Growing up an advertising-obesessed child in disadvantaged circumstances in Waterford, Pamela Uddin received a helping hand along the way from the likes of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. Now with her own London-based digital marketing agency, she talks to George Morahan about the importance of diversity hiring and how she plans to expand her agency
As a child, television was one of Pamela Uddin’s only outlets, but she would focus on the adverts.
When a programme started, she would switch over to watch the ads on another channel.
A career in marketing clearly beckoned, and she now leads the UK agency re:act Marketing as managing partner.
Born in Germany to an Irish mother and a Pakistani father, Uddin moved to Waterford at a young age, and lived with her mother in a one-bedroom council house with no indoor toilet.
She describes growing up “on the breadline” and recalls the daily walks to her grandmother’s house for dinner and a bath before returning home to bed.
As a mixed-race child with “a really bad stammer” who was also diagnosed with dyslexia at 14, Uddin was bullied “an awful lot”.
Her mother “did what she could with what she had”, but it was a “tough upbringing”, she says.
The family received support from the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in the form of Christmas hampers, and Uddin would sell the unwanted items to other kids on the estate.
Uddin also got financial assistance from the charity when she attended Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) to study Marketing with Advertising and Online Media.
She was also the beneficiary of two scholarships, one from Bank of Ireland when she attended WIT, and the Aspire Scholarship for UCD’s Smurfit School of Business, where she completed an MSc in International Business in 2012.
Uddin launched the Regina Angela re:act scholarship bursary in 2023 to help financially disadvantaged students attend Smurfit, and the bursary will be made open to students hoping to attend any third-level institution in Ireland ahead of the 2025/26 academic year.
Appearing over Microsoft Teams from her well-lit Oxfordshire office, wearing a mint green turtleneck, Uddin says she thinks “all the time” about how different her life would have been without scholarships, particularly the Aspire one, which “opened many doors for her” and provided her with important networking opportunities.
“It got me my first job at L’Oréal in Dublin — they only hired from Smurfit for their internships — and I would have never got into the world of [fast-moving consumer goods] and have the network that I have now without it,” she says.
After moving to London in 2014, she took part in BBC boardroom reality show The Apprentice (she declines to talk about it, but she made it to week six) before working for Unilever, Britvic and Nestlé.
Later, she co-founded re:act with her husband Tom Stone, an Englishman who also worked for L’Oréal and Unilever.
Uddin’s accent hints at a decade spent in London, but there is a road sign pointing to Trá Mhór on the wall behind her.
Established in 2019, re:act is a digital-first, social media-focused creative agency that spun out of Uddin and Stone’s dissatisfaction with what they felt was a haphazard approach to social media among leading advertising agencies.
Uddin remembers feeling that there were “things missing” from the service offered to clients by the likes of Saatchi and Saatchi, Wavemaker and Mindshare during the transition to digital advertising.
“The bigger agencies weren’t getting it,” she recalls.
“They would take my TVC [television commercial], cut it and put it on Instagram, and we were, like, ‘No, no, it needs to be specifically [designed] for that channel.’
“That’s where the idea of the agency came from. It was through working on the client side with these massive global agencies, and still seeing that they weren’t hitting the nail on the head.
“That’s when we said, right, let’s try and do this ourselves.”
At first, however, it was only Stone who made the leap, with Uddin assisting in the background while continuing to work for Nestlé.
Stone was always the more entrepreneurial of the two while Uddin’s ambitions centred on climbing the corporate ladder and landing some non-executive board seats.
After a somewhat precarious and uncertain early life, Uddin admits that “money drove everything” for her.
She moved to London soon after entering employment, dreaming of a better salary and a path to the top of the business world.
“I never planned on starting an agency or leaving my corporate life,” she says.
The couple were on their honeymoon when re:act landed its first client in October 2019.
Covid hit soon after, and the major agencies were slow to meet rocketing demand for online advertising content.
Their firm was “in the right place at the right time” to pick up business.
When re:act landed its first major contract in 2021, Uddin joined fulltime.
The company is now one of the fastest-growing independent agencies in the UK, turning “seven-figure” revenues into “six-figure” profits, according to Uddin.
The latest available accounts for re:act Marketing Ltd with Companies House show accumulated profits of £142,022 at the end of March 2024.
The agency bolstered its senior leadership team in early 2024 with the appointments of Nick Hart as client strategy director, Bilal Abood as creative director and Emma Bate as content and strategy director, with James Pugh joining in January as head of social.
The company promotes the diversity of its workforce, 25% of whom are neurodivergent, and 35% of whom are from ethnic minority backgrounds.
At a time when corporations feel emboldened to slash diversity programmes following Donald Trump’s return as US president, Uddin is sure that doors will be closed for people of colour and people with disabilities, although she believes many such initiatives were box-ticking exercises anyway.
“I think every company has a part to play to make sure that [the backlash against diversity] doesn’t affect their staff, and that’s easier said when you’re a smaller company where you have control over policy,” she says.
“I am going to do everything I can to make sure we keep breaking those glass ceilings and making sure that people can fulfil whatever passion they have through work, no matter what their background is because, ultimately, the world is getting more diverse and you have to market to that diverse group of people.
“Your employee base has to reflect the world and the consumers who are purchasing your products.”
You might think that a company set up to take advantage of established competitors’ blind spots would be open to acquisition, but Uddin is adamant that re:act will remain independent, at least for the next three to five years.
The firm completed its first acquisition last February with the takeover of production house Split Image, so it can now handle image and video production internally.
There are also plans to open a New York office.
In addition to creative work, re:act’s service offering includes media planning/buying, campaign strategy, social media management and influencer management.
Clients include dry shampoo company Batiste, protein shake brand For Goodness Shakes, tanning products maker St. Tropez, and even Disney.
The company handles some Unilever brands in Ireland too.
Asked if it is difficult to keep on top of an ever-changing digital/social media landscape, Uddin says it helps that re:act has advance notice of any algorithm changes at Meta and TikTok.
Trying to keep up with the surrounding politics — antitrust cases, changing regulation, the threatened TikTok ban, Elon Musk’s reign at X/Twitter — is a “minefield”, though.
With Trump back in the White House, she sees the lines between business and politics blurring, and focus shifting from consumer protection to US self-interest.
“What the actual bigger game beneath it all is very hard to pinpoint,” she says.
“We keep our finger on the pulse constantly, mainly because the algorithm changes affect our clients’ performance and how ads are used and the type of consumers we target.
“But it is getting increasingly difficult because the reasons why things keep changing are different now.”
