Showing posts with label darren-huston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label darren-huston. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

BlackPines Capital Partners, An Investment Firm: Darren Huston

Darren Huston is the founder and CEO of BlackPines Capital Partners which is a private investment firm.

The mission of BlackPines Capital Partners is to help both owners and leaders of private and public companies improve their investment results. 

Darren Huston BlackPines achieves this by deep and committed engagement in a select number of large-scale, high-profile, growth-oriented opportunities.


BlackPines Current Engagements Include:

  • Executive Chairman at Allegro, Poland's largest eCommerce site (www.allegro.pl) 
  • Poznan and Warsaw, Poland.
  • Chairman at Magento, one of the world's largest and most flexible eCommerce platforms (www.magento.com)
  • Campbell, California, USA

 

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Globe-trotting CEO on Future of Travel : DARREN HUSTON

Darren Huston says that ten years from now, no paper work will be involved in the travel. “You’ll have no passport, no credit cards, no confirmation,” predicts the Amsterdam-based Canadian.

"You just have to have your phone in your pocket, and if you lose it, everything will be in the cloud." Unless someone invites teleportation, however, we'll still have to fly – something Darren Huston doesn't really do.

But for now, this is the only way he can access all the local experiences he craves. "I like the odd taste and taste. I've eaten ants in Nairobi, frogs in Vietnam and a lot of weird things in China - I really enjoy it during travel. "

Black book: Europe
Comfort food: “In Amsterdam, if I feel homesick, I go to the restaurant Red. They serve only 3 things: steak, Canadian lobster and wine.”

Local fave: “Outside of Amsterdam is a little city called Delft, which is where Vermeer did his paintings. Everything still looks like it did in the 1600s.” 

Greek treat: “One place I just discovered and should have already known about is the Greek islands. Mario Restaurant in Naousa is super authentic and has a wonderful evening vibe. It’s Greek food and the Greek islands at their best.” 


Weekend getaway: "I like spontaneous travel. I used to be the kind of person with a kind of Let's Plan two months ago, but now I like to plan a week in advance. There are plenty of options within two hours of Amsterdam. At the end of a week, I told my family: ‘Why don’t we just go to Milan? I think the Expo’s on.’ 

We booked on a Thursday and ended up in Milan for two days. You have to be careful with flights, but in the world of hotels, prices sometimes go down at the last minute and you can get great deals if you’re not in high season.” 

Best base camp: “I love finding independent properties that have really high ratings and ones that are a little more local and attuned to the culture of the city they’re in. I recently stayed at Hotel Cubo in Ljubljana, Slovenia – its right in the centre of town, and it was amazing. 

It’s the number one rated [bookingdotcom] hotel in Ljubljana for good reason. Pre-technology, you would never have found places like this. You’d ask your travel agent, and they would have no idea. Technology now allows us to take a lot of good, calculated risks.”

Must-have tech:
“I like to read good books and novels when I travel – almost always on a device. I have the newest iPad, but I wish they would take another crack at it and make it even lighter. It can still make my arms a little tired.

Darren Huston "strange brew" travel habit
“As a Canadian, I love great beers. I especially like fruity-tasting beers like cherry, blueberry and blackberry. I don’t consider myself an expert; I just love exploring the dimensions of what’s out there.” Here are three of his global favourites:

Bavikhove, Belgium: De Brabandere’s Petrus Aged Red 

South Burlington, Vt.: Magic Hat Brewing Company’s Not Quite Pale Ale Fruit Beer 

Stamford, U.K.: Samuel Smith’s Organic Strawberry Fruit Beer

Thursday, February 6, 2020

Coronavirus outbreak highlights need for travel insurance


The Public Health Agency of Canada — along with other agencies around the world — has issued a notice to avoid all non-vital journey to China, with another notice to avoid all travel to Hubei Province, the epicenter of the outbreak.

According to the insurance provider Ontario Blue Cross, travel insurance coverage that includes trip cancellation or trip interruption will reimburse policyholders for their expenses as long as it was purchased before the Canadian authorities issued an advisory to “avoid all travel” or “avoid all non-essential travel.”

John Shmuel, managing editor at Lowestrates.ca, said that whether or not insurance will cover disease outbreak is less about the corona virus itself being covered, as much as it is the conditions surrounding when a person is traveling — in this situation, flying to a country for which the Government of Canada has issued a travel advisory, specifically China.


Tuesday, February 4, 2020

IAA WORLD CONGRESS SPEAKER - Darren Huston

The world is emerging from the most difficult business conditions experienced in decades. The global ad industry is also emerging, but it’s completely changing. And it’s never going to be the same! 

darren-huston


That’s why the International Advertising Association has assembled some of the best minds in the world to discuss the changes and consequences taking place. 

The Main Speakers of the IAA World Congress are:

MICHAEL MENDENHALL

Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, HP

Michael Mendenhall is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at HP, where he directs all aspects of the company’s corporate marketing operations globally. The organization oversees brand strategy, internal and external communications, digital strategy, global citizenship, integrated design, customer intelligence, services and operations, and hp.com.

DARREN HUSTON

Corporate Vice President, Consumer and Online Business, Microsoft

Darren Huston is the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Consumer & Online (C&O) organization. C&O is responsible for Microsoft’s global display and search advertising sales and marketing across Microsoft’s consumer products including Windows, Windows phone, MSN, Windows Live, and Bing. C&O is represented by over 3,000 professionals in more than 40 countries around the world.

MARC PRITCHARD

Global Brand Building Officer
Global Marketing Officer, Procter & Gamble

Marc Pritchard is responsible for the brand building disciplines of the world’s largest advertiser, Procter & Gamble (P&G). In his role as Global Brand Building Officer, Marc has responsibility for the areas of Brand External Relations, CMK (Consumer & Market Knowledge), Design, and Marketing.

NIKESH ARORA

President, Global Sales Operations and Business Development, Google

Nikesh oversees all revenue and customer operations, as well as marketing and partnerships. Since joining Google in 2004, he has held several positions with the company. Most recently, he led Google’s global direct sales operations.


Friday, January 31, 2020

New Exciting Innovations Show Off By Microsoft



Microsoft Darren Huston shows off the new exciting innovations involved in the multi-screen launch of Chevrolet's new Volt.

Darren Huston

When I (Darren Huston) spoke at the forays a few months ago, I talked about this analogy of a forest fire. Now a forest fire can be very scary because it burns through the brush it pushes you to the edge. It flames are around you, they look at your heels but the way to think about a forest fire like any transformation is what happens on the other side.
The transformation that we're skiing is a land that we're seeing as a landscape that won't be made up of banner ads and blue links but rather rich immersive and engaging content.
It's also a landscape made up of one & zeros and bits & bytes and the beauty of that is, it allows advertising to connect to the business and the value systems that happen within your company.
So whether it's the point of sale at the local Safeway and linking that all the way up to the advertisement or its buying a new car like will demonstrate and linking that perception experience down to point of purchase that's the beauty of digital and finally that forest fire is creating a landscape that reflects a new medium.

darren huston


It's a medium that has expanded options, new interaction points, infinite perspective and yes even beauty as you've seen a lot of devices that have been released recently the beauty of the Internet and the beauty of digital is really coming to four. So what I want to shift to now is one of the key trends is going on in digital and we call that multi-screen advertising.
Multi-screen is a reflection of the fact that there are so many different devices in consumers lifestyles each of which present marketing opportunities.
We did a study of 1,200 consumers this past spring around the topic of multi-screen advertising. 69% of them actually embraced the concept of multi-screen advertised and really believed that it would give them better recall of ads and would make content just more useful for them.
Another really interesting fact from this study is that if you take TV advertising and combine it with online video advertising it improves consumer recall by over 53%. But if you look back 9 months ago, online video you couldn't sell out, you couldn't sell the inventory associative video.
If you look today we are sold out across all of our video offerings almost everywhere in the world because of this simple fact that video works great when it's seen on both the TV and online and finally and this is almost just shocking media consumption continues to increase despite the dramatic amount of media.
We already consume media consumption is up in the United States, I mean how is that possible partly it's because people are time shifting their media consumption you know using things like TiVo and other products, their place shifting their media consumption because they're taking on the go and also there's a lot of simultaneous consumption.
This is a huge trend where people are watching TV with their phone and their PC all at once which is giving multiples on the way that people consume media and it's a super important trend for marketers in the audience to know that's particularly young people rarely watch television without another screen readily available around them.
So with this, we've also shown that across this multiple screen there's a great opportunity for marketers to tell a relevant and connected story.
We also are going to prove and show to you through an example of how those connected stories then add value to the marketed by increasing the impact of the message.

Bettina Sherick


darren-huston


From a digital perspective one thing we do is that we need okay or go home. I think Microsoft has an interesting proposition to the consumer because there's so many ways that they touch them. There's obviously the portal site with which internationally is very important but then they also have the Xbox platform and Xbox Live and they have ways for us to reach that consumer that may not necessarily be watching television and lastly there's of course the windows media mobile platform which is something that we experimented with in five countries for this release.

Jon Landau, Avatar Producer


darren huston


Most people give their first information about a movie online whether that's watching a trailer, whether that's reading some news about it and I think we as an industry have to embrace the online experience and roll it into all of our different marketing opportunities.
Now no longer really is it about what the critic’s right. It's what our people Twitter what do people you know say in their blogs and if you don't embrace them they're not gonna brace your fill.

Bettina Sherick

One of the things that this phone has done for us is now we can go to Microsoft and say, hey have you thought about this so it really is now a working partnership.

Jon Landau

Think out of the box, be original, I think if avatar advertisers & marketers think this way that they will be successful whatever campaigns they run.

Darren Huston

So avatar is a really inspiring example of a movie that was digital in making and completely digital in marketing. We also did some research after the launch of the avatar movie looking at this concept of multi-screen consumers and what kind of impact multi-screen marketing had on them.

darren huston


These results were absolutely incredible; I think a lot of us have been involved in traditional marketing for many years. Now that if you run a TV ad and support it with bill boards or radio or a newspaper you can get multiples on your investment.
Well the same thing happens in the digital space, the research showed that multi-screen consumers were three times as likely to go see avatar versus those that have only seen the advertising on one screen and nearly half of all consumers who saw all three ads went to see avatar in the theater helping to make it a truly global success. So clearly multi-screen advertising drives powerful value to brands and marketers.

A gallery's perspective on the Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale allows the best artists to leave their mark. Lorenzo Fiaschi , founder of the Galleria Continua, says that "artists...