Barclays' Elinor Bateman to lead WFA's new Insight forum

Elinor Bateman has been named as the first-ever chair of the World Federation of Advertisers' INSIGHTFORUM, ahead of two meetings in London.

Bateman, who is a Director in the Brand, Insight and Sponsorship team at Barclays, will play a key role in helping WFA member companies to learn from one another to increase the contribution of their insights function towards profitable brand growth.

She has held her current role at Barclays since March 2015, having previously worked at both ITV and the BBC. Bateman also played a key role in helping to develop the WFA's Future of Insights report, prepared in conjunction with BrainJuicer, setting out a clear vision for the development of this key function.

The client-only INSIGHTFORUM is designed to help insight specialists, who may cover a wide variety of other areas beyond marketing, ensure that they play a key role in putting consumer insights at the heart of their organisations, whilst driving the insights function further up the corporate ladder.

The new group will be meeting at the offices of the WFA's strategic insights partner BrainJuicer on October 18th with a workshop focused on measuring the impact of insights. A second meeting at the offices of WFA member Brown Forman on November 10th will look at storytelling, both as a methodology as well a means of working with multiple internal stakeholders.

Founded in 2014, the INSIGHTFORUM has already attracted a strong membership around the world with representatives from 40 WFA member companies attending its first five meetings.

"It's a huge honour to be the first chair of the WFA INSIGHTFORUM, and to champion the role that great insight teams can play in making their companies more effective and more dynamic. The inspirational insights experts I've met at previous WFA events have helped confirm my belief that insights is crucial part of effective management not just for the marketing team but right up to board level," said Bateman.

"We're delighted that Elinor has agreed to nurture our nascent INSIGHTFORUM and expand participation in this key area. Great consumer insights can be the difference between success and failure. This forum is designed to improve practice across our membership as we all seek to transform into more customer-centric organisations." said Stephan Loerke, CEO of the WFA.

The INSIGHTFORUM is one of six marketing groups that WFA brings together throughout the year. The others are the WFA CMOFORUM, IMCFORUM, MEDIAFORUM, CDOFORUM and SOURCINGFORUM, which bring together regional CMOs and senior marketers with regional media, digital and procurement responsibilities respectively.

For more information, contact Steve at s.lightfoot@wfanet.org