Howard Rickard
Head of Digital Marketing, Athena Advisers
Howard has spent his career building the systems that make digital marketing compound rather than repeat itself.
He came to it through music - studying in Brighton, running marketing for the Latest Music Bar before moving into design and web. At VistaJet from 2012, he worked on digital growth through the period when the fleet was scaling from tens of aircraft to hundreds. He joined Athena as Head of Digital Marketing, drawn by the same quality he'd recognised at VistaJet: a business that moves before it's ready rather than after.
His view on the work: brand and conversion are in genuine tension, and pretending otherwise produces things that look right and do nothing. Build the underlying strategy, iterate steadily on top of it, and the output eventually exceeds what the hours should allow.