Management Team

Michael Sugden
Managing Director

Michael Sugden is Managing Director of VCCP.

Michael started his career in 1995 as a management trainee in Hong Kong with Swire Pacific. On his return to London he moved to Claydon Heeley before joining HHCL in 1999.

At HHCL he was Account Director on Pot Noodle, Bacardi-Martini, Yahoo, FIFA and UEFA. Michael joined VCCP in 2002 on its first day of business and became Managing Director in 2006. His proudest career moments are winning the IPA Grand Prix for the launch of O2 and helping grow VCCP from five to 180 people in seven short years.

Follow Michael on Twitter - @MichaelSugden

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Darren Bailes
Executive Creative Director

Darren Bailes is the Executive Creative Director at VCCP and started his career at WCRS creating famous advertising for Butterkist Popcorn, Orange and Speedo. He started to get a taste for the kind of advertising that people were willing to talk about over a pintx with their mates – advertising with cultural currency.

After a few years he moved to mother and created campaigns for Pimm’s, Miller and then the relaunch of PG tips with Al and Monkey. Both Pimm’s and PG tips were both adopted into the national psyche. People appreciated the campaigns as entertainment, not just advertising, and they loved the brands all the more for it.

After a very successful seven year stint at mother he moved to VCCP with the desire to create more famous advertising that the nation would love.

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Tracey Follows
Head of Planning

Tracey began her career at McCann Erickson and then Cogent, enjoying chocolate, vodka, whisky and an IPA Effectiveness award along the way. She then went client-side to run One 2 One's advertising. By the time she left, she had helped rebrand it to T-Mobile and was overseeing all European markets' communications as International Advertising Manager. After a short detour into retail, Tracey came back to the world of Telecomms as Head of Consumer Communications at BT, before returning agency-side to indulge in some serious shopperholicism as the planner on John Lewis at Lowe.

She then joined VCCP in early 2009, as the lead planner on O2. Now Head of Planning, Tracey wants to develop the most culturally on-the-ball planning department in London, populating popular culture through brilliant planning, and thinks our planning approach is best summed up by the Emerson when he said: "little minds are interested in the extraordinary, great minds in the commonplace".

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Amelia Torode
Head of Innovation

Amelia Torode is Head of Strategy & Innovation at VCCP and leads planning on pure-play digital projects.

She has been responsible for bringing a unique digital and Social Communications methodology to brands such as London 2012, comparethemarket.com and comparethemeerkat.com, O2 and the COI.

Prior to VCCP Amelia divided her time between London and New York. She lived and worked in New York for six years where she was a digital Partner at Ogilvy One and then Senior Planner at Berlin Cameron/Red Cell. She was also Strategy Director at Naked Communications in London and was one of the very first WPP Marketing Fellows hired by Sir Martin Sorrell in 1997.

In her spare time Amelia enjoys writing/blogging/tweeting and has been published in The Spectator, Mail on Sunday, Campaign and the Financial Times. She judges creative work and talks regularly at conferences in the UK and the US on social technology, culture, advertising and digital innovation.

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Sophie Maunder-Allan
Group Head of Planning

Sophie is Group Head of Planning. Sophie joined VCCP as a Planner in 2003.

Sophie started working life on the WPP fellowship, working in the UK then Sydney in PR, research and planning. The first female Shareholder and Partner at VCCP, Sophie is proud to have been part of such a rapidly growing agency. Sophie was the main planner on the O2 account for 4 years and very proud to pick up the IPA Effectiveness Grand Prix  and Gold awards in 2004 and 2006. She was recently named as one of the "35 most successful women under 35" in the UK in the Sunday Times in 2009. Her proudest achievement is giving birth to her two sons.

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Peter Polster
International Managing Director

Peter Polster is International Managing Director at VCCP and is responsible for the international business of the agency and our offices abroad. Peter graduated with an MBA in his native Vienna and has worked ever since in the communications industry, mostly on the agency side. He is a true cosmopolite who has lived and worked in Vienna, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Paris and London where he managed numerous global and pan-European brands. Not least because of his background, he has a great knowledge of what it takes to succeed as a brand when crossing borders and transcending cultures whilst being relevant to local markets. Peter joined VCCP in 2004.

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Dominic Stinton

Dominic Stinton is Managing Director VCCP Share.

He joined us from TalkTalk, where he spent 18 months as Marketing Director, with an integrated marketing budget of £20 million. Notable successes under his watch included 'theforeverstory.com' (which won the IAB's 2008 'Unthink Your Brand' award).

Before this Dominic worked agency-side as a Director and Head of Account Management at BBH. During his nine years there, he ran Levi’s, KFC and various Diageo accounts. He also spent five years at HHCL, where he worked on the launch of Egg with Ian Priest, in addition to running the accounts for Pot Noodle, Russian Standard Vodka and various Bacardi-Martini brands.

Dom is a lover of folk music and once spent £100 on a Christian folk record.