Bastion Shine Hires Holly Dean as General Manager

Bastion Shine is kicking off 2025 with four new hires, strengthening its social media offering, as well as promoting Joanna James, who leads the communications, social and experiential team, to managing director communications and experience.

Holly Dean joins the team as general manager of Social, a newly-created role following significant growth in the agency. Holly brings more than 16 years of experience delivering award-winning strategic social media and influencer campaigns for brands including McDonald’s, Amex, Google, Goodman Fielder, L&P, Nestle, Foodstuffs, Te Whatu Ora, Samsung and Audi.

Tom Dyton comes to Bastion Shine as a senior content creator, another newly-created role. Tom brings a decade of experience crafting visual content for social media, television and newsrooms. His extensive experience will see him play a key role in creating best-in-class content for social channels including directing, crafting, filming and editing.

Bastion Shine also welcomes Amber Holyoake and Ellie Nicholson as senior social media manager and social & PR senior business executive respectively. Amber brings a wealth of experience having worked both agency and client-side in social roles. Ellie brings consumer and corporate PR and social experience from an agency environment.

The new hires see Bastion Shine’s Communications and Experience team grow to 11, since Joanna James was brought in to establish the offering in late 2022. The Communications and Experience offering covers public relations, corporate communications, social media, events and activations across a range of consumer and B2B clients.

“Continuing to build our team enables us to continue delivering both social-first thinking, whether always-on or as part of campaigns, for our clients that’s delivered at speed through our in-house content creators and editors. Alongside our growing social team, we’re also adding to our PR team with a new senior hire arriving in the next few weeks,” says Joanna

Bastion Shine CEO Toby Sellers says, "Attracting exceptional talent across PR, Social and Experiential is vital to strengthening the integrated thinking we deliver for clients. Jo has built a talented team of professionals who are delivering outstanding results. I'm incredibly excited about the continued growth in this area of our business under her leadership, and Holly’s arrival to lead our Social Media business."