Charlie Shawcross is a marketing consultant for the music business and creative industries. 

This is my bread and butter. Figuring out goals, timelines and budgets, then putting together the right team to deliver on them (either locally in the UK or globally, often across social, creative, PR and marketing). I lead through collaboration, valuing clarity, accountability and creative flair, building teams where people with differing perspectives are able to be their fullest selves. This delivers confident, self-assured work we can be proud of.

I lead the development and delivery of marketing campaigns to grow audiences and develop businesses, working across offline (TV, print, OOH, experiential) & digital (paid and organic social, influencer, SEO as well as website and sales funnel optimisation). This ranges from the granular to the Big Ideas, coming up with guerilla activations and things that have never been done before to get people’s attention and capture their imagination.

I also decode advertising reports, analytics and jargon because marketing should be simple for everyone to understand.

Simple, actionable and coherent; that’s what a strategy needs to be. It should creatively solve a problem, borne of a meaningful insight about how to win (I’m a big advocate of the ideas put forward in ‘Good Strategy Bad Strategy’ by Ruchard Rumelt).

For artists, I help co-create a defined artist proposition and vision, distilling this into guiding principles for the campaign and a subsequent plan of coherent action. For brands, I help them articulate their challenge, define their purpose, find their voice and present consistent visual worlds.

I advise on creative direction, write creative briefs and commission artwork, photography, logos, video, short form content and marketing materials. If you’re someone who creates any of these things, please do get in touch via email or Instagram: I am always trying to collaborate with new visual artists. 

I’ve worked with all budget ranges (including no budget at all). I can source funding too, seeking out appropriate brand partnerships and helping to broker those deals with persuasive, tailored decks that look good. 

Here’s a handful of my video commissions across music videos, live sessions and capturing gigs:

Ahhh social media… that cornerstone of audience development and the destroyer of mental health. It’s a landscape that’s only going to get more precarious with the rolling back of fact-checking (way to go Zuck), but I have experience navigating both the practical and the emotional side of audience development.

Creatives who foster a community around themselves understand what makes them standout, they know what they want to communicate and how that marries with what other people might want to hear and see. This is true across social, mailing lists and in real life. I can help piece this together and advise on the fundamentals of community building (through the likes of Discord, CRM, Whatsapp) and content creation without being formulaic (things like sharability, creating story arcs and hooks, alongside analysing engagement metrics rather than just follower counts). When it comes to making content, I can edit myself or find others who can help with content capture and delivery, plus I can manage livestreams, influencer campaigns and website builds (or I can just build a website for you). I write copy, help you strategise what to post when and why, devise content calendars and create assets, but more usefully, I can explain how I work to enable anyone to do this for themselves consistently over the long term with ownership over their data.

I’ve seen how online community building can become a vital expression of something both personal and meaningful, as opposed to an anxiety-inducing, credibility-sapping exercise in self-promotion under duress. Done mindfully, it is a way for an artist or brand to take control of their future, rather than simply succumbing to the Tech Bro hellscape.

I enjoy running qualitative and quantitative consumer research to better understand cultural and competitive landscapes. For brands, I find this is the best way to unearth meaningful insights that drive decision making. I also love leading groups to generate ideas and solve problems and have plenty of experience of delivering workshops in big corporate environments or small start-up cultures.

I’ve lectured at ICMP and the Tech Music Schools in London, and I’ve mentored through the Creative Mentor Network. If you’re looking for advice about working in the creative industries or you need a guest speaker, I’d be happy to help.