Aakriti Goel

Strategist & Advisor

Aakriti is a strategist whose business cards have been as varied as the countries she has called home. She believes creativity is a business multiplier rather than a cost line, and that the best growth creates shared value, for brands as well as for the people and the world they sell to.

She began on the client side, at the United Nations and Air France KLM, before building McCann’s social capability in the Middle East back when a ‘tweet’ was still a sound birds made. In her late twenties, she built a strategy department from scratch, integrating data and connecting strategy across the whole business, and tripled new business along the way. She has even launched an e-commerce business of her own. Along the way, she has led strategies for brands including Unilever, Nestlé, Mastercard, Samsung, Volkswagen and Subway, from repositionings and launches to new market entries.

As Head of Strategy & Insights at Leo MEA, she led a team of eclectically talented strategists on work across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. She also helped prove that creativity and effectiveness needn’t be a trade-off: the agency was named the region’s most effective three years running, the world’s most effective in one of them, and the region’s most creative at Dubai Lynx in multiple years.

Ranked among the top three strategists globally, she sat on the Cannes Lions Creative Effectiveness jury in 2026, has judged The One Show and the Effies, and has chaired the Loeries jury. Today she works independently: advising businesses, mentoring women in the industry, and teaching what makes work that works. She remains convinced that the best way to solve a business problem is to solve the human one first.