Snöball has always been led by marketers, and as an event marketing solution, that’s core to who we are. We know how to help organizers build an audience and fill a room. Today, we’re adding a powerful new voice to that mix.
We’re thrilled to announce that Tony Melis has joined Snöball as Chief Operating Officer. Tony comes to us most recently from SIAL Canada, the country’s largest agri-food trade show and part of the Comexposium world-wide network of food events, where he served as CEO. He has run a major show from the front lines, and that first-hand organizer’s perspective now sits at our leadership table.
At the helm of a show of roughly 25,000 attendees, Tony carried what organizers know intimately: a showfloor to fill with the right mix of exhibitors, a board to answer to, exhibitors and sponsors to keep happy, and an audience to grow year after year. That perspective is exactly why he’s here.
What Tony brings
Snöball has always been built for event organizers and the marketers who drive their growth. Founder and snöballer-in-chief Rachel Stephan built the company on exactly that expertise, years spent helping organizers grow their audiences. Tony’s arrival pairs that marketing firepower with the perspective of someone who has sat in the organizer’s chair and carried ultimate accountability for a major show. That’s the combination that matters: an event marketer and an organizer, side by side, shaping what comes next for Snöball and for the clients we serve.
“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.”
“The pace of change is faster than it has ever been before,” he says. “I understand the objectives an organizer has, the constraints, the pain points, the limitations. An organizer answers to many stakeholders: a board, leadership, exhibitors, attendees, sponsors. I can bring insight into what each of their pain points really are.”
And organizers carry all of it with limited resources: small teams accomplishing an enormous amount under real constraints. Tony has felt that squeeze firsthand, and it shapes how he thinks about the value a partner should deliver, taking work off the team’s plate rather than piling more on.
Having that front-line perspective in the room sharpens where we take the product and how we show up for clients. When a client goes quiet in the weeks before a show, Tony knows it isn’t disinterest. It’s an inbox with a thousand fires and a reply that may not come until late that night. When a floor plan shifts and a booth number changes six weeks out, he knows the marketing ripple that follows. He has run that machine, and now he helps steer ours.
He also joins at a moment of real momentum. Snöball has matured into an enterprise-ready, SOC 2 Type II-compliant solution, growing quickly across both product innovation and market reach. Recent advances like Snömotion, its new video share cards, paired with Snöball’s transparent, click-to-conversion reporting, answer a demand organizers are voicing louder every year: not raw data, but clear intelligence they can act on.
The challenges he knows firsthand
Every organizer is looking to attract the same thing: a sold out showfloor, a qualified audience, in the right mix, growing every year. Tony knows how much effort it takes an event team to achieve these goals, and how much of it comes down to reaching people who aren’t in the ecosystem yet.
The hardest audience to reach is the first-time attendee who doesn’t appear in anyone’s contact list. Reaching them takes something a broadcast email can’t do: the trust of a real person. That’s the mechanism Snöball activates. When an attendee, speaker, or exhibitor posts a share card to their own network, it reaches industry peers and people with shared professional interests, exactly the audience an organizer wants to attract. “It’ll go on a social feed, but it won’t be ignored,” Tony says. It doesn’t read as an ad, because it isn’t one. It’s an endorsement from someone whose network respects them. And because Snöball tracks the full path from click to conversion, that reach is measurable rather than assumed.
For Tony, the value went beyond registrations. “Snöball helped me discover clusters of networks I didn’t know existed before,” he says: the advocates and partners quietly driving attendance, finally made visible.
Where the events industry is heading
Tony’s read on the next few years is clear-eyed. Strategic horizons, he says, keep getting shorter. Organizers are asked to commit to venues and hotel blocks five, six, even seven years out while the world in front of them changes by the quarter. Tariffs, shifting trade relationships, and economic uncertainty ripple straight onto the show floor. And decisions to attend are being made closer and closer to the event date, which makes planning harder still.
There’s also a demographic shift underway. A younger generation is entering every industry with different habits and different channels, and they won’t be reached the way their predecessors were. “How do you address the people entering the market? Are they communicating in the same channels? Are you tapping into those channels? And what’s your value proposition for them to come and become your future ambassador?”
These are exactly the shifts Snöball helps organizers navigate, providing the insights to make informed decisions. And that work is now shaped by someone who has had to address these same changing variables for real, at scale.
Welcome, Tony
For Tony, joining Snöball is a chance to put everything he learned running a major show to work at Snöball, to the direct benefit of the event organizers we serve. That hard-won perspective is exactly what he brings to the team.
Please join us in welcoming Tony Melis to Snöball.
