ITV’s Rufus Radcliffe scoops marketer of the year prize
Radcliffe was the popular choice of a jury consisting of some of the UK’s most prominent marketing voices. He was selected from a shortlist of the highest rated marketers in the Marketing Week Top 100, sponsored by Salesforce.
It’s been a big 18 months for ITV CMO Rufus Radcliffe. In June 2019, he took on additional responsibility for its direct-to-consumer division, including the brand’s premium streaming service ITV Hub+, which now has more than 400,000 paid-up users. He is also a director of BritBox, the streaming venture from ITV and the BBC, which has seen “strong growth” in UK subscribers since launching in November 2019.
To top if off, he is now been named Marketer of the Year at the Marketing Week Masters awards. Radcliffe was the popular choice of a jury consisting of some of the UK’s most prominent marketing voices. He was the top choice from a shortlist of the highest rated marketers in the Marketing Week Top 100, sponsored by Salesforce.
ITV also scooped the award for Team of the Year and the Grand Prix for ‘Britain Get Talking’, an initiative it created with Uncommon to encourage conversations about mental health.
Rufus Radcliffe has been on ITV’s management board since 2017, overseeing marketing. In the fiercely competitive world of TV, Radcliffe has helped shift the ITV brand away from its “cosy” image towards something more culturally relevant, especially among lighter viewers.
He’s ramped up the company’s marketing capabilities by hiring a director of consumer marketing and a director of media to “get people to watch our stuff and spend time with us”, as well as creating an econometric model to understand media effectiveness.
Radcliffe is also passionate about integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into the business, and is using AI to build complex ad products for the ITV Hub. He also managed to poach Sanjeevan Bala from Channel 4 as ITV’s new group chief data and AI officer at the start of the year.
