Snöball Welcomes Tony Melis as Chief Operating Officer
We’re thrilled to announce that Tony Melis has joined Snöball as Chief Operating Officer. Tony comes to us from SIAL Canada, the country’s largest agri-food trade show and part of the Comexposium world-wide network of food events, where as CEO he ran a show drawing roughly 25,000 attendees. That first-hand organizer perspective now sits at our leadership table.
Snöball has always been built by marketers, for event organizers and the marketers who drive their growth. Founder and snöballer-in-chief Rachel Stephan built the company on exactly that expertise, and Tony’s arrival adds the complement that matters: the perspective of someone who has been accountable for a major show from the inside.
“Tony has sat in the exact seat our customers sit in every day,” says Rachel. “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 organizers we serve. I couldn’t be more excited to have him with us.”
What Tony brings
“The pace of change is faster than it has ever been before,” Tony says. “An organizer 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.”
He also knows those teams do it all with limited resources, which shapes how he thinks about the value a partner should deliver: taking work off the team’s plate, not piling more on. When a client goes quiet before a show, he knows it isn’t disinterest but an inbox with a thousand fires; when a booth number shifts six weeks out, he knows the marketing ripple that follows. He has run that machine, and now he helps steer ours.
He joins at a moment of real momentum. Snöball has matured into an enterprise-ready, SOC 2 Type II-certified solution, growing fast through product innovation and market expansion. Recent advances like Snömotion and video share cards, paired with transparent click-to-conversion reporting, answer what organizers are asking for: not raw data, but clear intelligence they can act on.
The challenges he knows firsthand
Every organizer is after the same thing: the right audience, in the right mix, with attendance that grows year after year. Much of that depends on reaching people who aren’t already on a contact list, and the hardest to reach is the first-time attendee.
Reaching them takes something a broadcast email can’t: the trust of a real person. When an attendee, speaker, or exhibitor shares a card with their own network, it reaches industry peers and people with shared professional interests, often the exact audience an organizer wants. “It’ll go on a social feed, but it won’t be ignored,” Tony says. It doesn’t feel like an ad, because it isn’t one; it’s an endorsement from someone whose network already trusts them. And because Snöball tracks the journey from click to conversion, that reach is measurable rather than assumed.
“Snöball helped me discover clusters of networks I didn’t know existed before,” Tony says: advocates and partners quietly driving attendance, now visible in the data.
Where the events industry is heading
Tony’s view of the next few years is clear-eyed. Planning horizons are getting shorter: organizers commit to venues and hotel blocks five, six, even seven years out while tariffs, trade shifts, and economic uncertainty change the picture by the quarter, even as attendees decide whether to attend closer and closer to the event date. At the same time, a younger generation is entering every industry with different habits and channels, and reaching them means rethinking how organizers build relationships with their future attendees and advocates.
Welcome, Tony
Tony joins Snöball with years on the organizer side of the table and a clear view of where the industry is heading. We couldn’t be more excited to put that experience to work for the organizers we serve.
Please join us in welcoming Tony Melis to Snöball.
