Bio: Gavin Heaton
Gavin was born on a boat on the Indian Ocean. He was about three months early and nearly did not survive. As a newborn he was so small that his mother wrapped him in face cloths rather than nappies, and dressed him in doll's clothes as nothing else would fit.
OK ... so only some of that is true. But which parts are fiction and which parts fact? What comes first the brand or the story? What is authentic and what is fable? (For the curious only the first sentence is false.)
Gavin has held book editor and publishing roles at Butterworths, tutored and lectured in performance and postmodernism at University of Western Sydney, written technical documentation, marketed technology solutions, established a "knowledge factory" and run innovation teams for IBM, created comprehensive marketing and branding strategies, launched new services and run communications campaigns for Fujistu Consulting and now head up the Interactive division for a global marketing and promotions agency.
In his "spare" time, Gavin writes the Servant of Chaos blog (www.servantofchaos.com) which is his personal rant on the world of branding and storytelling.
Posts by Gavin Heaton:
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Join Me or Sponsor Me This Movember,
09 Nov 2007 in Featured Posts
You might remember that I participated in Movember last year — the annual event to raise awareness around prostate cancer and to raise money for research into the "most common non-skin cancer".
This year, I want to go a step further. I…
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Re-Thinking Re-Thought,
05 Nov 2007 in Featured Posts
My first “real” job out of university was in publishing. I had spent a couple of years pretending to study accounting (with daytime chartered work financing my studies), until I finally realized that it was not my cup of tea. It was my first real…
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Share It Like You Are Seven,
26 Oct 2007 in Featured Posts
There are many books about creativity, there are exercises, websites, tools, tips and techniques. And yet, despite all this… we are still endlessly fascinated by the concept of “creativity” and desperate to unlock its elusive secret.
One of the b…
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The Audience Participates,
22 Oct 2007 in Featured Posts
To some extent, marketers are constantly dealing with the future. We gamble with trends and positioning, we make estimates, projections and create budgets. We plan and strategize around our products, services and brands … and segment, slice and…
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So, You Think You Can Market?,
16 Oct 2007 in Featured Posts
We all think that we are capable of coming up with a ground-breaking idea. We all think that we could, if given the chance, deliver a brilliant social media campaign that creates buzz, drives sales and makes our clients deliriously happy.
But do yo…
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Does Inter-Agency Collaboration Work?,
06 Sep 2007 in Featured Posts
It is a great idea in theory: Harness the best talent in your roster of agencies and get them to collaborate on projects.
The potential is enormous … you stand a great chance of developing a top-shelf campaign with an integrated, cooperative feel…
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Facebook’s Strategy Is Not Its Own,
29 Aug 2007 in Featured Posts
I was taking a look at some of the comments on my Facebook post the other day and there were two comments that echoed each other — “It seems to me that there is some indecision including on the part of Facebook itself about whether it’s social…
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Employers and Facebook: Turn the Other Cheek,
27 Aug 2007 in Featured Posts
There has been a feast of BSP (blogger sensory perception) this week over two converging topics — Facebook and “participation”… and I have been fascinated by the implications.
Drew McLellan points out that a number of corporations are banning th…
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Who Owns ‘You’,
03 Aug 2007 in Featured Posts
We all love social media … we love the way that it connects us, the way we can interact with people both near and far, and to an extent, we even love the gadgety effects of the technology that drives it all.
We have profiles all over the place, p…
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The Importance of a ‘Web Strategy’,
05 Jul 2007 in Featured Posts
It is easy to build a Web site these days. And with a raft of online tools and systems like blogs, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc., it is even easier to kick start a blog or social media experiment. But participating or building these does not…
