Our latest Leadership Spotlight features Harry Melsom!
Harry Melsom is a seasoned digital leader with a career to date spanning over 16 years of experience working across various organisations that include agencies, tech, corporate businesses, and startups.
Most recently he led marketing initiatives at Neptune as their Head of Marketing.
Among the major organisations Harry has worked with include social media giants Meta and Pinterest.
In our Q&A with Harry, he discusses his extensive career to date, the challenges faced with “the success of digital channels”, the major differences between working with startups and major brands, and appearing in a set of program notes along with Madonna, Beyoncé, and Salma Hayek!
Read our packed Q&A with Harry below.
Why did you join the Digital Leaders Club?
The topic came up with Jack and I didn’t hesitate. Not my quote but it rings true here: ‘If someone asks you to join a rocket ship, you don’t ask which seat’.
I joined because the idea of the 500 top digital leaders in one place is quite compelling. Particularly now. I began my career just as the winners were establishing themselves after the dotcom boom (and bust). Then we had Web 2.0 - remember that?! It feels like the AI era is firmly upon us without its full effects or potential really being known. The energy accompanying a great period of disruption is always exciting and the WhatsApp group is akin to a well-informed support group. It’s nice to know you're in good company.
What's your career journey been like to date?
3 main buckets:
2008-2016: Big Agency & Tech Corporate. Learning and consulting on media strategy in account management roles (Carat, Facebook (Meta), Pinterest).
2017-2019: Creative Consultancy & Startup focused on DCO. A period of learning how to take fragile concepts and help them stand up to the rigors of cross-examination (Google, Ad-Lib).
2019-2025: Client-Side (Soho House, Neptune). Putting what I’d learned to the test with a degree of budget accountability in a growth and transformation context.
Tell us about your current position
I was invited to form part of the SLT at Neptune by my former boss to develop the marketing strategy following a tough Covid-19 period, primarily to reinvigorate a much-loved brand, improve the efficiency of marketing spend and set the course for profitable growth by increasing our focus on eCom. In post-reflection, the major success has been a return to profit.
I feel my key contribution has been to help the organisation understand their customer better. Through that understanding, our posture should concern grouping our product ranges. We used customer data to help us understand several things but perhaps the most important was to determine the “must-win battles”. Beyond that, harnessing to the greatest extent possible our single customer view to give a nationwide business a boutique feel.
What do you love about working in digital?
I’ll have to narrow ‘digital’ to ecommerce and digital marketing as that’s really where I have experience and in that context I’d say firstly: it’s a team sport. It’s an area where subject-matter experts can really pull together to build something that, not for want of sounding corny, is greater than the sum of its parts.
Like anyone, I enjoy the satisfaction of good results and availability and accessibility of data in digital roles allows you to quickly determine whether your hypothesis is on track. If you’re not then you have the ability to test, iterate and move fast and decisively in pursuit of a given goal, whatever that might be, with much greater expediency than probably exists in analogue roles - if there are any these days?
There was a brilliant poster at Facebook that said ‘Data wins arguments’. Now, it probably starts a few too! But maybe that’s no bad thing. Arguments needn’t be had angrily, and if you have data to substantiate a point of view then so much the better. That’s what a growth mindset is all about.
What are the common challenges you see in digital leadership?
Interestingly the latest challenges I’ve faced have been related to the success of digital channels and the impact of that success on the broader go-to-market strategy. The challenges are best phrased as questions:
1) How should we grow?
2) How much should we invest in order to meet our goals?
E-commerce tends to be margin-rich in multi-channel (or omnichannel if you prefer) business but debates on how best a business should pivot given that success, hasn’t always followed a linear thought process based on forecasted profit potential. In the businesses I’ve served, the question ultimately has been the role of stores and the correct application of ROBO (research online, buy offline) principles - of course, you can have ROBO the other way round, and therein lies the puzzle. Most of us in this group though I suspect quite like puzzles. It is my view that you could use data to power assumptions around what a lot of marketers might term the “intangibles” of brand success.
You have worked with some global organisations and startups; what are the major differences you experienced leading in both?
Maybe it's obvious ones? You can probably simmer down many facets of doing business in a large or small organisation down to a spectrum: with scale and one end and agility at the other. Both have benefits and some inherent challenges. To offer you a sense of the challenges of leading, I think it helps to put yourself in the shoes of someone on the team.
In tech corporations, it’s easy to get a bit stuck. You may have heard the term “golden cage”? My 2 cents would be the peer review system, which calibrates performance on a bell curve, is a bit of a Jedi mind trick. It’s a very good system on paper but the objectiveness of plotting performance on a bell curve is diluted when you consider that manager-level discussions on candidates for promotion are ultimately what decides progression in the organisation. The process tends to disproportionately reward more extroverted personality types, which isn’t something many with a more analytical approach to problem-solving tend to demonstrate. Maybe this is human nature but it is a bias I think leaders should be aware of in these organisations.
The big difference of going into a startup, in my case a business that was bootstrapped (when there is no investor cash to give you a “runway”) was that to survive you had to respect development priorities while being incredibly collegiate: your responsibility to be clear in the ultimate aims of the business are paramount.
Going client-side, particularly as a budget owner, I think learning how to deal with the challenges that come with making decisions that aren’t going to be universally popular: be it cutting budgets or creating the atmosphere in which departments are likely to have the best chance of succeeding in their aims, which nearly always involves unsettling or changing the working pattern of some people.
Have you had any challenges in your career to date; and how did you overcome them?
Mark Ritson mentioned in his mini MBA that to navigate you need both a compass and a map. He used this analogy when talking about company strategy and I felt that by his definition both were lacking in my most recent role. The solution lies in marketing fundamentals: segmentation, targeting, and positioning. That gave us our direction and thereafter the map was drawn through a process of establishing key deliverables for touchpoints to give us our best chance of hitting our commercial objectives and triumphing in those must-win battles.
Tell us about your best success story, Harry
By any measure, appearing in a set of program notes along with Madonna, Beyoncé, and Salma Hayek is going to be tough to beat!
I was supporting clients at the time, Gucci, to generate awareness of their Chime for Change movement to empower women. The kick-off was a sell-out concert at Twickenham Stadium. My name is literally there in print next to these names in the program. Part of the “glow” I felt at that inclusion honestly comes from not expecting it at all.
Which trend do you predict will dominate 2025?
In a way, the trend has already established itself: AI. However, I hope that instead of AI we might talk instead about IA: Intelligent Automation. A brilliant term coined by my former colleague Patrick Collister.
How would your colleagues describe you
Collegiate and data-driven I suspect.
I’ve won a few unofficial awards in my time although I’m not sure what we might discern about my personality from these accolades: ‘most likely to wear a gilet to the office’, ‘biggest flirt’, and ‘most likely to feature on Soho House memes’!
What are your hobbies and interests outside of work?
I get my energy from being outdoors. These days that’s walks on the South Coast or the Peak District with my young family but even a brief run does wonders for my focus. Down the years though sport has been a great source of fun and relaxation for me and as a testament I still captain the village cricket team in the place where I grew up.
For the uninitiated, can I just say I think cricket is the most brilliant game to spectate by the way? I took a Finnish friend who described the experience as akin to going to a massive outdoor pub, with something happening in the middle to keep you occupied when you weren’t talking.
When inside, I’m trying to read more and have become a real history anorak since listening to The Rest is History (podcast) on my commute.
What's your plan for the future?
I hope to stay interested and interesting. Ideally, I’d grow in an organisation, acquiring a level of responsibility commensurate with the impact I’m having while having the opportunity to develop a product offering that brings about some real-world benefits to people.
What would you be doing (for a career) if you weren’t doing this?
If I weren’t doing this and money were no object, I would try my hand at financing and co-writing films focusing on stories of heroism of the British Army in World War 2. My grandfather was awarded the military cross (with bar) in the Scots Guards. His story is just one of so many untold stories that I think we need reminding of.
Connect with Harry on LinkedIn
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