Generation Z Summit 2023

Lisa Balestrieri, Senior Consultant, Kantar
Lisa sits in Kantar Consulting’s Creative Strategy team and has 5 years of experience working in Brand Strategy and Human & Cultural Insights across a variety of industries – from FMCG to beauty, fashion, and travel. She also has extensive research working on Brand Purpose, Positioning and DEI projects.

Lisa gets her energy from drawing the link between wider macro trends, emerging culture, and real human needs, enabling brands to drive meaningful change. Growing up in a bilingual and bicultural household, she is passionate about how different cultures shape people’s attitudes, behaviours and values.

Recent projects include helping a dairy brand in the Middle East redefine their purpose through the lens of female empowerment and unpacking a leading fashion brand’s positioning and DNA through a consumer and cultural lens to inform strategic recommendations.  

Marcella Bruno Senior Strategist, Discover.ai

Marcella Bruno is a Brand Strategist and Consumer Insights Specialist with a passion for unravelling the cultural shifts - and mysteries - of consumer behaviours, encompassing inner desires, narratives, and barriers.

Marcella brings her background in social policy and international charity research to her current multi-faceted role in data driven cultural and consumer insights.

Prior to embarking on her career in commercial research, her work focused on young people affected by hate crimes in the AMENA region, young women coping with mental health issues, and victims of sexual violence.

In her experience, these firsthand accounts of the challenges - and hopes - among marginalised young people have provided the key to truly delving into the core of the raw experiences and expectations of the new generation.

Today, Marcella combines this hands-on experience in ethnographic and traditional research with cutting-edge methodologies and advanced digital data insights. Her objective is to piece together the puzzle of Gen Z consumer personal narratives and behaviours, shedding light on how brands can effectively engage - and respond - to this distinctive target audience.

Dr Andy Burns, Director of Insight and Innovation, Brand Potential
Innovation & Insight Director at Brand Potential. A consumer psychologist, working at the interface of human behaviour, emotion, design and communication for over 20 years.

El Chetcuti, Brand Director, Sneak Energy
Brand director of Sneak energy. Heading up brand comms across community, influencers and campaigns as well as forming the cultural relevance and positioning of the brand in the ever growing energy sector. Formerly of fashion group Boohoo PLC and Missguided.

Laura Christian, Strategy Director at The Pineapple Lounge

Over 15 years of strategy and insight experience, with 7 years specialising in the family and youth sector. Laura has had a front row seat to the emerging generations from A-Z, joining the dots between insight and behaviour. An innate passion and flair for decoding kid-speak puts Laura at the centre of TPL’s innovation hub: new methodologies, creative techniques and applying theory to what we do best. At home, Laura is mum to two Jr Alpha’s; living, breathing the latest play trends and hot spots. 

Konrad Collao, Founder, Craft
Konrad has 20 years' experience investigating how people engage with media, technology and entertainment. He co-founded Craft in 2011. Based in London but with global reach, Craft is a boutique agency that helps its clients anticipate and react to changes wrought by the ongoing digital revolution. Using a mix of cultural insight, audience understanding and content development, Craft helps some of the world's biggest entertainment, news and sports brands to develop audience strategies and create content. 

Tim Donald, Creative Director, Sneak Energy
Creative Director at Sneak Energy, overseeing design, campaign concept development and production, and creative brand strategy. Tim has over a decade of experience, predominantly in advertising agencies, working with global brands such as Johnny Walker, Beats by Dre and Nike.

Dean Edwards, Co-Founder and Chief Insight Officer, MetaMinding Lab
Dean Edwards is the founder of Oliver Henry Consulting Ltd, a boutique market research consultancy based in Hong Kong and also Co-Founder and CIO of MetaMinding Lab, a company that uses Metaverse gaming to read Gen Z minds. With more than 30 years' experience Dean brings extensive, world class experience in qualitative and quantitative market research. Well respected in the market research industry in Asia, Dean is an active participant at events across the region and was a previous Chairman of the Market Research Society of Hong Kong. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry from Loughborough University.

Riwanon Gestin, MD, The Pineapple Lounge

Riwanon Gestin has been in the kids and youth insights game for over 20 years. Previously, she led research at PlayScience and was a vital part of MTV Networks' international research for a decade. She knows her way around the European, US, Japanese, and Chinese markets and has a keen eye for spotting global trends and local twists. At TPL, she's part of a tight-knit team of 14 from the UK, France, Ireland, and the US, all dedicated to understanding and connecting with young people and their families since 2010.

Helenor Gilmour, Director of Insight & Strategy, Beano Brain
Founder and Director of Strategy at Beano Brain, Helenor has 25 years global kids’ and family insight experience and has a broad business perspective having worked both client and agency side. An award-winning innovator in the kids and family insights field, she created Beano Brain’s Trendspotters panels & has been pivotal in growing the Beano brand.   Helenor is responsible for Beano Brain’s Thought Leadership programme and has authored various white papers focussing on Gen Z and Generation Alpha as well as launching the annual report of The Top 100 Coolest Brands according to kids in the UK and US in August 2023.

Jerryanne Hagan-Tetteh, Research Assistant, ClearView Research 
Jerryanne Hagan-Tetteh is a Research Assistant at ClearView Research. With a Bachelor's degree in Sociology and Criminology she has a passion for exploring the intersections of race, gender, identity, and social equity and loves working on projects that have the potential to drive positive societal change.
Gaining valuable experience in co-creation, data collection, and analysis, Jerryanne has worked on several projects where Children and Young people were the centre focus across the UK and the US. In particular, she has worked extensively with young Black girls to have an insight of their experiences across various life stages. She has also worked on initiatives to up-skilled community members, giving them training in research fundamentals.
Jerryanne also manages the clothing brand, UnXpectedClothings and provides events management and creative strategy services to various clients.

James Hamilton, Senior Audience Planner, Channel 4

Josephine Hansom, VP, Youth, Savanta

Kenny Imafidon, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Clearview Research

Kenny Imafidon is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of ClearView Research. is well connected across the social and public sector and has existing relationships with countless CEO’s, senior leaders and practitioners delivering voluntary or commercial services in local communities across the UK.
Kenny has led a number of high profile and world-record hitting campaigns, as well as two change.org petitions which received almost 70,000 signatures and national media attention and a petition calling for political education to be taught in all schools across England that gathered more than 30,000 signatures.
He featured in Forbes’ annual 30 under 30 list for Social Impact and is a trustee of several charities such as BBC Children in Need, Strength Within In Me Foundation, City Gateway and Spark Inside. He is also on the advisory board of HM The Queen’s newest charity, the Queen's Commonwealth Trust. Kenny has over a decades’ worth of experience in recruitment of people from ethnic minority backgrounds and underrepresented backgrounds.
Most recently, he published his memoir "That Peckham Boy" is a real-life manifesto calling for positive change for those on the fringes of society.

Alex Maguire, Insights & Measurement Director – EMEA, Twitch
Alex Maguire serves as the Insights & Measurements Director for the EMEA region at Twitch, with his base of operations in London. In this role, he leads Twitch's measurement strategy across the EMEA market, fostering collaborations with key clients and agencies to educate audiences and align advertising initiatives with consumer behavior.

Eugene Murphy, CEO, Indeemo
Eugene Murphy is the Founder and CEO of Indeemo. Indeemo is an AI powered, in-the-moment video research platform that helps researchers and designers understand people, products and experiences in the context of everyday life. 

Emese Pintér, Insights Specialist Asahi Europe and International

Emily Porter Salmon, Director of Semiotics and Cultural Insight, Sign Salad
Emily Porter-Salmon is a Director at Sign Salad, a cultural consultancy specialising in foresight, semiotics & language analysis. Emily has led projects for a wide range of brands across multiple markets and sectors. She has helped unlock the semiotic meanings of a wide range of cultural territories including wellbeing, metropolitanism, premiumness and helpfulness.
A geriatric Millennial parent of a Coronial toddler, Emily juggles an eclectic and occasionally embarrassing array of hobbies – from taking over the world in strategy computer games to attempting to contain her ever-expanding toy collection. Like most semioticians, she enjoys supermarkets as a recreational space.

Amanda Rhodes, Senior Director Insights, Coty UK&I

Alpa Arya Shah, Senior Manager Value Proposition, CIMA & AICPA

Alpa is a value proposition and market research specialist with extensive experience in developing solutions for B2B and B2C audiences and professional associations. She is responsible for designing new, and re-imagining existing value propositions, using design creation and validation methods that keep audience needs at the heart of design thinking. Alpa has been instrumental in developing understanding of the career development needs of Gen Z students and employees in the accounting and finance profession. Alpa’s background includes over 25 years of experience in the market research industry, working in a range of settings across global agencies, clientside at professional associations, and as a consultant. Her professional interests include understanding younger generations to design future-focused propositions, embedding diversity, equity and inclusion into proposition design, and creating holistic co-created customer solutions to solve strategic challenges.

Frances Spree, Senior Consultant, Savanta
Fran is a qualitative researcher at Savanta. As a Gen Z native, she’s passionate about next generation research and how brands can better meet the needs of young people. Fran works principally in the fashion and retail space and has seen first hand the rise of TikTok and its significance in how we shop, work and live.

Oliver Sweet, Head of Ethnography, Ipsos

Oliver has been running the Ethnography Centre of Excellence for the last 15 years. His experience spans both the public and private sector. He directs global ethnographic work that spans numerous sectors, including FMCG, Healthcare, Automotive, and Financial Services.
Through his experience, Oliver often combines anthropological thinking about how culture affects our lives, with social and cognitive psychology on how to create behavioural interventions. This mix of culture insight and behavioural science allows his work to truly focus on many of the unspoken drivers of consumer behaviour.
His work has spanned over 35 countries around the world and regularly writes in the marketing and research publications, and speaks at conferences about the importance of understanding consumers as real people making in-the-moment decisions. Oliver is a board member of the Association for Qualitative Researchers (AQR), and guest lectures at Goldsmiths College, London.

Matteo Petruzzo, Global Fundraising Project Manager, Amnesty International

Matteo Petruzzo is a Fundraising Project Manager working at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International. His role is to support country offices facing campaign and targeting challenges when they raise funds and engage with new and existing audiences. Innovation is at the core of his role and his expertise comes from almost 10 years of digital advertising and fundraising works across both the private and the non-for-profit sectors, across both the UK and international markets.