Capital Allocation
Media budgets governed like an investment portfolio: hypothesis, thesis size, stop-loss, and reallocation on a fixed cadence.
Shayaan
Digital Alchemy
Shayaan Zulfiqar Butt
Global Digital Strategy
Global Digital Growth Leadership
Shayaan Zulfiqar Butt, Global Head of Digital Strategy & Paid Media.
I turn media budgets into market share by engineering the measurement, the buying and the brand narrative that compound into category leadership.
Impressions orchestrated
Single-campaign reach across paid social, search & programmatic
Media under management
Multi-channel budget owned end-to-end, from forecast to attribution
Blended click-through rate
Roughly triple the accepted display & social benchmark
Organic growth delivered
Compounding non-paid revenue built alongside the paid engine
The Doctrine
Most organisations buy attention. I engineer the system that compounds it: every impression becomes an asset, every click becomes a signal, and every signal feeds back into a machine that gets sharper the longer it runs.
Growth stops being a marketing line item the moment it becomes an operating system. I build that system: paid media as the accelerant, organic search as the balance sheet, and brand as the multiplier that makes both cheaper every quarter. Channels are not strategies. They are instruments in a portfolio, and my job is to know precisely which one to play, at what volume, and when to stop playing it altogether.
I lead with the P&L in view. Budget is capital, not spend. Every pound, dollar and rupee I deploy is underwritten by a thesis on incrementality (what would not have happened without it) and measured against contribution margin rather than vanity reach. That discipline is what turns a media plan into a defensible market position.
The compounding advantage is data. I architect the measurement layer first: clean GA4 event design, server-side signal, Looker Studio boardroom reporting, CRM closed-loop attribution. A team that can see the truth in real time will out-decide a better-funded competitor that cannot, and speed of learning is the only durable moat left.
Media budgets governed like an investment portfolio: hypothesis, thesis size, stop-loss, and reallocation on a fixed cadence.
Measurement designed before the first ad ships: event taxonomy, server-side integrity, and attribution the board can defend.
Brand narrative and search demand engineered together, so paid efficiency improves as organic authority accumulates.
Weekly optimisation loops, monthly incrementality reads, quarterly strategic resets: velocity institutionalised, not improvised.
The Trajectory
Six chapters, one thesis: growth is an engineering discipline. Regulated finance taught the rigour, agency work taught the speed, and enterprise media taught the scale.
Defence Housing Authority
2024–2025
Lahore, Pakistan
Took command of the flagship multi-channel media programme for one of the region's largest real-estate developments, turning a broadcast budget into a measurable acquisition engine.
PKR 12.3M+
Media managed
82.5M+
Impressions
2.97%
Blended CTR
Owned a PKR 12.3M+ multi-channel media investment end-to-end (forecasting, channel mix modelling, creative strategy, in-flight optimisation and post-campaign attribution), reporting performance directly to executive stakeholders.
Engineered 82.5M+ impressions across Meta, Google Search, YouTube and programmatic display, holding a 2.97% blended click-through rate against a category benchmark closer to 0.9%.
Rebuilt the audience architecture around first-party signal and high-intent lookalike modelling, collapsing wasted reach and concentrating spend on the segments that actually converted to qualified enquiry.
Instituted a weekly optimisation cadence with creative-fatigue thresholds and automated bid governance, so budget moved toward winning placements within days rather than at month-end.
Built the executive reporting layer in Looker Studio: one source of truth spanning spend, reach, CTR, cost-per-qualified-lead and share of voice, replacing fragmented channel exports.
LimeOut Services
2023–2024
London, United Kingdom
Modernised the paid media function around programmatic buying, proving that disciplined, machine-assisted targeting beats budget size.
£13K+
Managed spend
DV360
Programmatic stack
AI-led
Bid & audience strategy
Directed £13K+ in managed paid media spend across Google Ads and Display & Video 360, treating every campaign as a controlled experiment with a defined efficiency threshold.
Deployed AI-driven DV360 programmatic targeting (automated bidding strategies, contextual and audience-list layering, and inventory quality controls) to buy attention at materially lower effective CPMs.
Restructured account architecture around intent tiers, separating prospecting from harvesting so budget stopped cannibalising demand the brand already owned.
Ran continuous creative and landing-page testing cycles, feeding conversion insight back into the media plan and lifting return on ad spend without raising the budget ceiling.
Standardised cross-channel reporting and pacing controls, giving leadership forward visibility on delivery instead of retrospective explanations.
BlackHeath Products × 9yards Creative
2023
London, United Kingdom
Owned end-to-end digital strategy across both B2B and B2C demand, building the organic asset base that makes paid media cheaper.
+35%
Organic traffic
−15%
Bounce rate
B2B + B2C
Dual-funnel strategy
Architected and executed the full-funnel digital strategy across parallel B2B and B2C audiences, aligning technical SEO, content, and paid support under a single commercial narrative.
Drove a 35% increase in organic traffic through technical remediation, search-intent-mapped content architecture, and authority building, converting search visibility into a compounding acquisition channel.
Reduced bounce rates by 15% via UX and messaging overhaul, tightening the match between search intent, landing experience and conversion path.
Rebuilt keyword and competitor intelligence in Ahrefs to identify uncontested demand, then prioritised the roadmap by commercial value rather than search volume.
Established analytics hygiene and reporting standards so organic performance could finally be defended in the same terms as paid.
NatWest Group
2021–2023
United Kingdom
Operating inside a regulated FTSE-100 institution, where judgement, data handling and customer trust are not optional refinements but licence to operate.
FTSE 100
Regulated environment
GDPR
Data governance
Root-cause
Resolution model
Resolved complex, high-sensitivity customer cases end-to-end within a major UK banking group, balancing commercial outcome with regulatory obligation.
Operated under strict GDPR and FCA-aligned data handling standards, discipline that now shapes how I design consented first-party data capture and measurement infrastructure.
Partnered across operational teams to close root-cause failure points rather than individual complaints, improving resolution throughput and customer retention.
Built fluency in translating dense policy and data into clear, defensible communication: the same skill required to take a media investment case to a board.
Foundations
Manchester Metropolitan University
Postgraduate
Manchester, United Kingdom
Formal grounding in the mechanics of modern demand: consumer psychology, integrated communications, analytics and digital strategy at master's level.
MSc
Postgraduate degree
Digital
Marketing communications
Specialised in integrated digital communications, consumer behaviour and data-led campaign strategy.
Applied academic frameworks (attribution theory, brand equity modelling, and communications planning) directly to live commercial problems.
Royal Holloway, University of London
Undergraduate
London, United Kingdom
The commercial foundation in finance, global markets and strategic management that keeps every marketing decision anchored to the business it is meant to serve.
BSc
Undergraduate degree
Global
Business strategy
Studied international business strategy, finance and cross-border market entry at one of the UK's leading research universities.
Developed the commercial literacy to argue marketing investment in the language of margin, payback and market share.
The Instrument Panel
These are not line items on a CV. They are a connected system — every node feeds the next, and the value compounds where they intersect. Drag the constellation. Interrogate any node.
Google Ads
Paid MediaSearch accounts rebuilt around intent tiers so budget harvests demand instead of competing with itself.
Capability topology
09 nodes
Drag to rotate · Click a node
The Next Chapter
If your category is winnable and your budget deserves a better thesis, there is a conversation worth having. Bring the ambition. I will bring the operating model.
Selectively partnering with brands scaling into new markets. Currently based in London, United Kingdom, working across UK, EMEA and South Asian markets.