Harry stood out in this category for his initiative and his passion for programmatic. His desire to upskill the commercial business in programmatic was impressive and no mean feat – and his results prove his effective contribution to the business.

Harry Rich has achieved unprecedented success for The Times’ publishing team. He has championed the brand in the market, attended over 200 meetings, organised over 15 programmatic roadshows and grown his patch by a record-breaking 370%+ YOY. Harry has been instrumental in growing the brand’s digital and programmatic revenue and nailed a host of impressive firsts, including selling the publisher’s biggest standalone digital deal worth £300k to Google. He has also doubled their amount of programmatic only clients and introduced many new agencies, demonstrating his tenacity, commerciality and passion for success.

The Times publishing sales team has evolved to become a full 360 cross-platform team. As it operates across so many channels, especially when closing a paper everyday, the challenge for their sales managers has been thinking more proactively and longer-term about how they grow digital and programmatic only revenues. The only salesperson in the team that was fully committed to this growth - setting himself his own individual KPIs - was Harry. He came to the management team with his strategy and plan, highlighting what he wanted to achieve and where he saw the opportunity, then set out to achieve it.

Harry used his initiative from day one. He identified the above opportunity very quickly and knew he could add value and bring in incremental digital revenue. He worked with other members of the Revenue, Operation and Strategy team to build out a Programmatic Sales Story, taking this out to all his key agencies, presenting it through immersion and ‘lunch & learn’ sessions. He sought out other agencies, within agencies (for example Media Future Group) and new programmatic independent agencies, such as VaynerMedia, that The Times had no contact or prior relationship with, helping to discover new clients that eventually would become new top spenders.

He became the ‘internal’ programmatic champion, working with other members of the sales teams to help drive their knowledge and working with the central team to forecast potential growth. He took it upon himself to upskill the whole commercial floor and hosted a series of Programmatic 101 sessions. Colleagues have found Harry’s approach in these sessions refreshing and easy to understand in a notoriously complicated market. He also attended external meetings with Sales Managers when they were unsure and needed support.

Harry has accomplished fantastic results due to his proactive attitude. The effort he has put in to wave The Times digital and programmatic flag has been vast and extremely notable, going above & beyond, whilst still managing to maintain his cross-platform role. So much so, he has managed to secure over £1M worth of revenue for the paper (20% above yearly target) and has grown key clients such as BP, Camelot and Fortnum & Mason YOY.

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