Current Marketer of the Year Paul Dervan has resigned as chief marketing officer of the National Lottery. He was appointed by Premier Lotteries Ireland to the newly-created CMO role three years ago. He was in charge across all the lottery’s marketing activity, including brand development and effectiveness, in which he is a specialist. Dervan will move to global tech company Miro where he will head up the brand team. Miro’s HQ is in Amsterdam.
Maebh Gleeson, head of brand at the National Lottery, will become acting CMO in September. Dervan has worked in marketing recruitment with both US company Indeed and Alternatives. At Indeed, he was senior director for global brand strategy and ran the company’s marketing campaign lab. His other previous posts include creative director for gambling brand Full Tilt and brand director for Telefonica’s 02 in the UK.
Rebranding
A graduate of both UCD and TCD, he also worked as a marketing consultant for FCB Huskies and in search marketing at Interactive Return, the agency which later merged with Captivate to become Radical and part of the Core group of companies. He was voted Marketer of the Year last November for his work in rebranding the National Lottery, for consolidating and reinventing its product portfolio and, crucially, for driving revenues.
Dervan’s strategy rested on six behaviours. The first principle was to be hard on the work, easy on each other – raise the quality bar while being kind to colleagues. To succeed, work hard. Critical thinking was next in line, along with a need to be skeptical, not cynical. Humility is a behaviour marketers need to nurture as ego gets in the way. Strong opinions, weakly held means changing course when evidence shows things are going wrong.
Marketers should share early and often – don’t spin results. It can be hard but the alternative is damaging. Dervan will be on the judging panel for this year’s Marketer of the Year.
