You work in digital media but have also built a career in stand-up comedy. How did that happen?
It started because I was phobic of public speaking, rather than because I had any great ambition to become a comedian. I was working in financial PR and getting increasingly frustrated by going to events where you would see panels full of men talking confidently about subjects I knew just as much about, wondering where all the women were when I myself was turning down these opportunities. I was good at my job, I could write, I could make the argument but put me on a stage and my body would basically treat it as a medical emergency. Eventually I realised I would have to be the change I wanted to see in the conference world or stop moaning about it.
I signed up for Funny Women's Stand Up to Stand Out course, which uses some of the techniques of stand-up to build confidence speaking in public. I hadn't done a gig before and, crucially, I had absolutely no intention of doing one afterwards. It was exposure therapy. I wanted to be able to stand up in a professional setting without feeling like I might die. But I really enjoyed the session and tweeted that maybe I'd like to give it a go.
In one of those urban legend style right place right time situations, comedian Mark Watson saw my tweet and invited me to take part in one of his 24-hour charity shows, where people were set different challenges for charity, mine was very specifically to get over my fear of public speaking once and for all by doing stand-up.
So suddenly the thing I'd spent years avoiding had become a public challenge, for charity, with no particularly dignified way of backing out. I had to write something, get on stage and do it - and then discovered, slightly inconveniently, that I absolutely loved it. What started as an attempt to make me better at my day job gradually turned into this whole parallel creative career. It required a complete reinvention, after years of moving in traditional marketing circles, with the majority of my friends in the same game, I was thrown into a completely new world where no one cared what my ‘day job' was.
How do you manage your time between the two? Is comedy a hobby, or could you ever see yourself doing it full time?
I don't really think of comedy as a hobby, but equally I don't see my professional career as the unfortunate thing I have to do until comedy rescues me from it, I enjoy both for different reasons so I just make them work. If you had asked me before, I would never have believed I could find three days a week to do anything meaningful outside of work, it was certainly my excuse when it came to the gym, but somehow I did.
That has taken me a while to understand. Earlier in my career I had a very conventional idea of success; keep climbing, take the biggest opportunity, work incredibly hard, make yourself indispensable. PR in particular can expand to fill every available bit of your life if you let it. Comedy unexpectedly gave me boundaries. If I have a gig at 8pm, work has to stop. I can't answer emails on stage, the phone has to go away and I realised I didn't have to always know what was going on in my inbox, things would wait until tomorrow. It broke a few self-imposed bad habits.
I've certainly made career decisions with both in mind. At one point I took what would previously have been my dream job at an incredibly high-performance global agency and discovered very quickly that I couldn't sustainably have that version of a career and the creative life I'd built. It forced me to ask what I actually meant by success. These days, success for me isn't getting as high up one ladder as humanly possible. I get to have a serious career working on interesting problems, and then I also get to make comedy, write and broadcast alongside it. There are periods when balancing them is objectively ridiculous. My diary can look like it was assembled as an act of revenge. But I think having both makes me happier and, increasingly, I think each makes me better at the other, I get a lot of consumer expert bookings because I'm fun to talk to as well as knowledgeable, and I can make dry subjects more entertaining.
You recently performed at the Edinburgh Fringe. How does an independent performer actually get involved, and is it useful to have on your comedy CV?
The brilliant and slightly terrifying thing about the Edinburgh Fringe is that it is open access. There isn't a panel of comedy elders deciding whether you're sufficiently funny to be admitted. You find a venue or promoter willing to programme you, work out your deal with them, register the show with the Fringe and, in theory, you're going to Edinburgh. You don't even have to have a show - typically you register in January with the idea of a show and then spend seven months turning it into a reality (not unlike a PR pitch process)
Getting into the Fringe is considerably easier than getting anybody to come and see you once you're there. Thousands of shows are competing for the same audiences, so as an independent performer you very quickly become your own tiny business. After seven years of trusting the right people would find me through a variety of different approaches - flyering, digital posters etc, we approached my new show Chief Petty Officer much more like a product launch than a traditional comedy show. We spent time working out who the audience was, where we were likely to find them and what would make the show stand out in such a crowded market.
That influenced everything from the PR and social strategy to the physical marketing. We mixed traditional flyers with branded beer mats because we knew pubs and venues would be much more inclined to keep something genuinely useful on their tables than another pile of paper. It worked - venues kept them out on bars and tables, and people even started taking them away afterwards as souvenirs.
Because we were performing on the Free Fringe - you pay a small fee to rent your room, agree to make your shows free to get into and ask for donations on the way out - we also thought about the collection at the end as part of the audience experience rather than simply putting a bucket by the door and hoping for the best. We offered a limited edition tote bag for those willing to pay a certain amount, so gamified the bit where you ask people for money.
I loved that side of it because it brought the two halves of my life together. We were thinking about audience segmentation, positioning, acquisition, conversion and customer experience - we just happened to be applying all of it to a comedy show.
I do think Edinburgh is useful professionally, but not simply because you can put "Edinburgh Fringe" on your comedy CV afterwards. For a few weeks a huge amount of the comedy industry and its most engaged audiences are concentrated in one city, and performing the same show every day gives you an extraordinary feedback loop. It is essentially a very intense, very expensive start-up accelerator where the founder also has to do an hour of stand-up every afternoon.
How did it go?
Far better than I'd dared hope. We had an almost completely sold-out run, which felt like a huge result for an independent show in such a crowded festival. Doing the same show every day also changes the nerves quite quickly - you stop worrying so much about whether it will work and start enjoying how each audience responds differently. It varied hugely from day one to day 10, and I was proud with what I brought.
Financially, Edinburgh Fringe makes almost no sense. There are huge upfront costs in travel, accommodation, registration, marketing and production, and some venue deals can leave performers owing money if they don't hit expected sales. I chose free fringe having gone with bigger venues before that required me to pay thousands in advance and then give up half of the ticket fees. It's a racket.
Accommodation is also absurd. You can end up paying the cost of a Caribbean holiday to stay in student halls with 11 other people and share a bathroom. That matters because it changes who can afford to take part. If you need thousands of pounds upfront, several weeks away from paid work and the ability to absorb a loss, you inevitably make it harder for working-class comedians to be there.
So, I was thrilled with how the run went, but an almost sold-out Fringe does not automatically make it a profitable exercise. For most performers, the benefits are much more of a slow burn - building an audience, generating reviews and recommendations, creating industry opportunities and developing a show that can have a life after August. That can absolutely be valuable, but it is not the same as making your money back there and then. You still have to be able to afford the upfront risk in the first place.
As far as comedy is concerned, what and where was the performance you are most proud of?
Probably performing at Alexandra Palace as part of a huge charity line-up alongside people like Nish Kumar and Russell Howard. There were around 1,000 people in the room, and hearing that many people laugh at one of your jokes is a feeling I don't think you ever forget. The most serendipitous part is how it came about. A journalist I met for my day job recommended me at the school gates to another mum, who just happened to be one of the biggest comedy bookers in the UK. That conversation eventually led to me being booked for this enormous show alongside comedians I'd admired for years.
It really brought home how unpredictable life can be. In my mid-30s, I thought my path was pretty clearly defined. I had a career, I knew what I was good at, and I had a fairly fixed idea of what my future looked like. If you'd told me then that a few years later, I'd be standing on stage at Alexandra Palace on a bill with some of my comedy heroes, I would have laughed in your face.
Comedy has been a lovely reminder that you don't necessarily know what's still ahead of you. Sometimes a whole new part of your life starts because somebody mentions your name in a conversation you weren't even there for.
And the worst?
There have absolutely been gigs where every second on stage has felt approximately four hours long. One of the brutal things about comedy is that there is nowhere to hide when something isn't working. In most professional environments, if you present an idea that doesn't quite land, everybody politely nods and you move on to the next slide. An audience does not extend you that courtesy.
The worst was probably doing a courtroom immersive ‘roast' to a drunken stag party in Cardiff. Me and a fellow comedian had been booked for not much money at all, sent to a local Conservative club at lunch time where we found out the manager had been expecting an actual party, not a one-hour comedy stag show. They had laid on extra staff for it, expecting a full, busy house not eight rowdy men from Essex. The booker wasn't answering so it was up to us to smooth it over. We had to ‘perform' in the vestibule between the door and the main bar so there was a constant stream of traffic, calm down the landlady - fortunately my friend was a local so I had been to her 18th, 21st and engagement party there so was able to do some fast talking and charming - and try to keep the stags in-line, and buying drinks so the venue got something out of the booking. They were unruly to say the least, and it was an incredibly long hour that really made me reconsider what I was doing with my life. But it's become a good anecdote.
Has having such a public creative life helped or hindered your professional corporate brand?
Much more help than hindrance. There was probably a time when people thought you had to present a very narrow professional version of yourself to be taken seriously. I think that has changed enormously.
Comedy has made me a better presenter, interviewer and communicator. Standing in front of an unpredictable room teaches you very quickly whether you're actually being clear, and it makes you much more comfortable responding when things don't go according to plan.
The reverse is true too. Product thinking has definitely influenced the way I make comedy. I test material, watch where audiences respond, think about positioning, understand who the show is for and iterate constantly. Edinburgh made that crossover especially obvious because we approached the show like a product launch rather than simply putting it on and hoping people found us.
I don't really think of professional Vix and comedy Vix as separate brands. They're both manifestations of the same slightly obsessive person who likes understanding why people behave the way they do and then explaining it to other people. One just involves significantly more PowerPoint.