Australia – Amplify, the creator economy agency, is expanding its Australian staff. They have promoted Sonja Stindl to the new position of general manager and appointed Ben Somers as partnerships director, among other new personnel.
In order to further the goal within the Australian team, Stindl will work closely with co-founders Alex Reid and Tom Maynard to supervise people, finances, and legal matters.
After holding the role of head of talent, Stindl is now general manager for Australia. She joins Amplify with three years of experience, having held senior talent management positions at MaxConnectors before.
Somers will now oversee the newly formed partnerships division, focusing on generating new business prospects and building strong relationships with clients across many business teams.
Somers, who was briefly employed at TikTok, has returned to Amplify in the role of partnerships director. He brings with him previous campaign team knowledge from his stint at Amplify.
To further strengthen the expanding Australian office, Jess Hill, a longtime Universal Music employee who formerly worked across Jean Paul Gaultier and Carolina Herrera at Puig, has joined as senior campaign manager. Ryan Paturzo, a Buzzfeed employee of six years, has been named account director for the production group. The last of the recent hires, Jyothi Krithivasan, assumes the position of coordinator for partnerships and marketing.
Speaking about her appointment, Stindl expressed, “It’s truly an exciting time to be part of the creator industry, and Amplify is leading the charge with the best content creators and clients in the business as well as our passionate team driving it all behind the scenes. I look forward to working with Alex and Tom to solidify our offering in Australia and prepare for our next growth phase.”
Meanwhile, Somers stated, “Returning to Amplify and leading this new Partnerships division is a really exciting move for me. As a business we’re growing from strength to strength and the aim of this new team is to drive connections – internally and externally – to meet the needs of our clients beyond traditional campaign structures.”
Furthermore, Alex Reid, co-founder of Amplify, said, “It’s taken a while, but we are starting to see mass adoption of creators into existing marketing mixes, using creators’ audiences to connect with relevant brands and their messages. With that comes the need for a bigger team and our approach has always been to hire people smarter than us, which hasn’t been difficult.”
He added, “Amplify’s growth is also demonstrated with our expanding talent pool. We’ve grown from having eight creators and producing live shows when we started the business in 2015, to having a roster of 50 creators and a team of over 80 across Australia, Southeast Asia and all the way north to Japan and Korea. We’re proud of the business’s growth and our ability to promote internally. Cultivating a thriving culture and fostering growth are important to us as business owners and we strive to ensure that our team feels this positive impact, even if we’ve run out of desks in the office.”
