Mary Keane-Dawson

Mary Keane-Dawson is an award-winning Business Leader, Coach & Mentor; and 2022 BIMA Hall of Fame inductee.

Mary’s career spans 35 years of female leadership experience in publishing, advertising and creative agencies, as well as martech, influencer, social platforms and performance media. Working with highly talented teams, she has built, led and sold three agency businesses as well as raising over £100+ million of  investment funding for both start-ups and established businesses.  Known for her candour and honesty, Mary is also a major ‘growth hacker’ – her early doors claim to fame is built on her winning a £20+ million contract from Ford of Britain, when she was only 27 years old and had a team of less than 10 people. She went on to lead the roll out of that programme across 3 continents  becoming that company’s Managing Director. From there she progressed to become Global MD of Spafax Airline Network, the world’s leading inflight entertainment and media business, with 70+ airline clients – which was sold to WPP in 1999. She spent the next 8 years between the USA and China leading Spafax and then building out the digital OOH network Global Cast, which was sold to JC Decaux in 2008. Later that year, she joined Steak Media as Global MD, and helped the founders build out one of the most successful independent Search agencies of the era (now a part of Dentsu).

Mary completed her MSc in Human Resources in the Digital Economy in 2012, and over the last 10 years she has led several iconic business’ including, Collective London, Neo@Ogilvy (where she held a main Ogilvy board position ), TRUTH Media ( a programmatic tech built on blockchain), TAKUMI (the influencer marketing platform) and very recently as interim Global CEO of Time Out Media.

Mary has an outstanding track record in improving commercial and team performance, planning and delivering investment strategies and achieving significant business development and growth – from start-up to mature businesses. Mary is committed to personal lifelong learning and development and mentoring talent, and frames herself as a coach, operational leader and board advisor. A committed advocate and ambassador of BIMA, as well as an advisor and mentor to MADFest, Performance Marketing Awards, The Drum Programmatic and AdExchanger Awards and a Board Trustee of the charity Digilearning,