Women to Watch 2023: Nicky Greville, Spark Foundry

Nicky Greville

Managing director
Spark Foundry 
New Zealand

To be appointed to your first managing director role of an agency that needed to be launched from scratch, in peak lockdown, whilst simultaneously pitching for one of the largest clients in New Zealand, is not for the faint hearted.

Luckily, Nicky Greville is anything but.

The agency she launched was Spark Foundry, and the business she pitched and won was Westpac, a major banking advertiser in Australia and NZ. When the pitch was won, Greville was the sole Spark Foundry employee in the country.

She swiftly built the team from one to 24 in the space of three months while still in lockdown. During this period, she also further secured three pieces of new business including Meta and Fletcher Living.

Early in 2022, at the time she was transitioning in several new clients and onboarding her newly-recruited team, Greville’s remit broadened to take on another two Publicis Groupe media agencies, taking the total media team count to 46. During this time of transformational change, she, along with her team, lost no clients, instead further bringing in Subway and Lindt under the agency’s umbrella.

In doing so, the success of Spark Foundry catapulted Publicis Groupe to the number two position in the NZ media market according to RECMA for the year end 2022, with Spark, Stardom and Zenith counted as one entity, all falling under Greville’s remit. In 2022, the agency saw operating income grow by 20% year-on-year (YoY). 

In the Groupe’s global 2022 earnings announcement, NZ was highlighted as posting a “very solid performance.” In the year-to-date (YTD), despite being in a recessionary year, the agency has seen over 45% YTD revenue growth.

Her ability to build high-achieving teams has been fundamental to Greville’s rise to the leadership position. Being a mother of two children with a husband who also works full-time, she supports a family-first and flexible approach. For example, 12% of staff work part-time and flexible working means ensuring that people who would have otherwise found themselves leaving the industry can work from anywhere, and on terms that suit them.

She has always been committed to a thriving media industry, and this year was invited to join the media committee as part of the NZ Commercial Communications Council, with a focus on the governance of issues impacting the media industry.

Greville has also signed Spark Foundry up as an early supporter of the Ad Net Zero framework which launched in NZ in August. Its mission is to accelerate the decarbonisation of the advertising industry.