LONDON — Technology specialist agency Harvard has completed its new senior leadership team, hot on the heels of Ellie Thompson becoming CEO in April.

Lorna Hughes moves up to managing director of PR & AR – the role vacated by Thompson when she stepped up as former chief executive Louie St Claire became chairman – and George Greenspan becomes the first managing director of Harvard’s consumer technology brand, Eat the Fox, which launched at the end of 2019.

Hughes (pictured, right), a board director at Harvard, has led a large part of Harvard’s £6m PR division – with clients including Cisco, Vodafone, Fujitsu, Square and NetApp – for eight years, having joined as an account manager (and Harvard's 13th employee) in 2012. She has also led on the development of its strategic media and editorial propositions and learning and development.

Greenspan (pictured, left), another Harvard stalwart, moves from her current position as business development director into a newly-created role as MD of Eat the Fox, whose clients include handset giant Oppo and Disney+.

The Eat the Fox team currently numbers six within 85-strong Harvard, plus drawing on the larger agency’s planning and creative teams. For its first year, the brand was led by Harvard’s consumer director, Alix Vonk, who is leaving to move into an in-house public sector role.

Hughes and Greenspan will form a trio of MDs with Andrew Last, who joined in March last year to look after Harvard’s marketing communications division.

Thompson told PRovoke Media: “We have an incredibly strong marketing MD in Andrew and I wanted to complete line-up of a leadership team focused on commercial growth. When Louie and I made the changes, we talked about consistency and creating opportunities for people. Lorna was a really natural choice for PR and AR: she has worked incredibly closely with me for the past year and shares a lot of my values around ‘people first’ and strategic client counsel, and she works really well with Andrew.”

One of Hughes’ tasks has been creating the framework for the agency to move to a new hybrid model of working, post-pandemic. Thompson said Harvard had moved to new offices and was limiting capacity to around half of the team daily as people started to come back on a voluntary basis, and although all contracts had been officially changed to two days in the office a week, the agency remains “digital-first”.

Hughes told PRovoke Media: “The past year has been tough, we’ve done well as a business but culturally it’s been hard: we’re very much about what it feels like to work at Harvard and we haven’t had that in lockdown. I want to re-establish that as a hybrid, and will make sure everyone has a voice in that, as well as more closely aligning PR with our creative team to turn every day-to-day smart piece of work into something phenomenal.”

Of Greenspan’s promotion, Thompson said: “Alix has done a phenomenal job at Eat the Fox, which has quietly been doing really well. Creating the MD role and upweighting the leadership with someone with George’s talent focused on getting the brand to get to next stage of growth is a statement of intent.”

Greenspan added: ““This is the total opposite to B2B PR, and it’s about doing the same as I’ve done at Harvard for the past seven years for Eat the Fox. I love building things and in an era where everything is technology, we’ll be combining deep tech knowledge with lifestyle experience, backed by planning and creative. If I can bring that together in the right way as the team’s cheerleader, we can rocket-fuel the agency into a real consumer technology player.”