Sofoklis Ioannou

Sofoklis Ioannou is Chief Revenue Officer at Tailwind EMEA, the leading Advertising Technology Consultant and Integrator helping brands across Southeastern Europe and the Middle East deliver Better Media: Ads people love; In Context they Trust.

Tailwind EMEA is the regional partner of global advertising technology leaders such as Integral Ad Science, Innovid, The Trade Desk and Lumen Research.

Over fifteen years in digital media, Sofoklis has built businesses from zero, including as the first employee of Epsilon UK and FreeNow. At Epsilon he scaled commercial operations from a standing start to $100M, and in 2023 he expanded Epsilon operations in Dubai, generating $10M in revenue in its first year. Along the way, he's been part of start-ups that went on to be acquired for a combined $7 billion.

Today, Sofoklis focuses on developing and launching Marshall, Tailwind EMEA's media curation platform. He's also a regular voice in trade press across Europe and the Middle East, writing on the relationship between brand suitability, attention and brand affinity, with one consistent message: The future of advertising isn't about being seen ; it's about belonging where you're seen.

Presentation Title:
"Meet Marshall: The Matchmaker Between Creators, Culture and Media"

Creator marketing has cracked something paid media still struggles with: affinity.
The best creator partnerships work because they connect brands with people, passions and communities that genuinely resonate. But when brands try to scale that connection through paid media, much of that cultural intelligence gets lost. Creator, brand and media teams operate in separate workflows, and carefully chosen creators often give way to formulaic target audiences, media wastage and brand risk.

Marshall, Tailwind EMEA’s Media Curation Engine, is built to bridge that gap. Its proprietary Affinity Index maps the cultural connection between brands, creators, content and audiences — turning affinity into a signal that can travel beyond an individual creator partnership and into scaled paid media across social platforms and the open web.

Because people live in Culture, not CRMs. And the opportunity for creator marketing is not simply to reach a creators’ audience, but to scale what made the connection resonate in the first place.