Available for projects

Adriana
Paterno

Strategic marketing & brand leader. I build brands that shape culture - deliberately.

From brand strategy to marketing transformation - I help organizations build both the ideas and the capability to deliver them.

01 - About
Portrait of Adriana Paterno in black and white

About me

Brands shape culture - and the best ones do it deliberately.

Over 14 years, I've worked across creative agencies, consulting, and in-house marketing, building a whole-brain approach: analytical enough to turn data into direction, creative enough to make it move people.

My career started in the trenches, actually making campaigns happen - from coordinating brand partnerships and events at a Caracas media agency, to assistant-directing on Spanish TV productions, to delivering integrated campaigns across TV, OOH, digital, and social at a major international advertising agency, learning firsthand what "good" looks like once an idea hits the real world. From there, I moved into strategy in London, defining brand positioning and building insight-led marketing frameworks, and later into in-house leadership, connecting insight to execution at scale across complex, cross-functional teams.

What ties it together is a consistent thread: building strategies rooted in real insight, leading people and partners toward a shared idea, and turning that idea into measurable impact. I'm energised by design trends, cultural shifts, and bold creative thinking - and I love the process of simplifying complexity until the right answer feels obvious.

02 - Projects

A track
record.

Not a client roster
AstraZeneca GSK Bayer Merck Danone Arla Foods Reckitt Benckiser Lego Ford Pepsi Adecco Rolex Metro ERM Maersk Colgate PZ Cussons Lilly AstraZeneca GSK Bayer Merck Danone Arla Foods Reckitt Benckiser Lego Ford Pepsi Adecco Rolex Metro ERM Maersk Colgate PZ Cussons Lilly

Each name here is a business I've sat inside, not just delivered to.

In the planning meetings, in the messy first drafts of a strategy, in the room when a leadership team had to agree on what "good" actually looks like. That proximity is where the real learning happens - what a framework needs to survive contact with a real business, and what falls apart the moment it leaves the workshop.

I've spent this time embedded in cross-functional teams - designing capability strategies, running brand transformations, facilitating leadership workshops, and building the tools that make marketing organisations work better day to day. Along the way, I've upskilled marketers across pharma, FMCG, and B2B category leaders on how modern brands actually grow, redefined ways of working to replace slow, costly annual campaigns with agile, specialist delivery, and shaped go-to-market strategies for brands facing everything from share decline to category expansion.

03 - What I do

How I
can help.

  • 01

    Brand & Marketing Strategy

  • 02

    Consumer & Market Insight

  • 03

    Marketing Capability Building

  • 04

    Workshop Facilitation & Training

  • 05

    Brand Activation & Campaign Development

  • 06

    Marketing Excellence & Operating Models

  • 07

    Cross-functional Programme Leadership

  • 08

    Brand Positioning

04 - How I work

Two ways to
engage.

Mode 01

Agencies & consultancies

Most of my work happens as part of a consultancy's roster - brought in as embedded strategic support, working inside a team as if I were one of their own. It means agencies get senior brand and marketing strategy expertise exactly when a project needs it, without the overhead of a permanent hire.

Mode 02

Freelancers & independents

If you're a fellow freelancer or self-employed and need an extra strategic head on a project - whether that's pressure-testing a positioning idea, sharpening a client deck, or simply another pair of hands when a piece of work has outgrown one person - get in touch directly. I'm always happy to be a sounding board.

05 - Contact

Let's
build.

Tell me about the work.

Based in

London - working globally

Elsewhere