Little Grey Cells #7… Audiences want things faster. A one-way communication broadcast doesn’t deliver on that

Simon Gunning is Global Head of Digital Media and Technology at advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH). We catch up with him, taking a good look into his Little Grey Cells…

When did you first get into tech?

I worked in the record business for long time, managing record producers and artists, and it was clear that it was an industry that was getting into trouble. At the same time, billions of pounds were spent trying to prevent the Y2K disaster, and the dot com bubble was growing. So I went to work for a company called Flextech television, which became Virgin Media television.

Quite extraordinarily I was appointed head of business development, and my job included setting up web sites for the four biggest channels in pay TV at the time. I had to set up their presence online, in mobile telephony and red button interactivity, which was seen to be the future of the world as we then knew it. Continue reading

Social CRM: Stop thinking about ownership and start thinking about culture change

Who owns Social CRM? This debate continues to divide opinion, but I believe it is the wrong question. Ownership is not the issue, and only echoes the ‘who owns social media’ tedium, which I have ranted about for longer than I care to remember.

The social media ownership debate has been perpetuated by a range of marketing and communications agencies with the objective of grabbing budget from each other and squabbling over whose social services are ‘better’. Continue reading