Hi, I’m Adam.

I spent ten years in digital and media roles at on the brand side at NIVEA (Beiersdorf) before moving over to agency side roles join Sampl

I love competitive and challenging categories, where you have fight to stand out

Answering questions like;

Which media channels can I rely on?
What can I scale?
What can I measure, learn from, and defend?
How do I get more impact without just asking for more budget?

I look for repeatability. Approaches that work more than once and got stronger over time. I love experimentation, but anything that couldn’t be measured properly or explained got cut quickly.

That search is what eventually led me to Sampl.

I hired them at NIVEA to replace another sampling platform and they blew me away. It finally allowed me to use sampling as a proper, scalable marketing channel. It produced data you could trust, outcomes you could prove, and real learnings that made us better.

Today, I run marketing, partnerships, and growth. My role is to help brand teams build trial and acquisition activity that is measurable, repeatable, and useful beyond a single campaign.

helping teams:

▶ Build first-party audiences they can use again
▶ Generate reviews that genuinely improve PDP performance
▶ Collect feedback that informs NPD, claims, and positioning
▶ Link trial and media activity to real purchase behaviour, including in-store

We do this through targeted digital sampling and cashback-based campaigns, depending on the product, category, and moment. The focus is always the same - measurability and results you can trust.

Alongside Sampl, I host the Beyond the Brand podcast, where I speak with senior marketers about how growth actually works inside modern organisations. 

I also advise and invest in early and scale-stage companies, usually helping teams prioritise, simplify, and build momentum without adding unnecessary complexity.

Ways we can work together

1. Strategy sessions: one-off conversations to pressure-test plans and priorities
2. Trial and sampling strategy: building measurable, repeatable growth channels
3. Advisory: ongoing support for teams navigating growth with limited resources
4. Speaking and panels: practical takes on brand growth, media, and measurement

If you’re thinking about how to stand out in a crowded category, how to build channels you can rely on, or how to get more from the budget you already have, drop me a DM

Adam Wright

📣 HIRING KLAXXON 📣

I’ve got 3 open roles in my team at Sampl

▶ Head of retail partnerships
Owning and running our retailer relationships. Working with partners to make Sampl commercially valuable to them and high-performing for brands.

▶ Senior / enterprise account director
Owning one of our largest global enterprise accounts. Leading strategy across brands and markets and setting the standard.

▶ Growth marketing manager
Owning marketing-sourced pipeline. Running paid media, CRM, website performance and reporting, and GTM campaigns.

If this sounds like you, or like someone you’ve worked with before, I’d love referrals. They’re consistently the best shortcut to finding great people.

Links are in the comments. Happy to give more context over a quick chat.

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👋 Hey, I’m Adam. I help FMCG brands run targeted, measurable sampling campaigns that build sales volume, 1P data, and credible reviews.

🔔 Follow or connect. And if you’re planning a launch, drop me a DM.

CMO @ Sampl | Precision product sampling for FMCG brands | Podcast Host @ Beyond the Brand

I’m looking for guests on Beyond the Brand in 2026

I've got 20 slots available and need your help 🙏

So far, the podcast has featured some amazing guests like:

Paul Stafford 
Azlan Raj 
Lottie Unwin (she/her) 
Tessa Tysome 
Louise Troen 
Bridget Hirst 
Sameer Amin 
Gerry D'Angelo 
Sophie Rock

I’m looking for more brand leaders who enjoy talking about the work they’ve done, and the stories behind them. Diving into what it really takes behind the scenes to build standout brands today.

Why be a guest on Beyond the Brand?

👍 A great audience and community of brand and marketing leads who care about the craft. They love to listen to hear how other practitioners think through the same problems they’re facing

👍 You get assets you can use - from one conversation, we’ll create audio clips, social edits, a Substack article, etc. You’ll see everything before it goes live

👍 It's great for connection. Almost every guest ends up hearing from other senior marketers who saw themselves in the conversation and reached out. Plus you get a new friend in me 😄

How Beyond the Brand performed in 2025

• 17 episodes released
• 1,000+ downloads
• An average of 10 hours of listening time per episode

Here’s the most recent episode with Louise Troen if you want a feel for it: https://lnkd.in/eXZ4F4Dh 

If this sounds like something you’d enjoy, drop me a comment or a DM.

And if you know someone who would be a great fit, I’m always up for introductions. Please feel free to share this with anyone you think would find it worthwhile. 

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👋 Hey, I’m Adam. I help FMCG brands run targeted, measurable sampling campaigns that build early sales volume and credible reviews. 

🔔 Follow or connect. And if you’re planning a launch, drop me a DM.

"We had 142 campaigns running... with the same 3 creatives."

That's what Hannah Parvaz found when she took over a supplement brand's ads. They were burning cash and going nowhere.

Three months later? Profitable. Four campaigns. Complete creative overhaul.

Hannah runs Aperture, a growth agency that only works with mission-driven companies. She's mentored over 200 startups and cuts through the growth hacking noise to focus on what works.

One of the things I love most is Hannah's ability to prioritise understanding real people over chasing tactics

She told me about working at a free drinks app early in her career. She thought people used it "to get a free drink." Then she talked to users. They were using it to impress their boss, discover bars, and build social capital.

That shift from "what does my product do" to "what job are people hiring this for" is subtle, but it rewrites how you approach marketing and growth. I'm a BIG fan

We talked about:
▶ Jobs-to-be-done and why most people get it wrong
▶ How to run customer conversations that uncover insights
▶ Why even big-budget brands massively underproduce creative
▶ The system that got them a 60% experiment success rate
▶ Why your real competitor might be Netflix, not your obvious rival
▶ Building a remote team that cares about the work

Listen now 👇
Spotify: https://lnkd.in/egVgM_c6 

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👋 Hey, I’m Adam. I help FMCG brands run targeted, measurable sampling campaigns that build sales volume, 1P data, and credible reviews.

🔔 Follow or connect. And if you’re planning a launch, drop me a DM.

When Tom Ollerton told me he was writing THE book on creativity and data, I knew it would be good

When I read it over Xmas, I realised it matters MORE now than ever

Marketing seems to be in this weird place where everyone's either obsessed with data (if I can't prove it it's worthless) OR they're pure creative purists who think numbers kill magic

Both sides are wrong

The best marketing happens when you stop treating creativity and data like they're enemies 

Tom breaks it down with interviews from 40+ marketing leaders (including legends like Rory Sutherland and Peter Field). He even made my mum proud by giving me a cameo

My takeaway. Data should make you relevant to MORE people, not visible to fewer. But you need to build the muscle for creativity and data together.

A perfect example is Meta's Andromeda update. It's completely changed how brands need to think about variation, creative scale, and data. 

The brands that are killing it understand that you can't just chuck data at creatives and expect magic. You can't ignore the numbers and hope for the best either.

Tom breaks down how to actually do both + write better briefs, get real insights (not vanity metrics), and build teams and processes that work

Do yourself a January favour and get out and buy a copy 

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👋 Hey, I’m Adam. I help FMCG brands run targeted, measurable sampling campaigns that build sales volume, 1P data, and credible reviews.

🔔 Follow or connect. And if you’re planning a launch, drop me a DM.

My biggest takeaways from my latest episode with Louise Troen (CMO at Clue, ex Headspace, Bumble Inc.):

1. Start with the human problem, not your product. Lou's entire creative process begins with a one-pager that asks: what emotional or educational void are we solving? No consumer cares about your features or business objectives - they care about their own struggles. If your product can't authentically solve a real human problem, walk away from the campaign.

2. Every decision we make comes from learning something new or feeling something new. Successful marketing does one of two things: it educates people (closing a knowledge gap) or it moves them emotionally (making them feel something that drives action). That's it. Everything else is noise.

3. Brand and PR are measurable - if you think otherwise, you're just measuring the wrong things. Lou pushes back hard on the idea that brand work can't be tracked. At every stage of the consumer journey, someone is doing something: shares, qualitative sentiment, referrals, organic search volume. The problem isn't that brand is unmeasurable; it's that marketers give up too easily instead of defining new metrics that matter.

4. Creative comes first, then strategy - not the other way around. At Bumble, Lou didn't start with a marketing plan. She started with scrappy, creative-first ideas (like wrapping G-Wagons in Bumble ads during London Fashion Week) that made people feel something. The strategy emerged from what worked, not from a ppt or spreadsheet.

5. Get comfortable throwing the paper away. Too many marketers sit in rooms, uncomfortable with saying "this won't work" or "we don't have the authority to talk about this." Lou believes the best work comes from being willing to start over when the human insight doesn't align with what you can credibly deliver.

6. Work on things you personally struggle with. Lou joined Bumble after a difficult breakup. She joined Headspace during COVID when everyone's mental health was collapsing. She joined Clue at 38, wanting children, navigating reproductive health questions herself. That personal context makes the work more honest and more effective.

7. Use competitors' failures as organic growth opportunities. When a rival period-tracking app faced a data privacy lawsuit, Clue saw 30,000 organic sign-ups overnight because their data protection under EU GDPR was rock-solid. Lou didn't run a campaign; she just made sure people knew Clue was the safe choice when it mattered most.

If you haven't already. Give the episode a listen on Spotify. You won't be disappointed.

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👋 Hey, I’m Adam. I help FMCG brands run targeted, measurable sampling campaigns that build sales volume, 1P data, and credible reviews.

🔔 Follow or connect. And if you’re planning an upcoming launch, drop me a DM

We've been measuring sampling wrong for 20 years.

When I was on the brand side, I saw lots of sampling campaigns that "performed well."

We handed out a lot of products. Got some nice photos.

Then finance asked: "Great, but did they actually buy the product?"

Silence

Because we had no idea. We tracked the number of samples given out. We couldn't track what happened after.

That's the fundamental problem with how most FMCG teams approach sampling.

We optimise for the wrong thing.

"50,000 samples distributed" sounds impressive in a deck. But it tells you nothing about whether those people became customers.

Here's what I wish I'd measured instead:

▶ Did they leave a review?
▶ Did they opt into our CRM?
▶ Did they actually purchase?
▶ Did they recommend to a friend?

When you track those things, sampling stops being a cost centre and starts being a growth channel. 

The brands winning right now aren't sending more samples. They're just sending them to the right people and measuring what actually matters.

Trial means nothing if it doesn't lead somewhere.

P.s. This is how we close the loop now → https://www.sampltech.com/

Sampling 1,000 of the right people beats 10,000 of anyone.

Most sampling programmes measure success by volume. How many samples did we hand out? How many people walked past the stand?

That logic works if your product is for everyone. It breaks when your audience is specific.

If you are selling a treatment for acne, handing samples to commuters at King's Cross is expensive guesswork. 80% of the people you reach do not have acne. Most will not remember your brand when they need it.

Precision sampling flips this. Qualify and validate the audience first, then sample. We can even then track what they do after.

Some examples of current targeting we are running for brands:

▶ Over 50s with eye problems
▶ Teenagers with acne
▶ Pet owners with new puppies
▶ People who spend over £400 on fragrance

For Clive Christian Perfume, we targeted high-income fragrance buyers through our partnership with The Handbook. Review rates hit 18%, 70% were new-to-brand, and purchase intent was over 60%. 

We also ruled out over 50% of requests as not the right fit for the brand.

Partnerships like this allow us to target curated audiences that are not available through standard channels. High-income urban consumers. Verified pet owners. Qualified skincare buyers.

There is a strong correlation that the tighter the audience, the stronger the result. We see that niche sampling consistently delivers 50-80% improvements in review rates and purchase rates compared to mass distribution.

It's difficult, but not impossible. It just requires better data and partners.

If you have a product that serves a specific audience and want to sample them, let's talk about how precision sampling works.

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👋 Hey, I’m Adam. I help FMCG brands run targeted, measurable sampling campaigns that build sales volume, 1P data, and credible reviews.

🔔 Follow or connect. And if you’re planning a launch, drop me a DM.

My biggest takeaways from Hannah Parvaz (Founder & CEO at Aperture):

1. Jobs to be done isn't about what people say - it's the "why" beneath the "why." Hannah used to work at a free drinks app. She thought the job was simple: "get a free drink". But people actually used it to impress their boss, build social capital, and look cool to friends. The key is to keep asking "why" until you hit something emotional.

2. Your real competitor isn't who you think it is. At DICE (a ticketing app), she realised that they didn't compete with Ticketmaster. Their real competition was Netflix. Staying in and ordering takeout, rather than going out. For supplement brands, the enemy is inertia: "I feel how I've always felt. Why should I change?" When you reframe the fight, your entire messaging strategy changes.

3. Only 5% of creatives will be winners - so you need volume. Meta's actual average for winning creatives is 5%. 1 in 20. Hannah once took over a supplement brand running 142 campaigns with the same 3 creatives talking about vitamins. She stripped it back to 4 campaigns, tested real customer psychology weekly, and hit profitability in 3 months. Her team now ships 8-10 new creatives per week for small budgets, hundreds for accounts spending over £1M monthly.

4. Treat every creative as an experiment and log what you learn. Hannah's team built an experiment board where every creative gets a hypothesis and documented learnings. For one client, they hit 60 winning experiments in a row because they obsessively fed insights from each test into the next. Growth is a muscle - you get better by doing reps and learning from what doesn't work.

5. AI handles the grunt work. Humans do the thinking. Hannah's team uses AI to generate hooks, automate campaign builds, and pull live dashboards. But they never copy-paste AI outputs straight into creator briefs. AI ideates, humans refine. Her campaigns upload themselves when moved in Notion, eliminating data entry. But there's always a human deciding what actually matters.

6. Growth isn't marketing - it's knowing where to focus. Most people think growth equals paid ads or tactics. Actually, growth is an experimentation mindset to learn what's high-leverage as quickly as possible. Hannah named her agency Aperture because a camera aperture controls focus - sharpening what matters, blurring what doesn't. The trap? Companies demanding statistical significance for every tiny decision get paralysed for months while competitors ship.

Listen Spotify: https://lnkd.in/egVgM_c6 

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👋 Hey, I’m Adam. I help FMCG brands run targeted, measurable sampling campaigns that build sales volume, 1P data, and credible reviews.

🔔 Follow or connect. And if you’re planning a launch, drop me a DM.

Sampling gets written off too easily as “giving product away”

Too often, it's treated like a freebie

In the latest Beyond the Brand episode, Tessa Tysome reframes it brilliantly.

Great sampling doesn’t feel cheap.
It's added value.

During her time at Nike her team built “money-can’t-buy” membership experiences. Not discounts. Experiences people wanted to be part of.

And Nestlé Nespresso SA pouring you a coffee from their stand works for the same reason. Not because it’s free, but because it’s premium, explained, and intentional.

It's the same product you'd have at home.
The difference is the experience wrapped around it.

I see this clearly in the best-performing sampling campaigns we run:

▶ intentional targeting. Who receives it, and why
▶ a considered unboxing and packaging experience
▶ a clear product story
▶ a connection back to loyalty, CRM, and lifetime value
▶ learning that feeds the next campaign

Samples feel low-value when they’re just handed out.
Used well, they create genuine added value. Earning attention, trust, and repeat behaviour.

🎧 The full episode with Tessa is live now on Spotify and Apple Music

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👋 Hey, I’m Adam. I help FMCG brands run targeted, measurable sampling campaigns that build sales volume, 1P data, and credible reviews.

🔔 Follow or connect. And if you’re planning a launch, drop me a DM.

I care about making engineering leadership better... more thoughtful, more human, and more effective.

Over the last 15+ years, I’ve worked across start-ups, scale-ups, and big tech. I’ve been hands-on as an IC, built teams as an engineering manager, and helped others grow into Staff, Tech Lead, and EM roles. I’m currently an Engineering Manager at Yelp.

Most people in tech step into leadership or management with very little training. They’re expected to manage people, run projects, influence up, and drive strategy, often all at once. I’ve been through that, and I’m building https://www.engleadexpert.io to help others do it well and build our industry together. 

I’m creating honest, practical content for people who want to lead well, not just think they are getting promoted. I share everything I’ve learned (and continue to learn) about the realities of leading in tech: the decisions, the mistakes, the messy bits.

I’m building this in public, and if any of it helps you lead better... I’m doing my job.

Ryan Murphy

Email from my sons school. 

Might start bringing mist spray water bottles to work.

Very proud to be asked to be part of the LeadDev Review Submissions Committee for the 3rd year running. 

Really enjoy this process every year, ensuring the bar is high, we deliver best content and working with the rest of the committee. 

Thanks to Lauren McDonald and the team at LeadDev.

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