The former SIAL Canada CEO joins the advocacy marketing platform, bringing the organiser’s side of the table to Snöball’s leadership team.
Snöball has appointed Tony Melis as chief operating officer. He joins from SIAL Canada, the agri-food trade show that sits within the Comexposium group, where he was CEO of a show the company says drew roughly 25,000 attendees.
The appointment adds an organiser’s perspective to a business founded by marketers. Snöball was set up by Rachel Stephan and built around advocacy marketing, the practice of getting speakers, exhibitors, sponsors and attendees to promote an event to their own networks rather than relying on the organiser’s contact list alone.
“Tony has sat in the exact seat our customers sit in every day,” said Stephan. “He’s felt the pressure of filling a show floor, answering to a board, and growing an audience year over year. Bringing that lens inside Snöball, alongside the marketing DNA we’ve built the company on, is how we make the product sharper for the organisers we serve.”
What Melis brings
Melis frames the organiser’s job as a balancing act between competing stakeholders. “The pace of change is faster than it has ever been before,” he said. “An organiser answers to many stakeholders: a board, leadership, exhibitors, attendees, sponsors. I understand what each of them needs, and what their pain points really look like.”
Most organising teams do that with limited resources, which shapes his view of what a technology partner should be doing: taking work off the team rather than adding to it. When a client goes quiet in the weeks before a show, he says, it is rarely disinterest. It is an inbox with a thousand fires.
The appointment follows a period of expansion. Snöball says it is now SOC 2 Type II certified, and points to recent additions including Snömotion, video share cards, and click-to-conversion reporting intended to show organisers what advocacy activity actually converted.
The first-time attendee problem
Melis identifies audience growth, and specifically the first-time attendee, as the hardest part of the job. Reaching people who are not already on a contact list is where broadcast email runs out of road.
His argument for advocacy is that a card shared by a speaker or exhibitor lands with their professional peers, which is usually the audience the organiser wanted in the first place. “It’ll go on a social feed, but it won’t be ignored,” he said. He also points to the diagnostic value: “Snöball helped me discover clusters of networks I didn’t know existed before.”
Where he sees the industry going
Melis expects planning horizons to keep compressing. Organisers commit to venues and hotel blocks five, six, even seven years out, while tariffs, trade shifts and economic uncertainty change the picture quarter by quarter. Attendees, meanwhile, are deciding later and later.
The second shift he flags is generational. A younger cohort is entering every industry with different habits and channels, and reaching them means rethinking how organisers build relationships with future attendees and advocates well before a show goes on sale.
