ABOUT ME

Sport fanatic and marketer helping organisations across sport connect with fans meaningfully.

With over 15 years experience working on global and local brands both agency and client side, I’m a well-rounded senior marketer with a strategic & creative focus. I’ve been fortunate to work on a wide range of partnerships, campaigns and briefs across sport in my career and since 2024 have specialised in offering freelance sports marketing strategy.

I help rights holders, brands, sponsors and teams understand fandom and come up with the strategies and ways to activate rights or create content which will genuinely connect with fans on their terms.

Being a passionate fan myself and regular traveller to watching sport around the world I understand and see at first hand the nuances between fans and the levels of sports fandom that need to be understood for teams to grow fanbases, sponsors and rights-holders to cut through the logo clutter and brands to show up in a relatable way.

Channel agnostic, with extensive experience in brand positioning to creative platforms, campaigns to social and digital content, insights to consumer research and sponsorship to cultural marketing I partner with brands or provide support to agencies on a variety of briefs and challenges.

portfolio request

For a more in-depth portfolio with detailed case studies, you can request one from me at hello@warrendell.co.uk

career history

If a career is like a book or some Netlfix show, then i’m now in chapter or season 5. Critics say it’s the most interesting one yet! I’ve done a variety of roles within marketing and advertising from brand to agency side and each previous chapter has contributed to where I’m at now, doubling down on a focus to work on sports marketing.

CHAPTER 1 2008-13: exploration

I never went to university, I went straight into work after college selling classified advertising to used car salesman for the Southampton’s Daily Echo newspaper, talk about an introduction to the working world. I also started evening classes and completed the National Council for Training Journalists courses while writing for a variety of online publishers and self-publishing work to get my foot in the door. I ended up at a publisher called Redactive in their newly formed digital department, as I helped a traditional publisher adapt to a more digital world. Through working here and my next role at STEAK I saw the rise of search advertising and the impact it could have on commercial success for brands like Currys, Dixon, PC World and Carphone Warehouse.

I always had eyes for this new shiny thing called social media and jumped at the chance to work with friends at an agency called Testify, where startup life saw me wear many hats from client services to email designer, copywriter to community manager as we punched above our weight to work on brands like DB Apparel, Vice and Giff Gaff.

CHAPTER 2 2014-18: SPECIALISING IN STRATEGY

During my time at MEC (now Wavemaker) I began to take more interest in strategy as I found what interested me was finding insights that could help shape the work across McVities, Vodafone and the Royal Navy. This led me to moving into a mid-weight planning role at Gravity Thinking and working on Hendricks and Glenfiddich as well as playing a key role in winning the Hyundai social media account against bigger agencies in a pitch. I squeezed a short 7 month contract stint in at Leo Burnett working on UBS where to be honest I knew nothing about how the rich banked but was a good challenge before getting to work on something much closer to home and one of my favourite brands New Balance at ZAK. With a focus on growing their football offering and reaching gen-z, we encouraged the one in eleven that wanted to be different from their adidas or Nike wearing team mates to choose NB’s growing boot range. I also worked on an award winning World Cup campaign called Make it to Moscow.

CHAPTER 3 2018-22: GOING BRAND SIDE

I always felt the best way to grow experience in creating brand strategy was to work for a brand and for 4 years I worked first at Chivas Regal as a Senior Brand Manager and then at Jameson as a Marketing Manager for Comms and Content. These were 4 invaluable years that included working on a strategic repositioning for Chivas, product asset creation, development of a global creative platform and content creation across the brands biggest partnerships with Manchester United and Balmain. I also had Andy Cole take a penalty against me. Of course he scored. I also set up Chivas Regal’s first Culture Marketing team to focus on delivering more culture first work and insight across the brand teams. At Jameson I worked in the UK market to help develop local relevance for the brand’s content and global WIden the Circle campaign.

CHAPTER 4 2022-24: RETURN TO AGENCY

I was lured back to agency land in 2022 to work on adidas and lead the strategy on Mobil 1’s motorsports partnerships as Strategy Director at TBWA\London. I was also a member of the network’s cultural intelligence unit Backslash, contributing towards the yearly Edges reports and more recently Future of Sport series.

CHAPTER 5 2024- : FREELANCE SPORTS MARKETING

Here we are, chapter in progress. Early scenes include working across sponsorship & creative strategy for Asahi, Lloyds, Coca-Cola, Powerade & Smartwater, NBA & Wilson tennis.