Elly Hewitt is the co-founder and Managing Director of creative communications agency, Alt/Shift. Launched in 2016, Elly has grown the business to 43 people across offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. In that period, she has attracted top tier global and local brands including The Walt Disney Company, Officeworks, Air New Zealand and Mazda Australia. Elly had a vision to build a modern communications agency that delivered strategically sound and creatively led campaigns, primarily across earned and owned media. From appointing two behavioural scientists to bringing owned media production in-house, Elly has always tried to identify the best way to grow the agency in a way that supports her clients’ needs. An empathetic leader, Elly believes that nurturing excellence and playing to people’s strengths is the best way to build high performing teams.
Prior to Alt/Shift, Elly was MD at Mango Melbourne and grew the agency from five team members to 37 in her tenure. Within this time, Elly worked closely with her Sydney peer, to bring the agencies closer together from a client and culture perspective. Within two years, this strategy delivered a 70% increase to the agencies profit, working nationally on IKEA, Tourism Australia and McDonalds.
Elly met her now business partners in her time at Haystac, an agency they founded. Haystac was her first agency experience and it was here that shaped her client relationship and leadership style.
Elly has worked on some of the world’s biggest sporting stages. Her career began in media operations at The Australian Open. She has also worked at the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics and the Manchester and Melbourne Commonwealth Games in broadcast roles. These roles in particular taught Elly that being calm under pressure and using humour to galvanise a team in high pressure situations were tools she would lean on for the rest of her career.
