About

I help founders build the marketing function they wish they'd had earlier

I'm Jitka. I've spent the last twenty years working in marketing — in agencies, in-house teams, and as a senior partner to global brands including Unilever, SharkNinja, and Lamb Weston. Marketiva is what I do next.

Twenty years inside global brands

Most of those years were spent in the rooms scaling founders are trying to reach. Leading multi-market website migrations and content strategies for Unilever's beauty brands across Asia. Running creative project delivery for SharkNinja's product launches at IFA Berlin. Building demand generation programmes in regulated industries. Developing international SEO strategy across markets most UK marketers never touch — Baidu, Yandex, Naver, the lot.

What that's given me is a clear-eyed sense of what good looks like at scale, and what's actually worth doing when you don't have a global brand budget. I know what gets escalated in those rooms, what quietly works, and what's expensive theatre. Most fractional marketers haven't sat in them. I have.

Why Marketiva exists

What I'm doing now with Marketiva is bringing that operating standard to founders earlier in their journey — when the agency rosters and the freelance patchwork have stopped being enough, but a full-time CMO is still a year away.

The gap shows up the same way every time. Marketing has stopped being something you can squeeze around the rest of the work. It needs a senior decision-maker. But the businesses that need that most are usually the ones least able to justify an in-house hire. That's the gap Marketiva is built for.

The North AI Collective

Alongside the fractional and Foundations work, I run the North AI Collective — two programmes for women founders across the North of England. First Light is a £30 half-day workshop. Compass is a six-month in-person programme.

I started them because the conversations I want to be having about AI don't really exist yet in the North. Not the conference circuit. Not LinkedIn theatre. Just twelve women in a room, running real businesses, getting honest about what works. Research from Harvard Business School found women are 22% less likely than men to use generative AI — across 25 countries, regardless of education level. That gap isn't about capability. It's about access to the right room.

How I work

I work from Leeds, with founders across the UK. I work especially well with women building businesses, though I work with anyone serious about doing it properly. My husband Said Lopez leads Leverage AI (opens in a new tab) — for fractional engagements, that pairing is part of the deal: marketing strategy and AI implementation, one team, one direction.

No junior account managers. No pitch decks. The work is done by someone who's delivered £5m+ for the brands you're trying to compete with — and the bar is the same.