Member Article

Live & Breathe appoints maverick strategist Jamie King

Award winning integrated retail and shopper agency Live & Breathe is bolstering its senior team with the appointment of Jamie King as executive planning director, who comes from Cheil.

King joins Live & Breathe this week to work across both the Leeds and London offices on its Birds Eye, Morrisons, Pernod Ricard, SAB Miller, The Restaurant Group, World Duty Free and Wyevale Garden Centres accounts. He will play an active role in new business and staff training, as well as managing the agency’s largest projects and overseeing all strategic output.

King, an integrated and shopper/retail marketing specialist, has over 20 years’ experience in retail and brand strategy, gained from working both agency and client-side for some of the world’s leading brands including the UK’s biggest retailer, Tesco, and the UK’s largest mobile network, EE.

At Cheil, King was responsible for developing integrated shopper, retail, experiential and ATL strategies, running the agency’s planning academy, which included developing a team of up-and-coming planners, and the day-to-day running of its planning department. He played a key role in Cheil’s core Samsung accounts and worked on developing new business with a number of brands including Coca-Cola GB and Fox’s Biscuits.

His first taste of agency life was in the planning department at Elvis Communications, where he joined to boost its shopper marketing capability. He began his career at Tesco, working up from the shop floor to head office, supporting the development of the Metro store format and then Tesco’s non-food offering, creating the cross-category Seasonal Plan, still in use to date. From Tesco he moved to the Woolworths Group, and then to T-Mobile UK (latterly EE), before moving agency side.

King will report into Live & Breathe MD Nick Gray.

Nick Gray said: “We were immediately struck by Jamie’s searing intelligence complemented by a down-to-earth nature, which make him the perfect fit for the agency and our clients. Jamie is a high-calibre individual and has done his time on the shop floor, gaining a real insight into how retail works from the ground up. He has a reputation for having strong, informed views and isn’t scared to do things differently to get the best result. Add this all together and he is the embodiment of our agency philosophy: Considered solutions, maverick thinking.

“This maverick nature will play a key role in helping us to reach our ambition of becoming the most famous independent integrated retail agency in the industry.”

Jamie King added: “The world is changing fast and ordinary people have more power over brands than ever. Evolving lifestyles, tech innovation and savvy consumer behaviour demand new creative approaches to business challenges. Planning has a crucial role in long term business health – shaping personalised consumer experiences, redefining value, and helping reinvigorate and reinvent brands.

“There is a huge opportunity for agencies like Live & Breathe to shape new strategies that connect brands and retailers with their audiences. Insight-led customer experiences that strengthen brands and deliver measureable commercial benefits are the Holy Grail. That’s my focus for our clients at Live & Breathe and I believe the agency is perfectly poised for success, with a mix of well-established clients, exciting recent wins and a brilliant team of people that I’m really excited to join.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Alex Sampson .