STW’s Moon Group has bolstered its senior ranks with the appointment of Rob Martin Murphy to group ECD and Emily Taylor to head of strategy.

The two new hires will be responsible for the overall creative and strategic output of the Moon Group, forming an integral part of its management team working alongside CEO, Gavin Levinsohn.

A multi-award winning writer and creative director, Martin Murphy moved back to Australia to take up the newly created post with Moon. His previous roles include working as National CD of The Furnace on brands such as Skins, Cadbury, Schweppes, RaboDirect, TAC and Peugeot.

He left the agency in 2010 and relocated to Hamburg. In 2011, he co-founded his own startup, Betabüro, based in London. He then moved to Santiago in 2013 after receiving funding from StartUp Chile. This year, while continuing to freelance in Asia, Europe and Australia, he co-founded Mulitply, a coding academy based in Singapore.

Martin Murphy said of the appointment: “It’s good to be back home. Gav challenged me to help the Moon Group do its best work ever. I like a good challenge. And I’ve still got a lot to prove. So it’s a great opportunity. The experience I’ve had outside of advertising will be invaluable in the new role. I’m looking forward to doing some amazing things with the super talented people we have here in the group as well as the wider ad community.”

An established strategist, Taylor’s career spans roles in both digital and brand communications agencies, working at Razorfish, AKQA and VCCP in London, before returning home to Australia where she has held planning director titles at BMF and Publicis Mojo.

In her time she’s developed brand strategies that have launched and repositioned a raft of brands, including the Xbox 360, very.co.uk, Expedia and the Northern Territory. She has won multiple effectiveness awards, including one for Expedia’s successful ‘New York on $50’ campaign.

Taylor said: “In Australia’s fragmented agency world the Moon Group presents a really interesting contrast. A collective of specialist agencies working together to create truly integrated work; where the brand strategies are developed with teams of design, communications, digital, shopper and internal comms experts around the table. This gives us the opportunity to create brilliant, holistic brand experiences. And that’s really exciting to me. The fact I get to do it with a group of smart, creative, refreshingly honest and lively individuals is the icing on the cake.”

Levinsohn said of the appointments: “In Emily and Rob I’ve found experienced and deep thinking partners who see the opportunity in Moon Group. I was enamoured with their ‘beyond-adland experience’, connected with their humour and resonated with their desire to prove something. I knew upon meeting them that I’d look forward to working with them every day and that’s a starting point for great things.”

Moon Group comprises an integrated group of agencies with specialist skills including Human (Organisational Change), Shift (Communications), Fusion (Digital) and Tribe (Shopper Marketing), that work alongside and complement Moon’s established and substantial branding and design capabilities. More than 70 staff work within the Moon Group.