Francesco Papagni

Overview

16 years building marketing acquisition engines in SEO, paid media, and CRO. I have done it at Gartner across 20+ localized markets, at Royal Caribbean EMEA, and at Mintel out of London and Chicago. Now leading SEO at Leadtech in Madrid and running 2ndvector, a small lab on AI, language, and how brands get surfaced by machines.

Career

At Gartner, I led international growth for the Capterra portfolio: 20+ localized markets, tens of millions of annual sessions, and a marketing team spread across several continents. Before that I ran EMEA digital for Royal Caribbean Group, and before that global digital and demand generation at Mintel, the market intelligence firm, out of London and Chicago. At Mintel the lead engine went from roughly nothing to about 250,000 qualified leads a year, and the blog we redesigned and launched won a Digi Award for Best Corporate Blog in 2015.

The through-line across all of it has been unglamorous: the technical architecture, the editorial choices, and the operational plumbing that let acquisition compound instead of leaking. Most of my depth sits in organic: technical SEO, content strategy, authority, and now GEO and AEO, which is the same job in a different room.

Expertise

SEO (technical, content, off-page, GEO, AEO). Growth and conversion (paid media, lead generation, CRO). International expansion and localization. Martech and AI-enabled marketing workflows. Building and running marketing teams across borders and time zones. The through-line is probably an unreasonable interest in how systems actually work. Not how they are supposed to work.

2ndvector

2ndvector is a research practice focused on a single practical question: when answers are generated by AI, what does it take for a brand or person to show up accurately, and consistently, in the ones that matter? Frameworks, measurement, diagnostics. Work in progress.

Education

Master's in Digital and Editorial Design from IED Madrid, and a postgraduate Master's in Linguistics with first-class honours from the University of Udine and the University of Warsaw. Linguistics and editorial design is a strange pair on paper. In practice it has made almost every content and SEO decision easier.

The same background runs through EIDEIA, a small computational art project that turns literary prose into deterministic visual fields. Interlinguistics meets generative art, which is a sentence I would not have written ten years ago.

Connect

Open to consulting, speaking, and genuinely interesting conversations. LinkedIn is the easiest way in, or reach out directly by email.