Will Sky's new marketer take it beyond digital TV's ceiling?

Sky's new marketing chief understands the potential of the brand.

At first glance, Charlie Ponsonby seems an odd choice to head Sky's marketing effort. The digital TV market has come to resemble a bear pit with aggressive battling for subscribers between Sky, ITV Digital and the cable companies. So is the urbane and cerebral Ponsonby the right man to lead Sky's brand through this tough terrain?

Before starting as Sky's marketing director this week, Ponsonby was the commercial director of Open, the ill-fated interactive venture that was wholly acquired by Sky last year. It was rebranded as Sky Active on Monday, but the first charge that can be levelled at Ponsonby is that he helped to preside over the stuttering start made by Open.

Ponsonby, a quietly impressive figure who is well over six-foot tall and strikingly thin, argues that Open was a trailblazing service that has prepared the ground for Sky Active, a service more tailored about programming content.

The road to Sky has been full of turns for Ponsonby. He studied geography at Cambridge before joining an economic development consultancy and travelling the world working on World Bank projects. He left in 1992 to "get a job that pays the bills" at Andersen Consulting.

His strategic marketing knowledge developed in a series of projects undertaken for Unilever and the retailer Sears. He then leapt to Sears to help run the Selfridges flagship store as a director.

Ponsonby helped Selfridges to turn itself from an unfashionable operation into a well run store that began to attract young consumers again. He left to join Open in early 1999 after completing a "change programme" at Selfridges that included demerging the store from Sears and launching a second store in Manchester.