TOM EVANS

MSN UK is one of the UK's biggest websites with around 16m monthly users.

In addition to wider team management, I had day-to-day responsibility for running MSN Money, one of the UK’s most popular personal finance websites. With a deep interest in business and finance, my role is to bring interesting, useful content to help our user’s solve their money challenges, combined with powerful tools including portfolio and currency management. Partners include FT, Business Insider, Motley Fool, and Money Advice Service.

I also ran MSN Cars, one of the UK’s most popular motoring websites. Building on my long experience in the category, we aim to supply an entertaining website that also informs and educates, supported by powerful research tools and classifieds from Auto Trader. Content partners include Auto Express, Autocar, CAR, and Car Buyer, with more to come.

I also ran MSN Tech, a technology vertical that brings together content from market leading websites like The Verge, Pocket Lint, and Engadget. The site aims to bring the sector to life, highlighting the technology people can buy today, as well as news tech that will change their lives in the future.

In addition, I was also Global Media Lead for automotive content on MSN worldwide. Building on my award-winning experience running MSN Cars, in this role, I coordinated a virtual team of people who operate MSN Autos websites in 50+ markets across multiple languages. My role involved identifying common successful themes that will work anywhere using the same content (with translation), achieving economies of scale.

I also managed MSN UK's newsletters, which are sent to millions of users every week, optimising for open and click rates and other key metrics.

I am highly commercially-minded. I am highly proficient in Omniture, Chartbeat, Comscore and other tools, in order to optimise traffic and revenue, and ensure that every page-view we sell is delivered. PS: I love SEO!

NTL at the time was the only company to have a fast digital cable network capable of running effective interactive television. Enthused by my work with programming at Pearson Television, I wanted to build on this, and my previous FT TV experience, with the chance to build an interactive TV service for financial services.

Working closely with key partners including Abbey National and Halifax, we built a system that enabled consumers to transact online and engage in e-commerce. Having successfully launched the service, and having enjoyed my work presenting to senior executives in the banking world, I decided to broaden my experience and go in a more commercial direction for my next role at Object1. NTL has since become Virgin Media.

Recruiting a team from scratch, I established and operated all of the company's internet activities, including websites for its leading TV shows like The Bill, Neighbours, Baywatch, and Wish You Were Here?

I worked closely with the production teams, nurtured our relationship, and helped a sometimes sceptical audience to understand how the internet was going to dramatically change just about everything, including television. We established fan sites for our key shows, notably The Bill, and showed producers how their audiences were going online to learn more about their favourite shows, and get closer to them.

I worked with the Wish You Were Here? team to build an interactive TV experience with BT, which was then rolling out ADSL. This matched destination information with clips of Judith Chalmers and co reviewing the actual locations. I told the (slightly incredulous) producer of that show that one day, everyone would buy their holidays online. In 2011 I ran into him and he very kindly remembered this, and agreed that I may have been on to something after all.

There was a successful fan website for The Sweeney, produced by the company 20 years earlier, which was being rebroadcast on Channel 5. Instead of suing the website which some wanted, I encouraged Pearson to buy the site for a nominal fee, and we drove viewers to it after the broadcast and sold them DVDs.

A colleague and I travelled to Hawaii in July 1999 to build a new website for Baywatch, which was by then being filmed there; gruelling stuff but someone had to do it.

I also conceived and produced the build of the company's first corporate website, and our first intranet, and I managed to buy the domain name neighbours.com for £10. I was greatly helped in all of this work by the far-sighted support of Nick Humby (then finance director of Pearson TV, later of Manchester United plc) and Greg Dyke (then CEO).

Pearson Television has since been renamed FremantleMedia, and is now part of the RTL Group.

I started as a runner on £50-a-week, running scripts around this TV studio, made a vast amount of tea and coffee, and destroyed several forests with photocopying.

My technology interest led to me being offered a role setting up the FT TV website, which I worked on for over a year. The WWW in effect had just started and it was an extremely exciting time to be working in an industry that was clearly going to be huge - and so it was...