Fractional CMO. Twenty-five years in marketing, two decades of it running an agency.
I'm Anthony Tattum, a Birmingham-based fractional CMO and co-founder of the Big Cat agency. I help businesses build the commercial marketing structures that make growth repeatable. I've been a founder, an MD and a CMO, and spent a fair amount of that time learning what doesn't work.
Most growing businesses have the same problem: their marketing doesn't reflect their commercial ambition. The brand undersells the business. The go-to-market is reactive. Marketing and sales aren't pulling the same way.
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Marketing consultancy and fractional CMO.
Senior marketing leadership for businesses whose growth has outrun their marketing capability.
Six stages, run as a loop, behind every Bonobo & Co engagement. Built to grow revenue and profit, build the brand and add value to the business.
A nine-session high-growth marketing programme, workshops for teams, and talks for founders and marketers.
The brands had to connect and the marketing had to sell. That was true when I was filling venues in the nineties, and it's true for the boards I work with now.
In the nineties I built youth brands that happened to be in entertainment and leisure. I had no word for marketing yet, just a knack for experiences that drew big crowds, and a very honest measure of whether they worked.
The room was either full or it wasn't.
In 2000 Nick Morgan and I turned that knack into a consultancy and built an agency model around it: Big Cat, headquartered in Birmingham. We were entrepreneurial, so we kept building our own brands alongside our clients'. London became our centre for large, complex outdoor events for tens of thousands of people. In the Midlands we worked with destinations and universities.
In 2014 the group split. The London events business went to Nick and I kept Big Cat. The team grew across services and sectors: B2B and B2C, direct-to-consumer and in person. Big Cat was built to deploy the right strategy, creative and tactics, whatever they turned out to be. Never just digital, PR or TV. Everything, working together, for the short term and the long.
Merging with spottydog communications to form Leopard Co made obvious sense. Four years as co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, building the agency's strategic approach and its use of behavioural science.
Everything above is what Bonobo & Co and Vector are built from.
BusinessDesk Leadership Awards
Former IPA Midlands City Head
Institute of Practitioners in Advertising
Big Cat, The Fair, Leopard Co
Places I have spoken, taught or been asked to comment.
I've spent my career adopting new technologies. The internet, search engines, algorithms, social media, and now AI.
Every one of them a means to an end.
We understand the laws of marketing, how brands grow and how people actually behave better than we ever have. Those things are constant and predictable. The technology should work with them, not rub against them. That is the whole job.
Some of the evidence I built. The rest changed how I work.
A behavioural framework, developed with Richard Shotton in 2020 and used in client work since.
A five-year research project into how figurative language works in advertising, published in 2022 with Dr Samantha Ford.
Tracking how visible a brand is to AI systems, on the view that being visible to a model is becoming about as commercially useful as being visible in search.
The Long and the Short of It
Les Binet and Peter Field's analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank, published in 2013. The case for balancing long-term brand building with short-term activation.
How Brands Grow
Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, 2010. The evidence that brands grow by reaching more buyers, and by being easy to think of and easy to buy.
Proud Brummie. Dad of two. Coffee snob. Enthusiastic but slow runner. Secret sci-fi nerd.
If you have a growth problem you cannot quite name yet, that is usually a good time to talk.
Get in touch