Dan Walsh’s Post

One of the best creatives I've ever worked with, incredible visual approach ✅ , great at copy ✅ ...but wait, is also super well structures AND a wonderful human being, now that is a rare thing. I suggest you all follow him to see his design drops over the next few months...

I have officially launched my marketing consultancy! 🚀 Need support with marketing and brand strategy, campaign creation and delivery, or optimizing your marketing team's structure and performance? Let's chat! #MarketingConsultancy #BrandStrategy #CampaignCreation #MarketingTeam

Ñuqaqa consultor de marketing freelance hinam churachkani hinaspam chiqaptapuni ancha allin kani, contratawanaykim! Lost in translation? One of the biggest challenges faced by emerging businesses is your message being lost in translation. What do I mean by that? Well, you have spent months, years, decades creating your product, you know the detail, the benefits, why it will make the world a better place, yet because you are so ‘in deep’, you are lost in a forest of messaging and tactics and are missing the tree that the customer really needs to see. I will be bringing together my 20+ years experience in the marketing sector with my training as an anthropologist at Oxford to provide a human centric, no nonsense, marketing consultancy to help you discover what your customer really needs to hear…and that’s not necessarily what you want to tell them. I will be offering support with: Marketing and brand strategy  Campaign creation and delivery Team development You can find out more by downloading this nifty creds deck I have put together. So, if you’d like to talk more drop me a message! …oh, and the language above? That’s Quechua, no real reason other than I spent a really great time in Peru a few years back, why not stick it into Google translate… #marketingstrategy #fractionalcmo #marketing campaign

Not sure that letting down your family, friends, colleagues etc would eventually lead to any sort of successful self care!? Short paragraph mantra memes, how nice in theory, so divorced from the reality of most people’s lives. Surely self care is more about creating nurturing environments, community and having people’s back? We’re social animals after all are we not? @Dan

Fantastic to spend some time with the wonderful folks at BFBS helping them build out the strategy and creative approach for their new summer sports campaign. Great energy and creativity in the room! Our main takeout, as is so often the case with great brands, was that the solution can be hiding in plain sight, and to never underestimate the power of your core offer. If you are working on something day in day out, there is a tendency to become blind to the true value of your brand / product, sometimes all it takes a bit of outside perspective to re-ignite the senses! If you need help on a similar sticky problem reach out... #Strategy #Creativity #BrandDevelopment #Collaboration #Innovation #workshopfacilitation

Let’s call this out, Kier Starmer’s performance at last night’s leader’s debate was poor. He relied almost exclusively on attacks on the government’s previous record and Rishi Sunak as an individual, tired tropes on his own upbringing and consistently dodged providing answers on Labour’s own position. He fell into the trap of letting Sunak control the narrative and failed to get Labour’s solutions across. Quality communication is all about getting your audience to hear the key elements of your message in a way that resonates with them. Here’s a few pointers on what Sir Kier should have said: 🌿On green: he let Sunak spin the same old scare tactics that the evil government would come and force you to scrap your car and rip out your boiler yada yada yada, so how about “no one is forcing you to change your car, quite the reverse, keep hold of your car for as long as you can, save your money, and only when it has reached the end of its life is it time to change to an EV, which is cleaner, much cheaper to run and maintain and more fun to drive“ 💷On tax: right from the off, debunk the claim, don’t wait until it has already been drilled into the audience parrot style, so “these figures are pure pie in the sky, created for faux Labour policies by the government and costed by the their own teams, but what I will do is ensure that those with the broadest shoulders are paying their fair share to fund the high quality services that that hard pressed British public deserve. Is it fair that that super rich are hoarding their money offshore whilst NHS waiting lists are at their worst ever length? Tax applied the fairly is the bedrock that keeps our health service, education and military fit for purpose and where raises need to be made to support these services for the vast majority of the British people I will ensure that they are applied to those that can most easily afford them” 🌍On immigration: again, Starmer ended up on the ropes and couldn’t come up with the goods to deal with a trap that had been set by Sunak. Try “the government has now spent £370 million with not a single asylum seeker being deported. It is perfectly natural for individuals to want a better life, the only long term answer to stemming the boats is to prevent people from wanting to leave their homelands in the first place by building our commitment to overseas aid and development which is currently only 3 x times what is spent on the failed Rwanda policy” Now admittedly it is exponentially easier for me to type out these responses on LinkedIn than it is to stand in front of the nation on live TV but the principle still stands, own the narrative, communicate your story in a way that will connect and make sure you know the detail. For a master class on how this is done search YouTube for Tony Blair hustings 1997. #generalelection #communications #messaging #keirstarmer #rishisunak

After two and half action-packed years at Speakers for Schools it’s time for a change. The charity has always been more than ‘work’ for me, this has been personal! I grew up the child of a single parent, educated at the local comp and in receipt of free school meals, but was lucky enough to go on to attend Oxford University. Within my first week the gap in experience between myself and some of my privately educated piers became abundantly clear. Not only did they know what they wanted to do but had parents that had opened all the necessary doors to get them there, I on the other hand was still only at the proverbial starting point in the race of life. It struck me that this was not only unfair, but limiting in terms of the subsequent talent pool that would be available to employers. So, when the recruiter reached out towards the end of 2021 coming to the charity seemed like a no brainer.    The last two and a bit years have been quite the journey, there have of course been challenging times, but the highs have invariably outweighed the lows and I can honestly say that projects such as the Work Experience For All campaign, developing our new brand, launching our CRM system and new website, hiring an incredible team and the numerous media wins have been real career highlights.   The needs of the charity have however changed, as have my own, so it’s time for the bat call: I’m on the lookout for interesting companies, with interesting people doing interesting things, so if you or someone in your network know of any opportunities that would align with my skills and experience I’d be super grateful for a recommendation or referral. I can't wait to see what's next in store for me, and I look forward to the conversations ahead.

To state the bleeding obvious, the energy transition is one of the key vehicles in the charge against climate change, but it also has the equally seismic opportunity to write a 40 year wrong and restore hope, pride and a future to the communities that have suffered most during the de-industrialisation of many areas of the UK. Last week I spoke at the IGPP' second National Energy and Sustainability Conference 2024 on the intersectionality between the energy transition and social mobility, and the opportunity that employers in new green industries such as green hydrogen have to deliver high skilled, high quality, well paid jobs to communities in areas such as the North East of England. The green transition is likely to bring: - up to 725k new jobs - many of which will be in areas most affected by the de-industrialisation of the 70s and 80s - 72% of young people what a job in this sector - yet 68% of employers in this sector worry about the skills back The key to harnessing and inspiring talent now and shape young people's choices prior to them taking the first career defining steps of selecting which subjects they will take forward to exam level. I would encourage all employers in this sector to engage in schools outreach programmes of the types we operate at Speakers for Schools. #greenjobs #energytransition #careers #socialmobility

An absolutely fantastic summation of the different educational experiences encountered by the 7% of young people that attend private school vs the 93% who attend state. The intentions are always the same, to do the very best for the young people in their charge, but the experience couldn’t be more different…

This Marketing Week survey came as no surprise to me. I recently spoke at a marketing leadership event, I asked 3 simple questions at the start: 1) hands up if you went to school, 2) keep your hand up if you went to state school 3) keep your hand up if you were on free school meals. Out of a room of 260 people there were 3 hands up at the end - if the audience was reflective of the population at large there should have been at least 52. This is not just a 'moral' problem. How can an industry, with consumer centrism at its heart, ever hope to truly understand its customer if the people creating the content are from such a narrow sector of society? For too long class and socio-economic background have been ignored in conversations around diversity. This needs to change. There are of course companies out there doing a great job to drive change, and access to work experience for state educated kids without parental connections to the industry is a great place to start. Agencies like Lucky Generals are opening their door via in person work experience programmes via Speakers for Schools, could your company do more to create a more representative workforce?