Catherine Becker – Episode 34
Catherine Becker is the Head of Media for Europe at Electronic Arts (EA). Catherine’s role at EA entails heading up media for Europe across all titles – across sport and games, including the world-famous FIFA and Madden, and more recently NFL and Formula One. Catherine’s media and marketing team have won numerous awards in recognition of their innovative approach to marketing FIFA20. Alongside leading a high-performing team, Catherine also Chairs EA’s UK Women’s Ultimate Team (WUT), which is an employee resource group (ERG) set up to promote and support equality for EA’s female teams. The group has delivered numerous programmes and events for EA employees as well as outreach to schools and universities to inspire and showcase female role models in the gaming and sports industries to better improve female representation and diversity.
Catherine started her career at JWT, the university of advertising, and progressed through the business specialising in media planning and buying. She was a director of Y&R before moving to one of the first media independents to split off from creative agencies. Catherine also worked at the head office of Aegis (now Dentsu Aegis) overseeing the creation and implementation of one global planning approach. A former Board Director at ZenithOptimedia, a position she left to run her own media-independent, adconnection, as CEO, which was sold to VCCP in 2015, running the merged VCCP media business until 2018. She was also one of the founding shareholders of Fetch Media, one of the first agencies to drive mobile advertising and marketing. Fetch Media was sold to Dentsu Aegis in 2014. She was an investor and board director of upmarket dating website Lovestruck, which was sold in 2016.
Catherine has been actively involved in Women in Advertising and Communication Leadership (WACL). Across her time there she has been involved in Gatherings and Gather (inspiring talks and mentoring for the of female leaders and most recently leading Campaigning for WACL that developed WACL’s #FlexibleFirst campaign, which has already made significant progress in setting the agenda for Flexible working at a key time of change from the pandemic, which has knock-on consequences foreclosing the gender pay gap which in will have an impact on achieving more equality for women in general. Catherine and WACL’s work has resulted in the production of a toolkit to demonstrate how businesses can improve flexible working practices and case studies of WACL organisations leading in flexible approaches, research that shows that flexible working leads to higher profitability, motivation and retention, and a checklist and Standard Leadership mark for organisations to track their progress on flexibility.
Catherine is the recipient of many corporate and industry awards both for innovation and business. These include being featured in the Sunday Times Fastest Growing Companies twice, appearing in 1000 Companies that inspire Britain four years in a row, Media Agency of the year 2017 in Mediatel, and awards in Marketing Week, Campaign, Drum and EGR. Alongside Media and Marketing Magazine awarding Catherine an award for “The Best Campaign in the last 10 years” in recognition of her work with Ford.
Most recently Catherine was awarded one of Ad Age’s 2021 Top 50 Leading Women in marketing, media and advertising across the US and Europe. The list recognises the forces that are leading change across the industry.
In addition to an illustrious career in media and marketing, Catherine has also been at the forefront of driving change in the industry through working with engineers to create the basis of Performance Marketing, creating new ad formats in newspaper advertising and developing the first scented outdoor advertisement. Catherine is also passionate about growing and nurturing teams, having hired and trained many people who are now running agencies and businesses of their own. She also mentors for NABS, WACL and within EA. And if that was not impressive enough, Catherine is married with two teenage boys and lives in Hampstead in London, where she runs 10km twice a week alongside skiing and being an enthusiastic but bad golfer.
In this episode of In Her Corner, we talk to Catherine about creating more inclusive policies to enable women to progress and thrive in the workplace, why diversity, equity and inclusion is good for business and her three career-defining lessons.
You can listen to the trailer for Catherine’s episode using the player below:
Catherine’s full episode will be released on Saturday 28 August and will be available to listen to on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other major streaming platforms.
Podcast theme track by Wayne Urquhart and Mix Engineering by Nick Murphy.
