via two-way communications. Her breakthrough came at Spook, the digital startup acquired by the Edelman PR network, where she developed the ‘Cool Cubes’ gamification app for Lipton Ice Tea. She was also influential in pioneering the use of influencers across the Tresemme New York fashion Week activation. This led to Tresemme being cited by WWD (Women's Wear Daily) as “One of the most forward-thinking brands when it comes to digital strategy. Integrating influencers into their overall marketing efforts, allowing these individuals to connect with their fans on cross-channels.” Krupnik moved to Ogilvy SocialLab in 2016 and has been influential in integrating creative and performance-driven social campaigns into existing above-the-line, digital and PR efforts. Outside of the agency, she is passionate about startups and tech, supporting companies within the Ikea accelerator program in Älmhult, Sweden to build their social and digital strategies. She has also lectured on ‘The Power of Social’, most recently at Cardiff University, inspiring and educating the next generation on career opportunities within the industry.

Having graduated at the height of the credit crunch, Bea Patman aptly enough began working for an e-learning business to help launch its platform aimed at plugging the Job Centre’s gap in newly unemployed professionals. Since moving onto digital agency Greenlight since 2011, she has served as head of SEO and, from this year, client partner within the client services team. Patman is credited with leading the SEO team to the best staff retention in its history and playing a key role in Greenlight winning one of its largest pieces of business to date from a major fashion retailer. Today she’s at the helm of an all-female team and delivers thought leadership to clients and prospects through speaking at internal events on mobile, technical SEO, UX and conversation rate optimisation. Her renown in the industry was reflected in her being among the speakers at the PerformanceIN Live conference in 2017 and being asked to judge the Performance Marketing Awards 2018.

In her role at IAB –non-profit, member-funded trade association for digital advertising in the UK – Catherine Cribbin is focused on making sure members get value from their IAB memberships. Cribbin’s job includes setting the direction and strategy of six groups focused on different areas of the digital advertising market and encouraging collaboration among members to deliver educational research projects, best practice handbooks and video content for advertisers and agencies. Podcast-obsessed Cribbin also plays a key role in creating the IAB UK’s own bi-weekly podcast and says this “hardly even feels like work” given her fondness for the medium. The podcast covers the latest developments, challenges and opportunities in the digital industry and features fun quick-fire interviews with IAB members.

Cathy White specialises in communications for tech startups and the wider ecosystem that supports them. She founded CEW Communications in 2016 and attracted clients including early-stage startups Bright Little Labs, KiteEdge and Klevio and investors BGTA, Five Seasons Ventures and Silk Ventures. The agency has grown to a team of four and was recognised as one of the UK’s top 100 small businesses by Startups.co.uk this year. Before launching CEW, White was head of communications for Tech City UK, now Tech Nation, and early-stage VC Seedcamp. She was recognised as a PR Week Rising Star in 2014 whilst working at Albion Drive, where she joined as employee number two and helped the business to scale to a team of 16 within Albion (now KBS Albion). Outside work she is a director of GeekGirl Meetup UK, an organisation that champions female role models within STEM and gives talented women a platform to share their expertise with others. She is the podcaster behind GeekGirlMeets and a prominent voice on diversity issues. As a long-time sufferer of both depression and anxiety, White also regularly opens up about her own mental health struggles in a bid to encourage others to do the same. She has spoken on the topic at Web Summit, Pioneers Festival, for The Independent, Forbes, and through her own blogging. As a champion that supports others in small business, White also dedicates part of each week to helping someone else. She started her own 'Power Hour' in 2018 so that anyone can book time with her to discuss anything from starting a business to managing their mental health.

As a senior creative at the agency Digitas, Charlotte Hugh works predominantly on campaigns for Kellogg’s (Crunchy Nut, Coco Pops, Pringles, etc) alongside art director Danny Pallett. Before that she spent five years at Iris working on brands including Camelot, Barclaycard and Dominos following her first agency experience on the other side of the world at Y&R NZ. When not writing scripts for cereal, she works on a number of side hustles including Badass.gal, a platform to champion young women in the creative industries which she set up with Pallett. They came up with the idea after noting the classrooms and lecture theatres they were speaking in were full of young, ambitious women but the industry they were working in was lacking them. Now they celebrate a different female talent every day in the hope visitors will use it as a hiring resource, find people to collaborate with or simply be inspired. Hugh is also part of The Young Creative Council, which is a team of creatives from across the industry working to bridge the gap between industry and education. It’s a subject she’s extremely passionate about and so she uses her spare time to host talks, workshops and events to mentor young creatives.

Charlotte Ward Caddle joined iProspect in 2015 and has played a significant role in developing and expanding its paid social team over the last three years. While overseeing two teams that worked directly with major retail clients she noticed they were using social primarily for branding and pitched for test budget to prove that social platforms could also effectively drive sales. The following three-month campaigns delivered return on ad spend in excess of display and in one test yielded an ROI of 1600%, according to the agency, transforming the way those clients used the medium. She was promoted to account director last September and was recently selected to participate in the exclusive Dentsu Aegis Network Women in Leadership programme, which offers mentorship and personal development opportunities to some of the industry’s brightest talent.

Upon graduating from the University of Glasgow, Christina Sunneklep felt the “greatest challenge” she could pursue would be starting her own agency and duly struck out on her own with Lykke Creative Content. After a year amassing invaluable experience and learnings, she joined the Software Advisory Service in March to create social and digital content on everything from software solutions to fintech and blockchain. Sunneklep’s role encompasses content for email campaigns, websites, press releases, webinars and social campaigns and in April she took on the extra responsibility of producing digital content for sister companies Pursuit Marketing and Fierce Digital. Her role helps to fulfil her goal of making tech more approachable for everyone, no matter the background, and she’s passionate about inspiring more girls to join the tech world.

As lead UX designer at Cook, Christine Berry has been instrumental in increasing the frozen meals business’s online revenue year-on-year through her work on its user experience design and front-end development. Skilled at mobile and responsive design, she has worked on both Cook’s public e-commerce website and internal systems used by over 500 staff in its 90-plus shops across the UK. Her projects are underpinned by continual research including data analysis, customer feedback surveys and user testing to ensure that every new design has a customer focus. Before joining Cook, Berry was head of digital and UX at web agency Redspa, heading up a team of designers and developers. Over the course of her career she has delivered projects spanning user experience design, web design and development and digital strategy for businesses such as Unilever, McAfee, Ferrero, OSKIA and Freesat. Her experience spans a variety of different industries, including food & drink, travel, technology, beauty, health & fitness and retail. When she's not working, Berry enjoys photography and swimming, is a keen cook and baker and is passionate about travel, running a lifestyle blog called levenstyle.com, where she writes about her adventures both local and abroad.

Dani Hughes has been heading up performance marketing and digital marketing strategy for Frame, the London-based fitness class company, since January. Before Frame, Hughes was digital marketing manager at the British Heart Foundation where she spent four years and rose up the ranks from digital advertising executive, to senior exec and then manager. “Dani proactively ensured the British Heart Foundation was at the forefront of new product and channel developments,” said her then-manager Amy Sharples. “Dani's impact was not just on her line reports – she was a digital transformation leader for the British Heart Foundation’s fundraising directorate which raises £121m per year to help fund life-saving research.” Striving for a more streamlined process of media buying and drawing on her organisational expertise, Hughes led the programme of work to move the charity’s digital media spend from agencies to in-house. She doubled the fundraising in-house spend in 2017 and saved the organisation £143,000 in agency fees.

Eimar McManus is the 25-year-old founder of the Digital Works Agency in London. Growing up within the target demographic of most major social platforms, McManus was particularly attuned to each channel and how it operated and sensed an opportunity to turn her enthusiasm for social media into a business.

Emily Davies joined the development team at technical marketing agency Yard three years ago while studying mathematics at nearby Cardiff University. Keen to enhance her programming skills to use alongside her mathematical knowledge, she has since developed a love and knowledge for programming, machine learning and statistics. Now a confident, established developer specialising in R, Python and JavaScript, she is making the move into data science as the driving force of the agency's recently created data science team. Alongside her everyday web development duties, she has been involved in projects including building a server for a Yard clients using Python Flask and AWS, creating materials and running training courses in R, Python and statistics, and building an algorithmic attribution marketing tool using Bayesian statistics combined with predictive modelling and machine learning.

Having joined Kindred as a graduate in 2010, Emma Parrish spent three years working in the agency’s PR team before moving over to its social media team in 2015. Last year she was promoted to associate director and now leads a team of nine, including community managers, paid social specialists and influencer experts. Shaping Kindred’s social media and content offering, Parrish’s clients include the National Citizen Service (NCS), for which she develops social media strategy and campaigns to engage and inspire teens, and the Ikea Foundation, for which she oversees global digital strategy and content production. She was behind a PR stunt for HM Treasury and The Royal Mint, enlisting English Premier League referees to use the new £1 for coin tosses at matches the weekend before its launch, and created the first ever promoted Facebook Live for The National Lottery. Outside the day job, Parrish is also head of social for Bloom – a network for women in communications which aims to help every woman in the industry achieve her potential through mentoring, events, skills-sharing and fundraising.

Funmi Adewodu started coding in 2017 following her decision to forgo a career in accountancy and instead focus on her passion for technology. A graduate of Code First: Girls and of the Makers Academy programming bootcamp, she now works as a software engineer at Starling Bank – the mobile-only challenger bank. Part of the mobile engineering team and responsible for developing features for its current account offering, she was the first engineer at the bank to deliver functionality on the Android and iOS platform. Alongside her work at Starling Bank, Adewodu also helps others get into coding through her work as a coach at Codebar – a non-profit initiative that runs regular programming workshops and looks to facilitates the growth of a diverse tech community – and by sharing her tech journey and insights into software development at a number of forums, including Rails Girls London, Afrotech Fest and Ladies of Code London. She is listed by Code First: Girl as one of its top women in tech under 30.

Hannah Watters joined customer experience agency Proximity London as a planner in 2016 and was promoted to senior planner at the start of this year. Over the last 12 months she has helped drive award-winning strategies for a number of clients, including acting as strategist on the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s (RNLI) ‘Communication Saves Lives’ campaign – the RNLI was the first charity in the UK to ask every supporter for express permission to keep in touch, making it the UK’s first full re-permission campaign. Watters also worked on Proximity London’s ‘Who knew?’ DRTV ad for Guide Dogs and is lead strategist on the Virgin Holidays account, bringing human insight to the fore to create individualised experiences for their customers, whilst working with partners to maximise cutting edge marketing technology. Actively involved in the wider agency, she is responsible for initiatives to ensure the agency remains at the forefront of new insights, technology and customer experience innovation. She is the gate-keeper of the agency’s insight tools and budget across data planning, strategy and UX, and has successfully built a business case to bolster the agency’s digital insight tools and training over the next 12 months. She also arranges ‘Lunch & Learn’ sessions to share, debate and inspire thinking, and is a mentor to junior strategists.

Jana Damanhouri is the global head of social at Jungle Creations – one of the most-viewed media properties in the world. A combination of media owner and creative social marketing agency, it creates video content for the likes of Baileys, McDonald's, WWF and Virgin which is distributed to an online community of over 65 million followers. Damanhouri oversees the company's social media strategy, building audiences and driving views through the distribution of entertaining and engaging content across its channels. Leading a social team of 15 people in London and New York, she also manages the Jungle Creations creative studio team of nine who create dozens of original videos every week. In addition to her work at Jungle, Damanhouri runs two successful YouTube channels, 'Jana Vlogs' and 'Jana Hisham', which have more than 300,000 subscribers. She created the channels when she was 16 years-old to share her perspective on life in London as a young Saudi woman.

Having joined Manchester digital shop Code Computerlove at the end of last year as a UX consultant, Jess Sherratt made such an impact in her first few months that she was promptly promoted to head of user experience. Starting out in the advertising industry at BJL in 2013 and moving to a more research-focused role at Sigma in 2015, she has developed a passion for creating meaningful online and offline customer experience using techniques such as research, rapid prototyping and design sprints to create meaningful solutions for clients, which have included Asda, AstraZeneca, Swinton Insurance and Your Housing Group. She recently helped north of England car dealer JCT600 better understand its customer touchpoint to reframe its end-to-end customer experience from website to showroom. Her work with Swinton, bringing nine of its websites under one umbrella and improve usability and design, led to a site that engages more users, reduces bounce rates and converts more customers.

Formerly a producer on reality TV shows for the likes of Channel 4, Discovery USA and TLC USA, Jo Lumb's time at We Are Social began with developing an internal production department for Adidas that went on to deliver the biggest sports magazine show on YouTube – Gamedayplus. 75m views, three seasons and numerous awards later, the bar was set. Then came Pogba x Stormzy, a transfer announcement that will be remembered for years to come, it generated 30m views and 3m shares. Lumb played a key role in bringing the project to life – and created a new genre for the sports marketing world to copy. As well as Adidas, Lumb has also produced global campaigns for brands including YouTube, LinkedIn and First Direct in her four years at We Are Social, featuring stars such as David Beckham, Professor Green and Diane Morgan, while her rapid response style of working, honed in the world of reality TV, means many of these global shoots can be turned around in 24 hours.

With an MEng in Computer Science from University College London, Joanna Tong has some solid tech credentials and, since graduating in 2011, has led initiatives at two of the world's largest and most successful tech companies, Microsoft and Facebook, in the areas of technical evangelism, games and platform partnerships and enterprise SaaS – most recently as a founding team member of the Workplace by Facebook product where she drove sales, growth, customer success, marketing and partnerships across the EMEA region, as well as acting as a figurehead for the product, speaking at Facebook's F8 developer conference to over 4,000 attendees. In December 2017 she co-founded Playrcart and, as chief operating officer, is charged with driving growth, strategy, fundraising and hiring for the video commerce company which aims to turn any online video into a store.

Three years into her media career, having previously worked as a biddable account executive at Starcom Mediavest and then Carat UK, Kyra Borella joined Bountiful Cow in February this year as a biddable broker, responsible for planning and buying search and social for The7stars' media agency startup. At Bountiful Cow, Borella manages a variety of clients and won a £1m travel client in her first three months in the job, having been poached from top-five UK media giant Carat where she had made her name for herself as both an expert client handler and team leader, delivering successful public awareness campaigns for the Department for Education and Home Office, Public Health England, Stoptober and Get Into Teaching. These campaigns saw Borella introduce new standards for brand safety, with the government running sexual health awareness campaigns on social media for the first time. A tabloid disaster waiting to happen, 'Snapchat Sex Education' instead became a controversy-free success for the government under her stewardship.

Lara Ferris got her first taste of digital marketing in 2014 when she moved to Paris and worked for a small French-speaking beauty and cosmetics PR agency. Being the youngest person in the agency she was put in charge of influencers. She then worked for a year in Milan on localisation and content for Yoox, part of the Net-a-Porter Group, where she learnt comms planning and digital strategy by working on site builds, CRM, search engine marketing and editorial for a raft of international luxury brands. Moving back to London in July 2017, she started as a strategist intern at Possible and then had a stint at Wieden+Kennedy working on Nike, Bumble and Sainsbury's, before Possible lured her back in January this year with a permanent position. Having already packed a lot into her 25 years, she has since played a key role in pitch wins – including a big fish retail client – and carried out audience research in Brazil and Mexico for Bayer. She took over the strategy of the Aston Martin account, went deep on the purchase journey for a motor manufacturer, dug into blockchain, trade trends and cryptocurrency for HSBC and built a micro-influencer strategy.

Prior to founding PR, social and content agency Silverthorn, Laura Crimmons was communications director at Branded3 where she started the PR team in 2012 and went on to oversee PR, social media, content and design. She is also a regular trainer and speaker at industry events such as Inbound, Learn Inbound, UnGagged Vegas, Yoastcon, SMX München and BrightonSEO, where she has delivered link building/digital PR training since 2013. She has led campaigns that have gained coverage by top international publishers such as BBC, Mashable, Daily Mail and many more.

Laura McHard's journey into digital began with a career in architecture, but she quickly realised that her real calling was in digital visual communication rather than physical form. And so, after taking an MA with distinction in visualisation, she spent two years as a 3D artist at visualisation studios in Glasgow and London where she developed an appetite for storytelling. She then moved to Soluis Group, the Glasgow-based computer generated imagery specialist, as creative consultant and, since 2016, as the group's lead creative. She has played a pivotal role in the group's most ambitious project to date – visualising the reimagining of an entire country in the Middle East and showcasing its future via full-dome share immersion (VR) experiences. Working directly with stakeholders, McHard was part of the team that challenged and redesigned the user experience for a global event, leading the content strategy, brief development and creative direction for a complex, undefined and rapidly evolving set of objectives and requirements. Her work has made a substantial contribution to the business, making an industry-defining splash, diversifying its service offering and pushing the boundaries of quality in its output. This year, she's been a speaker and panelist at Move Summit and listed in the Bima 100 as one of the industry's top rising stars.

As social media director at FCB Inferno, Laura Visick leads and manages cross-platform social channel and content strategy, running a team of six social and content strategists and community managers for clients including BMW UK, Uefa, Oreo, Havaianas Europe and Sport England. A multimedia journalism degree and background in search and SEO have helped set her up for a fast-paced, ever-changing digital industry where she can often switch between the commercial demands of a client like Huawei and purpose-driven work such as Pearson's 'Project Literacy'. Earlier this year Visick set up the influencer marketing arm at FCB Inferno – an initiative that has seen the agency run pan-European campaigns for multiple clients, with Visick working on multiple award-winning campaigns including the Cannes Grand Prix winning 'Project Literacy' campaign for Pearson and Uefa's 'Together #WePlayStrong' campaign which picked up a bronze for a multi-channel campaign in the Social & Influencer lions this year.

Starting her career at Teads where she progressed to senior global marketing manager and played a major role in launching the Teads brand into the UK market, Lauren Bigland went on to join LoopMe in 2015 as head of marketing – the mobile video platform's first senior marketing hire – and in July this year was promoted to global marketing and communications director. Responsible for all of the company's marketing strategy and execution worldwide, Bigland has built out the marketing team globally and, as the youngest member of LoopMe's leadership team, helps drive initiatives both inside and outside the marketing department, helping it grow to the UK's 12th fastest growing company according to Deloitte's Fast list. LoopMe uses artificial intelligence and data to drive brand outcomes, but only 25% of marketers have a confident understanding of AI. Knowledge of AI is vital to LoopMe, as its flagship product PurchaseLoop (successfully launched to market in 2016) uses AI to optimize toward brand outcomes. To promote understanding and adoption of AI, Bigland developed a series of global educational activations including the AI Award – a 2-hour training session designed to train agencies and brands. She has also co-authored two AI guides with LoopMe's data science team, ensuring complicated techniques are understandable and digestible.

Moving to London in 2011 after graduating from the University of Melbourne, Lisa Targett worked first as digital business development manager at the Telegraph Media Group before spending two years in Sydney as digital sales executive at Nine Entertainment Co (NEC) – Microsoft and Channel Nine's joint-venture – harnessing registered data to drive premium, personalised storytelling (and picking up an award for Netflix's 2015 launch campaign along the way). This evolved into content marketing and customer-generated advertising, and when NEC’s joint-venture with Daily Mail Australia was discontinued she moved over to join the publisher as group account director. With experience spanning multiple markets for leading global media houses, she returned to London in 2016 as senior agency partner at MailOnline before joining Tribe as its UK general manager in July 2017, charged with leading the UK expansion of the influencer marketplace that connects social media influencers with brands. In her first eight months in charge, UK monthly market revenues helped the company to break even and, under Targett's leadership, the UK now accounts for nearly 50% of the company's global revenues, exceeding forecasts.

From starting her marketing career in 2014 as an apprentice at Manchester creative agency Creation ADM before going on to several roles in content creation and business development, Lucy Atkins has experienced many aspects of digital marketing in a short space of time, working with many business owners along the way. Now operating her own marketing agency, the Blackburn-based Infused Media, she works alongside clients across the UK to build their businesses via creative marketing solutions, with her client base ranging from public sector clients such as the NHS through to national environmental and drainage company Mantank Environmental Services.

Lucy Marsden is a managing consultant at iX, IBM's digital agency. Previously a service designer and innovation consultant, Marsden has managed two innovation hubs to drive forward the oil and gas sector since joining IBM. She spent the last year helping a global aviation fuel provider to move into operations, sustainability and disruption using blockchain, predictive analytics and digital twinning. This earned her a commendation in the Young Consultant of the Year category at the Management Consulting Awards this year. Throughout 2018 she has managed four projects simultaneously, and grown her team from one to 14 by repeatedly demonstrating the value of experience-centric design. Marsden has worked to drive inclusion and professional development within IBM by developing career paths for general graduates to move into design. Outside work, Marsden volunteers for Wag and Company (a companion charity for isolated elderly in north England) and OpenIdeo. She is a mentor and career coach to three female graduates and interns within IBM and one external service designer, supporting young women to reach their potential.

Megan Dunsby is projects editor of Startups.co.uk. After joining the company as an intern working on news and content, Dunsby has risen to head up the site's projects and commercial content team, working with high-profile clients to deliver quality content. She also heads up the Startups 100 index – the UK's longest running ranking of the UK's top 100 new businesses. The 2018 index has attracted over half a million views in just one month since going live. She also runs the Startups Awards, the Young Guns Awards and monthly equity seed funding competition The Start-Up Series. As the winner of the Rising Start of the Year Award (Silver) at the British Media Awards, Dunsby is focused on encouraging more women to start businesses by showcasing successful female entrepreneurs as role models. Her work celebrating women in business includes interviewing Jacqueline Gold of Ann Summers, Notonthehighstreet.com's Holly Tucker, Liz Earle, and Forward Ladies owner and chief executive Griselda Togobo for Startups.co.uk. Dunsby has appeared on the panel circuit, speaking at events for names including Enterprise Nation and CEW Communications.

Having begun as an intern with 360i’s insights and planning team, Megan Train has since risen through the ranks to become a senior analyst. She is responsible for clients such as Save The Children, Mizkan and bareMinerals. Train has developed innovative methodologies to measure the effectiveness of Insights work at 360i, creating a new formula to measure and track the affinity of audiences to homeware brand Ikea. The result informed communication strategies for Ikea, as well as providing a measurement framework for success. Her affinity modelling is now used across multiple 360i clients. As a volunteer, she worked with both the Prince's Trust and Dentsu initiative The Code to plan and lead digital marketing workshops for young people from underprivileged backgrounds. She volunteers with MediaTrust's Women's Voices event on International Women’s Day, collaborating with other volunteers from the world of digital media to help charities to develop digital strategies.

Melissa Rynn joined Wire 18 months ago and has since personally introduced two new departments – insights and digital – and an array of new services. Leading all digital marketing activity for the company, her department has tripled in size over the last year, while Wire’s digital client list has grown from one to over 14 just 12 months after launching its first digital campaign. Her work has helped Wire win a number of industry awards. Sitting on Wire’s executive board as a senior leader, Rynn helps define the growth strategy of the firm. She has welcomed brands such as Jura Whisky, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Communicorp UK and the National Lottery to Wire, and challenged industry perceptions while doing so, delivering a 40-minute keynote on the creative opportunities of artificial intelligence as part of the Marketing Society Trendspotting series.

Melanie Hoke works at independent digital agency Your Favourite Story, where she leads creative interactive experiences for Mercedes-Benz. Hoke’s work has led to Mercedes embracing marketing firsts, such as an interactive touchscreen display project that marked the first time the brand had used such technology. In honour of International Women's Day, Hoke led Your Favourite Story's campaign to raise money for Bloody Good Period, an organisation whose aim is to end period poverty in the UK. The campaign included a film, which she co-wrote with copywriter Krish Puri, that makes light of the taboo around menstruation in the workplace. Prior to joining Your Favourite Story, she worked as a senior designer at Proximity London. At Proximity, she led design for Disney's eCRM campaigns and Bacardi's social media content. She was also involved in Omniwomen, Omnicom's network-wide organisation to promote gender equality in the creative industries, helping to lead communication design for a speed mentoring event.

Monica Karpinski joined digital marketing company Curated Digital in 2015 where she developed an audience research methodology – 'gap analysis' – that became a key driver for new business and one of the company's USPs. Since then, she’s grown her team from just herself to 10 people and helped shape the business. She then launched The Femedic, an educational women's health publication that deals with areas of women's health considered taboo. The publication has been rewarded for its honest focus on women’s health with an engaged, growing audience despite a minimal budget and small staff. The site has been featured in Cosmopolitan, iNews, The Mail on Sunday and more. Karpinski was asked to chair a panel discussion on women's health at Women of the World Festival 2018 and, most recently, she appeared on the Victoria Derbyshire show to discuss women's health taboos. The Femedic was also recently nominated in the Best B2C Editorial Team category at The Drum's Online Media Awards.

With 10 years’ experience of working with social, Rachel Kneen is the social media lead at Just Eat where she is responsible for all media and social ad spend. Working previously at mobile network O2, agency-side and in startups, Kneen has been at the forefront of social direct-response, turning social content into social sales. Since then she has produced award-winning work, creating the first haunted house controlled by smart tech, chatbots that drive sales and AR projects. A regular conference speaker, she's recently spoken at Social Media Week.

After a career that’s taken her from a local print design shop in Athens through several startups, design studios and ad agencies, Rania Svoronou is now a lead designer at IBM iX. She led the design of BPme – an innovative mobile app used by more than 300,000 people around the world – and her design work has been credited with helping the business retain key clients. Svoronou was awarded We Are The City's Rising Star Awards 2018 in its Digital Category, has been shortlisted for the Rising Star 2018 category at the TargetJobs National Awards and has won multiple internal IBM awards. Selected as a TopTalent IBM Global Business Services UKI and recognised as a Future Leader among 2,300 IBM practitioners, she is also a member of Founders of the Future – an invite-only private community of the most promising entrepreneurial tech talent in Europe, launched by Founders Forum. Svoronou is an active speaker, guest lecturer, industry mentor and has been invited to judge and mentor at multiple hackathons and design events across Europe. With the aim of empowering women in her industry, she has appeared at London Business School, UCL, UAL, King's College London, Royal College of Arts and at events such as UX Crunch, MobileUX London, UAL Graduate Futures Week, Techstars Startupboost and Google’s Startup Weekend.

As the head of up the content department at organic digital agency Builtvisible, Brown has undertaken a restructuring of her team, unifying the product suite and repositioning the agency's content offering to integrate fully with the agency's specialisms of SEO and analytics. Her approach to management during a comprehensive restructure has helped scale the content team, with a focus on training and development leading to the promotion of several key team members. This blueprint for staff progression has been replicated across the wider business. Committed to giving back to the digital community, Brown regularly shares her knowledge at training sessions, across the agency's blog and at high-profile speaking events, including a spot on the main stage at BrightonSEO. Brown’s efforts drove 30% year-on-year growth and prompted a recent promotion to director of content.

An account director whose experience in the digital industry spans strategy and user experience to creative design and development, Rebecca Vickery has worked on and led a series of high-profile projects in the UK including Heathrow Airport, TSB, The British Red Cross and London Business School. Working for brand experience agency Rufus Leonard, Vickery is responsible for leading cross-disciplinary teams to develop memorable and differentiated brand experiences that ultimately result in stronger relationships between brands and their customers. In the past year she’s run the agency's second biggest programme of work to re-platform the website of Lloyd's Register, as part of repositioning the 250-year-old brand as a leader in the industry. She then worked on the redesign and rebuild of the British Red Cross website in March this year. Vickery participated in the Bima Digital Day 2017, teaching a class of 16-year-old students about digital skills. She frequently attends industry events, organises hackathons and, more recently, has gained attention for her thought-provoking blogs on tech issues.

Rhiannon Stroud joined employee engagement agency Synergy Creative two years ago. Her work bridges the gap between strategic and creative teams, and has already been appointed to Synergy's leadership team following a promotion to a senior strategic position with her own team. At Synergy, Stroud gets under the skin of clients like IHG, Lidl and RBS to shape their employer brand engagement and internal comms strategies – creating seamless employee experiences across every channel, from intranets and bespoke apps to social networks, VR and beyond. Stroud was recently honoured by the Institute of Internal Communications as the UK's Best Communicator Under 30.

Ruchita Nathalal joined Publicis Groupe's graduate scheme in 2013 and was swiftly promoted to senior programmatic executive and later programmatic manager. Working across a number of clients including Samsung, Cineworld and Travelodge, Nathalal also helped to develop Starcom's mobile programmatic proposition. She played a pivotal role in transitioning AOD, Publicis Groupe's trading desk, helping to establish the UK programmatic strategy and activation team in Starcom and Spark Foundry. In 2016, she joined Run, a Publicis-acquired cross-screen DMP and DSP, to help spearhead its launch and expansion across EMEA. She helped to grow Run's global presence from one to 11 active markets over the course of a year. In her latest role as associate director she has been helping craft the go-to-market strategy for Publicis Media Precision, overseeing the client success team based in the UK and US, ensuring delivery of all client KPIs as well as leading the audience management strategy and implementation of an enterprise DMP solution for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles across eight European markets.

Sasha Spink started at AnalogFolk after a university internship and soon found herself working on AkzoNobel's trade and retail portfolios, as well as on campaigns for Cuprinol promoting its ‘Shed of the Year’ competition. She now runs a cross-functional team responsible for ensuring a unified customer and design experience across all digital touchpoints. As project manager and programme lead on the company’s largest financial services account, Spink manages an internal team of UX developers and designers, and manages client relationships across the globe. Spink also runs various specialist projects for the account, working closely with individual project teams across the globe.

After several years working in social media, including a stint with a Silver Lion-winning team, Sophie Katsali joined global digital marketing and social media agency Wilderness. Working with Warner Bros on a range of digital campaigns, Katsali led initiatives like the ‘Warner Bros Elves’ which drove engagement by as much as 1000% for the brand. As strategy lead, she oversees the strategy of the Warner Bros, Universal Pictures, Magic Light Pictures and 20th Century Fox accounts. Katsali mentors junior strategists to help them excel in the digital industry. Katsali co-founded non-profit organisation Echelon Donates at the age of 19. The group partnered with WWF and Doctors Without Borders, amplifying fundraising efforts on social gaining coverage on MTV Act, Billboard and Teddy Hilton.

Sophie Mindell joined H+K as the senior social lead for the Huawei Global social account and has extensive experience in advising clients on social media, digital marketing, paid media strategies and digital transformations. During her time overseeing creative planning, social and channel strategy for the Huawei social account, she has launched a wide selection of products, developing the creative output and increasing platform engagement rates by over 250%. She has also worked on a cross-agency WPP pro-bono brief for the Metropolitan Police. Prior to joining H+K, Sophie was a senior social media manager at TMW and recipient of The Drum's Community Manager of the Year 2014 at the Social Buzz Awards for her work on Durex. At TMW she developed content strategies, pushed creative content and produced live content from events for a range of brands including Sure, Wall's, Virgin Trains, Old El Paso and Canon B2B, along with several other key Unilever and RB FMCG accounts. Sophie also launched over 20 products with Samsung Mobile, establishing a global social presence and pushing the brand to collaborate with.

Taneth Evans is the head of audience development at The Times and The Sunday Times. Working across both titles, she has introduced new search approaches to the business for the first time since the implementation of a paywall and created the SEO team from the ground up. Specialising in digital content strategy, she has spent the last two years immersed in the culture change of bringing a national print newsroom into the digital world.

Zoe Gové is the head of client performance for Mention Me, a referral marketing business that is shaking up the way retailers and e-commerce businesses think about referral marketing. Leading a team of client success managers, she is responsible for ensuring that each of the 300 brands Mention Me works with are happy and that their referral programmes are reaching peak performance. In her role, she specialises in getting the very best results for brands, recommending incentives and AB tests, offering support and counselling client-side marketers on how to build promotional plans to increase engagement with their referral offers. In addition, Gové and her team provide analysis and benchmarking alongside sharing of best practice.