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.”
Apple and Google Face UK Investigation Into Mobile Browser Dominance
Apple and Google aren't giving consumers a genuine choice of mobile web browsers, a British watchdog said Friday in a report that recommends they face an investigation under new U.K. digital rules taking effect next year.
The Competition and Markets Authority took aim at Apple, saying the iPhone maker's tactics hold back innovation by stopping rivals from giving users new features like faster webpage loading. Apple does this by restricting progressive web apps, which don't need to be downloaded from an app store and aren't subject to app store commissions, the report said.
"This technology is not able to fully take off on iOS devices," the watchdog said in a provisional report on its investigation into mobile browsers that it opened after an initial study concluded that Apple and Google effectively have a chokehold on "mobile ecosystems."
The CMA's report also found that Apple and Google manipulate the choices given to mobile phone users to make their own browsers "the clearest or easiest option."
And it said that the a revenue-sharing deal between the two U.S. Big Tech companies "significantly reduces their financial incentives" to compete in mobile browsers on Apple's iOS operating system for iPhones.
Both companies said they will "engage constructively" with the CMA.
Apple said it disagreed with the findings and said it was concerned that the recommendations would undermine user privacy and security.
Google said the openness of its Android mobile operating system "has helped to expand choice, reduce prices and democratize access to smartphones and apps" and that it's "committed to open platforms that empower consumers."
It's the latest move by regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to crack down on the... Read More