Brand impact awards judges

The Panel of Judges. The study results were reviewed by two distinguished panels of judges – a panel reviewed B2C brands, while the other evaluated B2B brands. The judges provided insight into the story behind the numbers, commenting on the winning brand’s ability to create an emotional connection with its customers, and identifying the brand to watch in each category.

Since joining Creative Strategies in 2000 Ben has researched the global transition from analog to digital in consumer technologies and entertainment media. He has focused on projects and strategies in the emerging markets of the digital home ecosystem and the digital lifestyle, trying to understand how and why consumers will use new digital technologies in their everyday lives. His expertise is in understanding the Gen X and Millenial consumers and their present and future demands for technology. His research and strategic work spans digital entertainment and media, brand marketing and awareness, consumer products and corporate social responsibility. Ben manages Creative Strategies digital electronics and digital home research center where the impacts of many digital home and digital lifestyle technologies are studied. His current and past clients have included Sony, HP, Dell, Toshiba, Philips, Palm, and Microsoft to name a few.

Ben started his career in technology in High School by creating a company that developed web based solutions for local business and consulted with them on how to use the Internet affectively as a sales and marketing tool. After college he then went on to work at Cypress Semiconductor implementing web based solutions to streamline inter-department communication and efficiency. After leaving Cypress he joined Valley Credit Union as their webmaster tasked with developing and implementing their online banking strategy. After Valley CU he joined a startup called WebAgencies and was the director of Internet Operations for 13 Month's before joining Creative Strategies.
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Rob is President and Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group, a forward looking emerging technology advisory firm. Recognized as one of the best general Inquiry Analysts in the world, Rob specializes in providing rapid perspectives and suggested tactics and strategies to a large number of clients dealing with rapidly changing global events. Rob lives emerging technology and has a passion for personal technology and market strategy.

In addition Rob writes for TechNewsWorld, DarkReading, Digital Trends, Tom's Hardware Guide, ITBusiness Edge and Datamation. Rob appears regularly on WSJ Radio, CNBC, NPR, and Bloomberg Radio/TV.

Before founding the Enderle Group Rob was the Senior Research Fellow for Forrester Research and the Giga Information Group. While there he ran the eCommerce, Security, and Mobile research practices.

Before Giga, Rob was with Dataquest covering client/server software where he became one of the most widely publicized technology analysts in the world. Before Dataquest Rob worked for IBM as was in IBM's executive resource program. As part of that program he managed projects and people in Finance, Internal Audit, Competitive Analysis, Marketing, Security, and Planning. Prior to IBM he was a Marketing Director and sat on the board of the Southern California Marketing Director’s Association.

Rob holds an AA in Merchandising, a BS in Business, and an MBA.

Rob sits on the advisory councils for Lenovo, Toshiba, AMD, HP, Dell, Philips, Trusted Computing Group, and the Lifeboat Foundation.

Rob's hobbies include Sporting Clays, PC Modding, Science Fiction, Home Automation, and Computer Gaming.
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Charles King, Pund-IT's president and principal analyst, focuses on business technology evolution and interpreting the effects these changes will have on vendors, their customers, and the greater IT marketplace. Charles was a freelance writer in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, working on technical, business, and strategy projects for Cisco Systems, Adobe Systems, SGI, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He became an IT industry analyst in 1998.

Since founding Pund-IT in December 2004, Charles’ has produced regular commentaries in his newsletter, the Pund-IT Weekly Review, as well as numerous client projects. Charles has been quoted in media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, USAToday, Investor’s Business Daily, Forbes, and the Financial Times, and on IT industry news sites such as CNET, InfoWorld, Internet News, eWeek, TechTarget, and eChannelLine.
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Jason Pressman focuses on investment opportunities in the technology-enabled services and software sectors for Shasta Ventures. Prior to joining Shasta Ventures, he was the fourth employee at Walmart.com, a venture-backed start-up where he was vice president of strategy, business development and operations. In that role, Jason helped build the business into one of the leading commerce sites on the web.

Prior to Walmart.com, Jason served as an associate at Selby Venture Partners where he focused on services and software investments. Previously, he was an analyst and associate at Alex. Brown in investment banking where he advised venture-backed start-ups on financings and merger and acquisitions.

Education: M.B.A., Stanford Graduate School of Business B.S., Finance, University of Maryland
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Marty Neumeier is president of Neutron, a design think tank in San Francisco. The firm's stated mission is to incite business revolution by unleashing the power of creative process.

Neutron mixes elements of management consulting, brand strategy, and communication design to provide the "glue" that holds brand teams together. This new role is made possible—and increasingly necessary—by the emergence of brand as an organizing principle in business. As brand-building becomes more distributed throughout a company, it takes more coordination between teams to build a coherent brand.

Neumeier began his career as a brand designer, and later added writing and business strategy to his skills, working variously as a communications director, magazine publisher, and brand consultant. By the mid-1990s he had developed hundreds of brand identities and architectures for companies such as Apple, Adobe, Netscape, Kodak, and Hewlett-Packard. In 1996 he launched CRITIQUE, the magazine of design thinking, which quickly became the leading journal for improving design effectiveness through analysis and coaching. In editing CRITIQUE, Neumeier joined the growing conversation about bridging the gap between business strategy and customer experience, which led directly to the formation of Neutron and the ideas in his bestselling "whiteboard overview" books, THE BRAND GAP and ZAG. He currently serves as president of AIGA Center for Brand, for which he also edited THE DICTIONARY OF BRAND.

Neumeier now divides his professional life among three activities—consulting with corporate leaders, writing books on brand, innovation, and design, and developing workshops and brand programs for marketing professionals and Fortune 500 companies.
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Turn-around strategist, brand architect, Internet pioneer. These are just some of the terms used to describe Bill Ryan. Over the past 20 years, he has played a major role in shaping many of the industry's major brands, such as IBM, Apple, Yahoo!, Documentum, Interwoven, Cognos, Informatica.

Large and small companies alike look to Ryan to help re-craft their company's story, create new positioning strategies and transform their market presence. When Steve Jobs re-took Apple's helm, he called on Ryan and his agency to manage Apple's turnaround and to launch the iMac. When two Internet entrepreneurs at Stanford with a little search server call Yahoo.edu wanted to burst onto the national scene, they turned to Ryan and his team.

Having established a strong presence in the enterprise computing market of the early 90's, Ryan's public relations agency, Niehaus Ryan Wong (NRW), was among the first to start using online forums and the Internet to extend their clients' "field of influence" beyond traditional journalists and analysts. With their eyes keenly on the Net as it transitioned from a government and academic communications tool to a publishing and commerce platform, Ryan developed the first PR practice specializing in Internet communications, commerce and technologies -- promoting early net icons such as Yahoo!, Global Network Navigator (GNN), Internet-In-A-Box, Spyglass, Virtual Vineyards and Spry.

Today, Ryan is among a handful of marketing and business strategy professionals in the country with a deep understanding of both the technologies, applications and services driving Global 2000 IT and the emerging technologies shaping consumer experiences in areas such as wireless, audio/video streaming and digital entertainment.

Recently founding Portola Strategies, Ryan continues to maintain his proactive, hands-on work style – keeping him in daily contact with clients and their markets. A true industry insider, much of his time is spent keeping clients' executive teams abreast of market trends, developing corporate brand strategies and facilitating strategic relationship building. Additionally, he sits on the Boards of several companies and serves as strategic consultant to both startups and mainstream corporations.

In his free time, Ryan collects contemporary art with little concern for available wall space, loves to cook, studies yoga and the martial arts, listens to jazz and electronica, enjoys anything Japanese and regrets not being able to squeeze more movies into Web time.
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Roy A. Young is dedicated to the mission of strengthening the business impact of marketing in organizations worldwide. As President of MarketingProfs, a cutting-edge learning organization with over 300,000 members – from Fortune 500 organizations to entrepreneurial start-up firms – he works to make marketers more influential and powerful. His pioneering book, Marketing Champions: Practical Strategies for Improving Marketing’s Power, Influence, and Business Impact (John Wiley & Sons, 2006) has received praise from leading marketers, including Philip Kotler, Seth Godin and Jack Trout, and leadership guru Warren Bennis. His has worked with marketing executives from leading companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Visa, GE and Johnson & Johnson resulting in improved stature and value of marketing. Young gives presentations regularly through all leading marketing organizations such as the AMA, BMA, DMA, IIR and MENG and at universities such as ZBIS at Emory University, USC, UCLA and the Claremont Graduate School of Business. He has held high-level marketing and consulting positions at companies such as Time, Inc. and Yankelovich & Partners. Young earned an MBA in marketing from Stern School of New York University, and lectures on marketing at UCLA and USC in Southern California.
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Brand Impact Awards Presenter

With the gift of gab and a passion for people, it's no wonder Sandy Stec has taken the entertainment world by storm. Currently an on-air personality for Mix 106.5 Today's Best Mix (San Jose), Sandy hosts her own midday radio show from 10am-3pm on weekdays; music AND humor intensive. Though she'd like to consider herself a professional (she's been in radio over 7 years) she still manages to get the occasional case of hiccups while on-air; which is very embarrassing... and very entertaining.

But when the on-air mic is "off," the comedy mic is ON. From dialect-driven characters, sarcastic life stories and cynically optimistic views on just about everything, Sandy’s a funny force to be reckoned with. Her stand-up has allowed her to travel from coast-to-coast, performing with comedy greats like Dana Carvey, Gilbert Gottfried, Harland Williams, Mark Curry, Brett Butler, and many others. She’s currently a "Grace White Presents Women Who Kick Comedy Butt" regular; and was proud to be a part of the "5 Funny Females" National tour of 2006. She was also voted one of "California’s Funniest Females" of 2006, and has recently begun writing a monthly column for the Wave Magazine, and hosting "Best of San Francisco" segments for Ten Toe TV.

With dreams of becoming a late night talk show host, Sandy is happy to already have several forms of hosting under her belt, including: sporting events at the HP Pavilion for crowds of 15,000; summer concerts for San Jose's "Music in the Park", various corporate events and charity fundraisers, and on-air interviews with music artists. She is also a voice-over actress with professional training from Voice Trax of Sausalito.

When she's not on-camera or behind a mic; she's probably trying to find out more ways to be on-camera or behind a mic. And....eating cake.

To contact Sandy, log on to: www.sandystec.com
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