SapientNitro Melbourne expands exec team with the addition of associate CD Michael Kennedy

SapientNitro has appointed associate creative director Michael Kennedy as creative lead on its Melbourne business, to expand the management team of Aaron Tobin, director of client service and national strategy director, Phil Phelan, who last week addressed TEDx Melbourne on the topic ‘After Silicon: The next creative technologies.’

Kennedy’s appointment comes at an exciting time, as the agency experiences rapid growth on the back of recent new business wins including lead digital agency for FMCG giant Mondelez and marketing and technology lead for Carlton & United Breweries.

He has spent the past year in the SapientNitro Sydney office spearheading the agency’s transformation of their creative approach through the blending of technology, UX and advertising creative disciplines. His earlier career in Sydney saw him working on Microsoft and then IBM at Ogilvy & Mather, before moving north to Queensland where he worked at Publicis Mojo, Clemenger and GPY&R before landing at SapientNitro in 2010.

Says Kennedy: “I’ve spent the past few years re-digitising myself at this incredible company that survived the dot-com bust to emerge as a leading light in the integration of inter-disciplinary thinking.

“In many ways the big techs were way ahead of the market in the 90s, and a lot of the visionary thinking we were coming to terms with then has been re-imagined and deployed by much nimbler entities, like SapientNitro and the clients we create and build for. What’s exciting is the way traditional advertising has found a new lease of life in a new, always-on world where the complexity of brand-customer connection is everything and creativity has new purpose.”

Says Marcos Kurowski, SapientNitro managing Ddirector Australia: “During his 4 years with us, Mike has been a driving force in bridging the worlds of technology and story. His insatiable intellectual curiosity, depth of experience in telling brand stories, and love of teaching make him a unique talent in the rapidly changing creative landscape. His move to Melbourne will allow Aaron and the team to further build upon their success over the past 12 months, with a particular focus on our creative product.”

A passionate coach and mentor, Kennedy is a copywriting lecturer for The Communications Council and has taught within the Master in Advertising degree at the Queensland University of Technology, in the Marketing School at Bond University and in the Design Faculty of Griffith University. These skills have been a key to his role as a ‘change agent’ at SapientNitro, bringing two decades of advertising and direct marketing experience to a company that has invested heavily in developing a completely new approach to breaking the boundaries between technology and creativity.

The SapientNitro model of StoryscapingSM – as told in the eponymous New York Times bestselling book – is a roadmap to that new approach for clients, put into action by unique SapientNitro ‘blended’ teams who create ideas and systems that span the physical, virtual and emotional worlds to create brand stories with no ‘off’ switch.