Who we are

Sophia Livesey

Chief of Staff

The woman with the golden rolodex. Sophia spent many years in Argentina rubbing shoulders with elite sportspeople that we won’t name drop *coughs Lewis Hamilton & Lionel Messi coughs.*

Intimidatingly organised & calmness personified, Sophia is our eyes in the sky. Our air traffic control. She manages everyone’s time & workload. Under Sophia’s watch, the only thing that could possibly go off course is Måns’ career as a rapper, over which she has no control.

Alexi Mccarthy

Creative Director Partner

Spekk’s creative engine assumes form in the shape of Alexi. It was back in the noughties that Alexi’s penchant for graffiti morphed into commercial work – drawing on his love of drawing on walls to create iconic campaigns for Volkswagen, WWF & Oakley.

He now works out of Portugal, where he lives with his family & his enviably impeccable taste. A superb presenter with an infectious personality & a proper team player, everyone loves Alexi. Whether or not he is indeed Banksy, is something we are not – at present – willing to divulge.

Frankie Winsor

Paid Media Manager: Experiences

Frankie heads up our Festival & Experience Department and conducts what new joiners often perceive to be excessive amounts of research into her role outside office hours.

When she’s not neck deep in the rave, Frankie graces us with all the glitz & glam of someone whose client roster used to include Disney & Warner Bros. She’s a doer in the old-fashioned sense – all action, no brakes.

Måns Gårdfeldt

Co-Founder

Serial entrepreneur, failed rapper and Spekk’s self-appointed Head of Bullshit Detection, Måns has started businesses in everything from fireworks to chocolate to sophisticated marketing tech.

Before he built Spekk’s Paid Media offering he was the COO of a tech incubator and started a children’s charity that to date has built 20 schools in Asia. Yet the best use of Måns’ LSE Finance degree is to chase Erik’s Joe & the Juice receipts.

Erik Lehmann

Co-Founder

As a recovering CMO himself, Erik has likely walked several thousand miles in your shoes. From steering the tankers of global mega brands to taking the reins of agile challenger marketing teams, Erik is as well-rounded as an Ikea meatball – if an Ikea meatball had a Master’s Degree from Imperial College and spoke 3 languages.

Stationed at the intersection between Analysis, Strategy & Creative, Erik is the puppet master of our campaigns, and his ambition to make things happen sees no bounds – other than those imposed by Måns’ iron clad budgets.

Julia Fogiel

Graphic Designer

From the canvases of Adobe to the dance floors of Fabric, Julia is our resident shifter of shapes. As our Designer in Chief, we call Julia ‘M3 Sport’ – because she’s efficient, organised, timeless & German. HR are yet to rule on whether or not this is strictly appropriate.

Julia will literally bleed for the aesthetic, having recently gone hiking in Doc Martens, and subsequently coining her own niche genre of design – c’est mountain chic.

Gabriel Arribas

Senior Paid Media Strategist

Gabriel crashed a snowmobile on his first Spekk team trip. His grace in the face of calamity and impressive physical durability made him a literal permanent fixture here.

Clients love Gabriel for his XXL brain & what is frankly an unhinged appetite for success. Gabriel took his finals twice, once for a friend (Mike Ross whaaat!?) & holds the world record for Fastest Blindfolded Excel VLOOKUP. Amidst his dizzying achievements, we’re blessed to have him as one of our Paid Media Leads.

Alfredo Molinet

Team Trip Chef

We first met Alfredo on a team trip to Mallorca. He was employed full time as a chef, but agreed to cook for us for the trip. It was love at first bite. We all bonded with Alfredo like the stickiest of sticky buns.

In truth, including Alfredo here is just another part of our blatant, shameless & increasingly desperate campaign to woo him away from his day job to cook for Spekk full time*. Alfredo, if you’re reading this, Hi King, you up? 🥺😏👑

Oliver Bailey

Media Buyer & Analyst

Bored of science, and of Scotland, Ollie moved to Australia. And became a DJ. Despite these alarming red flags, there is much more to Ollie than meets the ears. While down under, he used his smarts to game Facebook ads, driving up Spotify listens on his own music. Nifty.

On his return to the UK, he joins Spekk, looking after ads for clients who run music festivals – combining the two of things he loves the most – numbers & bangers.

Pedro Casal

Senior Paid Media Strategist

First impressions can be deceiving, but when we accidentally caught Pedro singing to himself on Zoom before his first interview, nothing could have been less deceptive.

Having tangoed his way from Buenos Aires to Europe, the hyperactive, hyper-social Argentine understands Paid Media both as an art & a science. Pedro’s penchant for problem-solving is what gave him his workplace nickname, Pedro-No-Problemo. Which, like some of our other staff nicknames, may also be El Problematico

Stephen Purkess

Head of Paid Media

Brummie, sprightly & undisputed champion of the Spekk aptitude test, Stephen – or Stevo – is addicted to overachieving. Having climbed from intern to partner in little under 4 years, his left brain is probably bigger than your whole brain.

Despite this overdeveloped frontal cortex, sharpened at the esteemed Oxford University, Stephen still manages to lose 87% of the things he takes out with him. Living proof that one cannot indeed have it all.

Niamh Martin-McGarrigle

Paid Media Analyst

There’s a thin line between admiration and envy. People like Niamh test the narrowness of said line. With a First Class Degree in French & Linguistics, Niamh was helping businesses improve their resilience during COVID – while she was still at uni. Having spectacularly outperformed her contemporaries, she went on to spend some time at EY before joining Spekk.

When Niamh isn’t making us feel like useless layabouts, she somehow manages to find the time to be a fine chef, a keen guitarist and on her way to becoming a qualified nail technician – proving that she isn’t just well rounded, but more or less perfectly spherical.

Jonas Larsson

Head of Paid Search

Get yourself a Paid Search Specialist who’s a Pro Swing Dancer and DJ. The one and only Jonas is all glitter and solid gold. He may have spent 2500 hours of the past five years in meditation, but having brought himself to a state of wakefulness, consistently proves himself a master of Paid Search – as well as the inner workings of his own mind. And when he’s not enjoying the stillness of quiet contemplation, Jonas hosts educational sessions on search & analytics, managing six figure monthly budgets and repeatedly going viral on YouTube.

Edmalyn Pacanor

Data Analyst

Making sense of campaign performance data is an art, which makes Data Analyst, Ed our artist in residence. Optimistically self-describing her role as “the sexiest job in the 21st century”, Ed creates reports and dashboards visualising campaign results – proving ‘sexiness’ truly is subjective. With a Masters in Data Science and an Electronics & Communication Engineering degree, your nitty-gritty is Ed’s easy-peasy. When she’s not preparing data in delectable, digestible chunks, Ed is a keen crocheter and karaoke-r – sometimes even concurrently.

Kritika K

Media Buyer & Analyst

Badminton player, Bollywood fanatic and ex Intelligence Officer to the Indian MI5, Kritika helps set up ads for our clients and offers a wildly useful extra pair of hands on Spekk’s deck. With a tonne of experience managing high-budget international campaigns – including a six figure monthly budget for Scuderia Ferrari – Kritika has a proven track record of improving ROAS and reducing CPL quicker than you can say WTF. And, just when you thought Kritika’s life couldn’t be any more like a movie, everything she does is to music.

Kevin McLaughlin

Tracking Expert

Working out of a rock climbing gym is unorthodox, but only underlines Kevin’s knack for scaling lofty heights; he built the #1 Google Analytics Integration in Shopify’s App store and has helped thousands of SMEs track and analyse their data better than most big companies – all with free (or nearly free) tools. Kevin has one of the highest viewed GA4 Shopify channels on YouTube – which he assures us mortals is wildly impressive. With a Degree in Film and a Masters in Electrical Engineering, Kevin is an absolute rock star – in every department.

Saga Klaening

Media Buyer & Analyst

Singer, pianist & ex-employee of the month at a liquor store, Saga’s life rings true to her name. She joins our Start-Up Department with a Masters in Business Administration & a new pottery hobby to fund. We’re as lucky to have Saga as Saga is in life; she once won a trip to Paris courtesy of a coffee shop she worked at. And having launched an ad for cat insurance to critical acclaim, she’s perfectly suited to helping our start-up clients sell & scale their complex offerings – after all, there is no psyche more complex than that of a cat owner.

Claire Warne

Senior Paid Search Strategist

As a fresh faced Cambridge grad, the ever-so-clever Claire built a social media department for a marketing agency – from scratch. Having worked at Megabus, TUI & Virgin Galactic, you might think Claire was on the run. The truth is only slightly less exciting; travel is as much her pleasure as it is her business. She’s galavanted across the US and Japan and has now come to a comparative standstill here at Spekk having mastered the minefield that is paid media advertising, from channel and content strategy to crisis communication.

Luis Sanchez

Senior Paid Search Strategist

Open water PADI diver, Luis is happiest in water. And while we were unable to accommodate his request for a waterborne inflatable office, Luis graciously tolerates land. He writes the type of Excel formulae that make you fear for your job; turning tasks that take days into 15-minute jobs. Luis has a justifiably arrogant streak – claiming that the reporting dashboards tools he builds are “the best dashboards out there.” He dreams of owning a sea faring border collie and has unfinished business with an octopus who once tried to steal his GoPro.

Lily Stagg-Neal

Senior Paid Media Strategist

Creative problem solvers understand that regular habits minimise decision fatigue – which is why (in her words) Lily has soup and toast for lunch every single day. At her last agency, Lily mastered the science of reworking paid strategy and gained the auspicious title of ‘TikTok Oracle’ after 100x’ing a client’s revenue. It would have been immoral – a disservice to our clients – not to poach her. When she isn’t administering growth hormones to e-commerce brands, Lily is turtle-neck deep in a lucrative side hustle as a secondhand clothing mogul.

Yashi Sharma

Media Buyer & Analyst

With a Chairman’s Gold Medal for topping his MBA class, we’re just as proud to have Yashi with us as her mum was with this award. Yashi is the kind of person who will perform a sentiment and profitability analysis for your business, totally unprompted. She sprinkles Spekk’s decks with drama; deploying a creative flair you’re unlikely to have witnessed before in data visualisation. She dreams of living on a farm, but don’t horse around Yashi with inconsistent fonts; she is a total perfectionist.

Melania Husar

Paid Media Analyst

Well travelled, well educated and, well, a total star. Melania worked a part-time corporate job while she wrote her thesis on ‘A Study of International Consumers,’ and still somehow managed to secure her Dean’s scholarship for best performing student. With stints in Poland, Czechia, Paris and Norway, Melania worked at an AI marketing start up where she claims she developed a non-ironic, burning passion for Paid Media And as someone with a casual rifle-shooting hobby, who are we to doubt her.

Anja Timic

Paid Media Analyst

How do you get 300 students to attend a Project Management Forum in Serbia? By being Anja Timic. It was Anja who led the marketing team that made this sold out event look like a free surprise Beyonce show. A top Master’s student, who then went on to lecture on Management at the University of Belgrade, Anja has a penchant for niche sports like ‘artistic swimming’ and ‘efficient holiday packing,’ gaining notoriety for cramming as much into a day as she can clothes in a suitcase.