In her previous life, Fran was a Board Director at WCRS, where she worked on consumer brands including BMW, Prudential and Kattomeat. When she joined Warman & Bannister in 1993 she discovered business was a far more interesting subject than catfood and that as advertising was only one of 14 tools you needed to deploy to successfully engage business audiences, B2B agencies were far better equipped to develop properly integrated communications campaigns. She’s been a committed B2B ambassador ever since.

Fran started Omobono in 2001 with colleagues Ben Dansie and Chris Butterworth. The agency blogged from Day One, documenting everything from not being able to afford an office, to winning 3 IPA Advertising Effectiveness awards. Now in its 9th year, Omobono is one of the UK’s leading digital B2B agencies with a particular focus on customer retention, intermediary and internal communications. It was the first ever European winner of the US Ogilvy awards and this year has been shortlisted for Best Agency in the B2B Magazine 2009 awards. Fran was shortlisted for the media category at the inaugural First Women awards but lost out (unsurprisingly) to Fru Hazlitt of Yahoo and Virgin Radio. She is a regular speaker on B2B and sits on the COI regional council, taking up the cudgels for small businesses.