Having led development of global digital marketing infrastructure in several organisations, David has developed a broad and deep marketing technology experience.
Development and global deployment of such complex integrated marketing technology stacks requires effective organisational change management, budget, project and risk management, vendor selection and negotiation acumen, operational and people leadership, strong governance and stakeholder management, cultural awareness and sensitivity, emotional intelligence, and effective communication capability.
DXP, DAM and Web CMS platforms
David has led definition, design, development and deployment of web CMS and related digital marketing technology ecosystems, on a global scale on seven separate occasions. At ICON, David has led two website rebuilds, more recently migrating to Acquia DxP, entailing an integrated technology stack of Drupal CMS, Akami caching (WAF and CDN), digital asset management DAM, cloud-based Search Staxx site search, and website quality and governance monitoring tools for accessibility, usability and SEO.
Such was the speed of our fully integrated deployment I was invited by Acquia to speak at their 2025 EMEA customer event to present on ICON’s digital roadmap with the Acquia technology platform (see Events and view Acquia video).
The DAM also supports a number of internal portals (see also this Acquia DAM video testimonial):
The global common web platforms that David built and deployed at Deloitte & KPMG would support digital marketing teams and hundreds of marketers around the world in each organisation, supporting 130+ country websites in 30+ languages at each company.
Upon arrival at both organisations, David had a mandate to rescue troubled implementations which required immediate remediation (stability, performance and feature set) and ensure global deployment. This was achieved successfully, and in both organisations David would later secure significant $M CAPEX investment budgets to build a fit-for-purpose global digital platform, detailing all product requirements and evaluating major WCM vendors in a selection process.
KPMG was the first brand globally to launch on Adobe Experience Manager, whilst at Deloitte David led a platform upgrade on Vignette (since acquired by OpenText).
At both organisations David led selection, and management, of partner global digital agencies: AKQA (now part of WPP), SapientNitro (now PublicisSapient) and TAXI (now VML).
Social Media
Whilst at KPMG David launched the pioneering social media aggregation and data visualisation platform WEFLIVE. This platform aggregated Twitter activity from over 3,000 attendees at the World Economic Forum, including many global business, political and technology leaders. This aggregated social activity was analysed, categorised and presented via interactive data visualisations that enabled visitors and media to explore trending topics from the WEF Annual Forum. (See this article for more details). WEFLIVE supported KPMG’s global flagship brand program and would help secure media coverage for KPMG in top tier global media.
Social media policies: David has developed and implemented social media policies at both KPMG (see this video) and at ICON plc.
Social media hub: Visit the social dashboard for ICON. Had also previously launched a social media dashboard - Coronavirus Observatory - tracking COVID medical research developments during the 2020 pandemic (see PR).
Technology vendors: David has lead vendor selection and implementation of several technology providers: Crimson Hexagon and Talkwalker (monitoring), Spredfast and Hootsuite (posts management), Simply Measured (analytics), GIGYA (social login and sharing - acquired by SAP in 2017 and integrated into Customer Data Platform).
CRM & marketing automation
At ICON David chairs a weekly Leads Management meeting focused on related Salesforce CRM development roadmap. Participants include marketing digital operations, Inside Sales (which has dotted line reporting to David) and CRM technical operations. Data governance, dashboards and reporting, process automations and system integrations are all within scope of roadmap planning and delivery to accelerate sales velocity.
Marketing and sales are parts of the same commercial continuum. Marketing automation spans database governance, segmentation lists, lead scoring and grading, automated nurture campaigns, campaign analysis - all to ensure that the awareness and consideration generated via strong brand and demand generation campaigns are effectively converted to qualified leads for sales consideration.
David contributed a Sunday Business Post article on marketing automation. David has also been invited by SalesForce to speak at an EMEA customer success event, whilst ICON has been profiled by SalesForce as a 'customer success story'.
ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE
In 2020 David led development and deployment of an internal AI powered portal ‘PharmaTrends’ for automated market and customer intelligence that was integrated to both the marketing database and Salesforce CRM.
Employees could create a tailored news page by subscribing to newsfeeds on all ICON client segments.
Data enrichment analysis capabilities included natural language processing, sentiment analysis, article classification and topic tagging, entities detection and contextual ranking of contributors and articles.
Marketing Operations
David has implemented seamless cloud-based operations from enterprise work management (task, project and portfolio management, and dashboard tracking) to digital asset management (DAM) to brand portal and website publishing. ICON won an Innovator Award for its integrated implementation. WorkFront is now part of Adobe.
Search & Taxonomy
As a Chartered Information Scientist, David has long understood the importance of rich meta-data models to enable data manipulation, whether to power personalisation of web content, or to refine search algorithms and business rules for results relevancy. Developed ontology, defining entities and relationships for 'big data' manipulation on kpmg.com using SmartLogic, built taxonomies for Deloitte.com using Synaptica, configured Adobe Search & Promote for promoted web search results, and defined classification rules for enterprise search solutions such as Lucene/SOLR.
Have written several articles, an award winning peer-reviewed research paper, and spoke at several conferences on search engines (see Archive and Events for details).
Web Analytics
David has led vendor selection process for enterprise web analytics (e.g. core capabilities, dashboards and reporting, data export, risk managment, training and support) and has experience with Adobe Omniture, WebTrends, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
New GTLDs
Having first become involved with ICANN and new global top level domains (gTLDs) in 2007, David was the only brand representative to be invited by ICANN at the global press conference in London in June 2012 announcing this historic change to the internet, and was subsequently cited in a variety of major media including BBC News, The Economist, Wall Street Journal (see Media for full list). David led preparation of successful application to ICANN to operate a 'Dot KPMG' registry at the world root of the internet - financial, technical and operational plans, project management, policy development etc. David was previously a board member of the Brand Registry Group.
Desktop
Proficient in MS Office, some Photoshop, basic HTML