Sophie Doyle
Cultural Strategy Consultancy

About · How I work · Work · Writing · CV

Clients are named on my CV. What happened inside them isn't. These are problem shapes, not case studies.

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A global FMCG business wanted viral social in Australia

The CMO had come from a market where that ask makes sense — where people will post brand-framed content and turn up for a hashtag. Australians won't. The brief was unanswerable before anyone opened a deck.

Underneath it, two further faults. The marketing team could recognise what they didn't want but couldn't specify what they did, so work was commissioned, made, and killed on sight. And the client's own approval chain ran to six months — longer than any cultural window worth entering. The agencies were carrying blame for a slowness they didn't own.

The complaint was speed. The cause was insertion point. I worked with the agency village leadership to redesign how the two sides connect, moving the agencies upstream of the moment the work gets determined.

The village now receives the whole business problem at planning, rather than after it's locked — so they can find the opportunity and resource against it, instead of pricing a brief that was already wrong. Approval went from six months to eight weeks.

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A regulator asked for a social strategy

What it had was a social function nobody owned. Responsibility sat across communications, policy and legal with no single point of decision — which is why the channel defaulted to broadcast. Announcements pushed outward, at an audience the organisation had never characterised.

The agency relationship showed the same fault from the other side. Simple social video — the kind that needs to be shot on a phone and out the same week — was arriving through production houses, shoot run sheets and editors in post, built around a classic adland idea it didn't need. The agency hadn't done anything wrong by its own standards. It delivered exactly what its process produces. The process was the wrong one for the work.

A strategy document would have arrived into a structure that couldn't act on it. So the work became the structure: governance and decision rights, how the team was shaped, what the roles genuinely required, how to interview for them.

The remit kept widening, and the content work I'd originally been commissioned for stopped being the job. I ran a procurement and handed it to a strategy and production partner rather than keep it. Scope across the engagement covered roughly $500k of budget, excluding media.

The team was rebuilt. Social moved from broadcast to audience-led — the organisation now starts from what people need to understand and works back, rather than from what it needs to say.

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A global QSR couldn't get young people to apply — Nordics, 2022

Young people had stopped applying. Not a perception problem the business could advertise its way out of — a pipeline problem, restaurants that couldn't staff themselves.

It was briefed as youth marketing, which is what everyone in the room had always done: tell young people the job exists and is good. But a sixteen-year-old isn't making an employment decision. They're making a social one — what it says about them, whether they'd tell their friends. Status is conferred by peers, never claimed by the employer, which makes advertising the one mechanism structurally incapable of fixing it.

I was the strategist across the Nordic markets, working with agency leadership and the client's own teams. The work was to move the creative ask before any creative got made — so what got commissioned was something young people would choose to engage with, in channels the business hadn't previously been willing to use.

The campaign was Effie-awarded for effectiveness.