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He's enjoying his leisure time until he joins the company on August 19.

The denim-clad Dale, armed with half a dozen brimming carrier bags, is snatching a well-earned break from a West End shopping spree with his wife.

As brand and marketing director for the UK, Dale, 37, will take responsibility for all Orange's advertising and communications, reporting to executive vice-president John Allwood. It's a new role that will pool the brand development and marketing communications teams under his stewardship.

"Orange is very much a people brand. It's always been about being honest and refreshing, says Dale. "I think its competitors have tried in some way to emulate its philosophy lately and they've closed the gap. My job is to open that gap up again. No brand can stand still.

"From my conversations with them, it seems John Allwood and commercial director David Taylor want to get talked about and be a brand people love even more passionately. The focus has to be on the customer."

This isn't just rhetoric. At ITV Digital, Dale was disenchanted by a boardroom that failed to speak up for the interests of the customer. He came up with the idea of putting a mannequin at the table to represent the customer. The board approved and they named it Clarissa. "ONdigital was meant to be an antidote to Sky, the pay TV choice for the people. So I felt our brand strategy needed shaking up, with the focus obsessively placed on the customer, he says.

On strategy, he says he doesn't believe in keeping advertising agencies separate from media and PR agencies. "The ideas and the best results come when you get them all working closely together with the internal team", he says. "People have described me as a creative marketing director, but one of my big strengths is getting a team to gel."

On joining Orange, Dale will evaluate its present work and effectiveness, but says changing agencies is a "last resort scenario." However, this is the man who dropped BMP and hired Mother nine months into his stint with his previous employer, to create cult brand icon Monkey out of a grey knitted jumper from Oxfam.

"You can't blame the advertising for ITV Digital's demise, he says.

"People said it was fabulous and it delivered. Our sales were boosted 60% while it aired."

Dale has long been an admirer of Orange. On leaving the crumbling ITV Digital he says he wrote down the names of four companies he would like to work for. Orange was one, Virgin another. He's attracted by these 'challenger brands' that have entered the market and successfully taken on established market leaders.

Dale approached Orange's first marketing director, Chris Moss, and his branding consultancy, Red Zebra, in early 2001 to work on ONdigital's rebranding to ITV Digital. It was Moss who subsequently recommended Dale to Orange.

"Jeremy's incredibly intuitive and prepared to go against convention," he says. "He's also very impatient and had me working harder than I ever have. Orange and Jeremy should prove a great match for each other. It will always be a challenger brand and he'll be able to bring its spark back."

Dale is a strong advocate of disseminating a brand by word-of-mouth. He likes to create a stir and is prone to the odd PR stunt.

At ITV Digital, on the night of the premier of the Planet of the Apes remake in Leicester Square, he arranged to put up a 120-foot giant poster of Monkey on the Capital Radio building. The film's advertising strapline was 'Control the planet' while the Monkey ad carried the line 'Control the telly'. Rupert Murdoch, controller of rival BSkyB was attending the film's premier that night and on seeing the poster, executives ordered it to come down. Dale obliged but not before calling all the major TV news stations to film the poster and cover the story. "We got more publicity from the fact they got us to take it down than we would ever have done otherwise, he says.

"When Jeremy sees the wonder in great ideas his eyes light up like an excitable kid, says Robert Saville, partner at Mother. "He's incredibly headstrong. I've had stand-up rows with him as well as many great laughs."

While at THE Games, on the eve of Pokemon's arrival on UK shores, Dale hired a convoy of blacked-out Range Rovers carrying four Japanese guys dressed as Men in Black. A news crew filmed them leaving Calais, coming off the docks at Dover and arriving eventually at Westminster. The stunt made the main news on the BBC, ITV and Sky. "We got about £4m worth of media coverage out of a stunt that cost us under fifty grand. Everyone was talking about it. Word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful forms of marketing there is. Getting people talking about your product and marketing is fundamentally important."

If he gets his way, the word on the street will soon be Orange.

BIOGRAPHY
1992-1995
Commercial and marketing general manager, Associated Network & Carriers
(ANC)
1995-2000
Commercial and marketing director, Nintendo UK distributor THE Games
2000-2002
Marketing director, ITV Digital
August 2002
Brand and marketing director, UK, Orange