Staff profiles
Please plant your tongue firmly in your cheek and enjoy our alternate profiles.
Adam Leddin recently gave up his dream of recreating the Trojan War completely to scale with Playmobil men and instead returned to something he was very good at: design. Of course that was after his life-sized Lego space shuttle had failed to launch, and his attempt to incite a revolution by rebuilding the Berlin Wall with tacos had fizzed. Now he puts all that (admittedly insane) energy into creating gorgeous designs and perfect output files.
Canadians are a cheery bunch. They are, for example, the least likely nationality to suffer a serious gunshot wound or require their stomach pumped. It’s true. It is also true that they are the most likely to dabble in petty theft and kleptomania. So it’s no surprise that since Adrianne Nixon began as Head of Account Service our office is a cheerier place, but our stationery budget has trebled and no one can find the Wii.
It is said that the golden age of sixteenth century Poland was begun with the birth of a perfect child. Five hundred years later, Aleksandra Pawelek was born in Krakow and the whole country again held hands and prepared themselves for a new golden age to lift Poland out of its never-ending economic crisis. But then Michael from FBI Recruitment placed a call and we poached Aleks away to Australia to be our Account Manager. Sorry Poland.
Our producer Charna Rifai has traveled to so many odd countries that the CIA suspects her of being an Al-Qaeda operative. But her mission is much more innocent than that. You see Charna collects gastric infections. Her next trip is to Brazil where she hopes to contract Strongyloides stercoralis and a few rare Amazonian hook worms. Go Charna!
Chris Hunter worked for years honing his writing skills on prestigious clients like Malta Airways, Sunair and Lada. His industry brochures for Scotch Tape drove readership up by at least 3%, and no one was surprised when his infamous 3M headline (“Knock Knock, Glue’s There!!”) swept the Adhesives International marketing awards with two bronzes and a silver. After a few years in rehab for solvent abuse, Chris is back at the top as Rivet’s ECD. Just don’t ask him to mount anything onto boards.
Senior interactive art director Damian Simpkins was freelancing with us for a couple of weeks and we knew from the start he wasn’t interested in a full-time role. But his talent and attitude was so impressive that we withdrew from a major new business pitch and instead pumped the money into a campaign to get Damian to change his mind and join us. The ‘Get Damian’ campaign was launched midway through his second week of contracting. By the following Monday all his touchpoints were throbbing from a level of engagement they hadn’t known since his high school formal. How could he say no?
Dave Gibson hates poultry. Alive, dead, roasted with potatoes and gravy – it doesn’t matter. He instinctively gags at the thought of eggs (with the exception of protein shakes), avoids rubber chickens, and refuses even to interact with subservient chickens on interwebsites. In desperation he once sabotaged his own agency’s pitch for the KFC account by slipping a TVC script into the deck the night before, which revealed how the secret herbs and spices were in fact ground-up slaves from Colonel Sander’s cotton plantation.
Dave Johnson is an expert in the trafficking of human organs. Rarer still, he’s an extremely talented and experienced Executive Creative Director who is still a nice guy. No tantrums when two meetings are on the same day. No tedious stories of his sexual antics at Cannes before the bypass surgery. No Longrain pork binges. Just a top creative director with no artificial flavours or additives. We couldn’t believe it either.
Ella Horsfall was born with an ipod nano already gripped in her little hand and over 50 friends on Facebook. As our youngest staff member, her parents were still infants when Pseudo Echo were in the charts. But since taking control of reception a short time ago, Ella has become a beacon of positive attitude and the go-to girl for all emotional wrecks seeking wise counsel.
Financial whiz Erino Escobar Ramirez learnt her skills laundering millions in cash as the personal accountant of Diego “Lord of War” Montoya, during his decade-long rule of the North Colombian cocaine trade. After Erino’s arrest in 2007 she was broken by the DEA, testifying against her boss in return for a new life in Sydney under the name Erin Hamilton. Erin still drives Montoya’s 1968 Mercedes – her only memento of those crazy days – complete with bullet-proof windows, an inch-thick coating of pure cocaine across the back seat, and the entire Miami Sound Machine back catalogue in the CD player.
The last time Guy Lovell was home on a Saturday night, the great woolly mammoth roamed the earth. Much of his life is shrouded in myth and legend, but it’s true that the rights to Guy’s autobiography have already been bought by the Playboy channel for a six figure sum, without a word being written. Quite how he finds the energy to be a top Senior Account Manager is beyond us all, but he does.
Han Lee’s entire career was to spite his mother. When Han was 13 his head was always buried in a comic book or the computer. ‘Where will that get you?’ his mother scolded. Now he’s a top web designer, game designer, illustrator and programmer. But Han’s not an ‘I told you so’ kind of guy – especially to his mum. So as far as she knows he’s a janitor at the airport.
Is Jeremy Brook too young? Shot to fame in Draft London while barely out of nappies (he was the youngest Account Director in that network’s history), responsible for some truly outstanding work (Stella’s Lost Souls campaign still drops jaws) then named a Campaign Face to Watch in 2005. Was it all just hype? Rivet snatched him up to find out. Turns out Jeremy is just a normal guy, but attached to one of the sharpest advertising brains on the planet.
The daughter of a Church of Scotland Minister, Joan Lind was all set to follow in her father’s footsteps until a long and torrid affair with Bob Hoskins saw her cast out from the family home. Sneaking aboard a ship she hoped was bound for New York, she instead spent the next four years battling the Icelandic cod fishermen in the thirty-foot swells of the North Atlantic. Hardened and sharpened like a highland claymore, she marched south, conquered the UK advertising world and put Soho to the sword. Turning her focus to the colonies, Joan recently stormed our agency and took up a position as Director of Account Service.
Judi Lewis is our leading creative, specialising in gorgeous colour schemes, immaculate typography and to-the-point copy. She works only 10 hours a week, but her creative skills are so sharpened she never misses a deadline. She also rides a beautiful horse to work. Then she wakes up and finds, alas, she’s still Rivet’s much-loved CEO and her day is all meetings.
Julie-Anne Ellem aka Jewlz was raised by French gypsies in northern NSW. At the age of 21 she fell in love with a beautiful machine called Brad. The pair had an immediate sexual attraction. Jewlz would ride him for hours while he would fulfil her every desire. Their love was a forbidden one, as Brad was a bicycle. The couple left the gypsy camp in order to pursue a peaceful existence. They found that life on the street was harsh. Our Chief Financial Officer found Jewlz riding through the park counting pigeons and saw a hidden talent within her. As a result, Jewlz was appointed Finance Manager.
Karen Smailes is a calm and collected Senior Account Director, and our only staff member in the Guinness Book of World Records. The record she set is too embarrassing for public disclosure, suffice to say that had we bothered to google her name before we hired her, there might have been an extra clause or two in her contract.
Kate Setter may be our Finance Assistant but she is also gifted in the art of the Aquaggaswack. For those who aren’t familiar with this magical and soothing instrument, it is a homemade bell tree made with pot lids. Of the night of the full moon, Kate colours her hair to shades of purple and prepares for the celebration by watching the Exorcist. The night is then filled with dancing around a fire and the playing of MGMT’s ‘Electric feel’ on 29 hanging pot lids.
Kaylee Noonan shot to fame last year with her YouTube cooking show ‘Sweet Meat Treat’, where she prepares yummy meat-based desserts for busy families. Her lard blancmange with gristle sprinkles received over 3 million views, but death threats from vegan extremists forced her into a more conventional job in our Account Service Department. Fortunately Kaylee continues to experiment in the kitchen, and many a tired brainstorm is re-energised by Kaylee’s delicious pork-filled éclairs or salted liver cupcakes.
Kris Rees is hidden away in our edit suite for much of the day, humming NOFX and dreaming of doing a 50-50 grind down our expensive stairs. Kris likes to work with a different computer monitor for every thought in his head. Which means he has three, and one is dedicated to porn.
While struggling through the darkest Cambodian jungle on a bonding exercise gone terribly awry, our senior staff stumbled into a clearing to discover a young woman in Blahniks happily tapping away on a macbook pro. It was Lauren Portelli. Within minutes our wounds were dressed, our leeches salted and our location helpfully pinpointed on Google Earth. Such skills would be invaluable in an Senior Account Manager, we thought, so we smuggled her back to Sydney in a suitcase.
Lisa Brown is our Head of Production and a disgraced former Miss Australia who was secretly pregnant when she won the title. Strangely her huge tummy was not mentioned until the closing moments of the Miss World pageant, when a furious Miss Serbia finally pointed out the obvious to the cameras. Stripped of her crown in a violent swimsuit fiasco that left one contestant with a shattered pelvis, Lisa vowed to switch to a more deep and meaningful career – in advertising of course.
Our CFO Lyndon Brill is not your run-of-the-mill number cruncher. He’s explored most of the planet and has graced the cover of Adventure Accountant magazine four times – most recently clothed in nothing but the traditional string loincloth of a Khoisan warrior (headline: “Meet Lyndon’s Johnson”). He’s never in a suit, wears a necklace of shark’s teeth (extracted from his femur, of course) and will occasionally pay staff expenses in baht or rupee.
Masami Iida is our lead developer and after-hours soft-porn romance novelist. As such, he knows his ASP from his elbow, but not necessarily his climax from his narrative apogee. The unseen force behind some of our best online work, Masami sometimes gets his two careers confused – as a trawl through our clients’ source code will reveal.
Matt Cramp began his career in the Florida State Sheriff’s Department in 1981, in a quiet rural community outside of Jacksonville. But Matt’s loud style (he drove a black Daytona Spyder 365 GTS/4) and his unconventional policing methods (in his first year he’d shot dead over 20 perps, bedded the prom queen and flown a jet boat into a helicopter) saw him quickly promoted to the new undercover vice unit in Miami City. There he was teamed with Sesh ‘Tubbs’ Moodley - a violent Haitian homicide detective with a penchant for shotguns and lilac slacks. Together they took the city back from the criminals, and ushered in a new era of ‘police over-enforcement’ as the best way to reduce crime. But mostly they just drove fast around the city listening to Phil Collins. Then the 90s arrived, criminals suddenly had rights, and chicks starting asking Matt to wear a condom. So the duo handed in their badges and boarded a plane to the only other place where pastels never went out of fashion. Sydney.
Our IT expert Michael Morrison is addicted to acronyms. As if there weren’t enough in IT, he can often be seen with his headphones on, smiling and nodding his head as he listens to a live audio feed from Bankstown tower, where a C-172 INBD IFR RNAV to 29L has just called ATC because they’re below MOCA and need to GA to CN NDB ASAP.
If our agency was a giant can of coke, Monique Unwin would be the sugar. That’s not to say she’s unhealthy and rots teeth – though she does supply us all with daily Tim Tams – but rather that without her sweetness we’d taste a bit like that old water from the bottom of the toothbrush holder.
IT Administrator Nader Alfakhrany’s favourite pastime is standing next to someone who is desperately trying to replicate a problem that only moments before was causing his or her computer to seize up completely, but has mysteriously fixed itself while Nader climbed the stairs. “It seems to have fixed itself!” they offer apologetically. Nader also enjoys chewing tinfoil, the sound of shovels scraping concrete, and listening to Jamiroquai.
The word ‘übersexual’ derives from the German über = above, and the Latin sexus = gender, and is used to explain a super race of metrosexuals. It is said that the word was specifically created to describe our copywriter Nathan Lennon. His weekly regiment consists of a cucumber facial, a full body wax, and a fake tanning session. Sometimes confused with his hero Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nathan can often be seen dancing in cerise and blue hot pants in Pacha, Ibiza.
Nathan Quailey was hailed a NRL genius. He mentored such stars like John Hopoate and Willy Mason, just to name a few. Always entangled with controversy he took flight to the Colorado Mountains where he swindled rich women by posing as a ski instructor. In order to shake off Interpol, Nathan returned to Sydney to lay low by playing the role of Group Account Director.
Our lovely Production Manager Sarah Hadfield is an Elvis Costello fan and a chronic ailurophobe. One of these things means she’s slightly unstable and irrational, with a tendency to make a big deal out of small and hairy creatures, and the other means she’s scared of cats.
Stephen Pearson is the CEO of Lowe Group and one of Australasia’s most experienced marketers. If Stephen were to commit a robbery, it would resemble Hans Gruber’s storming of Nakatomi Plaza, such is the scale of his thinking. Never mind the budget Sharon, he’s prone to say with a dismissive wave of the hand, is the idea BIG enough? Stephen likes to blow people’s minds - albeit less literally than Mr Gruber.
Tom Markham is our oldest staff member, and the only with experience of prison. He first encountered the internet while building military networks for the USSR in the late 70s, and his famous prediction that it would lead to worker distraction and ultimately “the end of the capitalist world” was widely dismissed. Now our Creative Director of Integration, Tom is obsessed with raising the standard of internet content, one smart-arse paragraph at a time.
Research shows that one in every 80 men is obsessed with pugs, so for us to have two such men on staff is a stroke of considerable luck. Tony O’Halloran, Head of Strategic Planning, is one of them. The usual traits of a pug owner are all here in spades: hyper-intelligence, an eye for detail, excellent social skills, and the ability to see beauty in a face like a baboon’s fist.
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