Born: London, England
Worked in: London, Sydney and New York
Alex Hall is a champion of Personal Media and one of the four original founders of TigerSpike, the young specialist agency that “builds closer relationships through technology” via their offices in Australia, the UK and the US. Alex considers himself an expert in consumer behavior and its links with technology. A true internationalist, he has 15 years of experience working across European, Asian and North American markets, and has been instrumental in driving the agency’s impressive global expansion over the past 6 years.
TigerSpike’s personal media technology solutions, which enable organizations to form closer relationships with their content users, have led to the agency’s recognition by the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 during each of the last four years.
Alex started his career on the client side in both retail and FMCG/Consumer Products before joining the digital revolution. His consumer marketing and category management with Sainsbury’s Supermarkets (UK) and Nestle Australia instilled a strong focus on the customer. This has helped provide critical insight when recommending and developing digital initiatives for TigerSpike’s extraordinary array of blue chip marketers across all industry sectors and throughout all markets. Clients include: The Economist, PWC, Vodafone, Pepsi, Diageo, Time Out, Telstra, and World Wildlife Fund.
So what’s Personal Media? Alex Hall defines Personal Media as the growing range of personal devices from mobile phones to tablets, eBook readers, and portable and home gaming consoles. Through a mix of messaging, mobile sites and applications, TigerSpike helps marketers communicate personally with consumers, while the content delivery on each of the devices differs dramatically. Personal Media technology can be used to improve productivity, increase sales, enhance brand identity, improve consumer experiences, deliver location and contextually relevant information, deepen engagement and reduce costs for both consumer and employee audiences.
Certainly, tablet and phone apps are revolutionizing marketing. However, the first wave of mobile apps was consumer-focused. Now, the second wave is becoming enterprise-driven through initiatives from big corporations to optimize the utility of these devices. As a result, TigerSpike recently secured equity financing from Aegis Group Plc, so they can accelerate growth through new markets and products while keeping at the forefront of the new opportunities in personal media.
Dictionary definitions aside, how would you characterize innovation in the work you do? Innovation is about inspiration, education, and context. If we can free the minds of our customers, show them what's possible and useful when they're ready to receive it, then we have succeeded. The world of Personal Media is so new that every progressive device breeds a subtle change in a user's everyday behavior. Our job is to work out what content users will want on these devices in the future and how it could be experienced more intuitively.
Any other interesting aspects to your international background? I now have Australian/ British dual citizenship and am trying to work out how many passports it's possible to hold at any one time, without ever really doing the legwork to investigate this.
If that isn't an interesting Internationalist fact, I suppose you could say that my Sydney Olympic experience was pretty international, running a flag raising team and hoisting gold medal flags in Basketball, Tennis, Cycling, Beach Volleyball and Shooting events for any number of countries including Britain, Australia and the US. There's nothing like raising a flag at the Olympics and hearing your national anthem played.........unless perhaps if you had actually won the medal and put in the thousands of hours of hard work, sweat and tears to get there.