The awards are judged by an esteemed panel of industry leaders and experts, the judging is a rigorous two-stage process including pre-scoring to determine shortlists and a judging meeting where entries are discussed and evaluated in detail to decide the winning entries.
From a transparency perspective, we may video aspects of the judging session to show on the evening and give entrants an insight into why a winning entry was chosen.
Dawn Anderson | Managing Director | Bertey Ltd
Past roles at Carat and Latitude, working on search marketing campaigns for major brands. International Search Marketing Conference speaker on SEO and Digital Marketing Strategy. International SEO Consultant to brands in-house teams covering ecommerce, sports, travel, food and nutrition, legal, finance and insurance. A decade in SEO. Researcher into search engine crawling and crawl efficiency.
Thea Burrows | CO-FOUNDER & MANAGING DIRECTOR | MAKER PROJECTS
Thea runs Maker, a creative production company that tells brands’ stories using the power of film. She has a natural flair for helping brands engage with audiences in a way that respects and moves them. Since 2003 we've partnered with brands and agencies to make beautifully crafted cinematic content that works wonders.
Simon Butterworth | VP Digital Marketing | Manchester Airports Group
Simon joined Manchester Airports Group (MAG), the UK’s largest airports group, as VP Digital Marketing in July 2017. The Group serves 59 million passengers across three airports (Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands), which contributes £7.1 billion to the UK economy. He sits on the leadership team at the Group’s digital division, MAG-O, which was created with one driving mission; to create the world's most customer-centric and stress-free digital travel experience. Simon has led MAG-O through a period of digital transformation. After a phase of intense growth, hiring 40 digital marketers in 12 months, all digital acquisition channels are now managed and optimised in-house. This includes Paid Search, Organic Search, CRM, Affiliates, Display, Paid Social and Content Marketing. After the acquisition of two digital businesses, MAG-O is now entering its next exciting phase of growth as industry-leading platforms are deployed in airports internationally.
Jon Cleaver | Chief Technology Officer | In The Style
Jon is the Chief Technology Officer for the high growth, social first, fast fashion brand www.inthestyle.com. Prior to that he spent 3 years leading the omni-channel transformation for Sofology as Chief Technology Officer. Jon believes in putting the customer first and building simple engaging digital journeys around their needs.
Arianne Donoghue | PAID MEDIA DEVELOPMENT MANAGER | EPIPHANY
Having started off her digital career client side over a decade ago, Arianne has worked for both agencies and brands in-house, specialising in all things paid search. She is now back agency side supporting on biddable media digital strategy. A regular on the conference scene, she’s also an editor and contributor at popular site State of Digital.
Jemma Edwards | Digital Marketing Manager | @dontpanicevents | Don't Panic Projects
Born and bred in the North with ten years experience in the industry, Jemma lives, eats and breathes conversion rate optimisation. Working for a variety of big brands such as ISP’s to bespoke gate services, she’s touched on everything from eCommerce, influencer marketing, SEO and social ads. Now with a passion for B2B marketing & PPC, she heads up the digital marketing for Don’t Panic and the International Search Awards series, which can be found as far as MENA and the USA.
Daniel Evans | Digital Consultant | MSL Group
Daniel leads MSL’s digital strategy offer for all of our clients. Daniel has 20 years’ experience initiating, scoping and delivering creative and effective digital solutions. His experience ranges from multi-channel communications programmes with audiences in the tens of millions to experimental digital artworks; from large-scale ecommerce sites and multi-player online games to organisation-wide programmes of strategic digital change. Daniels clients include EY, LBG, ABinBev, Heathrow, Landsec and MoreThan. Before joining MSL he spent seven years as head of the digital team at the Science Museum Group. There he fostered a culture of digital innovation at one of the world's most forward-looking cultural organisations and won some of the most prestigious accolades in the global digital industry. MSL is a creative communications agency specailising in digital and PR-led solutions. Our digital offer spans influencer marketing to corporate websites and everything in-between. Clients include Sainsburys, EY, Lloyds Banking Group, Renault, RSA and Canon. We are proud to have won multiple awards for our corporate websites, intranets, games, content development, social and influencer campaigns.
James Ferguson | Lead UX Designer | On The Beach
James has lead the User Experience team at On The Beach since February 2017. In that time, the team have championed and adopted the Design Thinking process across the business (not just in design) and revolutionised the way new projects are approached and delivered. His background includes working with global brand names like Gatorade, Michelin, and Esso and in helping start-ups get concepts off the whiteboard and into the App Store, whilst all the time instilling a culture of constant improvement and user focus. When James isn't knee deep looking for innovative ways to solve complex problems, you can find him eating, drinking, pushing his daughter on a swing or watching movies (hopefully with his dog).
Grant Kemp | Data Implementation Consultant | Photobox
Grant Kemp is a data evangelist. He loves to create analytics and data solutions as well as build the capability to use them within customer teams. Grant has over 15 years experience in digital starting out as a developer and working across multiple verticals including ecommerce, publishing, startups and travel. Grant Kemp works at Inviqa as a data and analytics consultant where he helps customers with Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Data Studio and a bevy of other tools to generate more revenue through data.
Mark Kuhillow | Founder | @ | R.O.EYE
Starting his career on 1994, Marks media roots are firmly planted within the offline direct response world, moving online in 1999. Seeing the opportunity to apply a digital direct response agency model to affiliate and performance marketing campaigns, Mark founded R.O.EYE in 2004. Now seen as the largest specialist in its sector, R.O.EYE counts the likes of HMV, Best Western and Jessops amongst its clients.
Neil McKay | CEO | @ | Endless Gain
For more than 15 years, Neil has been helping businesses here in the UK, Europe and USA grow their online profits. He started his career at publisher Media Ventures Group (MVG), helping to build and sell Global Media GmbH to private equity firm The Carlyle Group before leading the UK acquisition of Bigmouthmedia (now part of DigitasLBi). He later led Lakestar Media to success before it was acquired by McCann Worldgroup in 2012. Neil's latest venture is Endless Gain – a Conversion Optimisation Agency which launched in January 2016.
Paul Morris | HEAD OF MARKETING PLANNING & PERFORMANCE | Tesco Bank
Paul has over 19 years’ experience leading Marketing and Digital both agency and Brand side and currently heads up planning and performance at Tesco Bank. Paul was previously global Digital/ Ecommerce Director at PZ Cussons (brands including St Tropez, Imperial Leather & Original Source), led Digital marketing, content and social at the Co-op Group (Food, Pharmacy, Electrical, Bank, Insurance, Legal Services & Funeralcare) and has Digital/ through the line experience of working both client and agency side with brands including Wickes, Laterooms, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Cash Generator, Stagecoach and Silverstone.
LUIS NAVARRETE GOMEZ | HEAD OF GLOBAL SEARCH MARKETING | THE LEGO GROUP
Luis Navarrete-Gomez is the Global Head of Search Marketing for The LEGO Group. Based in London he is responsible for all SEO and Paid Search activity for LEGO. Luis has over 15 years’ Digital Marketing experience in helping corporations use the web to drive online visibility and generate leads that have resulted in new business online.
Polly Pospelova | Head of Search | Delete
Polly co-manages Delete agency’s Visibility team, working with SEO consultants, technical developers, PPC managers, content managers and UX designers. She works on digital strategies and solutions for major brands in sectors including higher education, sport, property, travel and more. She is also a search marketing conference speaker on SEO, Page Speed Performance R&D and Digital Marketing.
Juliette van Rooyen | Founder & Head of SEO
Juliette is an SEO Specialist with more than 14 years experience in both client-side and agency environments in London & Cape Town. Starting as a developer, she was lured to the dark side of SEO with the promise of being more creative. After getting a taste for SEO, she moved to London and spent 6 years working for various agencies. Her clients included Nintendo, Samsung, COI & Shell. She returned to Cape Town where she worked on the gambling industry on the client-side, spearheading multi-region and multi-language strategies for global casino brands. After 6 years of working in that arena, Juliette returned to London in 2018 to lead UK SEO for a multinational ecommerce brand.
Gerry White | SEO Consultant | Just Eat
Gerry is a technical marketing consultant working with Just Eat supporting SEO on the 14 sites they operate around the world, including apps, mobile, technical and outreach. Ensuring that the sites are organic leaders in the markets they operate in. With an 17 year history in digital – Gerry has worked on sites from the BBC, McDonalds, Premier Inn and DirectGov in various roles from digital analyst, site search but usually in SEO, as well as spending a large part of his career agency side. Gerry also co-runs a digital roundtable conference called TakeItOffline which aims to replicate the best of the post pub conversations, typically in a pub.