ADAM SMITH spent the first seven years of his career working for a steel trading company in London entailing mainly two-way trade with western Europe and the former communist bloc: scrap out of the UK and prime steel back. The 1989 recession put a big dent in the steel business and Adam switched to the emerging business of a-la-carte media buying, which seemed like a natural step from commodities at the time. This was for Zenith, at its dingy original Paddington home, where Adam remained for sixteen years. He spent the last eleven of these as head of publications, the team behind many well-known industry titles including the Advertising Expenditure Forecasts, World Press Trends, World Magazine Trends, and the Market & MediaFact pocket book series.

He joined GroupM in January 2006. GroupM is creating its own authoritative industry forecasts (the This Year Next Year series) and Adam gets the chance to take these into the wider field of marketing communications beyond just advertising, with access to the WPP network – which Adam thinks is easily the best of the big four, and he should know.

This Year Next Year won the corporate category in WPPs internal 'Atticus' awards in 2007.

Adam lives in Maidenhead with Maria, Samuel (two) and Poppy (one).