About Me
What do I do?
Most days I work at Poke www.pokelondon.com. I am a founder of Poke. One of 6 co-founders in fact. Which makes us sound like some kind of bloody co-operative. And on a good day we are. My job title varies by day, or even time of day. For a while I was a Creative Director, and sometimes I still am called that. Other times I’m Head of Planning. I’m not convinced that either of those titles is right. So I tend to avoid giving my title wherever possible. Or resort to something nebulous like partner.
I do a kind of creative plannery type thing though. It’s either strategic creative or planning with a creative slant (both of which are kind of what you’d hope for anyway). So perhaps I’m mediocre version of one or the other. If I was much better at one of them I think my title would have become obvious by now…
Where it seems to work is that by having that balance I can talk to most people in a fairly staightforward fashion and cut through a lot of the shit quite quickly. Which is generally a good thing.
Oh, and just in case you’re wondering, anything that I say on here is, in no way, sanctioned by Poke. But at the same time it’s hard to separate the online me from the professional (or unprofessional) me…
Why is this blog here?
There’s a few reasons. Firstly it forces me to organise my thoughts into a form that can (hopefully) be understood by more people than just me. Secondly, I found that I kept bombarding everyone with ‘Hey Look at This!’ emails, now I don’t have to bother, if they’re interested in what I say, they can just come here. And thirdly, it’s a space for me to play around with geeky stuff and figure out how things work.
My Past (in case people are trying to track me down)
I’ve worked at Poke, Monkey Kingdom, First Tuesday, Oven Digital, Syzygy and a few other places back in Edinburgh. Before that I studied Psychology at Edinburgh University. And, if my memory goes that far back, I grew up in a small village called Barton-under-Needwood in Staffordshire.
I was born in Edinburgh.
