Jack Glancy is a Performance Planning Lead at Brave Bison. He has worked across major brands including New Balance, Tottenham Hotspur, Pandora, Asda and Pernod Ricard, with experience spanning paid media, forecasting, budget planning, incrementality and marketing effectiveness.
Who is your digital hero?
I’ve never really been someone who has had a particular digital hero, but looking at how much digital has changed in such a short space of time, I think it would be hard for me not to say Sam Altman.
AI obviously existed long before ChatGPT, but what Sam and OpenAI have done is make it accessible in a way that has completely changed how people and businesses interact with technology.
What has he done to win hero status in your eyes?
For me, it’s the scale of the change.
AI has gone from something that felt quite futuristic to something I use every day for analysis, planning, automation and challenging my own thinking.
The biggest thing is that it has reduced the gap between having an idea and actually being able to do something with it. That has opened up a huge amount of possibility for people who might not traditionally have had the technical skills to build, analyse or automate things themselves.
How has his heroism helped drive digital?
I think AI is the biggest change we have seen in digital for a very long time.
It is changing how we build, how we analyse data, how we create content and even how we search for information.
It is also changing where the value of a marketer sits.
If AI can increasingly optimise campaigns, analyse datasets and automate a lot of execution, then our value needs to move further towards asking the right questions, understanding the business problem and making better decisions.
For me, that is the exciting part. Less time spent on repetitive execution should mean more time spent actually thinking.
What are the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
Measurement and transparency are still the biggest ones for me.
We are going to automate more and more of digital marketing, but automation does not automatically mean better decision making.
The danger is that platforms become increasingly automated across targeting, bidding, creative and measurement, and we just accept the answer because the technology is more sophisticated.
We still need to keep asking a basic question: did the marketing actually change the outcome, or did it just get credit for it?
AI can help us answer that, but we still need humans who are willing to challenge the answer.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
Probably the shift I’ve made from tactical thinking into much more strategic planning.
A lot of my career was spent getting deep into performance marketing, whether that was platforms, audiences, optimisation, budgets or trying to squeeze more efficiency out of campaigns.
The biggest change has been learning when to step away from that detail and start with the wider business problem instead.
Rather than asking, “how do we make this campaign perform better?”, I’m now much more likely to ask, “where should we actually invest?”, “what role should each channel play?”, “are we creating demand or just capturing it?” and “how much of what we are seeing is actually incremental?”
That shift has completely changed how I think about planning.
I’m probably most proud of keeping the tactical understanding I built earlier in my career, but now being able to use it to make much broader strategic decisions.
For me, the best strategy comes from understanding the detail, but also knowing when to step away from it.
