• Paul Wright, 40, Managing Director

Paul has unrivalled experience in online sports advertising and sponsorship. With over 18 years in the media market with both BSkyB and Sports.com.

As one of the first members of the Sky sales team, Paul was one of the core sales people in the early days of multi channel TV, gaining a great insight into selling highly targeted media.

After 7 years of TV trading at Sky, Paul became Commercial Manager and was instrumental in helping to build a team that encompassed broadcast sponsorship, text sales, promotion and the Internet.

Despite a promotion to Head of Interactive Sales at Sky in 1999, Paul was lured away to become Director of Sales at Sports.com and was rapidly promoted to Group Sales and Marketing Director, driving not only revenues, but marketing strategy, trade PR and research initiatives.

Paul's many successes include:
- High profile sponsorship ranging from Budweiser in 1998 to Avaya in 2002
- Highly respected marketing strategy for Sports.com in the UK via radio sponsorship
- Major developments in the research of digital sport sponsorships

Paul is a regular conference contributor and a former Director of the Internet Advertising Bureau.

• Sandie Murphy, 33, Director of Client Services

Sandie has worked in media sales for 8 years and online for 6. After 2.5 years learning her trade at 'The Lancet' and achieving record sales, she moved to BioMedNet - at that time one of the biggest web sites in the world with 500,000 registered users. Promoted to European Sales Manager with responsibility for generating revenue and managing a sales team of four.

In 1999, Sandie moved to Associated New Media as Sales Manager of This Is Money and was soon heading up the larger site, This Is London, before being appointed Commercial Manager of the ANM network of sites. Whilst at ANM, she did the biggest deal of their history to date, a 12-month, 6-figure sponsorship with C&G.

Sandie moved to Sports.com in 2000 as Commercial Manager. In addition to managing key agency accounts on a day-to-day basis, she has sold and/or implemented several major sponsorships including the Avaya World Cup sponsorship in 2002, adidas - Euro2000, Wimbledon 2001 - Fred Perry and Six Nations 2002 - Tetley's.

Sandie managed the development of Sports.com's seven World Cup sites in five languages, and F1 sites in five languages with an eye on commercial opportunities and delivering against sponsorship contracts and specific customer-led products.

• Richard Lee, 34, Commercial Director

Richard is highly experienced in online sales and sponsorship with over 9 years trading within major publishing houses, newspapers and digital media owners.

Richard started his media career at Future Publishing in 1995 where he seized the opportunity to convince the company’s major magazine advertisers to consider investing budgets into the digital property, FutureNet.

After Future, Richard moved into recruitment advertising with leading recruitment portal Taps.com as Sales Manager before going into business take out in the market with an offering for the public sector.

He moved back into the main stream in 1999 by joining the Independent Newspaper group, as Sponsorship and Marketing Manager, with responsibilities for digital revenue generation, cross media sales and database marketing.

After two years, Richard was poached by AOL UK to build an agency sales team, to position the ISP’s proposition to traditional agency buyers.

Richard joined Aura in January 2003, to head up the Sales Operation. 

• Zoë Templeton, 33, Director Of Operations

Zoë was Client Services Director at Sports.com where she over saw all admanagement systems both for marketing and sales.

Zoë is one of the most experienced people in the UK marketplace working on advertiser implementation. Her understanding of the process needed to create rich media ad formats and how to deliver them is unsurpassed. Broad experience of Dart for Publishers, Dart for Advertisers, Dart Mail, as well as rich media technologies such as Tango Zebra, Eyeblasters, popups and popunders, transitionals, dhtml, and sponsorships made Sports.com's sales team one of the few that had a reputation for accurate and timely delivery, ensuring client satisfaction. 

Zoë started in this area at Associated New Media, as Client Services Manager.

• Nicola Jordan, 23, Account Director

Most recently Senior Sales Executive at Sports.com, Nicola has proved herself adept at generating revenue from online agencies in the UK. Her ability to manage campaigns and her excellent communication skills make her a huge asset to the Aura Sports team.

Nicola started out at Sport First newspaper where she was responsible for developing a web directory in which online betting clients paid for listings. She then moved to Teamtalk prior to joining Sports.com.

• Samantha Seal, 31,  Head of Client Services

Sam started her media career at Channel 5 six months prior to it's launch, working in the sales and sponsorship team.  She remained there for 4 years before joining Engage Media to help launch the first B2B online advertising network across Europe.

Previous to joining Aura Sports, Sam held the position of Sponsorship & Partnership Manager at the leading women's website handbag.com, a joint venture between Boots & Hollinger Telegraph.  Here, Sam secured the company's largest ever commercial partnership with Dating Direct.

Sam Joined Aura in June 2004