August 20, 2026
Georgina Benjamin, Head, CIB Marketing (Europe) at Standard Chartered, joined us at our Agency Future Leaders event recently for an “Ask Me Anything” session. What followed was a candid, wide-ranging conversation about career, confidence and the courage to be yourself.
It’s safe to say that Georgina has not followed the typical career path. From launching her own business to consulting for The New York Times; from working with the UK Government, to eventually leading brand and marketing at one of the world’s major banks, she’s had what she describes as a mosaic career – one that had been anything but straight forward.
The conversation was refreshingly honest. She spoke about failure, about being the only person of colour in the room, and about what it takes to build a career you’re proud of.
Failure is just a chapter
Georgina opened with a story she once swore she would never tell anyone. As a young entrepreneur, she set up a nail bar business at a tennis tournament in Cincinnati, backed by family and running on optimism. It didn’t go to plan. Attendees had either had their nails painted beforehand or expected freebies. She left having lost a significant amount of money, and worse, the feeling that she had let her family down.
“I realised very early on the first day that I was going to lose a lot. Every day was really difficult,” she recalled. “I came home and thought, what have I done?”
What followed was a period of genuine hardship when Georgina felt she’d hit rock bottom. She applied for more than 70 jobs, hearing nothing, until a media client said they’d keep her CV on file. This time, they did call back, looking for someone to market a New York Times arts conference in the Middle East. Georgina wrote out a full plan, pitched it to the interviewer, and left with the job!
A few weeks later, she opened the newspaper and saw her own campaign looking back at her.
That failure in Cincinnati, she said, gave her a resilience she couldn’t have built any other way. When later challenges arose, she had the context to keep them in perspective.
Nobody has 100% of the criteria
For anyone quietly wondering whether they’re qualified enough for the role they want, Georgina’s advice is: apply anyway.
“Nobody ticks every box. And a lot of very senior people don’t always know what they are doing either.” She noted that women, in particular, often see a job description, feel they’re missing half a point out of ten, and talk themselves out of applying. “You should just go for it,” she said. Her other advice is to “try to make yourself a great fit,” by reaching out to someone in that industry, for example, or starting a conversation on LinkedIn. “Some of the best things that have happened in my life have been because I just started a conversation or someone has started a conversation with me,” she said.
The mosaic career is a strength
When asked why she had moved across so many sectors and roles, Georgina was unapologetic. She described making deliberate, intentional moves: into sales because she wanted to understand how people make decisions; into her own business because she was passionate about it and wanted to give it a go; into government and financial services because she had never worked in these worlds before. Each move had a logic, even if it was not immediately obvious from the outside.
When an interviewer questioned why she’d “jumped around so much,” Georgina turned the question back on them, pointing to a stint they’d done in an entirely different field and noting how valuable those experiences must have been. “I think there’s real beauty in thinking more broadly,” she said.
Diversity is not just about optics
Georgina described her time working for the Department of International Trade on a campaign to attract visitors to the UK. As they were reviewing the advertising campaign, she noticed the creative included an image of an old ship, intended to represent Britain’s heritage, sitting alongside a new submarine. To most people around the table, it looked fine. To Georgina and a couple of colleagues from ethnic minority backgrounds, it looked like a slave ship. “Everybody else was looking at this saying, it’s great,” she said.
This lack of awareness, Georgina pointed out, is what happens when there’s too much of one type of person in a room. Her view of diversity extends beyond race and gender to disability, background and experience. Without that range, important perspectives simply get missed.
Don’t be afraid to be yourself
When asked what advice she would give her younger self, Georgina didn’t hesitate: “Don’t be afraid to be yourself.”
She spoke about wearing colour in rooms full of people in black and blue; about being proud of being from South London and saying so; and about encouraging her teams to bring their full selves to work rather than just completing tasks. “Who are you? What do you enjoy doing? Why would somebody want to look the same or be the same? You don’t stand out that way.”
It’s a message that ran as a thread through the entire conversation. Authenticity shouldn’t be used as a corporate talking point but as a lived conviction – who you are is an asset to be used.
A reframe changes everything
Perhaps the most enduring lesson from Georgina’s career is the habit of reframing. She doesn’t talk to herself from a victim’s perspective. She doesn’t describe people as having wronged her; she notes what happened and moves forward. She takes the experience of losing all her money at that tennis tournament in Cincinnati and traces a direct line from it to her success at the New York Times, her government work, and her role at Standard Chartered today.
“I wouldn’t change it,” she says of that failed business. “I really wouldn’t change it. I learned how to be poor and it was character building. And when challenges presented themselves afterwards, I thought, I lost 25 grand in a week once, so this can’t be that bad!”
For additional insights from our client “Ask Me Anything” sessions, check out Ebru Ozguc on building unshakeable client / agency trust.