Social should drive business, not vanity metrics. Own your audience and test on your own money. A proposition only counts if the brand understands it.

Simmonds is originally American, born and raised in New York, where she started out thinking she wanted financial services and quickly found it wasn't for her. She landed in a marketing consultancy doing customer segmentation, a data analytics heavy role, which is how she came into marketing. She joined the Kepler Group as its 21st employee, a paid performance agency she says has grown to almost 900 people globally, launched its New York analytics practice, and in 2018 moved to London to open the firm's first international office. She arrived with no clients, hit the streets for 18 months, reached profitability inside 18 to 19 months, and grew the business to around 100 people overseeing EMEA by 2025.

She wasn't actively looking, but she always takes the conversation. After meeting an all female leadership team, she went home and told her husband she really wanted to do this. The energy was palpable and the proposition compelling. She joined Jungle in April, moving from data and paid performance into a full service social agency and publisher, a real change of environment where she says the same agency principles still apply. Having a genuine USP that isn't just better people or faster, she says, is a great position to be in.

Simmonds has been an endurance athlete since 14, a sub elite marathoner in the US and now a triathlete who has represented GB twice and qualified four times. She's up at 4:30, coffee and emails, out the door by 5:30 or 6:00. Having let off steam and achieved something before the office makes her less manic and clearer about the day. More than discipline, she says, training is an outlet that lets her stay looser through the workday, which matters in a role where the plan at 8am is not the plan at 9am.

She took all her remaining holiday from Kepler to spend time in the Jungle office so she wasn't starting at zero, then spent about four of her first eight weeks listening and getting familiar with the P&L. Understanding a business, for her, is two things: time with the people and interrogating the numbers. She is moving from discovery into implementation, aware she is in a comfortable spot where everything is her responsibility but nothing is yet her fault, and that over the next month or two it all becomes her fault.

Jungle has 13 years of performance data across eight social brands and 165 million followers, built into a system she calls Jungle IQ to see what's working and why across audiences and timeframes. It also has live, active audiences, so the agency can test against them using its own money rather than a client's, put content ideas out and see what comes back. Leveraging both the historical data and the live media brands, she says, is central to the offer.

She is candid that the business has done only an okay job marketing itself, and that scaling depends on landing the proposition. Saying publisher powered means nothing to a brand on its own. Before joining she would have asked what it means and why it's good for her. So the focus is explaining the benefit plainly: the data, the audiences, and a culture, process and tooling all centred on driving real business impact, because the business uses social to make money for itself daily.

On organic social and creative, measurement is harder than paid, where she had the luxury of clear transactional data. She encourages clients to step back from vanity metrics, followers, views and reach, and to think about what they're really trying to drive, then approximate ways to measure it. That requires comfort with estimations, but impact can be triangulated with platform metrics, econometrics, lift testing and brand lift studies. Being goaled on increasing followers, she says, is easy and formulaic and does nothing for the business.

Jungle still gets a lot of content for content's sake, like briefs asking for 20 TikToks a month. The team takes them but interrogates the why, because the goal may not need 20 TikToks a month at all. She would love more strategic briefs, brands looking for full service partners across social, and when the one off project or platform briefs arrive, the team responds with a broader lens on what social could do for the client.

The agency moved to a pod structure in the last year, the model she used at Kepler. Pods are built around clients, so people spend the day immersed in one client rather than separated by function. Each pod is led by an account lead who is the first stop for the client and across production, performance and paid, surrounded by creative, strategy, paid and production people who meet daily and feed performance back into the next round of shooting. She sees the opportunity in bringing publishing and agency even closer, a more real time flywheel.

The culture, energy and buy in from bottom to top were what drew her in, and she has no plans to change it. What she can add is an analytical mindset. She describes herself as a little less cool and more corporate, more math and science oriented, joking she needs a new wardrobe to match the office. Combining that analytical edge with the creative energy of the business, she says, is where she hopes to be additive.

Creator is a big part of social strategy for almost any client. Jungle built a tool called Pollinate, a network rather than a roster, that connects creators by overlapping audiences. Because it takes multiple touch points to convert someone, seeing several trusted people promote the same brand makes them more likely to buy, so Pollinate matches creators you might not think of as overlapping and puts them on one plan. On the publishing side, partnerships like The Confidence Hour podcast with Dani DMC on the IV NINES brand show how creators feed what the business does.

Simmonds doesn't love Cannes. It's taxing and not her favourite week, and talking business in 40 degree heat is less enjoyable than the same meeting in air con in London. So she does the opposite of the jolly: she meets people she can't meet in London and has conversations she might not otherwise have, often with partners who are looser at the beach. Her advice to the team is to come in late, leave early and stack the middle.

Looking back from a graduating age, she would tell herself to relax, having wasted energy panicking about things that resolved themselves, and learned that it's possible to be productive without being manic. A year from now she hopes to be talking about new clients won and advances in Jungle's technology, exposing more of the tooling built internally to clients. If not, she says, it will have been a bit of a failure.