About

I am a senior marketing and business-transformation operator — twenty-five years across the world's two largest marketing communications groups, leading some of their largest and most complex client relationships across the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

The work has been the same shape throughout: take responsibility for a multi-market, multi-discipline client engagement at scale; design the operating model that holds it together; build the team that runs it; deliver against commercial targets while shifting the underlying capability of the organisation. The categories have varied — automotive, consumer health, beverages, telecommunications, consumer packaged goods. The structural problem has not.

Most recently, I led the WPP relationship with Colgate-Palmolive out of New York: a $200M+ engagement orchestrating more than 1,000 people worldwide across media, creative, production, data, technology, commerce, CRM, and enterprise transformation. The work included designing the global content supply chain — a modular, AI-enabled production system projected to deliver 30–35% efficiency on production spend, and more fundamentally to shift the economics from output-based pricing to lowering the marginal cost of content itself.

That last shift — from selling units of output to compounding the marginal cost of cognition — is what made the Compounding thesis inevitable for me. I had spent two decades watching senior operators carry the entire invisible context of their organisations on their own nervous systems. I was watching it happen to myself. Then I watched AI begin to deflate the cognitive labour I was being paid for. The two problems are the same problem. There is no published practice for working through it.

Compounding is the practice I am building, naming, and writing down. The opening essay is forthcoming. The thesis page summarises the argument in roughly 600 words. The manifesto follows. The book follows that.

Before all of this: BA (Hons) Geography, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996. Born and educated in England. Lived and worked in London, Cape Town, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila, Singapore, and New York. Currently based in the New York metropolitan area.

The fastest way to reach me is paul@paulroebuck.com.