Women to Watch 2021: Claire Butterworth, GroupM

Claire Butterworth

General manager, investment
GroupM 
Australia

She might not be winning at Cannes Lions for it, but as a media-investment specialist, Claire Butterworth’s job is no less significant. In fact, in many respects, it’s the lifeblood of the industry, creating the funds necessary for creative ideas to come to life. Not only this, Butterworth is blazing her own trail while doing it as one of the only women leading investment at an Australian big-five holding group.

Prior to taking up the role as general manager of investment at GroupM, Butterworth was overseeing investment for MediaCom, the largest agency within the largest holding company in Australia. Eighteen months into the role, she enhanced the agency’s operations and was also generous with her experience and wisdom. It was her success at MediaCom that enabled her to move into a group role.

Through relationships, trust and transparency, Butterworth has consistently created media value for clients like Uber, Ebay, KFC, Vodafone and Mitsubishi that have delivered tens of millions of dollars of profit over the last 10 years.

During her tenure at MediaCom, Butterworth oversaw a project to deliver ‘beautiful basics’, a piece of work creating best-in-class process and execution from implementation strategy to invoicing. But then the pandemic hit and Butterworth found herself having to quickly embrace change. So she created an investment community, bringing together the best agency talent to share work, partner on projects, learn from each other and improve overall quality of work.

The impact Butterworth created at MediaCom parlayed into the opportunity to transfer to GroupM in a new role as general manager of investment, where the billings oversight she manages has moved from hundreds of millions of dollars to billions.

By demonstrating modern leadership and keen commercial acumen, Butterworth has shown that she can be a hard-nosed negotiator, a gentle mentor and an action-focused executive. She is as comfortable leading a multimillion-dollar negotiation as she is discussing the challenges of getting the kids into daycare.