New consumer chief Lyssa McGowan takes direct charge of marketing across Virgin Media, O2 and Giffgaff, two years into the Essential For Living brand reset.
Virgin Media O2 marketing is changing hands. Rachel Swift, the company’s executive director of brand and marketing, is leaving following a restructure by new consumer chief executive Lyssa McGowan, who will now oversee marketing across Virgin Media, O2 and Giffgaff herself.
McGowan joined in July to run a newly merged commercial and operations unit, and the company says she has been reorganising the leadership team to bring greater prioritisation and simplification. Swift is not the only departure. Chief operations officer Rob Orr and chief commercial officer Christian Hindennach are also going, as Marketing Week reported.
Swift arrived in 2024 after four years at Tesco Mobile, with a brief to reset the O2 brand. The result was Essential For Living, a platform that repositioned the network as the thing that makes life’s big moments possible. In a statement the company credited her with leading brand and advertising “with heart and ingenuity” and shaping both brands for their next chapter.
McGowan reports to chief executive Lutz Schüler and brings a consumer pedigree: more than a decade at Sky, ending as chief consumer officer, and most recently the top job at Pets at Home. Schüler has said the market demands the business become “simpler, faster and focused”.
The pattern is becoming familiar. A company merges its commercial functions under one consumer leader, and the standalone senior marketing role disappears into it. Marketing does not lose its budget, but it loses its seat, and the brand becomes one of several levers a general manager pulls rather than somebody’s whole job.
That is a risk for a brand two years into a reset. A brand platform pays back through consistency over years, and new leadership almost always wants a fresh look, which is how good platforms die young. The contrast this month is Sonos, which hired a heavyweight marketer precisely to give its repositioning a champion.
O2 has owned some of the most distinctive advertising in British telecoms. Whether Essential For Living survives its author is now the question.
He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.
Opening the Festival of Marketing, Hegarty set out a simple triangle for judging creative work, blamed KPIs for a sea of sameness, and admitted he once had no idea if a famous Audi ad would work.
The IPA Bellwether Report finds a net 14.3 per cent of marketers raised budgets in Q3 2026, with main media at a nine-year high, though the 2027 adspend forecast was cut.
After Snoop Dogg, Katy Perry and Craig David, Just Eat's new global platform by VCCP is built on ordinary moments, led by a grandfather meeting his grandchild.