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 #471 of 19,190 LinkedIn creators in Marketing & Advertising, and is a standout voice in United Kingdom. They have 9.4K followers and published 34 posts in the last 30 days at a 0.5% average engagement rate.
- 9.4K followers
- 34 posts / 30d
- 0.5% 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
- Consistent Creator — 18 posts in 30d · top 5%
- Top 10% in United Kingdom — Ranked #137 of 1849 creators
- Top 25% in Marketing & Advertising — Ranked #143 of 1094 creators
- Big Audience — 9,360 followers · top 25%
Recent posts
In 2022, I first came across Emily English . A nutritionist, building a small, niche audience in Instagram. She became popular, quickly. She went from 1,500 followers to 100,000 in what felt like months. Today, she’s got 2.3m followers, two best selling books (they’re used regularly in the Connelly household), her own gut health brand Epetome, and plenty of tier one brand partnerships. When I spent time with her last week, beyond the advice she gave about the importance of obsession in this video, I realised something about Influencers and Entrepreneurs. The modern day entrepreneur now ne
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Marketers, if you’ve tried Influencer marketing and it didn’t work, the problem was probably with you, not them. The typical influencer brief: find a creator with a big audience, agree a flat fee, get the post live, screenshot the impressions. This is pure media buying with a worse CPM. Gymshark understood something that most brands are still arguing about in quarterly reviews. You can't buy your way into culture. Their athletes weren't campaign assets with deliverables in a contract, they were part of how the brand got built. Audiences feel the difference between a creator who is paid to
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Spoiler alert - Influencer marketing needs an intervention. Everyone is talking about creators but far fewer are asking where creator marketing is actually heading. And over the past few years, we've become very good at optimising the existing playbook with better targeting, reporting and attribution. But optimisation isn't the same as innovation. The result is an industry producing more content than ever, but not necessarily creating more influence. That's why we created Find Your Nerve. Not another trends report, but a challenge to some of the assumptions shaping creator marketing tod
14 reactions · 5 comments · 0 reposts