Insight, Global Growth, and Culture: GWI on Its Everyday Use of Slack

SVP at the leading global consumer research platform shares her experience of Slack as the collaboration powerhouse of its digital headquarters, connecting teams, tools, and partners.

GWI empowers the marketing industry with an in-depth understanding of consumer behaviors, attitudes, and preferences worldwide. By leveraging large-scale data from millions of online users across diverse demographics, GWI provides actionable insights to help businesses make informed decisions, connect effectively with their audiences, and thrive in a fast-evolving digital landscape.

Launched in 2009, today GWI has more than 500 employees in five global cities – and by maintaining the agility, energy, and spirit of a startup, it continues to scale and innovate at the highest level. While ambitious to grow, the company is equally focused on cultivating a strong community spirit.

At the Slack City Tour London event in November 2024, GWI’s SVP Communication & Content, Vic Miller, met with Slack Regional Sales Director, Stephen Noad, to discuss how Slack have been key to knitting together remote teams, unifying culture, and accelerating project delivery.

 

Stephen Noad: How does GWI work?

Vic Miller: We have a hybrid setup with remote teams in five locations – London, Athens, New York, Prague, and Singapore. And we’re expanding into new regions to build our network of touchpoints around the world.

SN: How has Slack affected your business?

VM: Slack has been critical in bringing us together. Getting stuff done is really hard without Slack. I honestly don’t know how we’d do it. It’s central to everything we do.

SN: And how has Slack supported you from a culture and customer perspective?

VM: For us, working at GWI means being able to show your personality and adding your own flavor. We’re not particularly corporate, and we don’t want to be. A lot of our culture is based on being authentic and bringing yourself to work in the way you wish to. Slack is a big part of that. It enables us to do things in a way that feels natural and organic but within a really clever structure. Slack has really helped us move things forward at pace.

SN: You sound very comfortable with Slack. How is GWI maximizing its effectiveness?

VM: We’ve heard a lot today about integrations and I think they’re a big part of how we maximize Slack at GWI. Our expenses coming into the workflow, for example. Lattice being integrated, that’s absolutely critical. Sometimes we underestimate how important integrations are and how easy they make our teams’ lives. We’re always looking for new opportunities to automate or create new workflows – it’s a big thing.

I also really like that Slack has best practice guidelines; basically how not to be stupid on Slack! We spend a lot of time digesting that guidance, and then applying our own values and flavor so we’ve got guardrails on how to communicate – or how not to communicate – and we then build that into our onboarding. It’s a big part of how we live and breathe at GWI. Slack is where it all happens.

 

SN: What does that look like on a day-to-day basis?

VM: Personally, I’m impossible to get on email. I will reply eventually, but Slack is where we get hold of people.

We’re always working on fast-moving projects, so speed is critical for us, and the speed at which Slack enables us to do things is really important. In terms of the collaboration piece, Slack brings authenticity to our communication. I love working with partners and customers via Slack because it feels more like they’re an extension of our team rather than going through dozens of emails, back and forth, over days.

Authenticity, speed, and ease of communication. Obviously, as SVP of Comms, I’m looking for these things.

SN: What are your most used emoji?

VM: “Melting face” is one of my most used! I have to say across the marketing team, our bespoke emoji – our custom ones – are very popular.
There’s a lot of jokes and lots of emoji. Slack’s just a really nice, friendly way to communicate – it’s been very important for that.

Vic Miller is SVP of Communication and Content at GWI; Stephen Noad is Regional Sales Director at Slack. The pair were talking at the Slack City Tour London event in November 2024, where the theme was The Future of Work: Human-Centric, Agent-Powered.

Read the full case study to find out more about how GWI relies on Slack to scale, support its collaborative culture, and maintain efficient operations.