McCann NY has added Lynn Teo to serve as chief experience officer, a new role at the ad shop. Her experience on the agency side over the years includes being head of user experience at AKQA and earlier as a key staffer at SapientNitro.
Teo will build and lead McCann NY’s first experience design department, which will focus primarily on shaping products, services, systems, and communications that create positive, rewarding, and integrated customer experiences. She will oversee McCann’s client portfolio to ensure that an understanding of human needs and interactions sits at the core of all brand innovations. Her thought leadership and expertise in multi-platform interactive design will complement McCann’s integrated marketing communications and generate new perspectives in how brands engage with consumers.
Teo will be responsible for developing and communicating McCann’s point of view on the current and future state of experience design. She will report to Hank Summy, president of McCann Erickson North America.
“Lynn will work across a wide array of disciplines and teams, providing hands-on digital insights and managing change across the highest levels of the organization,” said Summy. “The consumer’s journey has become increasingly complex and multi-faceted. Lynn will ensure that each of our brands is meeting their customers’ expectations and needs, and delivering integrated value-add at all touch points.”
Teo has 15 years of product design and interactive agency experience, including multiple years leading cross-disciplinary global teams. In the past year, Teo advised startup companies in New York City on product development and digital marketing strategies. She was also an external graduate thesis advisor for an MFA design program in Detroit. Most recently, she became a founding member of the first US-incorporated chapter of the Service Design Network (SDN), based in NYC. Service design is a rapidly growing sister discipline of experience design that represents the next frontier of brand innovation.
Previously, Teo served as creative director and head of user experience at AKQA, New York. She held dual roles at SapientNitro, directing teams in New York and London. Earlier in her career, she held user experience design posts on the client side and the consulting side, including five years as senior usability specialist and user interface designer at Bell Communications Research.
Teo said her McCann team “will be tapped into the consumers’ motivations, context, influences, and emotions at all points of their brand interactions. Their insights will drive experience design on all platforms–in-store, retail, B2B, web, smartphone, tablet, touch, and voice- or motion-activated experiences. Human empathy, innovation, design, and a desire to bring lasting positive impact to consumers’ lives are the foundation of my passion for experience design. McCann is pushing on every front to redefine modern marketing.”
Stage and Film Actor Tony Roberts Dies At 85
Tony Roberts, a versatile, Tony Award-nominated theater performer at home in both plays and musicals and who appeared in several Woody Allen movies โ often as Allen's best friend โ has died. He was 85.
Roberts' death was announced to The New York Times by his daughter, Nicole Burley.
Roberts had a genial stage personality perfect for musical comedy and he originated roles in such diverse Broadway musicals as "How Now, Dow Jones" (1967); "Sugar" (1972), an adaptation of the movie "Some Like It Hot," and "Victor/Victoria" (1995), in which he co-starred with Julie Andrews when she returned to Broadway in the stage version of her popular film. He also was in the campy, roller-disco "Xanadu" in 2007 and "The Royal Family" in 2009.
"I've never been particularly lucky at card games. I've never hit a jackpot. But I have been extremely lucky in life," he write in his memoir, "Do You Know Me?" "Unlike many of my pals, who didn't know what they wanted to become when they grew up, I knew I wanted to be an actor before I got to high school."
Roberts also appeared on Broadway in the 1966 Woody Allen comedy "Don't Drink the Water," repeating his role in the film version, and in Allen's "Play It Again, Sam" (1969), for which he also made the movie.
Other Allen films in which Roberts appeared were "Annie Hall" (1977), "Stardust Memories" (1980), "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" (1982), "Hannah and Her Sisters" (1986) and "Radio Days" (1987).
"Roberts' confident onscreen presence โ not to mention his tall frame, broad shoulders and brown curly mane โ was the perfect foil for Allen's various neurotic characters, making them more funny and enjoyable to watch," The Jewish Daily Forward wrote in 2016.
In Eric Lax's book "Woody... Read More