James Connelly — Built, exited, building again → Board Advisor. CEO @ Charlie Oscar. We bring marketing science to modern marketing, growing brands at scale.
Built, exited, building again → Board Advisor. CEO @ Charlie Oscar. We bring marketing science to modern marketing, growing brands at scale.
James Connelly ranks #606 of 18,566 LinkedIn creators in Marketing & Advertising, and is a standout voice in United Kingdom. They have 9.4K followers and published 28 posts in the last 60 days at a 0.4% average engagement rate.
- 9.4K followers
- 28 posts / 60d
- 0.4% avg engagement
- 179 follower growth / 30d
The roast
James Connelly runs an agency called Charlie Oscar, which is exactly the kind of name a mid-life crisis gives to a boat it’s too afraid to sail. He claims to bring marketing science to his clients, yet manages a 0.75% engagement rate—the statistical equivalent of a flyer stuck to a pole.
About James
I founded my first agency from my kitchen table in 2009. I exited to Dentsu in 2018. Now I’m building again with Charlie Oscar - with a world-class team and the benefit of experience. I write about: - Marketing effectiveness (what drives growth vs what just looks good in a report) - AI (what’s changing - and what brands need to do about it) - Business + personal growth (the messy stuff people avoid talking about) When I’m not in our London office, I’m usually in the gym or on a golf course. If you're into any of the above, let’s connect. www.charlieoscar.com
Highlights
- Top 5% Creator — 28 posts in 30 days
- Top 10% in United Kingdom — Ranked #95 of 1840 creators
- Top 10% in Marketing & Advertising — Ranked #90 of 1092 creators
- Top 25% Audience — 9,360 followers
Recent posts
Inference. It's a word I first learned of and understood in the context of AI. It was at a CMO roundtable with Alex Schultz, then the CMO of Meta and now their Chief Data Officer. One of his big priorities and concerns was inference. I hadn't even heard of it and was sat there thinking, this is a bit embarrassing 😅 If you don't know what it is either, the short version is this: The more people use AI, the slower it's going to get. The speed, the usage and the volume all depend on the capacity. Capacity in power, chips, infrastructure and so on. If you remember when everyone was on the int
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Some people in the creator economy are worried about AI content. Three months ago, I could tell the difference between AI generated content and human content. Every single time. Now it's a lot harder. There are some AI videos that are perfect. Runway ran a study in January and only 9.5% of people could reliably pick AI video from real footage. What will it be like in three months, never mind three years? There is no doubt we are going to have a feed full of AI content from brands, without us even knowing. Will brands need creators anymore when they can make their own content, which looks t
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This is a proof of concept, so it might not survive contact with a real client Everyone in paid social will tell you that you need more creative. That's not quite it. What you need is variation. Ads that look, sound and feel genuinely different going into the algorithm, rather than forty versions of the same idea with the logo moved. Producing that by hand doesn't scale, so we've built a system for the parts that were never the creative bit. It reads what customers and reviews are actually saying, pulls out the personas and the pain points, and hands that to the team as a brief. The team com
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Last updated 2026-08-01