Meet Jaywing's new UK managing director Dr Catherine Kelly who has made a career out of telling stories with numbers

The listed business, which has offices in Leeds, Sheffield, Sydney and Melbourne, uses numbers to tell stories for its clients. The approach has seen it work with businesses across a wide range of industries on a diverse range of data science, creative and media projects, such as using data and modelling to help catalogue firm Studio Retail’s transformation into ecommerce.

Last year, Jaywing executed an award-winning campaign for Ironmongery Direct and ElectricalDirect, which included a giant piece of artwork made up of 687 high-vis vests that was displayed on a construction site in the West End of London to represent the annual number of trade suicides in the UK.

At the helm of the business is mathematician Dr Catherine Kelly. “We talk about marketing being storytelling and at Jaywing all our stories are told with numbers,” she says on a video call from her home in South Yorkshire. “One can’t exist without the other.”

Kelly, who joined Jaywing in 2017, was promoted to UK managing director in January this year from her previous role as managing director of media and science.

Her promotion coincided with Jaywing unveiling its new brand proposition: ‘stories written with numbers’.

It also comes as Jaywing continues to battle challenging economic conditions.

Last year, the company restructured its UK business, removing around 14 per cent of its headcount, resulting in 20-30 job losses.

It now employs 245 staff across the UK and Australia.

In a trading update this week, the agency said trading in Australia and its risk consulting business had continued to offset weakness in the UK agency market.

It has launched a strategic review to explore options for the business, including a possible sale.

However, it stated that, while market conditions continue to be challenging, there are "encouraging signs of recovery”. Significant new contracts have been secured, including with Crocs (Asia Pacific) and with Homes England.

“Market conditions have been really tough,” admits Kelly. “That’s been the case across most agencies and we went early on a couple of things. Firstly ensuring the cost base was set up in the right way for what we thought the future looked like. I think that was probably quite brave and forward thinking.

“Secondly, it enabled us to make sure that we have the right talent profile. Clients want a variety of different things and we took the opportunity to ensure that we had the right skill sets to move forward.”

AI is a key driver of growth for Jaywing. The company has been using machine learning for 25 years and now uses AI at the heart of its technologies, including customer experience modelling.

"It’s a tool that can be used to power marketing messages so that the right people get things that are really relevant to them rather than just blasting everybody with the same information,” says Kelly.

Jaywing has also built a tool, using AI, to measure the impact of PR. “That’s been game changing for our PR clients,” says Kelly. “Measuring and understanding the impact of PR is really hard and it can be a barrier for our clients to unlock more spend."

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Kelly has been using machine learning since she was a mathematics student at Nottingham University in the late Nineties.

"The recent game changer is not the AI capability and the modelling capability but the processing power capability, which didn’t come until the late teens,” she says.

"When I first started at Jaywing, there were already AI models as part of what we did, we just didn’t brand it and make it fashionable.”

She adds: "Nobody was shouting about it back then because nobody cared what was inside that box. A bank just cared that they could assess how likely somebody was to default from a loan.”

Finding a career that combines maths and marketing is a dream come true for Kelly.

"There are two kinds of mathematicians: The ones that love pure maths and the ones that enjoy maths with purpose. I’m the second, pure maths bores me,” she says.

After completing her degree and a PhD where she modelled an immunotherapy cancer treatment that employed white blood cells to deliver drugs to the cancer site, she decided to change direction and look for jobs in business.

Her first role as an analyst in the marketing department at premium drinks company Diageo was where she fell in love with marketing at a time when the use of data, analysis and modelling was in its infancy.

She was advised to progress her career with a commercial position so she moved to Kelloggs where she spent three and a half years in commercial and operational roles before returning to Diageo to set up a business intelligence (data science) team.

Eight years and three children later, Kelly, who was spending several days a week in London away from her family, made the call to move her career back to Yorkshire.

She took a role as head of data science at Asda in Leeds, where she had her fourth child, and a year later was headhunted by Jaywing.

"It was a big leap going from client side to agency side but I’ve never looked back,” she says.

Kelly, who describes herself as kind, passionate, hardworking and optimistic, says her aim for Jaywing is to be one of Prolific North’s top three integrated agencies, the benchmark ranking for the North’s top performing agencies. “I think we can achieve that. We’re in the top 10,” she says.