Apparent has hired Carmela Soares, the former head of Creative Shop at Meta Australia and New Zealand, to lead its social, content and creative systems practice. The appointment puts a platform-side creative leader inside an independent agency, with a brief that stretches well beyond traditional social media management.
Why the hire matters
Soares arrives with more than 100 awards, senior creative roles across Australia and internationally, and more than a decade of AWARD School lecturing. At Meta she led a team built around platform strategy and creative effectiveness. That background makes her fluent in the mechanics that decide whether content gets seen, shared or ignored.
Platform-native is the new brief
The move is a useful signal for social and growth teams. Platform-native does not mean repurposing a TV ad into a vertical cut. It means designing for feed behaviour, search surfaces, remix culture and share triggers from the very first brief. That is a very different workflow, and it is the one Apparent is building.
The job: systems, not just content
At Apparent, Soares will lead the social and content capability and develop systems that connect ideas, technology, platforms, data and production. Her focus includes:
- Helping clients decode how creativity and algorithms shape content performance.
- Building platform-native work around real user behaviour: how people find, watch and share.
- Weaving AI into the full workflow from brief and research through to creation, optimisation and distribution.
For Apparent clients, the goal is to move AI beyond a novelty or production shortcut and into the core creative process, where it can unlock speed, scale and effectiveness.
What social teams can steal
The clearest takeaway is organisational: build systems that make great ideas more agile and scalable, rather than treating each post as a one-off. Soares described the ambition as “connecting craft, culture and tech in ways that make human ideas flourish.”
Apparent managing director Suzy Smiley said social and content are evolving faster than ever, and the agencies leading the way are those that connect creativity, culture, technology and smarter ways of working without losing human insight.
The appointment lands during a strong year for Apparent: the agency was named Australian Marketing Institute agency of the year in the over-50-employees category in 2026, with content, social media and creative effectiveness wins for work with GTI and the Vanuatu Tourism Office.
For growth marketers, the practical next step is to audit whether your AI use stops at asset generation. If it does, you are leaving the speed and scale play on the table.
Source: Campaign Brief
