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.
An important hypothetical question we often ask ourselves is “If there was a street fight between the ad agencies of Sydney, would we win?”. Concerns that too much of Lowe’s muscle was in fact metrosexual “muscle definition” led to a new role being created in Finance for someone with a knack for numbers and genuine upper body strength. Andre “The Breaker” Morris fit the bill perfectly – a kiwi rock drummer who’s been known to shatter titanium drum sticks on the final bars of Stairway to Heaven.
Every agency needs to have a connection with the common man. The simple folk who tend the earth, don’t trust banks, enjoy professional wrestling and click when banners display “CLICK HERE NOW!”. In desperate need of this missing link, we travelled out into the country to find ourselves a hard-working yokel. A few miles past Buggerydoo we spied a handsome, dirt-covered lad atop a camel, chewing on a lizard. It was Andrew Rose. With basic hand signals we coaxed him into the car, bathed him thoroughly, and taught him rudimentary creative skills. As predicted, his first idea (‘Dirt is Good’) won gold at Cannes.
Iconic soft-pop duo Savage Garden formed in 1994 when sloppy-faced singer Darren Hayes teamed up with multi-instrumentalist Carl Gallagher. Their music went on to define everything that was wrong with this country, and as tourism sagged the government was forced to intervene. In a deal brokered by Kofi Annan, Carl agreed to split the band in return for a job as our Executive Producer and $2M in cash. Darren tried to continue to make music, and was assassinated in 2007.
Let’s be honest. Some of the profiles on this page have had the truth stretched a little, in order to make the subject seem more worldly and worthy. But with Account Manager Carly du Toit this is not required. You see Carly spends her spare time helping at an animal shelter for abused and unloved dogs. And there really is nothing more you need to know about someone to conclude they are FRIKKEN AWESOME.
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 Lowe’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.
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.
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? Lowe snatched him up as a Group Account Director 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 Lowe’s much-loved MD 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.
Somewhere near Luxemburg there’s a small, inconsequential place called France. Compared to an awesome country like Australia, France has little to offer the world in regards to art, film, fashion or fine cuisine. So it’s not surprising that earlier this year King Louis XXXI - after watching an inspiring episode of Home & Away - ordered his eldest son Karim Louis Hadid to take the country’s finest donkey and travel across the globe to Sydney to study our advanced culture. Karim soon ran out of French money (called ‘pesos’) and took a job at Lowe as a Digital Producer. And as a result, we’ve won France as our agency charity client.
When Karla Prokurat applied for a job here we noticed her CV mentioned “dressing up” as a hobby. That’s fine, we thought. With all these creatives dressing like homeless hipsters, someone who takes pride in their appearance would be refreshing, right? Only it turns out Karla is a Furry. Which means she dresses in a shapely vixen fursuit, talks in yelps, and takes frequent breaks for public ‘yiffing’. Still, anything’s better than a hipster.
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.
By day, Luke Townsend is a fairly normal I.T. guy with a nervous laugh and a Leatherman in his pocket. By night, however, he becomes ‘LuckyLuke67’, a dyslexic old Texan widower who has turned to online poker out of loneliness, who’ll keep forgetting if a straight beats a flush, who likes to chat aimlessly about his horses before the flop, and who will calmly take all your money within an hour.
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.
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.
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.
Earlier in these staff profiles we had a bit of a lapse of judgement, and rather than making up some silly story about Erin Hamilton to protect her identity, we told the real story of her history in Columbia. Alas, thanks to unlimited Google access in Bogota’s toughest prison, Diego Montoya read the profile and sent a ‘kite’ to his number-one assassin, the brutal Uruguayan killer Nelson ‘The Jackal’ Mercardal. Having recently infiltrated our agency under the guise of an interactive art director, we feel it is only a matter of time before Nelson makes his move against Erin, and – worse still – vanishes the day before a FOXTEL deadline.
Sourina Ghafouri looked stunning in the brochure, but when she arrived from Sweden she was in pieces, in a small cardboard box with a sheet of instructions and a handful of screws. After five hours of sweating and cursing and forcing Tab A into Slot B we had finally had our shiny new Account Executive….and a single left-over screw. Doh.
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.
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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