Mandie van der Merwe, Chief Creative Director at Dentsu Creative & Aimee Davies, Mental Health Educator and Counsellor
Special guests, Chief Creative Director at Dentsu Creative, Mandie van der Merwe, and Mental health educator and counsellor, Aimee Davies, join us for our latest event. Asking For A Friend teams an industry leader with a psychologist to give advice on career, mental health and everything in between. It’s there for the questions you don’t yet have the courage to ask of your boss or at your workplace for fear of how you may be judged or treated. Of course, we hope you can ask those questions, but just in case, you can ask them anonymously for a friend instead.
Aimee is a mental health educator and counselor who currently helps creatives and the general community with integrated therapy services. Aimee started her career in sound engineering before embarking on a colourful and varied career throughout the creative industry, including opening her own creative studio. After almost half a decade of working in the health sector as a counsellor, Aimee combined her therapeutic skills and creative industry experience to create The Hey Mate Project, which offers niche therapeutic support to creative professionals and organisations.
Mandie is the joint Chief Creative Officer at Dentsu Creative, Australia. Over the last 18 years, she has worked on 3 continents and been recognised over 200 times at local and international award shows, including Clios, Cannes, D&AD, One Show and more. After graduating from art school, Mandie, much to the chagrin of her purist art friends, sold her soul to advertising. But, over time, she’s bought it back. The payment has been made, painstakingly, with an ideal that we can change business and social problems with great ideas and the care to execute them beautifully. It is this belief that has guided her work on Tourism Australia, Fox Sports, Nando’s, Tourism New Zealand, MINI and Go Gentle Australia. Beyond the world of advertising, Mandie is an enthusiastic ceramicist and hopes, one day, to own a kiln and have the time to use it.