Here’s a few things I’ve been up to the last few years. some good, some fun, some not-quite-there-yet. Most of it is from my time at Hall & Partners as Partner, Innovation.
My role at H&P was varied, but I did manage to carve out a niche for innovation in the qualitative division. You’ll see some of the themes I explored and helped build thinking around on this blog…
For instance – this is a talk I gave at the ARF re:Think conference in 2008 in NYC about participatory brands and communications, with a focus in digital and social media. My colleague, Steve Pagan, and I presented together, and got some positive reviews elsewhere – the original version of the paper was presented at ESOMAR – and won best paper.
I also played host and emcee for a few Fresh Meet events – one of my favorites was the Fresh Meet in which we used the Pecha Kucha format to explore the topic “Liberating Constraints.” Check out all the videos – my friend Robin’s might be my favorite (yeah, I’m biased), but Michael Hastings Black, Paul Parton, and Rex Sorgatz’s talks were all fascinating and attacked the brief in very different ways. For my part, I gave a Pecha Kucha about Pecha Kucha, which, as noted in the video below, is very meta.
We did an event on H&P’s Big Digital Experiment as well – no video up that I’ve found of the event, but it was quite a conversation… Seems it’s 15 years in and we’re all still fretting about the same stuff when it comes to what goes on, online.
Here’s me, though – being bossy and chatty, as usual. Good turnout though:
Last summer I co-authored a piece for AdMap with Vanella Jackson, H&P’s Global CEO on the effect the recession would have on consumer behavior – ours was a story of shifting values, and though I think the condensed version here does not quite do the story we developed justice, it turned out to be a fascinating look into how people think about ‘value’ in the context of their own personal and social values.
And I have a stack of these in my apartment now:
A super fun thing I got to do was guest lecture at VCU’s BrandCenter in Caley Cantrell’s planning master class. We talked about innovation in brands, communications and in research – and a member of the class is now part of the Innovations group I work in at OTX. The world is small and miraculous. And now Noah Brier tells me he will be giving a guest lecture on innovation there soon – should be pretty amazing. In any event, I got to use my favorite image as the title page (via 20×200.com):
Amen.
There’s more of course, but now I’m tired of talking about myself and want to go finish writing a short story instead.