Up until a few months ago, Gemma Mc Aloon had spent her entire career at W Communications. Joining as an assistant account executive in 2009 when the agency was in its infancy, she rose through the ranks as they grew to become the 29th biggest agency in the UK. In 2021 Mc Aloon was picked to head up its expansion in the US, becoming senior vice president, North America.
After almost four years in the role, however, she decided it was time for a new challenge. Having announced her decision earlier this year to leave W Communications and return to the UK, Mc Aloon says she had several agency offers. But she realised what she really wanted to do was to embed herself in an “evolving” brand, rather than to become a small part of a PR team with many different clients and sectors.
Then she was approached by L+R Hotels through the network of contacts she had built over the years, having “worked on many hotel brands” during her career. Attracted by the prospect of creating something from scratch, in a newly created role, she decided to take the plunge. In May she jumped into her first ever in-house role – director of brand and communications at the global hospitality investment and management company.
The shock of the new
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the transition has come as something of a shock, she says. “I think agency folks are always like ‘it’s going to be quite quiet and slow-paced’, and that’s definitely not the case,” Mc Aloon says.
“I love the fast-pacedness of working on many different brands. Every day is incredibly different, and obviously this role is giving me the opportunity to work across multiple different hotels and properties, so it’s not just one standalone proposition.”
Any fears she might have had that an in-house role would not be a sufficient challenge for her have proved unfounded. “The creative adrenaline that I thought I would miss is definitely front and centre,” she affirms.
One big change she has noticed in particular has been the longer term, strategic approach of being in-house as opposed to agency-side. She has found herself “navigating a wealth of stakeholders and to be honest departments that I have never had access to: commercial, the revenue teams through to operation asset management.”
“They require a different level of diplomacy and patience…” Mc Aloon reveals. “But I think the good thing is I can see the broader picture in terms of the long-term goal of what we are trying to build.”
So what else do people need to be aware of if they too are considering making the move from agency to in-house? Any crucial pieces of advice to share?
“They need to be ready to slow down in the right way,” Mc Aloon says. “We are all conditioned to deliver results and impressions and metrics, but your brain will need to attune to an approach where the results don’t come overnight.
“It’s that longer impact that’s in play that will have bigger rewards further down the line, through working with all of the other operations and teams – and I think that’s hard.”
Creating a team from scratch
In her new role, she is leading on brand and comms for L+R Hotels’ global portfolio, which includes such illustrious, premium hotels such as Cliveden House, the Hotel Excelsior Venice Lido Resort and Palm House Hotel, Palm Beach. Mc Aloon is also charged with internal comms and marketing campaigns, and the task of creating a central comms team from scratch.
As she starts to find her feet in this new in-house role, In.Comms asks her to share with us some of the things she had not expected when she took the job. Mc Aloon lets us into a secret: “I think the most shocking bit for me is how the external PR agency becomes very far down on my to-do list at the moment!”
She tells us her mentality is changing, too, from: “‘How do I chase headlines and get quick wins?’ to ‘This is a long-term play, and working with the right teams and functions on a holistic level we will see the outcomes of that.’”
Another “eye-opener”, she adds, has been seeing from the client-side: “how agencies operate and how I might change that along the way in terms of rigour and processes. I think sometimes maybe agencies forget how invested they need to be in clients… we want to be your first priority always.”
However, while agencies might be a little “down her priority list at the moment”, Mc Aloon says she is open to that situation changing “if we had the partners in place who maybe give us better guidance and were more agile”.
While the transition from agency to in-house certainly seems to have thrown up its share of surprises and adjustments, it sounds as though the new challenge she came for is certainly starting to deliver.