Sam Phillips – Keynote Speaker

Sam Phillips is a senior EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) professional who loves driving leadership and business change. She specialises in delivering Board and Executive Team level analysis, insights and strategy and achieves results through building leadership confidence to act. Sam is commercially minded, well-networked, creatively confident, a strong communicator and sector-agnostic.

Sam’s background is as a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) and Leadership Exec who took up simultaneous EDI leadership reins (before this was commonplace). She went on to establish her own successful EDI practice and longer-term clients to date include:
– Lloyds of London, across both Corporation and Markets, with focus on Culture and EDI – contract extension to lead Culture / EDI strategy review and recommendations for CEO / ExCo / Chair
– ECB (England & Wales Cricket Board), working with C-suites and Chairs across the ECB and First Class County infrastructure
– RPC Law, advising the Board / Partnership Executive and delivering a bespoke vision, strategy and data plan. Subsequent CEO / Partnership work, also

Sam also has good understanding of the broader Sustainability landscape having taken time out to study Sustainable Business Leadership (Cambridge University CISL Distinction / 91% awarded January 2023). This is strategically helpful when considering ‘good business’ in the inter-connected ESG round.

If your business is in the foothills of its EDI / Sustainability journey – perhaps with different departments / locations having progressed at contrasting rates to date – Sam’s expertise is there for you. If you’re up and running with your EDI activity but wondering why change is so slow, Sam will make a difference. If you’re looking to inspire and motivate, Sam has helped many businesses break personal and corporate barriers as she elegantly deduces what’s really going on and works with leadership to plan forward from there.

Prior to setting up her own business, Sam spent 15 years at Omnicom – a global leader in marketing communications. Her greatest focus in the latter years was leading 50+ businesses / C-suites (creative, media, health, CRM, PR, branding, experiential) and their 9,000 employees from thinking of EDI as a tertiary issue to establishing it as a top-down leadership priority, with strategy, vision and data that drove bottom-up trust, energy, voice and change. Sam’s parallel roles were CMO Omnicom Media Group UK and Assistant Dean (global) of Omnicom University – Omnicom’s global Exec Education leadership programme in conjunction with Harvard Business School professors.

Before joining Omnicom Sam spent nine years as Marketing Director of Time Inc / Head of Marketing at ITV. Back in the dim-distant past she cut her teeth as an account handler at advertising agencies J. Walter Thompson and TBWA, leading client business such as Wonderbra in the ‘Hello Boys’ era.

Sam Phillips is a sought-after speaker (10, Downing Street, Council of Europe, The Oxford Union) and she is also commissioned by businesses (e.g. Barclays, PwC, comparethemarket.com) to educate, motivate and drive change in their organisations. She is a Trustee of the Valuable 500 (changing the business world’s perception of disability) and of the National Bereavement Partnership.

Sam Phillips is glass-half-full and has a genuine desire to make business better.