Watson Comes Home for New Role at Opinium

Continuing a year of multiple senior appointments, London-based Opinium has brought in former Hall & Partners exec Scott Watson as Head of Marketing Sciences. He returns after four years in Australia working for insight agency Nature.

Founded in 2007, Opinium also has offices in New York, Amsterdam and Cape Town, and in addition to opinion polling works for clients in multiple sectors on projects including brand and communications, product, customer, employee and thought leadership.

Having graduated from the University of Hertfordshire in 2001 with an MSc in Research Methods in Psychology, Watson (pictured) worked at the University for four years as an Associate Lecturer and a further three as a Research Assistant. He then joined Maritz Research Europe as a Senior Research Analyst, before moving to Hall & Partners in 2013. Here he was promoted to Marketing Sciences Director in 2015 and then Group Director, Marketing Sciences in 2018. In early 2020 he moved to Australia to join insight agency Nature as an AD, rising to Director by the autumn of 2022.

In his new role, Watson returns to London to help drive Opinium's analytics offering. He joins a number of other new senior arrivals: in January the firm hired Matthew Barton as a Senior Consultant focused on European growth and based in Amsterdam; and in June Mark Rowden joined the firm in London as Head of IT. In April, another former Hall & Partners exec Wez Eathorne was promoted to the new role of Global Head of Brand, Comms & Product Research, seven years after joining the company. In May, it named ten more staff members as equity partners, continuing its drive towards a goal of 50% employee ownership.

Web site: www.opinium.com .