What drives people to run?
WE FIND OUT WITH HELP FROM MATTHEW INMAN, CREATOR OF ‘THE OATMEAL,’ AND OTHERS.
Cyberthreats, you are now
officially outnumbered.
Step 3:
YOUR WORDS. YOUR PORTRAIT.
YOUR WORDS. YOUR PORTRAIT.
Connect to Facebook or Twitter and have a portrait created from your own words. Or, type in the words that best reflect who you are to make your own personal “word portrait.”
Today’s workforce,
one story at a time.
one story at a time.
Goodbye Cyber Monday.
Hello Cyder Monday.
Hello Cyder Monday.
Who WE WORK WITH
what WE DO
Strategically Driven
to provide a thoughtful and disciplined foundation for the work we create
to provide a thoughtful and disciplined foundation for the work we create
Creatively Expansive
through an open model that allows for wide-ranging creative solutions
Humanly Fixated
in how we treat each other, our clients, and how we engage audiences
Learn More
Our
Leadership
TEAM
Ted Nelson Founder / CEO & Strategy
Ted is a very hands-on CEO, and one of three founding partners who conceived and launched Mechanica. His responsibilities include contributing to the building and management of a next-generation business model and organization, as well as general strategic oversight across Mechanica’s clients and businesses.
Prior to launching Mechanica, Ted spent eight years as the Managing Partner/Brand Strategy Director at Mullen. Ted’s specific responsibilities at Mullen included building and managing an award winning brand strategy and customer analytics group, which contributed to the brand development and customer acquisition and retention strategies of brands as varied as General Motors, Disney, Sony, Coca-Cola, Nextel, Lending Tree, Oxygen Media, Monster.com and Genuity.
Prior to joining Mullen, Ted honed his skills while working at Chiat/Day on both coasts, with strategic responsibilities for a diverse set of clients including Reebok, Intel, Dell, Coca-Cola, and Nynex. Following Chiat/Day, he launched the brand strategy discipline within Anderson & Lembke, then the world’s largest business-to-business specialist agency with offices in Europe, the U.S. and Asia.
Ted is a five-time EFFIE award recipient for communications effectiveness. He served for a number of years on the national brand planning board and was awarded an EPIC award honoring culture changers.
As a regular speaker at business and brand development conferences, Ted focuses on the impact converging forces are having on the strategy development and implementation process. Speaking engagements include the Council on Corporate Brand Management, Atlanta’s Marketing Roundtable, The CMO Breakfast and an International Symposium on Creativity and Business held in China.
Ted has a passion for rethinking business models. He recently led Mechanica’s Engine90 joint-venture which reinvents the traditional business consulting model. Ted also lead Mechanica’s Branding Forward Project collaboration with Fast Company. This project focused on mapping the dramatic changes impacting marketing and brand development today, with the goal of sharing knowledge and capitalizing on opportunities.
To hear more about Ted’s commitment to strategy and collaboration, watch this recent video from the CMO Breakfast Series™.
Micah Donahue Principal / Brand Engagement Strategy
Freed from the pressure to create media plans that support only traditional “ad agency” services, Micah develops true customer-driven and targeted brand engagement strategies. Micah and his team begin with a deep dive into brand positioning, audience mindsets and behaviors in order to construct deep and insightful customer journeys. The team then maps out key customer touch points that generate engagement, increase brand awareness, drive trial/purchase, support sales forces, and deepen customer loyalty. This unusual approach has led to collaborations with Kickstarter campaigns, apps that generate unique social media portraits, specifically targeted video campaigns, and disruptive event activities tightly nested within large, international campaigns.
Since joining Mechanica, Micah has led business initiatives for Saucony, Sea Cuisine, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Northeastern University’s D’Amore McKim School of Business, OSRAM SYLVANIA, Neighborhood Health Plan, Ticketmaster, Akamai, Fallon Community Health Plan, Kronos, PTC, and Communispace. Micah is currently working to launch new product lines and programs for Saucony, Sea Cuisine, and Sylvania.
Prior to joining Mechanica, Micah led successful initiatives on behalf of clients at Mullen, Ingalls, and Campbell Mithun Esty. Past client experience includes Land O’Lakes, Kmart, the U.S. Department of Defense, Nextel, Eddie Bauer, Four Seasons, and General Motors. Micah holds a BS in Communications and Psychology from Cornell University, and is a frequent panelist, speaker, and blog author.
In his spare time, Micah’s passions include overlanding, live music, hiking, travel – and most importantly, spending time with family and friends.
Libby DeLana Founder / Creative
A philosophy major from Mount Holyoke College and a graphic designer by trade, Libby honed her skills at the Boston Architecture Center and the Harvard Extension School, as well as under Milton Glaser and Jack Lenor Larson at the Haystack School of Craft.
Libby’s work has won many industry awards, and has been featured in such noted publications as PRINT Design Annual, Graphic Design & Logo, Fast Company, Communication Arts and has been profiled by the BBC for the series called The Chain, “leading figures name the woman who’s inspired their success for the next interview in this audio chain.”
For many years, Libby has been a big advocate of developing more female leadership and talent in and outside of the ad industry – which has notoriously few senior women creative directors. She has also served as a mentor to the 3% conference, is on the board of directors for Newburyport’s Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center, is a wild advocate and avid volunteer at The Do Lectures, and is on the board of directors of BlinkNow, Maggie Doyne’s foundation which provides an education and loving, caring home to orphaned, impoverished and at risk children in Surkhet, Nepal.
For the last four years Libby has been taking a #morningwalk no matter where she is and has been documenting it on Instagram as @parkhere (Park is her middle name). The idea came from a simple idea: to relearn how to see, and to practice a simple gesture of gratitude each day. She is currently putting the finishing touches on a #morningwalk book proposal.
Libby lives in Newburyport with her husband and likes to describe herself as the mother of two tall boys, wife of a master furniture builder, rower, kombucha brewer and impatient knitter.
Jim Garaventi Founder / Creative
As creative director at Mechanica, Jim gets to do exactly what he’d hoped for when he helped launch the company: work closely with clients to craft meaningful brand positions, and help create interactions of all types to make those brands – and what they stand for – more relevant in people’s lives.
Over his 25+ year career, spanning behemoth NYC agencies to creative boutiques, Jim’s work has won many national and international awards. His campaigns have appeared in many industry publications, a textbook or two, and even on the walls of a fictitious ad exec played by Mel Gibson in a movie few people remember.
Prior to working with a full spectrum of clients at Mechanica, Jim worked on brands including Four Seasons Hotels, General Motors, Swiss Army Brands, XM Satellite Radio, The Speedvision Channel (now Velocity), L.L.Bean, Fortune Magazine, Nextel, EMC, MFA/Boston, and others big and small.
If Jim isn’t at the office or with his family, then odds are you’ll find him on a tennis court, a bike, or in the garage tending to the many needs of an old car.
Arabella Plum Principal / Operations & Client Services
Arabella has led and managed the strategic development and implementation of communications for a wide range of clients. From the ticket sales and distribution giant Ticketmaster to the global running lifestyle brand Saucony, Arabella has demonstrated her ability to build and grow numerous brands. In addition to ensuring successful brand initiatives and client relations, Arabella leads Mechanica’s operations, business strategy and development, and has a deep passion for the OpenWork movement, a nonprofit inspiring a national conversation about the need to reinvent how work gets done in the 21st century.
Over the years, Arabella has enjoyed creating highly successful brand engagements for Time Inc., MTVu, Stride Rite, Fallon Community Health Plan, Nextel, Communispace, Forest City Enterprises, and various High Liner Foods brands.
When she’s not building brands and creating cultures of trust and accountability in the workplace, you can find Arabella traveling, playing tennis, or caring for horses.
Everything at Mechanica puts the customer first, informed by data and strategy. We have developed a proprietary Insight-Driven Collaboration Session (ICS) methodology that allows teams of stakeholders to analyze large data sets and achieve alignment around key implications, including a focused, relevant and distinctive brand positioning. We call this “the art of sacrifice.” Through bringing cross-functional stakeholders together under the umbrella of our carefully structured collaboration framework, we’re able to co-create, make decisions, develop concepts, prioritize brand FIT (Fix, Improve or Transform) implications, and get buy-in from all stakeholders to move forward. The result is that we’re able to break through the daunting complexity and cross business realities that so often doom brand experience development projects. Customers and prospects are involved in positioning and Brand Experience Strategy (BES) development through a range of innovative research, collaboration and application methodologies. These include online panels, community and diary-based methodologies, ethnographies, business and social media analytics, segmentation studies, trend spotting, persona development, etc. Importantly, we incorporate systematic customer journey mapping, spanning digital and physical interactions, into our methodology. We identify current and future states, and opportunities for better aligning brand positioning with the reality of a customer’s journey. We have several powerful tools we employ when relevant, including the Panoramic Brand Experience Audit and the Marketing Orienteering methodology for especially fast changing categories, and to ensure brand strategies that are actionable across all touchpoints. Once we’ve identified key insights, we develop a focused brand positioning and future state customer journey. This drives all brand concepting, prototyping, and final creative execution. The positioning encompasses target market, frame of reference, point of difference, key support pillars and brand personality. It’s sometimes discovered that broader organizational issues are impeding the ability to fully deploy critical programs. It’s for these instances that Mechanica has jointly developed the Engine90 process. Engine90 represents a fast, efficient, and innovative approach to helping companies connect brand experience strategy to holistic execution (beyond marketing and branding silos) in a highly collaborative, cost-effective and global manner. Finally, Mechanica is a community of thought leaders in the realm of strategic brand development, pioneering the idea of “Branding Forward” thinking. This is anchored in the conviction (born out of observation) that today’s branding frontlines are shifting from persuasion through consistency and repetition, to a vastly more dynamic customer relationship landscape based on continuous innovation and engagement.Strategy First
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