TED NELSON

CEO/Strategy Director, Mechanica

Biography

Intro
Ted is CEO of Mechanica, a next generation brand strategy and marketing development firm. Ted’s responsibilities at E90 include working to ensure the speed, quality and impact of each E90 engagement. His specific expertise lies in the realm of brand and customer development strategy.

Defining Experiences
As CEO/Strategy Director of Mechanica, Ted oversees work for clients as varied as Akamai, Kronos, Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), Disney, Weight Watchers, Art Science Labs, F-Squared Investments, FCHP, and the U.S. Department of State.

Prior to launching Mechanica, Ted spent eight years as the Managing Partner, Brand Strategy Director at Mullen, the nation’s 17th largest integrated communications firm. While at Mullen Ted built 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, Oracle, Dell, SAP, Disney, Sony, Coca-Cola, Nextel, Lending Tree, Monster.com and Genuity. Prior to Mullen, Ted honed his skills while working at Chiat/Day on both coasts where he was the first ever American Account Planner hired in the midst of the British Account Planning invasion.

Knowledge Framework
Ted is a multi 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 that converging forces are having on the strategy development and implementation process. Specifically spanning the gap between inspiration and implementation. Recent speaking engagements include the Council on Corporate Brand Management, Atlanta’s Marketing Roundtable, and an International Symposium on Creativity and Business held in Changchun, China.

Ted most recently 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.

Core Competencies
Ted’s firm, Mechanica’s work spans research and positioning, naming, brand identity and governing brand ideas through to ongoing execution of everything from print, online and TV advertising to social media programs, online video content, events, site design and product development. Mechanica creative hallway video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvvoleeabf8

When it comes to core competencies, Mechanica strives to be a world-class strategic organization, placing special emphasis on innovative data collection The Panoramic Brand Experience Audit, collaborative interpretation of implications and brand strategies that are actionable across all touch-points.

Another area of expertise is a highly expansive creative approach designed to release brand possibilities by engaging consumers through their beliefs, values, needs and feelings. Mechanica’s innovative creative development model — an “endless creative hallway” — provides a tremendous amount of flexibility in assembling the right team(s) for the task, whether the most pressing objective is creativity, breadth of output, consumer relevancy, timeliness, cost effectiveness or “all of the above.”

Finally, Mechanica’s creative development model enables working in a highly collaborative fashion with a wide range of partners. Freed from the limitations of internal silos of execution, our unique model allows us to collaborate in a much more effective manner. This enables us to effectively and efficiently deliver our clients a wide range of breakthrough solutions.

Practice Models
Insight Driven Collaboration Session
Governing Brand Ideas
Contact Strategy
Ongoing Partnership and Program Execution

ARTICLES BY TED NELSON