John Moore - Ad Age Media Maven 2010

Mullen’s commitment to keeping media and creative closely connected has been rewarded as our Chief Media Officer John Moore has been recognized as an Advertising Age Media Maven.  As you’ll see in the Ad Age report, John was given this prestigious award based on his passion for media innovation, his major contributions to the agency’s new business success and innovative media executions that our mediahub group created recently for Olympus, Timberland and Zappos.

John joins a group of 18 media luminaries selected by Ad Age including, Brandy Ruff from Mullen client Alberto-Culver, Christopher Batty from Gawker, Ian Tait from Wieden & Kennedy, Brian McMahon from IPG’s Orion Trading, Seth Kaufman from Pepsico, David Levy from Turner Broadcasting and Colleen Fahey Rush from MTV Networks.

It’s been a couple of great weeks for mediahub, which also picked up a series of awards for media innovation from The AdClub recently. However, all is not rosy for John, as his beloved Boston College Eagles got wrecked by Virginia Tech over the weekend.  Hopefully being named an Ad Age Media Maven will ease the pain.

Brenna Hanly, Mobile Catalyst, mediahub from Mullen

Earlier this week, mediahub from Mullen formally announced the creation of a new mobile media practice that closely aligns our resident emerging media specialists with the agency’s integrated creative teams. This new mobile unit is the latest manifestation of a fast-growing capability. We’ve developed and implemented several successful mobile media and creative campaigns, and are seeing an increasing allocation of client resources into this fast-growing channel. To date, Mullen has produced integrated mobile campaigns for Timberland, Timberland PRO, Ernst & Young and Foxwoods Resort Casino, among others. The agency’s mobile app and tablet computer creative portfolio includes work for Olympus, Stanley, Century 21, Victorinox Swiss Army and MassMutual.

The mobile media-creative fusion effort will be led by Brenna Hanly, who takes on the newly created role of Mobile Catalyst. Hanly was originally an Emerging Media Specialist at Mullen and more recently operated in a hybrid role as a media planner with cross-channel expertise in both online and offline media.

“With mobile ad spend expected to increase by 10 times over the next 3–5 years, this is the right time to create a dedicated mobile practice,” said John Moore, Chief Media Officer at Mullen. “Brenna’s background in emerging media, coupled with her metrics-focused digital experience, is critical to success in the mobile space. And, by embedding our mobile practice in Mullen’s creative group, we will have a significant impact on the content we create in this exciting channel.”

“Within five years more users will be accessing the Web through mobile phones than PCs,” said Hanly. “While in many ways mobile is the new Web, we believe that mobile requires special, dedicated thinking because of the unique nuances of location and personalization that are endemic to this medium.”

Mullen’s mobile media practice will be focused on the creation and distribution of mobile apps, banners and tablet creative, as well as mobile commerce, campaign metrics, activating offline campaigns and working with the creative group in order to inspire and ideate within this new and exploding universe.

We’ve had some great response to the announcement from mobile, media, advertising publications and blogs. Mobile is clearly the new frontier and we look forward to sharing future news about new campaigns and inventions from this team.

For those of us who’ve lived it, the Institute is more than educational… it’s transformative. We learned about a variety of topics from leaders across different agencies – our own chief media officer John Moore and Arnold’s chief digital officer Troy Kelley.

But, there’s a beast behind the weekly lectures… the pitch. A client is invited every year to brief the group of young, inexperienced, unseasoned admen and women for a 3-month-long pitch process. This year’s client was Converse. It was a tough assignment, but I’ll spare you the details.

Instead, I will leave you with some insights my fellow Mullenites and I were able to pull from getting thrown into a pitch setting with teammates from eight different agencies across the Boston area:

• You’re not the smartest person in the room. You won’t always be right, and your agency’s process isn’t right – just different.
• But you might have the big idea – so speak up! Insights don’t always come from the planner, or the creative, or the (scoff) account guy. Don’t ever discount yourself before you’ve been heard.
• Be bold. Not so much in your work or your words, but in your strategy and ideas. You can’t always present campaign platforms like “F*>k the rules” or “balls out, gentlemen,” but be balls out and f*>k the rules when it comes to conventional marketing. Cliché, I know.
• Always do what’s right. Don’t put your client somewhere where they shouldn’t be. Nor should you put the brand somewhere that’s inaccessible to your consumer. Converse isn’t best experienced on the iPad, or on Twitter (though they’re dabbling).

Perhaps the greatest insight, however, is that title means nothing. I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing a true industry phenomenon. Traditional roles are quickly disappearing. And when the account guy can write an ad, your media pro can come up with the campaign platform and the project manager develops a killer guerrilla strategy, you know that you’ve achieved something great.

Congratulations, everyone! It was an amazing, and rough, three months. Keep the momentum, keep pushing the rules and together we’ll revolutionize this ad-game.

John Moore in the Mullen Media Lab

John Moore is a fast moving, intense guy. He’s a force of change in our agency always trying to push the limits of creativity and innovation in the use of media. John’s had his hands on a lot of the cool things we’ve done for Timberland, Ask.com and Match.com among others.

We’re happy to announce that John is now leading mediahub, Mullen’s full-service media planning/buying group. Moore was recognized for his leadership in launching and building Mullen’s Ideas and Innovation practice.  He takes over mediahub from Steve Calder who just recently joined Hewlett-Packard in a global media position.

“John is a vocal champion for progressive, digital and social media; and he’s a huge catalyst for media-creative fusion,” said Joe Grimaldi, Mullen’s president and ceo.

“I’ve witnessed a tremendous transformation of the media discipline in the last 20 years,” said Moore. “However, it’s still not moving fast enough. Too many entities are clinging to the past and not embracing the new realities. Data is exploding, enabling us to create the same kind of laser like communication in offline that we currently have in online. Every media professional needs to understand the fluidity and portability of content and that media is about activating experiences consumers will seek out, share and talk about.”

Over20+ years in media Moore has worked on some of the most respected brands in America including Wendy’s, General Motors, Whirlpool, H&R Block, NEC, L.L.Bean, Monster and XM Satellite Radio. He has won two prestigious Mediaweek “Media Plan of the Year” awards for Wendy’s and Monster.com.

On a personal note, John is a big Boston College sports fan and is at most of the football games cheering on his beloved Eagles and his daughter who is part of the elite BC dance team. His daily reads include Silicon Valley Insider, TechCrunch and StumbleUpon.

You can followed John on twitter @jmoore700.