MI Awards Voting

The community of UTalkMarketing are invited to vote for their chosen Innovative Individual of 2012 from the shortlisted entries in this year’s MI Awards 2012.

Please review the entry details from our shortlisted candidates below & place your vote today!

Voting will close on Wednesday 29^th February with the winner announced during the MI Awards ceremony taking place as part of the MI Expo conference on the 6^th March. Full event details can be found here – www.marketinginnovationexpo.com/europe

The shortlisted entries are:

Alistair Crane, CEO & Co-founder of Grapple Mobile

Alistair Crane is the CEO and co-founder of Grapple Mobile.  As CEO of Grapple Mobile, Alistair has been responsible for forging partnerships with over 90 of the world’s leading brands including adidas, McDonald’s, and P&G, to deliver ground-breaking mobile innovation.

In late 2009, the full scale of Alistair’s entrepreneurial potential was revealed when he identified a common problem for brands set out to create the solution. Alistair identified that brands needed to reach the widest possible audience on mobile regardless of smartphone, but that developing for individual platforms was costly and not time effective. Alistair realised that the solution was technology that allowed for the production of cross-platform apps from a single source code. Subsequently Alistair raised funds to acquire a patented platform that enables the time and cost-effective production of high quality cross-platform apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and Nokia from a single source code. With this platform at the heart, Grapple has become the leading mobile innovation agency, guiding leading brands through the whole development process from concept to download.

Hugh Fletcher, National Digital Manager, Audi UK

Hugh’s career has been spent bringing innovation to some of the world’s largest car manufacturers including Renault, Peugeot, Volkswagen & Skoda before joining Audi.

Hugh has ensured Audi’s Vorsprung durch Technik’ philosophy, or ‘advancement through technology’ Audi’s has been applied in the ever-changing world of digital marketing, developing the Audi brand on web, mobile and social platforms, contributing to a record year for Audi.

In a prolific 12 months, Hugh has:

• Launched the m.Audi mobile site – achieving 219,328 unique visitors in the last 10 months and shortlisted for three major industry awards,
• Generated 10.7 million unique visitors on the Audi UK website
• Managed the Audi YouTube Channel – creating 900,000 views in the last 12 months
• Initiated a social media strategy with a strong Audi UK presence on Facebook and Twitter
• Developed mobile apps for major sporting events – Goodwood Festival of Speed and the Le Mans 24 hour race.
• Implemented a search-engine optimisation project has seen a 20% increase in natural search traffic

Maani Safa, Innovation Director, SOMO

As the man who almost single-handedly brought cool to The Telegraph, Maani was chosen to found and lead the product division of Somo mobile marketing agency back in 2010. His decorated early career saw him heading the Telegraph Media Group’s mobile division, where he was responsible for launching industry-leading mobile products, including the mobile version of The Telegraph, the hugely successful iPhone application, The Telegraph Kindle edition, and the first ever news app for the Android Market.  He also set up their innovation Laboratory  known as T-labs, the centre of innovation for the company, which was sponsored by Apple, Google and Adobe.  At Somo, Maani has spearheaded the growth of the product department and conceptualised many of its most successful creations, including:

• the award winning Audi Le Mans app, which demonstrated the first use of augmented reality in an automotive app in the UK
• the Dominos app suite, which has generated more than  £12 million of sales in under a year
• The Conde Nast Glamour apps, one of which,  “Fast Beauty” was named in The Times App 500

CLICK HERE TO PLACE YOUR VOTE!

Voting will close on the 29th Feb at which stage votes will be counted &  verified.  Please note: Only one vote per person will be counted.