Women to Watch 2022: Anna Cherry, Spark Foundry

Anna Cherry

National head of strategy
Spark Foundry
Australia

Paving the way has been a consistent theme for Anna Cherry throughout her career—from making award-winning documentaries before she even started high school, to presenting television shows, and ultimately pursuing a career in strategy. To date, Cherry has completed stints at PHD, where she built strategy from scratch, before taking on the national strategic helm at Blue 449 (then Spark following the global merger), bringing brands together by creating Spark Foundry’s vision.

Today, as national head of strategy at Spark Foundry, the scale of strategic output that Cherry oversees is monumental. Despite the challenges of the past year, Cherry has onboarded 17 clients (including two of the biggest advertisers), led seven agency and two Groupe pitches, and upskilled more than 200 staff. In addition, Cherry and her team have achieved an 80% pitch success rate, and front one of the fastest-growing agencies in Australia with 76% billings growth,  141% revenue growth in the past year, and 170% profit growth.

As a leader, Cherry is focused on turning the industries ‘ors’ into ‘ands’. For example, it's not people or profit, it's people and profit. People are the foundation on which Cherry has built the product. Similarly, Cherry believes in thought leadership and meaningful action: paying lip service is worse than doing nothing.

In addition, Cherry looks beyond traditional parameters to impact change for people, product and industry, and supports the equal contribution of her team. She focusses on the whole self and operates zero pay gap in her team against the industry standard of 15% in favour of men.

Outside the core responsibilities of her role, Cherry is the architect of a study of agency and marketing professionals, and has started to unpack topics of tenure, short-termism, creative capital and job satisfaction. The findings are open-source and provide a platform for industry change.