Founder of Quiet Riots
Twickenham, United Kingdom
- Current
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- Founder at Quiet Riots
- Past
- Education
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- Chartered Institute of Management Accountants
- University of Cambridge
- Connections
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397
connections
- Industry
- Internet
- Websites
Simon Darling’s Experience
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Founder
Quiet Riots
(Internet industry)
January 2008 — Present (1 year 11 months)
Quiet Riots enables people to change things by grouping up.
It's in development.
Had the idea in 2002 but put on hold for various reasons. Good to be working on it again. -
VP Marketing
Skype
(Internet industry)
2007 — 2007 (less than a year)
Performed interim role as VP Marketing from February 2007 to December 2007. Initially 2 days a week that became full-time by the end of the year.
Reorganised the team of 25 people to coordinated marketing activities with more focused objectives and metrics across all marketing channels including PR, online, onsite and EM, brand and design. Also included responsibility for 50 person customer support team but this bit largely ran itself with an excellent manager in charge.
Marketing delivered global campaigns across more than 10 sites with a localisation team communicating via email in over 20 languages. Fascinating having centralised marketing across so many territories.
Team launched the 3 Skypephone in partnership with the mobile operator, 3 in Italy, UK, Denmark, Hong Kong.
Member of the the Skype Management Team which included the period of transition over the summer from Niklas Zennstrom as CEO to Michael van Swaaij from eBay. -
Managing Director
Headingford
(Internet industry)
July 2006 — December 2007 (1 year 6 months)
Set up consultancy whilst I figured whether I wanted to start a new venture or join another company. Had enjoyed time at eBay, was ready to move on to new things, had one idea wanted to explore and decided to take time to have a look around.
Did consulting projects that ranged from a day or two to a few months with clients (or clients of companies I subcontracted via) that included Tesco, Microsoft, Joost, Warner Music, Skype.
Consulting on marketing leadership when integrated old and new channels, building customer-centric marketing infrastructure and leadership development.
During course of 2007 built plans for 2 possible ventures to start in 2008. Decided to pursue Quiet Riots.
I still do some consulting with Headingford. -
Customer Development Director
eBay UK
(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; ebay; Internet industry)
September 2005 — July 2006 (11 months)
In Oct 2005, I was part of the management team that reorganised the UK business to become even more customer-led as we moved from acquisition to retention. We scrapped the roles of Marketing Director and Category Director. I took responsibility for a 25 person team responsible for:
• Strategy: leading the development of eBay UK strategy for 2007-09
• Customer planning across product, marketing, customer support .
• Innovation prioritisation driven within 3 year strategic planning priorities
• Revenue, expense and resource allocation and targets
• Insight: a team of research and data analysts mining our customer data and qual data. This includes segmentation and churn modeling.
• Culture change and people development: strong personal interest in change leadership and culture; have led eBay UK’s Great Place To Work initiative; many learnings about re-org and what works and what would do differently next time
• Motors business
• UK Management Team member
• Global projects -
Marketing Director
eBay UK
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; ebay; Internet industry)
October 2002 — September 2005 (3 years )
Marketing Director (Aug 03–Sep 05); Head of Internet Marketing (Feb 03–Jul 03); Consultant (Oct 02-Jan 03)
• Leadership: built team from 8 to 30 with marketing budget grown from humble origins to in excess of £10m with business objectives of acquisition and growing share of wallet of existing user base. User base grown from 4 million to in excess of 10 million.
• Brand & marketing strategy
• Internet marketing: built IM team from 4 to 8 providing highly cost effective CPA through search marketing, affiliate marketing and portal marketing.
• E-mail & Onsite marketing: lead development of behavioural segmentation on 10m+ user base; campaign management; partnership with dunnhumby
• Offline marketing: selected eBay UK’s first creative agency for launch of Oct 04 TV campaign; selecting media agency
• PR: challenge is to prioritise PR activity to focus on strategic marketing priorities; hired Head of PR from leading consumer PR agency with strong strategic planning skills -
European Business Development Director
Bolt
(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Online Media industry)
February 2001 — February 2002 (1 year 1 month)
Bolt is a venture-capital backed, US incorporated, web and mobile youth communications platform service. Was responsible for selling Bolt’s white label community management solutions into the major European telecom operators, handset manufacturers, their portals and media companies.
• Established high level contact in target clients within three months through tenacious networking
• Presented a compelling sales pitch whilst the product offering was often ill-defined and not certain to be built.
• Chased meetings with many different groups in each target client with proposals reaching advanced stages with several including Nokia, BT Cellnet and Sky. None ultimately closed. Although tightening budgets in the telecoms and media markets was a contributory factor, the main reason was that we were selling a service to a buyer who wasn’t asking for what we had. They only wanted a small part of it that didn’t require such major integration with their existing offerings. -
Founder and Sales & Marketing Director
Fonepark
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Telecommunications industry)
January 2000 — February 2001 (1 year 2 months)
A business providing location-enabled SMS text messaging chat services to consumers and businesses.
• Sought and successfully closed seed investment capital with The Accelerator Group (TAG) and an angel investor. Gained experience of detailed VC Term Sheets with minority shareholder protections as part of TAG’s investment negotiation.
• Hired a team of 9 young, relatively inexpensive, inexperienced staff that with hindsight would have been better composed of fewer, more experienced people.
• Successfully built the first and second versions of the application using an IT development company in Prague saving considerable money compared to equivalent UK resource.
• As it became apparent that it was at least another 12 months before mobile operators would be able to revenue share, we sought a buyer for the business.
• Closed a cash and equity deal with Bolt, moved two of the Fonepark team across and laid off the remainder -
Interactive Marketing Manager
Unilever
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; Consumer Goods industry)
December 1995 — December 1998 (3 years 1 month)
Wrote a job description whilst working in Lever Europe in 1995 and sent it to Senior Managers in Unilever Corporate explaining that the internet had huge implications for Unilever and I would like a strategic development role.
• Worked on new media projects including Ragu, Lynx, Domestos, Persil, I Can’t Believe Its Not Butter. Strong network at all levels both inside Unilever in marketing, sales, purchasing and research and outside including WPP and marketing services companies.
• Built a network of internet marketing agitators across the business culminating in the focusing of resource in North American and European Interactive Brand Centres. Two $15m three-year deals were done with AOL and MSN making it at the time “the world’s largest commitment to internet advertising” (CNN, 1998).
• Ran many workshops with regular ratings on feedback forms as ‘inspirational’.
• Rated as ‘Outstanding’ in management appraisal and awarded bonus for meeting ‘stretch’ targets -
Finance Manager
Unilever
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; Consumer Goods industry)
September 1993 — November 1995 (2 years 3 months)
Finance Manager, Lever Europe (UK)
Company Financial Reporting Manager (1995) and Home Care Group Assistant Management Accountant (1994/3) working in Jif, Domestos and Dove teams. Completed Unilever’s two year UCMDS training scheme including factory experience, marketing, management and sales training.
Simon Darling’s Education
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Chartered Institute of Management Accountants
CIMA Passed Finalist , 1993 — 1995
Sir Ian Morrow Prize, Strategic Management & Marketing
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University of Cambridge
BA , Economics , 1989 — 1992
First; Scholar, Corpus Christi College
Additional Information
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