Adastrum is a London executive search and leadership advisory firm. We appoint chief executives, chief commercial, product and technology officers, and transformation directors into media, publishing and broadcast businesses.
Distribution moved, audience behaviour moved, and the revenue model had to be rebuilt while the business kept running. The leadership appointed to hold that together decides whether the plan lands.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentWe are retained by boards, chief executives, chief people officers and investors to appoint the commercial and operational leadership of a media business. Retained means we are engaged to solve a defined problem rather than to fill a vacancy: we map the whole relevant market, approach leaders confidentially, assess them against the problem, and stay involved through the offer and the first hundred days.
This is the leadership that runs a media business rather than the talent that makes its output. Both matter, and they are different searches with different markets. Being explicit about which one you need is usually the fastest part of the whole process, and skipping it is expensive.
Media briefs arrive in the language of platforms, formats and audience. Underneath, they reduce to a small number of leadership problems.
We are retained to appoint permanent and interim executive leadership, including
Our work is the commercial, product, technology and transformation leadership that runs a media business. We do not place editorial, journalistic, production, content development, talent or creative-craft roles, we do not work below director level, and we are not a contingent agency. If that is what you need, we will gladly point you to someone better placed to help.
Five stages, run the same way on every mandate. The timings are the ones we work to, not the ones that read well.
Stage 1
We establish what the appointment has to change and what the business will actually let a new leader do. In media that second point matters more than most sectors admit, because commercial decisions and editorial independence sit in the same building and the boundary is rarely written down anywhere a candidate can read it.
Stage 2
We map the relevant market comprehensively: leaders already running commercial, product or technology functions in media, and those in adjacent industries whose experience transfers, particularly from subscription and platform businesses. We approach each one personally and confidentially.
Stage 3
Assessment is a subject-matter conversation between peers, not a scripted competency exercise. We weight how a candidate handles a business where the people producing the value do not report to them, which is the structural reality of most senior media roles. Each shortlisted candidate receives a written assessment mapped against your problem.
Stage 4
We present three to five candidates with our recommendation, the trade-offs between them, and what we would do if it were our decision. We are explicit about which candidate suits the business as it is and which suits the business the plan says it is becoming, because those are frequently different people.
Stage 5
We manage the offer and stay close to the leader and the sponsor through the first hundred days. A commercial or product leader new to media meets its internal politics early, and how that first encounter goes tends to set the ceiling on what they can achieve.
A strong CV from a well-known media business is a safe-looking choice in a board pack. It tells you what someone has been part of. It does not tell you how they will lead when a revenue line misses, a platform partner changes terms overnight, or a restructure lands on the team they have only just started to build.
Working with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, we assess how a leader operates when the room is calm and what they reach for when it is not. Those defaults are developable rather than fixed, which is the useful part: a leader who can see their own can regulate it. It is the difference between an appointment that compounds and one that quietly comes apart around month twelve.
We place across sectors on purpose. The pattern recognition that changes an outcome usually travels better from outside an industry than from within it, because people inside a sector have often arrived at the same answers as one another.
A leader who has already rebuilt a subscription business, or already taken a product organisation through a change of model, carries that judgement whatever industry earned it. We map the market inside and outside media and let the problem decide where the right leader comes from.
Adastrum brings twenty years of appointing senior leaders into complex organisations, a behavioural assessment method developed with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, and our Meta Team programme, which has worked with leadership teams at organisations including Nasdaq, Novartis, HSBC, Unilever and EQT.
No, and this is the clearest line we draw on this page. We appoint the commercial, product, technology and transformation leadership that runs a media business. We do not place editorial, journalistic, production, content development, on-screen talent or creative-craft roles at any level.
Before your next senior appointment, one question is worth sitting with. Are you about to hire someone who knows what good looks like, or someone who has actually built it?
If that is a conversation worth having, it is exactly the one we welcome.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentObservations from twenty years of appointing leaders into complex organisations: what separates an appointment that compounds from one that quietly comes apart, why succession plans drift towards the most visible candidate, and what a board ought to ask before it signs off the brief.
The Collaborator is the schema you appoint to make a divided organisation move as one. It is also the one most likely to keep seeking agreement long after the moment for agreement has gone. The most dangerous phrase in a senior team is not “I disagree.” It is “let’s get everyone aligned first.” I watched a leader run a good business into a wasted quarter on that phrase, and almost nobody in the room could see it happ
The most expensive senior appointment I have watched fail had the best roadmap I have ever seen. I mean that sincerely. It was a genuinely impressive piece of thinking. Every workstream mapped, every dependency identified, governance and sequencing and risk all accounted for. The board saw it in month three and applauded. He was still refining it in month fourteen, when they let him go.
The Commander is the schema you appoint in a crisis. It is also the one you have to watch once the crisis has passed. There is a phrase you hear in big organisations when nothing is moving. "It's just how things get done here." Say it out loud and it sounds like culture. Listen properly and it is something sharper. It means someone at the top is commanding, and everyone below has quietly learned to wait.
The board thought they had found the perfect CEO. Two successful exits. A scaled multinational division. References that read like a character witness: decisive, commercially sharp, a natural leader. In the interview he was confident, fluent, convincing on growth and culture and transformation. The appointment was unanimous. Twelve months later the same board was negotiating his exit. Revenue targets had been missed.
There’s one question almost every HR-led interview process insists on. “Tell me about a time you failed.” At junior level, it sometimes earns its keep. At C-suite, it’s a junk question. And it’s almost always the wrong thing to ask in the room. I’ll explain why I won’t ask it. And then I’ll tell you what I ask instead.
Most succession planning assumes someone is ready to step up. But what happens when the obvious successor is the one who leaves? A look at why heir apparent plans fail, the real cost of an unplanned leadership transition, and how boards build genuine continuity.
