SPECIAL APPOINTS MADDIE MAROVINO AS NATIONAL HEAD OF SOCIAL TO STRENGTHEN EARNED CONNECTIVITY

Special has appointed Maddie Marovino as its National Head of Social, a newly created role designed to expand the agency’s earned connectivity offering. With 15 years of experience across start-ups and global brands, Marovino will lead Special’s national social strategy, integrating social thinking across creative, media, PR and influencer campaigns.

Special has appointed Maddie Marovino as its National Head of Social, a newly created role that signals the agency’s growing focus on social-led communication and earned connectivity. The move comes as brands increasingly rely on fast-moving digital conversations and cultural relevance to build stronger connections with audiences.

In the new position, Marovino will lead Special’s social offering across the organisation nationally, developing ideas and content designed to help brands appear meaningfully and memorably within social platforms where trends shift quickly and audience attention is fiercely contested. Her role will involve building strategies that bring together creative thinking, media planning, experiential marketing, public relations and influencer partnerships into a cohesive system centred on audience engagement.

The appointment reflects the agency’s ambition to strengthen its earned connectivity model, which places cultural insight and audience participation at the centre of modern communications. Social media, within this framework, functions not merely as a distribution channel but as the engine that links various creative and marketing disciplines into a unified storytelling ecosystem.

Marovino will work closely with Special’s creative, strategy and production teams, ensuring that social-first thinking shapes campaigns from their earliest stages. By embedding social insight into the development of ideas rather than treating it as an afterthought, the agency aims to create work that resonates with audiences in real time while maintaining consistent brand narratives across multiple platforms.

Alex Bryant, Managing Director of Special PR Australia, described the appointment as a significant addition to the agency’s leadership team and social capabilities.

“It’s not every day you meet someone of Maddie’s calibre,” Bryant said. “Her start-up background gives her the hustle and nimbleness that thrives at an independent agency, while her global and local experience and strong industry partnerships will help expand our agency’s social capability, unlocking new opportunities for clients and driving earned-led connectivity across the business.”

The role will also see Marovino oversee the agency’s national social output while expanding the team of social specialists within Special. As digital ecosystems grow more fragmented and consumer journeys stretch across multiple touchpoints, the agency sees social media as the connective thread that can unite different elements of a campaign into a coherent audience experience.

Marovino herself emphasised the strategic importance of social in modern communications, particularly at a time when brands must respond rapidly to cultural conversations while maintaining authenticity and relevance.

“I’m incredibly excited to join the team at Special and further integrate social firepower into everything we do — from insight and idea through to execution and impact,” she said. “In a landscape where the consumer journey is increasingly fragmented, social can be both the spark and the glue.”

Her career spans more than 15 years and includes experience across start-ups, scale-ups and established global companies, giving her a broad understanding of how brands operate at different stages of growth. Before joining Special, Marovino spent five years at Hello, where she served as Director of Client Experience and played a central role in shaping integrated marketing and communications work for major clients.

During her career, she has worked with an extensive roster of international brands, including Uber, Uber Eats, Air Canada, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s and Harley-Davidson. Her work with these organisations has involved creating integrated campaigns that combine brand storytelling with real-time audience engagement across digital platforms.

Industry observers note that agencies are increasingly creating senior leadership roles dedicated specifically to social strategy. As platforms evolve and audiences expect faster, more authentic interactions with brands, social media has shifted from being a supplementary communication tool to a central driver of brand relevance and cultural participation.

For Special, Marovino’s appointment represents both a strategic investment and a reflection of wider industry trends. By placing social thinking at the centre of campaign development and integrating it with creative, media, PR and influencer strategies, the agency aims to build campaigns that feel culturally aware and audience-driven rather than purely promotional.

Her leadership will focus not only on producing engaging content but also on translating cultural insights into creative ideas that cut through crowded feeds and spark conversation. In an environment where brand messages compete with entertainment, news and personal updates, success often depends on the ability to create work that feels native to the platform and meaningful to its users.

With Marovino now leading the charge, Special is positioning its social offering as both the spark that ignites creative ideas and the glue that binds together multiple communication channels, reinforcing the agency’s commitment to integrated, culturally attuned brand storytelling.