Katie Vanneck-Smith, CMO - News International

Katie Vanneck-Smith is the Chief Marketing Officer at News International (NI).

Katie was appointed to the newly created role in October 2010 and oversees all marketing activity for The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and the News of the World. Her role encompasses responsibility for circulation revenue and the continued growth in subscription sales of print and digital products.

Katie joined Times Newspapers in 1996 as a graduate trainee.  She rose quickly to marketing manager and, from 2000– 2002, she was digital director responsible for launching Times Online.  From 2002 – 2005 she was promotions director and then left to join the Telegraph Media Group as marketing director.   She returned to Times Media in 2007 to the role of sales and marketing director. Katie became interim MD, Digital & New Business for a short period and was later appointed MD, Customer Direct at NI.

Katie is a graduate of St Hugh’s College Oxford and, on graduating in 1995, she spent a year teaching English in Japan.

Haseeb Rahman, Marketing Manager Dressings UK & Ireland - Unilever

Haseeb is currently the Marketing Manager for the Unilever Dressings UK & Ireland business where he leads the brand building activities for Hellmann’s, Colman’s and Maille and is responsible for the business strategy, brand equity, and P&L.  His recent launch of Hellmann’s Flavoured Mayo has won the prestigious Unilever Global Category Award for significant value share growth & the DBA “Design Effectiveness Award”. Some of his previous marketing campaigns have been also recognized in Ad-watch and Guinness World Records.

Prior to this role Haseeb has worked in brand management on several other global brands like Bertolli, I can’t believe it’s not Butter, Lifebuoy, and Lipton along with a stint in global marketing excellence looking after Brand Stewardship and Best Practice Marketing.  Haseeb started his career with Unilever Pakistan in the Management Trainee programme after an MBA (Marketing) from IBA Karachi from where he graduated as a double marketing gold medallist.

Gill Smith, Executive Coach

Gill is Vice Chair of the Association for Coaching in the UK, and is an AC Honorary Life Fellow.

She is an executive and organisational coach, facilitator and qualitative researcher. Her purpose is to uncover powerful truths - with coaching clients and organisations.

She builds warm, trusting relationships with clients to support deep and sometimes challenging self exploration, so they can make better decisions.

Gill’s previous career was in strategy development in leading London advertising agencies. She is an accredited coach, trained with the Academy of Executive Coaching in 2005 and is a Master Practitioner of NLP, as well as a Full Member of the Market Research Society.