The sports camera company’s vice-president of brand marketing and communications tells Tim Healey how a rough idea about rewarding the best amateur goal grew into its biggest brand communications platform.

You’ve worked across strategy, agency and client-side roles and now lead brand marketing and communications at Veo. How did that journey unfold?

I studied illustration at university. I wanted to be a Marvel comic book artist, but quickly realized that wasn’t going to pay the rent. I ended up in media sales at Haymarket, working on PR Week and Marketing Magazine, and that’s where I fell in love with marketing communications.

In my spare time, I was DJing, skating and playing American football, and what I was seeing in culture wasn’t reflected in brand communications. Magazines like Vice and Vibe were capturing it, but brands weren’t. So I started offering my services as a new business developer and advisor.

I moved to Copenhagen and launched a consultancy advising strategists on culture and how planning could be more responsive to trends. That ran for nine years. We worked with brands like Nike, Adidas and Ferrari. Looking back, we were quite arrogant. Our approach was very much: ‘we know culture, you don’t’, which led to some heated debates with clients.

I later moved into agencies, including Leo Burnett, but found that strategy in that environment is often limited by the need to ultimately deliver ads. There were opportunities to shape broader business direction, like product or design, that sat outside that remit.

After roles at Pandora and McCann, I made what felt like a risky move to join Veo, then a small startup with Series B funding. It probably seemed insane to leave a global agency for a business with little awareness at the time.

Five years later, we’re now at Series C, and we’ve taken the brand from ‘Who?’ to winning creative sports campaign of the year in 2025, doing the kind of fun, culturally relevant work I’ve always wanted to make.

Veo offer a camera and software system to enable recording and sharingof sporting moments.

What is the offer at Veo?

So Veo is one of Europe’s fastest growing SAAS companies and anchored in the sports technology category. We make 10 things, including a camera for recording sports that is relatively simple to use and broadcast-quality.

If you see a little green alien shape on a tripod on pitches all around the UK or the US, that’s probably us. On the back end is our AI-powered software that can analyze, dissect and livestream this footage.

So now we’ve got a situation where my mum, who lives in St. Lucia for half the year, watches my son’s games just as much as she watches the Premier League because we can stream for free. Democratization looms large in our DNA. We believe that everybody should have access. So that’s our journey.

What’s coming up for Veo in 2026?

Following our success, we’re in a new league, and we’re learning to be quite comfortable in that skin. We are fully in scale-up territory, moving towards being profitable as an organization.

That throws up some wonderful challenges now, as both a consumer electronics organization and a SaaS organization. We’re focused on growth, but also being robust with our existing structures: in our corporate communication, brand communication and brand experience. For example, how do people interact with us when they have a challenge? Customer service is crucial.

How is your marketing team structured?

I have a small group of ninjas – a team of eight. Everything’s based on mutual trust. Everybody’s got really good skills. I’ve had bigger teams on my watch, but I really like this setup. A colleague in a different business was convinced we had a team of around 100 people.

We’re a tight-knit group of digital natives and editorial folks – specialists in photography, creative and videography. The majority of the communications output you see from Veo is created by my team.

Rob on stage in conference mode.

Drawing on your leadership expertise, what has your career taught you that helps you to make a great team?

Most of my learnings are from playing team sports. I played American football at an amateur level up until my mid-20s. I coached for about another 15 years. Team sport really teaches you that the person at the lowest part of the totem pole can be just as important as the one at the top.

For example, players of an American Football team need hydration. The person who provides the water is crucial. If you don’t get hydrated, the 52 players are not going to get very far. Through football, I learned to recognize patterns: how and when to deliver bad news, when to challenge, and when to try and inspire. Everything came from a sports background.

Could you describe a moment when your instincts and the data pointed in different directions? How did you decide where to go? And what was your takeaway from the experience?

It’s actually the thing that Veo is most well-known for right now. Around four years ago, we kept having conversations as a team about the idea of doing some sort of award that would reward ‘the best grassroots goal’. We finally had a way of doing it and we drafted a Photoshop letter to Fifa to kind of say: “We think we’ve got great goals that maybe you haven’t seen”. We sent it, and then we went to lunch.

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I thought that would be the end of it. Four years later, the awards are the biggest brand communications platform we have. Over 300,000 people vote. Over 2,000 people enter with goals from all over the world, which is crazy.

It really proved a hypothesis that I believed in 100%, but I didn’t know for sure. I was so pleasantly surprised. Every time we start the preparations for the new year of the award, I do chuckle because I remember there’s a couple of people in the team who wouldn’t let the idea go. Finally, I said, ‘OK, fine, let’s do it.’ We came back from lunch that day and all hell was breaking loose.

One of the things that’s always jarred with me about the advertising and marketing communications category and industry is that I always found the strategists to be arrogant, annoying and always wanting to be the smartest people in the room.

One of the things which we did really well at Leo Burnett, and at McCann as well was to deconstruct that a little bit. We’re beginning to understand more and more that it’s about being in the right territory, and not being about viewing through a single lens.

Audience ‘need states’ are moving fast. Things are changing all around us, especially given technology, politics and culture. Trying to pin down precisely ‘what people want’ is futile. I believe that marketing is more about achieving some sort of consistency and clarity with communication.

Quantitative and qualitative research methods should live alongside each other. The data will tell you what – at a particular moment – has happened. But I am fascinated by why it happened. A lot of the initiatives work for us because we’ve got our finger on the pulse of what the audience is thinking and feeling. We don’t pander to it. We play with it.

Championing grassroots football at all levels, Veo’s People Puskas campaign.

Could you tell us about one significant activity you’ve deliberately stopped? What capacity did it release and what did the results teach you?

We had an initiative that I was fully behind. And early doors, we could tell it wasn’t working. Either we didn’t get it right or the timing wasn’t right. I had a one-to-one with our chief revenue officer who I report into. To be honest, I use our meetings a bit like a psychiatrist’s couch.

I was very honest. I explained, “You know I really wanted to do this. I had full belief. I pitched it, got the investment. But it’s not working.” The wonderful part was that he just said: “OK, then kill it.”

Somebody once said that when an initiative isn’t working, it’s almost like a train going in the wrong direction. The longer you sit on that train, the further you’ve got to get back to a destination that is any good. Learn fast, trial in small doses. When something works, keep going.

How do you manage to surf the tidal wave of marketing technology?

I don’t actually, I’m getting worse. When I was 17, I was like Tom Cruise in Minority Report with technology. These days I look at my kids, and tech flows through them. I’ve retained a little bit of the ability to curate, but I’m now at that stage where I actually hire the kind of people that I wish I was.

I hire people who can navigate the absolute tsunami of tech that’s out there. I’m also becoming more and more aware of my own biases. I’m going to be 50 in January. Most of my team are between 25 and 28 years old.

When working with them, I might be referring to George Michael’s hit single ‘Freedom’ and I have to remind myself that most of my team weren’t born when that was released. I think the marketing communications industry needs to get a handle on and move beyond the old way of working. The foundations of marketing will never change. But there are some wonderful things happening and I think we’ll have huge benefits for work and for success from a technology perspective.

What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?

Marketing is not a siloed set of exercises that the accounts person hands over to the strategist who briefs the creative team and then they never speak again. The opposite is true. The more collaborative you can be about the gathering of intelligence and then working together to find out how that can be exemplified, the more that can be used in a collaborative sense, the better it is. The problem is, that’s not an often-used business metric.

There needs to be implicit trust between different arms of the business. In the past, when I was agency side, I worked with creative teams where I’ve been their ‘defense lawyer’ and explained to clients why the work will align with strategy. Now I am client-side, I see myself as lucky to have co-conspirators that we work with, both within my team and externally. If you get what we’re after, we will do some work together. And if that’s successful, we will do some more.

Veo’s system allows for academic game analysis.

What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer that I interview?

What is the biggest revelation you have witnessed in the last year that will affect the next 10 years in marketing?

I know for me, for instance, that would be the proper use of AI. There are amazing benefits. The improper use of AI is a huge worry.

Having a team that is super-collaborative is key. It is one of the reasons why I pulled everything in-house. I’ve been on both sides. Agency and client. When I was in the agency, I didn’t get to spend enough time with the client to fully understand their business. As a client, I found that I could brief an agency in the morning, but things could change literally within a few hours and we’d need a rebrief.

When I’ve got a team, like my ninjas, or my ‘marines’ as I call them, we can discuss, we can pivot. I want my team to feed me information. In American football, you have an offensive line. They can communicate, they protect the quarterback, who’s the most highly paid player on the team, but they can all speak to each other without looking at each other.

That’s what we are working towards with my team. You have to trust that the person on that side will do what they set out to do. Once you employ the same approach, you get to move so much faster. In 2026, without that mentality, it’s just not going to work now. Things are moving way too fast.

Veo believes that ‘the beautiful game’ deserves to be played and enjoyed by women just as much as men and continues to campaign and support women’s football.

Your question from the last senior marketer I interviewed is: which ad is your guilty pleasure? One you might be embarrassed to reveal you love – and why do you love it?

John West ‘Bear Fight’. It still makes me laugh every time I see it. It just speaks to ‘the absolute’, you know, it’s the same reason why I watched The Two Ronnies’ ‘Four Candles’ sketch. It’s just so stupid. It is brilliant.

If there is one thing you know about marketing, it is?

Marketing is everything. It is how you can consistently deliver a competitive advantage.

Marketing is every touchpoint you have with your customers. Today more than ever: when I’m in California and I visit the Apple visitor center, and I touch the corner of the table, and I realize the corners of the table are the same proportions as the corner of the laptop that I’m looking at now or the corner of my Apple watch or the corner of my phone.

When I go to Aesop to buy skincare, I can be in any store in the world, no two stores look alike, and yet the staff will speak to me in a familiar way. They will ask me to try something. There will be a sink so that I can wash my hands.

Marketing is as much about what you do in analog as digital. It’s about how you behave, how you sound. Marketing right now is absolutely everything because the audience is moving fast. The audience is always on. The audience is constantly making rational and irrational decisions consciously and subconsciously about what they want to enjoy, what makes their life easier, what would be an advantage.

Our role as marketers is to make sure that when it comes to that need state, our product or service is there. If you’ve done that well, then they’ll choose you even when there’s another product or service that’s exactly the same, or maybe even better: they’ll choose you because they have an affinity to you and that’s ‘brand’.

This interview is brought to you in partnership with Worth Your While – an independent creative agency based in Copenhagen, working globally. Named one of The Drum’s Indie Agency Top 100, WYW exists on the belief that time is humanity’s most valuable resource, and that the only ideas worth making are ones that earn it. You might die tomorrow. Make today worth your while.

Tim Healey listens, learns, and synthesizes real-world best practices from hundreds of marketing professionals and serves them up in his weekly interviews for The Drum. Tim’s Little Grey Cells Club is a trusted, no-sales, peer-driven network where senior-level marketing directors unite to exchange authentic insights, confront challenges, and drive leadership forward.