LONDON, 19 JANUARY 2026: Social-first agency SAMY has appointed former Kantar Futures Practice Lead Meredith Smith as Global Head of Future Strategies.
The role, newly created for Smith, forms part of SAMY’s ambition to help brands develop a much deeper, social-first understanding of audiences that truly drive brand love and commercial growth.
Based in the UK and reporting into Chief Strategy Officer Alex Hill, Smith brings more than 20 years’ experience spanning strategic foresight, consumer and cultural insight and innovation strategy. Her appointment reflects a growing shift in how brands need to understand people in a world where culture, commerce and community increasingly unfold in real time across the social universe.
Smith began her career as a product designer, developing a strong grounding in human behaviour and what motivates people. Drawn to the cultural drivers behind these behaviours, she went on to complete an Innovation Management Master’s at Central Saint Martins. This marked the start of a career focused on blending long-term foresight with qualitative and quantitative insight to inform innovation and brand strategy.
Across her career, Smith has worked with multinational organisations across sectors, helping leadership teams bridge the gap between long-term ambition and day-to-day decision making. She has seen first-hand how short-term pressures can prevent brands from building relevance over time, and how traditional insight models often struggle to keep pace with cultural change.
Smith joins SAMY from Kantar, where she spent almost five years leading futures, consumer and cultural insight across FMCG, beauty, retail, hospitality, food & beverage and Big Tech. Her work included advising brands such as Diageo, Unilever, L’Oréal and Google, as well as co-leading a widely cited, multi-brand report, The Future of Socialising, produced in collaboration with partners including Diageo, Pinterest, Tinder, Google, Unilever and Pepsi Lipton.
Her decision to join SAMY followed a collaboration with the agency and Diageo in 2025, during which she saw how social-first intelligence is reshaping audience understanding. In a world where discovery, decision-making and advocacy increasingly happen in public, social spaces, Smith believes traditional research methods alone are no longer providing brands with the depth of understanding needed to create meaningful impact.
In her new role, Smith will sit within SAMY’s global strategy team, with a remit to combine the agency’s technology, talent and acquisitions into new strategic capabilities for clients. A core focus will be helping brands move from social listening to a fuller social-first understanding, capturing how communities form, how sentiment shifts and how meaning is built around brands in real time.
One of Smith’s first major initiatives will be the development of new metrics and methodologies designed to help brands understand whether their content and social strategies are creating meaningful connections and increasing long-term relevance. This work will focus on tracking how strategy, creativity and execution combine to make brands matter more over time.
Alongside this, Smith will support new business and strategic development, helping connect corporate ambition with brand-level execution across markets, and ensuring that insight translates into real commercial impact.
Alex Hill, Chief Strategy Officer, SAMY, commented: “Meredith’s 20-year career supporting iconic brands will be invaluable, particularly her expertise in anticipating change and translating emerging cultural, technological, and behavioural signals into commercially powerful strategies.
“This experience will supercharge our mission to transform how businesses can harness insight and intelligence to build meaningful connections across the social universe.”
Smith commented: “I see SAMY as a spice rack full of amazing ingredients. They have such an exciting variety of technology, talent and social intelligence.
“When those spices are combined in new and novel ways, SAMY is in a strong position to help organisations in ways most large insight companies can’t, by fundamentally changing how brands can understand audiences in order to truly reach them.
“It’s time to move beyond some traditional insight models, and SAMY understands how people behave, connect and build meaning around brands in a truly social-first world.”
Today, SAMY has more than 1,000 employees across 23 offices and operates in over 50 markets worldwide. 2026 has seen the agency expand its footprint across key markets, rebranding team5pm Nordics, team5pm Poland and Finnish social-first creative agency Kurio under the SAMY name, while Smith’s appointment also follows the recent senior hire of Anabela Bonuccelli as US Managing Director.
