Diva CEO Suzy Barnes drives overall strategy for the business, ensuring we have the right mix of people and products to deliver next level marketing for all of our clients. Her creative mindset and passion for client service makes sure we deliver on our promises.

An entrepreneur at heart, Suzy’s first business was a music talent agency. She has also worked in journalism and had a successful career in agency PR and event management before co-founding Diva in 2007.

Suzy is a strong advocate for creating a better "people experience" in agency businesses and works hard to champion work-life balance, actively implementing people policies that prevent burn out and drive diversity at Diva.

Suzy sticks her hand up a lot. A former local Councillor and School Governor, she currently coaches junior football and is a youth club trustee.

Crucially, she thinks cats are more enlightened than dogs, and is known to enjoy gin and techno. Though not necessarily together.

Diva co-founder and COO Andy Barnes has worked in the games industry for nearly 20 years. In that time he has been instrumental in launching and promoting some of the world’s biggest interactive entertainment brands.

His creativity, innovation and attention to detail has led to longstanding relationships with a who’s who of AAA publishers and developers, including Sony PlayStation, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Square Enix, and Activision Blizzard.

Andy is the operations powerhouse as Diva, making sure the studio team and backend system run without a hitch.

He sports the world’s most impressive collection of shoes, plays guitar like Slash’s less talented cousin, and would rather be out on his bike than stuck behind a screen.

Deepa is a multi-award winning Chief Financial Officer, board advisor and leader in the network agency field, formerly holding senior positions within Omnicom Group Inc and Publicis Groupe.

Deepa has been actively driving the diversity and inclusion conversation forward in the creative services industry. In particular, she is passionate about improving the profile of underrepresented groups within the industry, as well as helping more women progress into senior positions. During her time at Publicis, Deepa was the Chairwoman of the VivaWomen! Deepa also runs her own successful consultancies - Lab Eight and Sherper Group, as well as advising as a non-exec director.

She loves cars - the louder and faster the better - and will sing beautifully if offered the right cocktail.

Chief Creative Officer Nic Roope is one of the best strategic thinkers around - a brilliant mix of creativity, long-term vision and operational business nous. He truly understands how brands are constructed and is always providing challenging and thought-provoking solutions. Prior to his work with Diva, Nic co-founded Poke agency (sold to Publicis Group in 2013), where he was part of the core launch team for EE, on the UK brand leadership team for Orange, and was involved in the early days of developing Skype.

Nic is widely recognised for being extremely tall and wearing arguably the coolest glasses, plus there isn’t a cutting-edge London members establishment he can’t get into.

Having run internationally recognised brand and communication agencies for over 15 years, there are very few brand challenges Alex hasn’t seen and solved. Usually with a complex collection of multi-coloured post-it notes. As Diva’s Brand Director, Alex brings a wealth of experience in supporting creative businesses to understand, shape and activate their brand to engage employees, partners, customers and shareholders alike.

Alex is a globally renowned DJ (you can find him on Spotify) and sits firmly in the dog camp. He is extremely interested in technology with a love of AI and VR.

David Lilley has been in the games industry since September 1988, joining the fledgling magazine publisher in Bath, Future Publishing, followed by internet start-ups throughout the early noughties.

Most recently he led the brilliant team at Gamer Network who successfully took The Eurogamer Expo and made it into EGX, the UKs biggest and best recognised videogames consumer event.

He is responsible at Diva for keeping the brand in firm touch with the changing needs of games producers and gently moving the agency into new territories - be that physically, digitally or philosophically.

He is known for charity haircuts, boozing and enthusiastic but largely incompetent golf.

Nick obtained a first-class honours degree in Electronics with Computing at Swansea University when computers were the size of Swansea University.

His first business achievement was leading the Motion Media Technology IPO in 2000 with a valuation of over £270m.

Nick is at the core of high-tech business growth in Bristol, providing a physical venue (Engine Shed) and leading an ecosystem for tech companies to scale-up with the SETsquared Incubator.

He’s a governor of Bath Spa University, was awarded an MBE for services to the digital economy and now freelances as a non-executive director, speaker and economic development consultant.

He’s a keen motorcyclist with a great love of the Isle of Man TT and sits firmly in the dog camp.

Emily has 20+ years experience in communications for videogames. Emily began as QA tester at GT Interactive, before landing a junior role at Konami.

Emily specialised in International PR, with roles at 2K, Square Enix and The Pokémon Company International. Career highlights have included leading global comms for Crystal Dynamic's Tomb Raider reboot and launching a pop-up Pokémon Centre in Paris. The latter caused massive crowds, stopped traffic and the police were called - eek!

Proud mum of two little boys, recently Emily has balanced parental responsibilities with consultancy clients including BAFTA, Wellcome and McLaren Technologies. She also worked with boutique PR Agency, Renaissance, heading up Corporate and CSR projects. Emily is well connected within the gaming sector, having also served as a Chair and Trustee for GamesAid.

Stuart has over 20 years of experience working within communications, advertising, and technology. He brings a wealth of experience from the entertainment and games industry, having worked with the likes of BMG, Xbox, SCEE, BBC, HBO and Sky.

His trophy cabinet is overflowing with awards, Including 3 D&AD pencils for his recent work with Adidas, Google and EA to launch the smart tracking inner sole “GMR” that connects real world data with FIFA Mobile.

Stuart enjoys games that involve blasting hordes of the undead and has also been a zombie in real life as an extra in Shaun of the Dead.

David has worked for award-winning independent and network agencies in the UK and North America, including Havas and We Are Unlimited (part of the DDB network) bringing experience across a variety of categories and disciplines for both household names and fast-growing brands.

He is passionate about producing strategic and creative work that will resonate with consumers, perform for Diva’s clients and be enjoyable for our teams and clients to work on. David has developed several of the most successful loyalty programs in Europe, launched new customer-centric service and product offerings, developed innovative best-in-class Customer Experiences, and delivered multi-award-winning integrated campaigns (one even featured in a Super Bowl Half time show!)

In addition to being a passionate gamer, David is a lover of sports, travel and as the ginger beard indicates, an IPA.

James has over 18 years of marketing communications experience gained working on integrated brand campaigns for clients such as Mondelez, Converse, Heineken, Expedia and Honda F1 Racing.

He occasionally describes himself as a ‘T-shaped’ strategist. Noting that because of the way social and digital has broadened from a discipline to something that impacts everything, so too has his work gone from depth of specialism to breadth of capability. Skills that have seen him develop award winning work at both WPP and Publicis.

James is also the co-creator of the DICE Charter initiative - a scored set of regulatory guidelines to ensure diversity and inclusion at conferences and events.

In his spare time, James enjoys Destiny 2 far more than should be allowed… as well as making huge Minecraft worlds with his two children.