Cold Fusion

I was twenty-two years old, driving a white company station wagon through the outskirts of Sydney with the boot full of Liptons tea, Robert Timms coffee and cardboard displays ready to be constructed.

My job was to sell in cases of tea and coffee, build displays, fill shelves (and nab a few extra facings…), and drive on to the next store. My marketing degree was three months old and worth approximately nothing at seven in the morning, waiting to speak to a store manager as she opened up for the day.

I had studied marketing. But it wasn't until I started this work that I learned marketing.

After tea and coffee there was John West tuna, then Ragu pasta sauce and more as I moved through the family of Unilever's food brands.

I learned where things come from. Not in the supply chain sense, though I learned that too. I mean the deeper thing: I learned what it means for a product to earn its place in someone's life. Not to be chosen once. To be chosen again, and again, and again, by someone with a limited budget, competing priorities, and absolutely no obligation to choose you.

That is the question. The only question, really.

How do you earn the right into the weekly shop?

In the time between that car and today, I led brands at Unilever, Nokia, Orange, and Coca-Cola across dozens of markets. Then I spent fifteen years in marketing services with the last significant stretch as CMO of Publicis Groupe, sitting on the global Management Committee as the company transformed from fourth to first in its industry for every meaningful metric. I co-founded Simbioniq, building new approaches to consumer understanding using AI. I wrote a book about marketing orchestration.

Everywhere I went, the question followed me. Different category, different market, different budget, different competitive context. Same question. The consumer doesn't owe you anything. The shelf doesn't care about your strategy deck.

How do you earn the right?

Today, I have a new place to answer it. I am joining Nomad Foods as Chief Marketing Officer, with responsibility for brand strategy, consumer marketing, communications, and R&D. At first glance, you may not recognise Nomad Foods, but you have enjoyed their brands. The portfolio that includes Birds Eye, iglo, Findus, Aunt Bessies, Ledo, and Frikom… brands that have been in families' freezers, on parents' shopping lists, and in children's memories for generations.

I start today. And I couldn't be more ready.

I've learned in my career that I am most energised by returning the right thing to its rightful place.

There is a category of brand, iconic, trusted, formative, beloved that through market pressure, competitive squeeze, or organisational drift has lost ground it shouldn't have lost. These brands are not broken. They are underleveraged. The equity is real. The emotional connection is genuine. The question is whether you can channel it into commercial performance that reflects what the brand actually deserves.

Birds Eye. iglo. Findus. These are not legacy brands in the pejorative sense. They are brands that have been trusted by families across Europe for half a century or more. Children grew up with them. Those children are now the parents doing the weekly shop. The emotional ledger is full. What is required now is the intelligence to translate that equity into modern growth.

That is the brief. And it is exactly the brief I would have designed for myself.

In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT Media Lab, argued in Being Digital that the defining shift of our era was from atoms to bits. From moving physical things to moving digital information. He was right. The last thirty years proved it.

In early 2026, investment markets started calling the reverse: the "atoms over bits" trade. The argument that the physical infrastructure of supply chains, tangible assets and the genuine weight of things had become more valuable than the software running on top of them. That the digital economy had hit a physical ceiling. The pendulum, apparently, swings back.

I think both camps are missing something.

The real opportunity is not in choosing. It is in the fusion.

Recently I have been deep in bits, building Simbioniq, developing a practitioner's perspective on what AI can and cannot yet genuinely do for brand marketers. Now I am rebalancing this with atoms. Because the discipline of atoms, the accountability of a physical brand that must earn its place in the shopping basket every single week, makes you a sharper, more honest, more rigorous thinker about what bits can actually deliver. And the capability in bits makes you a fundamentally better steward of atoms than was possible even a decade ago.

I am not arriving with answers I wrote somewhere else. I am arriving with thirty years of better questions and the genuine conviction that what we build together at Nomad over the coming years can return these brands to the prominence they have earned.

Everything I have accumulated about the thing that matters most: How do you earn the right into the weekly shop?

Brandflow continues. Twice weekly. Unchanged in sharpness or ambition.

In fact, I would argue it gets sharper. The reason this newsletter has any credibility is that I have never written from the sidelines. I have always been in the game and building something, accountable for something, learning in practice what I then bring here. That has not changed. It has intensified. I am now the CMO of a major European consumer business, building an AI company, and writing about the intersection of both. The insider perspective you come here for is more insider than it has ever been.

The Simbioniq work continues with full commitment. Bits informing atoms. Atoms testing bits. The experiment is now running in real time, and I will bring you what I learn.

I am back in food. Thirty years later, a different role, a different scale, tools that didn't exist when I started. The same question.

And for the first time in a long time, exactly the right place to answer it.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 7 May 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.