Writer, board trustee and CEO with 25 years’ experience in the UK creative industries
Mel Exon (Copeland), Aylmar 1983-1989
"Most recently the Group CEO of Sunshine, the London & Los Angeles-based brand and entertainment company, I previously led the creative agency, BBH, as their Managing Director. Whilst at BBH for over nineteen years, I was the agency's first Chief Digital Officer and also the co-founder of BBH Labs, the company's global innovation unit. Along the way I've worked with the likes of Google, Tesco, British Airways, Diageo, SoundCloud and Yeo Valley to help them define and communicate their brand purpose. I was appointed a Trustee of Doteveryone, the responsible technology think tank founded by Martha Lane Fox, in July 2019, and also sit on the Advisory Board of The Writer. I’m currently enjoying a second life as a writer myself (literary fiction for grownups this time) and I'm the proud working mother to two daughters. My expertise lies in the leadership of creative companies; primarily by fostering strong, creative cultures where difference and change are sources of creativity and growth, alongside my commitment to creating equity and equality for all, both inside and outside the industry. To that end, I'm a 2019-2021 campaigning committee member of WACL (Women in Advertising & Communications Leadership), have written a children's book in aid of Help Refugees, and volunteer at a children’s literacy charity in London. Inspired by a brilliant teacher, Dr West, I left Sherborne in 1989 to read German and Russian at Durham University. She was the kind of teacher who encourages you to do things everyone else tells you are impossible. Dr West took a small group of us to Moscow during the early glasnost era and instilled a love of Russian culture and history in me that defined a lot that followed: six months living in Siberia as a student (together with Lucy Ferguson, also a Sherborne OG!) and later spending my very first years as an ad agency graduate trainee pitching for, and then running Procter & Gamble's advertising business across the Russian Federation and Central & Eastern Europe."
