Photographs by Jeff Leyshon

Royal Leamington Spa has a reputation for sleepiness and faded glory. Yet this quintessentially English town has had somewhat of a renaissance in recent years as the home of a sizeable chunk of Britain’s gaming industry. Recently reinvented with the sobriquet of Silicon Spa it was, perhaps appropriately, the birthplace and childhood home of Tim Harrison, vice president for global communications & PR at Sony Mobile Communications. Royal Leamington Spa was also the home of Victorian occultist Aleister Crowley. Perhaps giving truth to the adage that the devil has the best tunes, Harrison’s early career was not in comms but as the bass player in ’90s band Herb.

Harrison had a happy childhood; raised in its outskirts, Leamington provided a healthy mixture of country and town. However, as a teenager, the small town mentality and the lack of opportunities that existed at the time started to worry him. His interests in performing arts and media, writing and drama increasingly drew him away from the spa town. As Harrison says, “I realised that Leamington Spa wasn’t going to be holding the road to my future career.”

He left for Exeter University where he studied English and drama. A short stint selling cinema advertising followed, but, having formed a band at university, the lure of a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle was too strong. Harrison and his friends quit their jobs to make music full time. Harrison describes it as hard work. “We didn’t have any chart success. We played many, many gigs, mainly in London, and put out a few records on our own label. This was before the days of the internet so unfortunately we weren’t able to use some of the tips and tricks that make things easier these days for the aspiring musician. Hard work,” he concedes, “But we had a lot of fun.”

A rock ’n’ roll lifestyle encourages creativity, and as Harrison began to realise that Herb was never going to be the next Red Hot Chilli Peppers, he realised that writing was what he enjoyed the most. “I saw a small ad in a newsagent’s window asking for contributors for a property magazine in southeast London.” Harrison submitted a couple of articles and the owner was so impressed she gave him the job of editor. “I hadn’t intended for it to be a full-time job, and it only lasted about six issues, but I think I really cut my teeth there.”

“Contract publishing is close to PR. It’s about trying to get your client’s point of view across while maintaining a level of entertainment for your reader and a level of authenticity as best you can within that brand environment.”

Harrison had edited his university magazine and as the band members started to realise the extent of their limitations he started to see journalism as a real career choice. He took a job with Redwood, then, like its peers, a contract publishing company, but these days known as a branded content agency. With Redwood for five years, Harrison worked on a number of airline in-flight magazines, Marks & Spencer magazine and other titles. Redwood was at the forefront of the industry’s repositioning to branded content. “It was an exciting time to be working at Redwood. There was an entrepreneurial feel to the company and the roster of publications were growing as more and more brands could see how creating their own content could be a useful exercise in brand building,” says Harrison.

After five years at Redwood, Harrison was ready to return to an itinerant lifestyle, this time as a roaming hack. Over the next few years he carved out a living as a freelance journalist. He edited a few travel books for Insight Publications, spent some time writing for Men’s Health and helped set up a lauded but ultimately unsuccessful news digest magazine called Cover.

This was the beginning of the dot-com boom and Harrison’s work changed almost overnight, “Many web startups wanted to get people with journalistic and editorial experience to come and build their website’s content. It really was a time of opportunity and I joined a travel dot-com startup as a content editor.”

This was the beginning of Harrison’s shift into the tech world. From the startup he was headhunted to a Vodafone-funded startup called Vizzavi. Over the next six years Harrison’s role developed alongside the development of the nascent mobile content industry. “My role moved away from actually building web pages, including writing, production, and editing, into a much more general manager role,” he says. “Vizzavi changed into a games and entertainment portal and my role eventually developed into one where I managed the mobile games business for Vodafone.

”Increasingly Harrison took on the role of what he calls ‘developer evangelism.’ This role took him around the world, talking at conferences, trying to tell the conventional games industry why mobile gaming was a great new thing. 

It was also the first that he started to fully appreciate the role of public relations. “I think this was the first time I sat down with our internal house PR teams to work out ‘What do we say here?,’ ‘How do we get this point across?,’ ‘Who should we be talking to?’ I started learning about PR planning and message creation. More of the dark arts of PR, I guess,” he adds.

Harrison’s role was shifting. It was now about talking to the media and standing on stages speaking at conferences. Yet Harrison says this wasn’t a case of role reversal, “My career has always felt like an evolution. I’ve enjoyed my career so much so far and I don’t see it as poacher turned gamekeeper. Although I wrote for magazines they weren’t funded by the subscription revenue. Most of my journalist career was on contract publishing which is a very different kind of thing. It’s actually much closer to PR. It’s about trying to get your clients point of view across while maintaining a level of entertainment for your reader and trying to maintain a level of authenticity as best you can within that brand environment.” Harrison sees the exposure he was getting to marketing and PR as a turning point in his career; it was at this time he realised that this was the direction in which he wanted to go. “Being a pure play journalist is now something I regard as my apprenticeship rather than a previous career.”

At that time, large companies like Vodafone were recognising that data was set to be an important part of their revenue. Mobile operators invested heavily in enabling third party services and, in turn, creating some of the backbone that the third party services could run off of. Harrison feels that Vodafone was far-sighted in seeing the importance of data, adding, “It was fantastic to really be there at the launch of Vodafone 3G services for example. Vodafone provided the first ever colour mobile portal. Sounds terribly old fashioned now but at the time it really was pretty exciting stuff.”

These were early days in the mobile industry, and many of the players were shaking off the perceptions they had of colourful characters in an under-regulated industry. According to Harrison, the challenge in the sector was balancing the pace, speed and opportunity with the very important reputational aspect. He says one of Vodafone’s key strategies, “Had been to encourage the growth of the mobile internet while still maintaining consumer trust.”

This belief in maintaining trust was obviously important to Harrison. After six years with Vodafone he took on the chief marketing officer role at OMTP, the mobile industry body focused on software security and content development standards. The position rekindled the evangelist role he’d had in his early days with Vodafone. It wasn’t, however, to be a lengthy tenure. Gaming giant Electronic Arts (EA) soon headhunted him for the role of European marketing director. Although he had only been with OMTP for six months it was an offer he couldn’t turn down.

It was a big switch for Harrison. Where his previous positions had been more centred around content and relationships, this was more of a marketing position. But what neither he, EA, nor anyone in the electronic gaming world had been able to predict was the impact a new entrant would make on the industry.

“The launch of the iPhone and in particular the App Store, changed the whole mobile game operating model more or less overnight,” Harrison says. “You had a situation where previously the mobile games business had been almost entirely controlled by the mobile operators. When the App Store, and then the Android market later, came out all of a sudden, the creators of the mobile game became their own publicists. The whole model of the business changed from a publisher-driven business to a developerdriven business. It shifted from a consumer marketing/sales and relationship-driven business towards a raw metrics-driven business. Again it was a very exciting time, a time of great change for the game industry. But ultimately my role EA changed massively, and, in what was such a US-centric kind of business my role began to make a little bit less sense and I was let go.”

This was October 2008; the year Lehman Brothers collapsed and the world went into economic meltdown. Not the best time to find yourself without a job. For Harrison, however. it was a time of fabulous opportunity. With his experience and contacts throughout the sector, he consulted for a number of games publishers keen to take advantage of the changing environment.

The last company to approach him as an advisor was Sony Ericsson. Harrison was asked to help position a dedicated gaming phone and persuaded him to stay on. His role has shifted from head of content marketing and strategy to director of external communications & PR to his current role as VP for global communications and PR. 

It’s meant that he has spent most of his career in the mobile gaming and telecoms business. Despite this, he has never felt a need to move on and out of sector, “I’ve always felt like I’ve worked in an incredibly exciting, fast-moving sector. There has been tremendous change. We’ve seen this whole development economy; the Apple ecosystem, the Android ecosystem.”

That’s not to say he would rule out a change. “Would I consider another sector? Of course I would, absolutely. It’s challenge and change that sparks me. But I’m working within an industry that is very fast-paced, pretty touch and offers something new all the time. Sony Mobile is effectively a challenger brand, with an incredibly powerful mother brand with a distinctive heritage and reputation. My job is helping build our voice and reputation in mobile, within that context. I’ve been a Sony fan since forever, so there is a personal resonance there too, but that forward momentum is my motivation.”

Although Harrison’s role has evolved and is far more structured than his earlier positions in content management, he is still evidently enjoying the position.He also takes a holistic view on PR, “I think my broader experience outside the traditional comms path, gives me a deeper perspective that I can’t help using in my role. Of course, it is about bringing what we do as a company alive in our comms. But I can hold my own in a room full of marketers, developers or engineers. you need to have an eye for the story before you embark on any journey. The decisions you make are the story and I encourage all my internal stakeholders to apply that thinking the same way.”

Evidently not a man to do things in half-measures, his greater interest in public relations has led him to recently complete the CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) diploma. More as an intellectual exercise than anything. He describes it as, “Revisiting the theory after learning the practice,” adding, “It was a great experience. I am a big admirer of how [current president] Stephen Waddington has reinvigorated the organisation. I am very supportive of its vision.”

Harrison seems a man content with his role, but when pressed on what he’d change, say the one thing that would make life more comfortable would be, “To spend a little bit less of my life in airport departure lounges and a little bit more playing music.” Fortunately he still manages to find time to mess about with a bass guitar among friends.