David Butler has almost 20 years’ experience in high profile sports and cause related marketing and sponsorship. He is managing director of Loxley & Co. a change marketing catalyst linking sport and entertainment marketing with sustainability and legacy programmes that create positive social and environmental change.

Previously he was marketing director of the Honda Racing F1 Team, marketing director of Laureus and a divisional board director with Octagon.

Starting his career with Alan Pascoe’s Sponsorship Group (API) he was responsible for British Athletics sponsor media management in the mid 1990s and in addition managed press facilities at all major Grand Prix I and II events in the UK. He was also responsible for sponsor media management of the highly successful 1997 British and Irish Lions Tour to South Africa and set up and managed the communications division of the 2004 Cape Town Olympic Bid.

Evolving into the newly formed Octagon Group, Butler directed API / Octagon’s media operations in South Africa and was part of the management team that grew Octagon in the region to one of the group’s leading operations worldwide.

As divisional board director responsible for media operations and television editorial he set up and ran etv/Time Warner’s national daily sports news operation and was creator and producer of a number of leading television sports shows.

Returning to the UK to join Laureus, he was instrumental in setting up the operations of the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, which grew from 12 to 49 projects worldwide, working with the legends of the Laureus World Sports Academy as Academy counsel.

Promoted to marketing director of Laureus Butler helped develop the Laureus brand focusing its rationale as much on the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation as the Laureus World Sports Awards; becoming a passionate advocate of “harnessing the power of sport”.

He joined the Honda Racing F1 Team at the end of 2007 and evolved the earthcar concept inspired by Simon Fuller into a cause related marketing programme “earthdreams” supporting a number of environmental programmes around the world in line with Honda’s corporate ethos of “being a company that society wants to exist”.

Butler was invited last year to become an Advisory Board Member of “Beyond Sport” a global initiative under the patronage of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and supported by UNICEF, bringing together many of the world’s greatest athletes, business people and political figures to recognise and support the work of sporting social entrepreneurs; using sport as a means of achieving beneficial social change.

He is also a Trustee of the globally acclaimed Fight for Peace Programme using education and boxing to work with children in disadvantaged environments and is a Friend of Spirit of Soccer, a unique programme aimed at mine awareness amongst children in Cambodia and Bosnia using soccer as an educational tool.

An Oxford Honours graduate and keen sportsman, Butler lives in London with his wife Trudy and daughters Phelix and Macy-Grace.