The Role of Cross-Industry Innovation in Executive Leadership
Leaders with diverse industry experience bring fresh perspectives to organisations, fostering innovation and creative problem-solving....
Media Executive Search for Commercial and Technology Leadership
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 appointmentRetained Executive Search for Media and Publishing Leadership
We 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.
Leadership Challenges Facing Media Businesses
Media briefs arrive in the language of platforms, formats and audience. Underneath, they reduce to a small number of leadership problems.
- The revenue model is being rebalanced in flight. Advertising, subscription and licensing are all moving, and someone senior has to own the commercial architecture rather than the individual lines.
- The product organisation is really a delivery team. It ships what it is asked for competently. Nobody is accountable for whether that was the right thing to ask for.
- Technology and data cost a great deal and decide very little. The investment is visible in the P&L and invisible in the decisions the business actually makes.
- Platform and distribution economics changed under the commercial team. The terms are set elsewhere, and the function was built for a market where they were not.
- Two businesses have been acquired and one operating model has to survive. The integration is political long before it is operational, and the leadership question is who can carry both sides.
Media Leadership Roles We Appoint
We are retained to appoint permanent and interim executive leadership, including
- Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Commercial Officer
- Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer
- Chief Digital Officer and Chief Data Officer
- Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Marketing Officer
- Directors of Digital Transformation, Programme and Change
- Board, non-executive and advisory appointments
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.
Media Executive Search at a Glance
The scope of a mandate, in short. Where a brief falls outside it we will say so at the first conversation rather than three weeks in.
| Scope | What we do |
|---|---|
| Roles in scope | Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Commercial Officer. Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer. Chief Digital Officer and Chief Data Officer. Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Marketing Officer. Directors of Digital Transformation, Programme and Change. Board, non-executive and advisory appointments. |
| Roles out of scope | Editorial, journalistic, production, content development, talent and creative-craft roles, and anything below director level. We are not a contingent agency. |
| Seniority | Director level and above, up to and including the board. |
| Engagement basis | Retained. We are not a contingent agency and do not work on percentage-of-placement terms. |
| Typical timeline | Shortlist four to six weeks from briefing. Eight to twelve weeks from briefing to accepted offer. Interim leaders can be in the seat within days. |
Our Media Executive Search Process
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
Defining the problem
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
Research and market mapping
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
Approach and assessment
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
Shortlist and decision
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
Offer, onboarding and the first hundred days
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.
How We Assess Media Leaders
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.
Cross-Sector Search for Media Leadership
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.
Why Boards Choose Adastrum for Media Executive Search
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.
Media Executive Search: Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Publishers, broadcasters, streaming and digital media businesses, B2B information and events companies, and investor-backed media groups. The common thread is a business rebuilding its commercial or operating model where one senior appointment carries a disproportionate share of the plan.
The service is specialist; the firm is not, deliberately. Our specialism is leadership: defining the problem a business needs to solve and assessing how a leader will behave under pressure. That method travels across industries, which is frequently why it works inside media.
Most mandates reach shortlist four to six weeks after briefing and run eight to twelve weeks to accepted offer. Board-level appointments and roles requiring rights or regulatory familiarity take longer, and we say so at the outset.
Retained, exclusively. Being retained is what allows us to spend the research time a mandate genuinely needs from day one, and it means every leader we approach on your behalf gets a consistent, considered experience.
Yes. Where you cannot wait for a full retained search, we place experienced interim leaders within days to hold a function steady or deliver a defined programme with a clear end point.
Speak to Our Media Executive Search Team
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 appointmentLeadership Insights for Media Businesses
Observations 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.
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