Damian Blackden

An entrepreneur that brings ideas and strategies to scale, Damian Blackden is Global Chief Strategy Officer at GroupM. A member of GroupM’s Global Leadership Team, Damian focuses on the group’s strategic operations and developments that work to usher in a new era of media where advertising works better for people. Those programs include initiatives such as an offshoring program that gives GroupM agencies and their clients access to world-class activation capabilities from hubs in places like Bogotá and Delhi.

With more than $50 billion in media investment billings across 80 markets worldwide, GroupM is the largest media investment group. It also has three of the world’s top five media agencies and a range of businesses innovating in advanced TV, AI-driven programmatic, eCommerce, and more.

Prior, Damian served as Chief Strategy Officer at GroupM’s Essence, a data and measurement-driven global agency. There he designed and built Essence’s differentiated globalized offering, launched new offices from which to service clients, and created new service lines such as an in-housing consultancy for marketers.

Damian is an original digital marketing pioneer from the late 1990s, having launched and scaled two successful and award-winning digital agency marketing businesses. He started Zenith Media’s digital business in 2000 and then became joint CEO at UM U.K. He then led Omnicom Media Group’s programmatic and analytics capabilities in Europe and Asia. Damian also co-conceived and launched a cookie-less tracking business, Device[9], in 2014, which was subsequently acquired by Flashtalking and integrated into its technology stack.