Mark Rowntree
Mark has two sides — a media technologist, and brand image consultant. With his focus on innovative design, he has developed and produced many award-winning solutions in the US and Europe. He stays on the leading edge of communications by challenging what’s possible, and by incubating new media technologies, including Internet marketing and social media marketing.
Mark grew up in Europe, then returned to the USA to study design and marketing at Boston University. He began his career as an advertising agency art director, then opened his own shop in 1985 to service the worldwide Sheraton and Braun accounts, and many Fortune 500 companies in hi-tech and real estate. By 1995 the company was producing and directing short films and TV commercials — serving broadcast clients like HBO, CNN, Bravo, and Discovery with on-air branding and promotions. In 1999, he renamed the company Fiction — developing creative new media for communications. In 2000, he invented a persistent reality game called PlayFiction, and in 2003 was the co-inventor of MovieGames, a patent-pending mobile phone-controlled interactive cinema game technology. Today, he focuses on developing Web 2.0 strategies in wireless, on-line, TV and film. Recent projects include a brand-image DVD and online videos for UPS, social media and game marketing for Merck, an online-TV channel for Peruvian-American immigrants, developing an interactive news platform, and the Social-smart social media marketing dashboard.
Jasper Blake
Jasper is a new addition to the Social-smart team. His speciality is Business Development. Jasper is British, now living in Arizona with his U.S. born wife Naomi who he met online (the internet is a wonderful thing!). Prior to coming to the USA, Jasper had been involved in the worlds of music, film production, and web design before putting his archaeology degree to good use in helping to build a living history educational tourism project which received wide publicity, including spots on BBC’s Countryfile and Channel 4’s Time Team. Additionally, he was a member of the Forest of Dean Tourism Association, spokesman for Tourism on the Coleford Partnership Committee, Director of Archaeology for Dean Archaeological Group, served on the Committee for Archaeology in Gloucestershire, taught Landscape Archaeology at Forest of Dean College, & was Branch Leader of the Young Archaeologists Club.
Once in the U.S. he worked briefly as a field archaeologist for a Phoenix-based company until the housing crash killed off all development. He then sort of fell into social media, first working for a blogging company and later setting up on his own with a colleague to form Dude Blog Your Business. It was there he discovered Social-smart, signed up for one of the online demos, and slowly became more involved through ongoing discussions with Mark. The rest is history-in-the-making. Also a bit of an art collector, in his spare time he sources fair trade art for the Fair Trade Cafe in downtown Phoenix.
