Taking on the leadership of a major industry body is no small task. But for Simon Michaelides, known across the industry as a “change agent”, stepping in as the new director general of ISBA feels like a natural fit.

“‘I’m not the steady as she goes guy,” Michaelides tells Marketing Week. “I like the transformation briefs where there’s an opportunity to build something, whether that’s organisational capability, brands or products and services.”

Michaelides officially takes up the post today (10 November), succeeding Phil Smith, who led ISBA for eight years. For him, the appeal of the role lies in the scale of change facing the industry.

“We’re probably going through the most dynamic period the advertising and marketing industry has ever experienced,” he says. “The opportunity to work at the centre of the industry in such a prestigious organisation as ISBA, and to be a part of helping to determine those solutions and shape the future of the industry was really appealing.”

A ‘squiggly’ career path

Michaelides describes his route to this point as a “squiggly career path” and a “perfect convergence” of all his past experience across multiple sectors, roles and challenges.

“I always describe myself as a bit of a professional magpie,” he says. “I’m eternally curious and I love putting myself into new situations where there’s a great opportunity for me to learn something new, hence why I’ve changed industry sectors an awful lot.”

He began his career at P&G and PepsiCo before taking on senior leadership roles including chief commercial officer at UKTV, chief marketing and innovation officer at BBC Studios UK and chief customer and strategy officer at Riviera Travel.

More recently, he served as chief customer officer and later acting CEO at Great British Racing, which, like ISBA, operates as a member-funded not-for-profit organisation. Michaelides says that experience provided “huge parallels” with his new role.

He’s no stranger to ISBA either, having previously served as a non-executive director and council member between 2020 and 2023.

I’m a big believer that you don’t know what you don’t know, so why not experiment and test the boundaries?

Simon Michaelides, ISBA

Looking back, Michaelides admits he’s consistently run toward “burning platforms and blue-sky opportunities”.

“I had a coach once who told me, ‘Your problem is that you think of yourself as a marketer who happens to be a change agent. You’re actually a change agent who happens to be a marketer,’” he recalls.

That mindset has underpinned a series of transformation projects across his career – from pioneering shopper marketing at P&G to “tearing up the rulebook” on juice innovation at Tropicana and leading a turnaround at Walkers crisps during the first wave of regulation around less healthy foods.

Most recently, at Great British Racing, he led an organisational restructure, overhauled governance and oversaw the sport’s largest-ever advertising campaign.

“I’ve always tried to add new strings to my bow,” he says. “I want to know: am I any good at this? Do I enjoy it? If not, I’ll shut the door. But if I am, keep it in the mix. I’m a big believer that you don’t know what you don’t know, so why not experiment and test the boundaries?”

“I always aim to chase down that opportunity and leave the business in better shape. And thank goodness, I’ve yet to fail,” he adds.

Key priorities

Despite his reputation for transformation, Michaelides is not rushing in with a ready-made playbook. His first priority, he says, is to listen to members, staff and the broader industry.

That aligns closely with the advice from his predecessor Phil Smith, who told Marketing Week earlier this year: “Listen to the members. Spend time understanding what’s keeping them up at night, because there’s a lot. Marketers are being asked to do more with less. It’s not getting easier for a marketer to navigate today’s world.”

“The absolute number one priority is to listen,” says Michaelides. “I know ISBA and I know the industry, but I’m just one person with one perspective.”

Once that groundwork is done, he says the task will be to define clear priorities that best serve members’ interests. Among those priorities, Michaelides identifies the impact of AI as a defining issue for the industry and for ISBA’s role within it.

“[AI] is very far-reaching. From what should the organisational structure of the marketing department of the future look like? What skill sets will it need? What does it mean for contracting with agencies, for the agency model and for remuneration?” he adds.

Another key focus is diversifying ISBA’s membership and attracting organisations that may not have previously seen it as relevant to them.

“To many observers, ISBA still feels anchored in above-the-line brand advertising,” he admits. “To a degree, that’s true but that was never intended to be at the exclusion of any other advertisers. ISBA is totally inclusive as an organisation.”

However, he recognises that perception can be a powerful barrier.

“The perception from many digital-first, ecommerce or performance marketing-led businesses is often that ISBA isn’t for them,” he says. “Perception is reality. If we’re seen that way, there’s clearly something we’re not doing to engage and appeal to those organisations.”

That, he says, will mean re-examining ISBA’s language, positioning, and outreach to ensure it feels relevant to newer forms of advertising and marketing.

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Michaelides is inheriting an organisation that has already undergone significant evolution under Smith’s leadership.

“In the last eight years, ISBA’s profile has just grown consistently and gone from strength to strength,” he says.

He highlights ISBA’s work on Origin – the cross-media measurement initiative developed in partnership with advertisers, agencies and platforms – as a landmark achievement. The project, which measures deduplicated reach and frequency across YouTube, Meta and linear TV, is currently in its expanded availability phase with around 50 advertisers testing real campaign data.

Project Origin is now being spun off as a standalone company, which Smith will chair.

He also points to ISBA’s 2025 Media Services Framework, which sets updated principles for advertiser–agency relationships and initiatives like the Ad Accessibility Network, which helps the industry make advertising more inclusive and accessible as well as ISBA’s role in providing guidance around the advertising of less healthy foods.

The evolving role of ISBA

Looking ahead, Michaelides says ISBA has a role to play as a “neutral enabler” within the industry, particularly as debates around performance versus brand marketing continue to polarise marketers.

“The balance between brand building and performance marketing is still a hot topic,” he says.

Because ISBA represents organisations rather than individual marketers, he says, it’s in a unique position to engage directly with senior leadership and help elevate marketing’s role within the broader business conversation.

“ISBA has no vested interest in whether the money goes into one medium or another,” he says. “But actually, then I think that gives us license to be able to have conversations with CFOs and CEOs and to actually equip CMOs with a toolkit to have perhaps a more objective, slightly different conversation around that.”

Another area of focus will be retail media, which Michaelides describes as “universal and ubiquitous”. ISBA, he says, can play an important role in shaping and continuing that dialogue following the launch of its Responsible Retail Media Framework two years ago.

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When asked what success will look like after his first year in the role, Michaelides keeps it simple.

“Earning the trust and respect of the team and our members,” he says.

Beyond that, he wants ISBA to have a clear set of priorities backed by a strong mandate from members and a longer-term roadmap for delivering against them, as well as focusing on diversifying memberships.

“If we get to the end of my first year and we’ve got a really high membership renewal rate, but we’ve also grown our membership and added new businesses into our membership, then those would be the green shoots of future success.”