Gilroy appoints Gareth Clark as Managing Director as agency enters next phase of transformation

For five decades, Gilroy has worked alongside many of the world’s leading enterprise B2B organisations, helping them build reputation, strengthen relationships and to protect and grow revenue. That history remains a source of pride: However, heritage alone is not enough in a market that has fundamentally shifted.

Today’s B2B buyers behave differently. They are self-serving in digital channels, for the majority of their buying journeys, preferring information and opinion from credible sources and the brands they trust, over more traditional sales engagement. Marketing models built around campaign bursts and volume based MQL targets are struggling to keep pace with how buying actually happens.

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As Kevin Sleap, CEO of Gilroy, explains:

“How B2B buyers are choosing to buy has fundamentally changed. Buying groups are larger and more complex these days, and the average number of touches, from awareness to deals closed, has risen exponentially from 17 in 2019 to between 60 and 100 in 2024. To succeed, our customers must completely rethink how they respond to this complexity, to turn buying journeys into immersive, connected buying experiences.”

Gareth’s appointment reflects both the strength of Gilroy’s expertise and a clear intent to evolve our services in response to market dynamics. With deep experience in leading and growing B2B marketing agencies, Gareth brings a strong customer mindset, commercial clarity and a track record of building high performing teams. His role is not simply to maintain momentum, but to accelerate Gilroy’s transformation.

Leading change in a market that won’t wait

Gilroy’s evolution is not cosmetic. It is a deliberate response to how B2B buyers now research, evaluate and choose suppliers. In a market where over 70% of buying happens in digital channels, brands that fail to adapt will lose visibility, influence and ultimately market share.

Our transformation reflects a clear belief: to help clients navigate marketing change with confidence, we must first build the model ourselves. Under Gareth’s leadership, Gilroy is advancing its operating model and launching a new portfolio of AI enabled products and services designed to address two parallel challenges facing B2B organisations.

First, the need for longer term structural transformation in how marketing and sales work together around the buying journey. Second, the need for immediate action that protects performance and sustains growth in uncertain conditions.

“There are strategic transformations organisations need to make. But there are also things they need to do quickly. We have built a portfolio of solutions that helps with both.”

Introducing OrkestIQ, connected buying experiences

At the centre of Gilroy’s transformation is OrkestIQ, the agency’s operating model for connected buying experiences. OrkestIQ tackles the challenges of poor lead conversion and disengaged sales teams by unifying the customer buying experience across multiple tactics and channels. Rather than optimising isolated campaigns, it maps how accounts genuinely progress through discovery, scoping, evaluation and validation, aligning marketing and sales around shared stages and shared success metrics.

It enables clear attribution of marketing spend by mirroring how sales measure deal progression, provides detailed, data rich, real time reporting at a single account level, and brings together the efforts of sales, marketing and service teams into a single collaborative framework.

Data founded and AI powered, OrkestIQ delivers personalisation and scale across customers’ trusted channels. It tracks and influences engagement, mines sales intelligence and supports deal progression in a way that reflects the complexity of modern B2B buying cycles. In doing so, it moves organisations beyond vanity volume metrics and campaign bursts towards systems based, always on growth aligned directly to pipeline and revenue.

LumusIQ and AI enabled marketing

Alongside OrkestIQ, Gilroy is introducing LumusIQ, our Generative Engine Optimisation capability designed for an AI mediated buying landscape.

As generative AI reshapes how B2B buyers research, evaluate and shortlist suppliers, LumusIQ ensures brands are not only visible, but credible and influential within AI generated responses. It strengthens digital authority, content structure and semantic relevance so that organisations are surfaced accurately and persuasively when buyers are asking high intent questions. Crucially, LumusIQ is not simply an optimisation exercise. It is both an audit and activation model.

We assess how your brand currently performs across AI driven discovery environments, identify structural weaknesses in content and authority signals, and then activate improvements across site architecture, messaging, content ecosystems and distribution channels. The result is measurable uplift in discoverability, AI citation presence and influence at the earliest stages of the buying journey.

Around LumusIQ sits a broader AI enabled marketing portfolio, including AI powered intent modelling, LLM strategy and MarTech consulting. These capabilities allow us to identify emerging demand signals, align platforms and automation to account progression, and translate AI insight into commercial action.

Integrated into the OrkestIQ operating model, LumusIQ strengthens the very first stages of the buying journey, feeding intelligent visibility and intent into a connected framework that drives progression, pipeline and revenue.

Together, this represents a deliberate repositioning. Gilroy is not experimenting with AI at the edges of marketing. We are embedding it at the core of how brands are discovered, evaluated and selected.

A milestone moment

Gareth Clark commented:

“Gilroy has an exceptional 50-year heritage and a strong foundation to build from. The opportunity now is to evolve how we help our clients grow, integrating sales and marketing around connected buying experiences, investing in AI enabled capability and delivering measurable commercial impact.”

Kevin Sleap added:

“Gareth has proven himself as a highly effective leader with a strong customer mindset and a clear vision for modern B2B marketing. His appointment as Managing Director is a natural next step in Gilroy’s evolution and an important milestone in our succession planning.”

For Gilroy, this is not simply a leadership announcement. It is a statement of intent.

The agency is evolving to reflect the realities of modern B2B buying and to ensure that, just as it has for the past 50 years, it continues to help ambitious organisations grow in markets that are more complex, more competitive and more digitally driven than ever before.