The awards are judged by an esteemed panel of industry leaders and experts, the judging is a rigorous two-stage process including pre-scoring to determine shortlists and a judging meeting where entries are discussed and evaluated in detail to decide the winning entries.
From a transparency perspective, we may video aspects of the judging session to show on the evening and give entrants an insight into why a winning entry was chosen.
Head judges
Arianne Donoghue | Founder | Tempest
A veteran of 14 years’ experience in the industry, Arianne has worked for some of the UK best-known agencies and most-loved brands. She's passionate about helping teams and businesses do the best work they can, through driving strategy, integration and inclusion. Arianne now runs her own small consultancy where she helps agencies and brands maximise their potential.
Paul Morris | Head of Ecommerce | Havas Media
Paul has 22 years’ experience leading Marketing, Digital & Ecommerce both Agency & Brand side. Paul was previously Director of Digital/ Ecommerce at Marshalls PLC, Head of Marketing at Tesco Bank, global Digital/ Ecommerce Director at PZ Cussons (brands including St Tropez, Imperial Leather & Original Source), led Digital marketing at the Co-op Group (Food > Funeralcare) and have through the line experience of working both client and agency side with brands including Wickes, Laterooms, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Cash Generator, Stagecoach & Silverstone. Paul is now Head of Ecommerce for Havas Media.Judges
Tom Armenante | eCommerce Director | GOCABLETIES
Tom Armenante is Ecommerce Director for Gocableties; a rapidly expanding online cable tie and business supplies business with a strong marketplace presence. At Gocableties Tom defines and drives the ecommerce strategy and is responsible for the site’s ecommerce platform. Previously Tom was Ecommerce Manager for high-end fashion brands Wolsey, Nicole Farhi and BLK DNM, implementing ecommerce strategy for all 3 brands. Prior to this Tom was the Head of SEO at Matalan, where he was responsible for organic growth and working with internal teams to drive ecommerce performance. Tom also has previous experience at the award-winning SEO agency, Branded3 where he helped to formulate the search strategy for some of the UK’s largest brands.
Michael Ashworth | Co-Founder & Managing Director | Nublue
Michael founded Nublue in 2005 with his brother Tom to create and host exceptional ecommerce websites. Today he leads a team of 45, focussing on running a business which people enjoy doing business with. Michael is an expert in Magento, Shopware, Shopify and ecommerce strategy, brand promotion and management. His strengths lie in facilitating growth and delivering big impact ecommerce platforms for ambitious brands. Out of work, Michael’s keen on snowboarding, sailing and scuba diving to avoid getting square eyes.
Jan Bartczak | Head of eCommerce | Graham & Brown
Jan is the Head of Ecommerce at Graham & Brown. In this role he is responsible for G&Bs global digital marketing & ecommerce strategy and execution. His ambition is disrupting the decorating sector by offering customers an excellent end to end online journey. He has an extensive ecommerce experience across several markets and industries. His previous appointments include senior roles at AO.com and Tyres on the Drive. Jan has a real passion for utilising insights as well as developing and empowering teams to enable creating great customer value.
Catherine Buckley | Group Head of eCommerce | Regatta
Uzo Ezeh | Head of Agency Partnerships | Total Processing
Uzo is originally from Manchester but built his career over the past few years by working all over the country with some of the UK’s leading brands and organisations. After completing a degree in Law, Uzo segued into a different career path; instead, pivoting to become a Media Planner with Mediacom at their base in London. Finding himself at the beginning of what would becoming a steep and rapid learning curve within the partnerships and agencies industry, Uzo launched into working with several big accounts to help solidify his passion in the sector. Returning to Manchester, Uzo’s latest point of pride is grounded in continuously contributing to the digital roots and strengths of Northern businesses through his other opportunities at Strawberry and Regital. In recently making a move to Total Processing, Uzo now heads up the agencies and partnerships division of a leading fintech within the payments space; and is based within Manchester’s business district – Spinningfields. Working daily with the likes agencies that he began his career with, Uzo is happy to be fostering business relationships and generating new business within the North West and across the UK.
Emma Forward | Freelance eCommerce Consultant
Emma is an independent eCommerce consultant with 10 years' experience in eCommerce. She worked in-house heading up eCommerce at Royal Academy of Arts prior to setting up her consultancy. Since becoming an independent consultant, she's project managed a number of migrations and re-builds across a variety of different verticals and retailers, including fashion, luxury, lifestyle, media and heritage sectors. She works to increase profitability online through eCommerce strategy, conversion rate optimisation and site auditing.
Becky Franks | Optimisation Lead | The Co-operative Bank
Becky Franks heads up the Digital Optimisation team at The Co-operative Bank. The Bank is proud to be the only UK high street bank with a customer-led ethical policy and a purpose to make a positive difference to the lives of their customers and communities. Alongside her role as Optimisation Lead, Becky formed and leads the ‘Digital Bees’. The goal of the Bees is to build co-operative relationships across Manchester that break new ground. With the ambition to strengthen the Bank’s digital connections, host free meetups and events, while also supporting local communities. A big part of their work is to help address the skills and gender gap in Digital and IT careers, by supporting, mentoring and involving young people across the North West.
Jamie Hinton | CEO | Razor
Jamie is CEO and Co-Founder of Razor. He is first and foremost a ‘techy’, but one who can translate the complex world of software development into language that everyone else can understand. Jamie has a long history in software engineering and a proven track record in translating business opportunities into living, breathing software that delivers real value. He has architected solutions for blue chip companies and large financial institutions including, Alfa Romeo, Co-Operative Bank, HCCi and Dyson. Jamie now applies his development thinking and extensive passion for technology to fuel the growth of Razor.
Kevin Hoggarth | eCommerce Development Manager | Shearings
Liam Howley | CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER | Music Magpie
As Chief Marketing Officer at musicMagpie, Liam is tasked with the development and direction of the business's strategic marketing plans to maximize brand growth, customer acquisition, conversion and retention through online and offline channels. This includes control and management of internal digital, marketing and design teams & external agencies, with responsibility for planning, analysing and optimising a multi-million pound marketing budget in the UK for musicMagpie.co.uk and in the US for Decluttr.com.
Brendan Keegan | Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing | MMU
Brendan has taught a broad range of digital marketing topics in Manchester Metropolitan for over a decade, after a few years in agency-land. His research examines the role of analytics in marketing strategy decision-making, as well as the utilisation of digital technology in shaping spaces and places.
Mark Kuhillow | Founder | R.O.EYE
Starting his career on 1994, Marks media roots are firmly planted within the offline direct response world, moving online in 1999. Seeing the opportunity to apply a digital direct response agency model to affiliate and performance marketing campaigns, Mark founded R.O.EYE in 2004. Now seen as the largest specialist in its sector, R.O.EYE counts the likes of HMV, Best Western and Jessops amongst its clients.
Davina Lines | Managing Director | Ecommerce Club & Mixing Digital
Davina Lines is Managing Director of Mixing Digital and the Ecommerce Club. She brings a wealth of knowledge and a big black book of digital contacts to ensure Mixing Digital’s event management services are of the highest standard. Davina co-founded Netimperative in 1999 and became Managing Director in 2002, stewarding the brand into new product launches and creating one of the most successful events programmes in the digital marketing industry. In the mid 90s Davina cut her digital teeth on New Media Age (now Econsultancy), forming part of the founding team and was responsible for the commercial development of the magazine and its early events from launch in May 1995 to 1999. In recent years Davina launched an ecommerce peer-to-peer community, the Ecommerce Club, which runs regular events in London and Manchester on topics relevant to the retail community.
Donna Pullen | BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER - PROGRAMMATIC EMEA/APAC AT | Expedia
Donna begun her career in media ten years ago where she started out within the New Business team at OMD UK. Since then, she has worked across a variety of fields within the industry including at Affilinet, where she specialised in Affiliate Marketing and planning and account management at Omnicom Media Group within their B2B Lead Generation and Affiliates team. Following this, she made the transition from agency to sales where she has been specialising in Programmatic advertising ever since starting out as a Sales Manager at Trinity Mirror to currently overseeing Expedia's programmatic division across EMEA and APAC
Liam Quinn | Head of Technology | Vervaunt
Liam Quinn heads up the technical arm of Vervaunt, the London based ecommerce & paid media consultancy. Working alongside some of the most premium and ambitious brands Internationally, within a range of verticals, to advise and give hands-on assistance in architecting and delivering the right technical solutions to achieve their business goals. With 10 years of experience in the ecommerce space, Liam has previously run several development teams within Northern based agencies, delivering apps and websites across a range of platforms. Going on to become Head of Digital at a 40-man National and Northern Digital award winning agency, running projects for International brands replatforming and scaling their ecommerce offering.
Darren Ratcliffe | Founder and Head of Agency | Digitl
Duncan Rutherford | Head of eCommerce | BT
Ricardo Seixas | Managing Director | One Day Agency
Along his 15+ years international career in the digital space spanning 4 continents, Ricardo worked for consumer brands, start-ups, software houses and digital agencies. Most recently, and after being a lead at Google, he restructured and led Media Agency Group’s digital division ClickTap Media collecting multiple awards with brands like Liverpool ONE, I Saw It First, including Digital Agency of the Year. Across his experience, he led innovative digital projects for L’Oreal, Telefonica, Sanofi, Ambev and world’s top agencies.
Simon Wharton | PushON | Business Strategy Director
Having led PushON for 12 years, In 2017 Simon transitioned from Managing Director to Business Strategy Director where he could apply his considerable experience in digital transformation to PushONs digital consultancy service. Simon has spent more than two decades operating within the digital sector, initially in a corporate environment, before becoming embroiled in the early days of the Manchester digital community. Alongside his business partner, Roy Wilding, he pivoted PushON out of an incarnation of a previous successful digital business. Steady planned growth has seen the business gain recognition as one of the North West’s leading eCommerce agencies. The business’ expertise in eCommerce development and its particular skill with online marketing has led to a raft of peer reviewed award wins throughout the North West, UK and Europe. Simon also has a reputation for “sticking his oar in” to drive the digital sector forward. He is a council member for Manchester Digital, lectures at local universities and was a founder of SASCon, the infamously expert digital marketing conference. He speaks at events, organises events and largely keeps himself busy both in the sector and in the community. He has four
Keith White | Director | DMW Group
As a director at DMW Group Keith leads client engagements delivering digital transformation across multiple sectors. DMW is one of the UK's leading independent technology consultancies specialising in the design, delivery and implementation of digital transformation programmes. With 20 years’ experience as a Digital Solutions Director before joining the DMW Group, Keith has a deep background in digital and ecommerce. This includes delivering high profile UK and European digital and eCommerce transformation programmes in sectors as diverse as automotive, airlines, customer electronics, train operating companies, public sector, healthcare, and financial services. A Fellow of the British Computer Society, Keith has been delivering ecommerce and digital transformation initiatives since 1999.
Max Wilkinson | eCommerce Specialist | Nosto Solutions
I have had the pleasure of working in the marketing and technology sector for the past five years, through this time I have engrossed myself in a number of aspect of the industry. Being able to look at ecommerce holistically from the agencies, brands and technologies such as Nosto has been truly fascinating. I have taken real pleasure in learning from my peers and using this knowledge to help drive the success of the projects I have been lucky to be a part of over the years. I look forward to seeing all the entries at this year's awards and playing a role in selecting the very best the UK has to offer.