Michael Abdel

Michael Abdel is an Australian advertising executive and brand strategist, and the Founder and Executive Creative Director of The Sphere Agency in Melbourne. He established the agency in 1998 and has led every major client engagement since, building one of Australia's longest-running independent agencies across nearly three decades of change in the industry.

Born and raised in Melbourne to a family of Egyptian Coptic heritage, Michael began his working life in music and entertainment promotion, moving nightclub and touring work across the city through the early 1990s. He completed a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Arts at Deakin University, majoring in marketing, and left the entertainment industry to move into commercial work. He founded Sphere in 1998 with a single graphic designer, no clients and a leased office in Armadale taken on at about $23,000 a year.

Michael co-wrote and produced “Hearts on Fire” for Nando's charity campaign United Against Malaria, released in 2010 to mark the FIFA World Cup. The song became the official cause anthem of the Africa Cup of Nations, performed to an estimated worldwide audience of over one billion people. The credit is recorded on Wikipedia under Michael's former name, Michael Abdul.

The agency's earliest growth came through local-area marketing for KFC franchisees, expanding within its first eighteen months to work with franchisees and the franchise committee across the eastern seaboard. Michael then moved the business deliberately out of graphic design and print production and into strategy-led advertising. Its defining early relationship was with Nando's: Michael was a Nando's franchisee and led the marketing account through a long Australian relationship.

Michael was selected as a featured Australian industry practitioner for Cengage Learning's fifth Asia-Pacific edition of Integrated Marketing Communications, which carries a dedicated IMC Profile on Michael and The Sphere Agency. He also recorded educational interviews and practitioner case studies for the edition, bringing agency experience — including work with Nando's and Chatime — into Australian university marketing teaching.

In 2019 Michael was interviewed by Professor Robert Crawford of RMIT University for the Digital Dawn in Adland oral-history series, research behind Crawford's book of the same name published by Routledge in 2021. The recording and its transcript are held in the collection of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, preserving a first-person account of Sphere's founding and of the Australian advertising industry's shift from print production to digital and social media. Michael has since founded Hummington, a consultancy that optimises in-house marketing departments, and continues to lead client work at Sphere.

Further reading: oral-history interview held by the National Film and Sound Archive; featured practitioner in Integrated Marketing Communications.