Alastair Watson

Alastair is a real pleasure to work together with. He has a versatility and positivity that enhances every interaction from the very first phone call, through managing the team in the field to closing off the final reports on the job. The phrase “can-do attitude” is over-used in this industry but in Alastair – it encompasses everything he does. A worthy Masher of the Month”

The Mash Team – Oct 2010.

and here is the reaction from Alastair himself…

“Oh my God that’s amazing and a complete shock! Thanks so much that really means a lot and I have to say I love working for you guys, it makes a real difference beining involved in a company that is organised, values their staff and you’re a cracking bunch as well”

Great stuff! Look out for our October winner next month.

The Fan Zone outside the National Theatre on London’s South Bank featured a full-size basketball court that gave fans the opportunity to test their skills by shooting hoops alongside NBA legends and current players. MASH worked in partnership with The Promotions Factory to place a group of female sports fans amongst the fan zone, creating a buzz about the games ahead and the coverage held by ESPN. Six brand ambassadors were at The National Theatre on the 2nd and 3rd of October and ten brand ambassadors outside the O2 Arena on the 4th October, taking planes, trains and auto-mobiles to get there thanks to the warm welcomed tube strike!

All the sights and sounds of the NBA were on show, with skills clinics, a professional ‘dunk’ team, video games, NBA team mascots and performances by LA Lakers cheerleaders The Laker Girls alongside interactive sponsor experiences and attractions, of which our girls were a huge part and really helped to get the crowds excited.

The Larry O’Brien NBA Championship Trophy was also on show, with which fans could have their pictures taken on a green screen background and have themselves superimposed next to their favourite team.

Ignite will activate the Fan Zone at the Palais Omnisports de Bercy on the 6 October 2010 with the addition of a three point court and interactive activities.

A huge well done to the ESPN teams who worked hard to create a real buzz about the matches and promote the support and involvement of ESPN with NBA’s European tour matches. An eye-catching sight for all NBA fans, old and new.

Lauren Danecek hails from Sydney, Australia and after working on Mash Australia’s first job on the Sony Ericcson World Cup Campaign on Darling Harbour – was recommended to Mash UK by our MD Down Under – Neil Burton – after she received glowing feedback!

Lauren already had grand plans to hit the UK’s glorious shores on her travels and set up base for a while – so why not keep on Mashing while she did? And Mash have been so much better for it…..Lauren having successfully completed 8 activities with glowing feedback since joining us at the end of July.

Congratulations Lauren – great to have you on board. £100 Arcadia Vouchers on their way to you!

For all UK-based Mashers planning to travel to Australia then don’t forget to let us know as we will happily recommend you to meet our Australia Office to keep the Mash Magic flowing.

Look out for the Mash girls at the upcoming Russian Standard Vodka Originals Film Festival, in collaboration with Empire Magazine – which sees truly classic films playing in luxuriously decadent cinemas right across the country – kicking off with a VIP launch night in London on 31st August at the Everyman Cinema in Belsize Park.

Monica has completed hundreds of projects for us and never lets us down and always prepares really diligently and thoroughly for every campaign. She is currently knee-deep in her dissertation for her Masters in Marketing – and is focusing her project on Experiential Marketing.

Mashing through the years has clearly inspired her to take her experience to the next level and is hoping to land a graduate role with a top agency soon…

In the meantime, she’s still holding out for that elusive “Salsa Dance” campaign…

Well done Monica from all at Mash Towers.

First up to walk the Mashing walk of fame….

Rachel Walker joined Mash back in October 2007 and has gone on to deliver campaign after campaign with consummate professionalism and a wonderful smile on the face. Rachel always responds brilliantly to the huge variety of briefs thrown at her and has often accepted ‘last minute changes’ with complete flexibility and positivity.

Rachel is also one of our main ‘npower girls’ and has contributed to the ‘best team yet’ and we’re all looking forward to the remaining 4 Tests from the end of July.

It’s great to have you Mashing Rachel – Well done!

They say that in good times businesses get richer and in bad times they get better. Having forsaken the riches, the pay off has been huge leaps in quality as we finally find that much sought after 20% excess time that can be leveraged to work ‘on the business’ rather than in it. As a result, and in a strange twist of fate, the huge flux that we’ve all experienced over the last 6-12 months has in effect improved our business and set us up to deliver more innovative staffing solutions, a leaner and fitter business and ultimately, a stronger partnership offering to our clients.

Our industry, tactical staffing, is suffering just as our clients suffer, budgets continue to be slashed and burned, and the pipeline is no longer a reliable indicator of revenue for the coming months. We have reached a stage in the cycle where some suppliers within the space are starting to resort to survival pricing, costing activity at any price to win the business, and as a result damaging the value perception with clients and putting further pressure on the earning capacity of the field staff who continue to experience frozen pay rates.

The staffing agencies who are resorting to such drastic price cutting have clearly exhausted their quality driven proposal and as a result, clients should be wary of these agencies delivering the ‘cheapest service’ as opposed to the ‘best value’.

The quality providers within the industry appear to be faring relatively well, considering, and the agencies who look to innovate and continue to strive to deliver additional value rather than pure cost cutting, will manage through this recession whilst retaining their quality proposition. For Mash, our driver for this year is ‘excellence’, capitalising on the 20% time to further enhance our service offering, leverage the goodwill that we have built with our field staff community and further strengthen our partnerships. As the economy recovers and our partners start to grow once again, we’ll prosper in turn, delivering a greater partnership offering and operating in a space where only the strong will be left standing.

Leyton Ede, Client Services Director, Mash Marketing Ltd

http://isp.org.uk/awards.php?pid=28

By BRAD STONE of The New York Times

When Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, Calif., for a huge barbecue. Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user.

That staggering growth rate – doubling in size in just eight months – suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.

Yet Facebook executives say they aren’t planning to observe their latest milestone in any significant way. It is, perhaps, a poor time to celebrate. The company that has given users new ways to connect and speak truth to power now often finds itself as the target of that formidable grass-roots firepower – most recently over controversial changes it made to users’ home pages.

As Facebook expands, it’s also struggling to match the momentum of hot new start-ups like Twitter, the micro-blogging service, while managing the expectations of young, tech-savvy early adopters, attracting mainstream moms and dads, and justifying its hype-carbonated valuation.

By any measure, Facebook’s growth is a great accomplishment. The crew of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 24-year-old co-founder and chief executive, is signing up nearly a million new members a day, and now more than 70 percent of the service’s members live overseas, in countries like Italy, the Czech Republic and Indonesia. Facebook’s ranks in those countries swelled last year after the company offered its site in their languages.

All of this mojo puts Facebook on a par with other groundbreaking – and wildly popular – Internet services like free e-mail, Google, the online calling network Skype and e-commerce sites like eBay. But Facebook promises to change how we communicate even more fundamentally, in part by digitally mapping and linking peripatetic people across space and time, allowing them to publicly share myriad and often very personal elements of their lives.

Unlike search engines, which ably track prominent Internet presences, Facebook reconnects regular folks with old friends and strengthens their bonds with new pals – even if the glue is nothing more than embarrassing old pictures or memories of their second-grade teacher.

Facebook can also help rebuild families. Karen Haber, a mother of two living outside Tel Aviv, logs onto Facebook each night after she puts the children to bed. She searches for her family’s various surnames, looking for relatives from the once-vast Bachenheimer clan of northern Germany, which fractured during the Holocaust and then dispersed around the globe.

Among the three dozen or so connections she has made on Facebook over the last year are a fifth cousin who is a clinical social worker in Woodstock, N.Y.; a fourth cousin running an eyeglasses store in Zurich; and another fifth cousin, living in Hong Kong selling diamonds. Now she shares memories, photographs and updates with them.

“I was never into genealogy and now suddenly I have this tool that helps me find the descendants of people that my grandparents knew, people who share the same truth I do,” Ms. Haber says. “I’m using Facebook and trying to unite this family.”

Facebook has also become a vehicle for broad-based activism – like the people who organized on the site last year and mobilized 12 million people to march in protests around the globe against practices of the FARC rebels in Colombia.

Discussing Facebook’s connective tissue, Mr. Zuckerberg recalls the story of Claus Drachmann, a schoolteacher in northern Denmark who became a Facebook friend of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister. Mr. Drachmann subsequently invited Mr. Rasmussen to speak to his class of special-needs children; the prime minister obliged last fall.

Mr. Zuckerberg says the story illustrates Facebook’s power to cut through arbitrary social barriers. “This represents a generational shift in technology,” he says. “To me, what is interesting was that it was possible for a regular person to reach the prime minister and that that interaction happened.”

As Facebook has matured, so has Mr. Zuckerberg. He has recently traded his disheveled, unassuming image for an ever-present tie and making visits to media outfits like “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” And he says Facebook’s most important metrics are not its membership but the percentage of the wired world that uses the site and the amount of information – photographs, news articles and status updates – zipping across its servers.

Facebook’s mission, he says, is to be used by everyone in the world to share information seamlessly. “Two hundred million in a world of six billion is tiny,” he says. “It’s a cool milestone. It’s great that we reached that, especially in such a short amount of time. But there is so much more to do.”

AS Facebook stampedes along, it still has to get out of its own way to soothe the injured feelings of users like Liz Rabban.

Ms. Rabban, 40, a real estate agent and the mother of two from Livingston, N.J., joined the site in November 2007, quickly amassing 250 friends and spending hours on the site each day.

But these days, she spends less time on the site and posts caustic comments about Facebook’s new design, which turns a majority of every user’s home page into a long “stream” of recent, often trivial, Twitter-like updates from friends.

“The changes just feel very juvenile,” Ms. Rabban says. “It’s just not addressing the needs of my generation and my peers. In my circle, everyone is pretty devastated about it.”

Ms. Rabban is not alone. More than two and a half million dissenters have joined a group on Facebook’s own site called “Millions Against Facebook’s New Layout and Terms of Service.” Others are lambasting the changes in their own status updates, which are now, ironically, distributed much more visibly to all of their Facebook friends.

The changes, Facebook executives say, are intended to make the act of sharing – not just information about themselves but what people are doing now – easier, faster and more urgent. Chris Cox, 26, Facebook’s director of products and a confidant of Mr. Zuckerberg, envisions users announcing where they are going to lunch as they leave their computers so friends can see the updates and join them.

“That is the kind of thing that is not meaningful when it is announced 40 minutes later,” he says.

The simmering conflict over the design change speaks to the challenges of pleasing 200 million users, many of whom feel pride of ownership because they helped to build the site with free labor and very personal contributions.

“They have a strange problem,” says S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, of Facebook’s quandary. “This is a technology that has inherently generated community, and it has gotten to the point where members of that community feel not only vested but empowered to challenge the company.”

Those tensions boiled up previously, when Facebook announced the intrusive Beacon advertising system in 2007, and again when Facebook introduced new service terms earlier this year, which appeared to give the company broad commercial control over the content people uploaded to the site.

Facebook responded to protests over the second move by promising users a vote in how the site would be governed.

But while Facebook is willing to give users a voice, it doesn’t necessarily want to listen.

Users are widely opposed to terms that grant Facebook the right to license, copy and disseminate members’ content worldwide. But Facebook says it has to ignore those objections to protect itself against lawsuits from users who might blame the company if they later regret having shared some piece of information with their friends. (Other Web sites have similar stipulations.)

While Facebook addressed the feedback on its unpopular design changes last week – partly by saying it would give users more control over the stream of updates that appear on their pages – it also said members’ pages would soon become even busier and more dynamic, updating automatically instead of requiring users to refresh their browsers to see new posts.

That’s a change that may irk users like Ms. Rabban, who don’t like how busy their pages have become. Facebook executives counter that it will help users share more information, and that they will eventually come to appreciate it, just as they have with previous changes that were initially jarring.

“It’s not a democracy,” Mr. Cox says of his company’s relationship with users. “We are here to build an Internet medium for communicating and we think we have enough perspective to do that and be caretakers of that vision.”

PEOPLE, of course, sometimes like to keep secrets and maintain separate social realms – or at least a modicum of their privacy. But Facebook at almost 200 million members is a force that reinvents and tears at such boundaries. Teachers are yoked together with students, parents with their children, employers with their employees.

Uniting disparate groups on a single Internet service runs counter to 50 years of research by sociologists into what is known as “homophily” – the tendency of individuals to associate only with like-minded people of similar age and ethnicity.

Facebook’s huge growth is creating inevitable collisions as the whole notion of “friend” takes on a highly elastic meaning. When the Philadelphia Eagles allowed the star safety Brian Dawkins to leave for the Denver Broncos earlier this month, Dan Leone, a gate chief at Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles’ stadium, expressed his disappointment by referring to the situation with an obscenity on his Facebook status update.

Mr. Leone’s boss, who was his Facebook friend, forwarded the update to an Eagles guest services manager, who fired him. The team has since refused to reconsider the matter, despite Mr. Leone’s deep remorse and his star turn on countless radio talk shows across the country to discuss the situation.

“If you know your boss is online, or anyone close to your boss is online, don’t be making comments that can be detrimental to your employment,” Mr. Leone advises.

Facebook is trying to teach members to use privacy settings to manage their network so they can speak discreetly only to certain friends, like co-workers or family members, as opposed to other “friends” like bosses or professional colleagues. But most Facebook users haven’t taken advantage of the privacy settings; the company estimates that only 20 percent of its members use them.

Other problems are trickier, especially among true friends and family members. How, for example, can Facebook remain a place for teenagers to share what they did on Saturday night when it is also the place where their parents are swapping investment tips with old friends?

In the six weeks since Rich Hall, a 52-year-old theater manager in Mount Carroll, Ill., joined Facebook, he has reconnected with more than 400 friends and acquaintances, including former high school friends, his auto mechanic and former buddies from his days as a stock car driver.

In the course of his new half-hour-a-day Facebook habit, Mr. Hall also “friended” the 60 high school students he is directing in a school play, so he could coordinate rehearsal times. That led some of them to deny his request because, as he says they told him, their parents “found it creepy.” Along the way, Mr. Hall also found photographs of his 19-year-old son on the site, drinking beer at a Friday night bonfire.

“He denied it and said he wasn’t there,” Mr. Hall says. “I said, ‘Let’s go to this page together and look at these photos.’ Of course he did it. There are no secrets anymore.”

Dwindling secrets, and prying eyes, are at the heart of the Facebook conundrum. While offering an efficient and far-reaching way for people to bond, the site has also eroded sometimes natural barriers.

“People usually spend a lot of time trying to be separate – parents and children are a good example,” says Danah Boyd, a social scientist who has studied social networks and now works in the research department of Microsoft, which has invested in Facebook. “You are already seeing young people sitting there thinking, ‘Why am I hanging out with my mother who is reminiscing with her high school mates?’ You are seeing some reticence with young people that wasn’t there two years ago.”

For their part, Facebook executives say they are less interested in being cool than in being a useful place where anyone can go to share elements of their lives.

“The people who started the company weren’t cool. I’m not cool,” Mr. Cox says. “If you look at the people who work here, it’s much more nerdy and curious than cool.

“Cool only lasts for so long, but being useful is something that applies to everyone.”

MR. ZUCKERBERG hopes that being ubiquitous and useful translates to the bottom line.

Though Facebook is privately held and doesn’t publicly disclose its earnings, various press and analysts’ estimates of its 2008 revenues span from $250 million to $400 million. That range may not be enough to cover the company’s escalating expenses, and it hardly justifies some of the atmospheric valuations that have been placed on the start-up, including the $15 billion that Microsoft assigned to the company when it invested in it in 2007.

Facebook’s financial challenges aren’t unique. Popular free e-mail services like Hotmail from Microsoft and Gmail from Google have little in the way of profits to show for their vast audiences, aside from a few text ads that people rarely click on. Instant messaging networks like Microsoft Messenger and AIM from American Online are similarly popular but have never been hyperprofitable, for the simple reason that people do not want intrusive ads inserted into personal conversations.

Facebook’s approach is to invite advertisers to join in the conversation. New “engagement” ads ask users to become fans of products and companies – sometimes with the promise of discounts. If a person gives in, that commercial allegiance is then broadcast to all of the person’s friends on the site.

A new kind of engagement ad, now being tested, will invite people to vote – “what’s your favorite color M&M?” for example – and brands will pay every time a Facebook member participates.

“We are trying to provide the antidote for the consumer rebellion against interruptive advertising,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and Mr. Zuckerberg’s business consigliere.

Ms. Sandberg, who ran Google’s highly successful advertising initiatives before leaving the search giant to join Facebook, said her company’s revenue was growing despite a brutal downturn that is hurting other kinds of online advertising. She also puts one rumor to rest, saying the company is not considering charging members for any aspect of its service.

“We’re pretty pleased with the overall trajectory,” she says. “Our conversations with big advertisers have broadened in scope and we also have more people asking about how they can work with us.”

Facebook recently introduced advertising tools to let companies focus on users based on the language they use on the site and their geographic location. So, for example, an advertiser can now tailor a message to the Latino community in Los Angeles or French speakers in Montreal.

Despite the gloom permeating much of the advertising world, and the formidable challenges facing the site, some advertisers say they glimpse the future in Facebook’s brand of interactive advertising.

“Our clients all want to see if they can make this work,” says Al Cadena, the interactive account director at Threshold Interactive in Los Angeles, which represents companies like Nestlé, Honda and Sony. “Advertising used to be a one-way communication from advertiser to consumer, but now people want to have a dialogue. And Facebook is becoming the default way to do that, not only in the States but really for the whole world.”

Internet evangelists say that when a technology diffuses into society, as Facebook appears to be doing, it has achieved “critical mass.” The sheer presence of all their friends, family and colleagues on Facebook creates potent ties between users and the site – ties that are hard to break even when people want to break them.

Many who have tried to free themselves of their daily Facebook habit and leave the site, like Kerry Docherty, a student at Pepperdine University’s law school, speak of a powerful gravitational pull and an undercurrent of peer pressure that eventually brings them back.

“People gave me a hard time for leaving Facebook,” says Ms. Docherty, who quit at the end of 2007 but then rejoined six months later. “Everyone has a love-hate relationship with it. They wanted me to be wasting my time on it just like they were wasting their time on it.”

Maddie and Holly and the famous Sock Monkeys

My name is Maddie George.  I am 23.  I live in North London.  I like to spend my Saturdays exploring, laughing, and eating cake.  I like the colour purple, I like The Beatles.  I like cookery shows,  and harbour an unhealthy obsession with 24 / Jack Bauer.  I clean too much, I recycle and boss my boyfriend around more than he would like.  My spelling is rubbish.  I am normal.

On 22nd January 2009, less than 24 hours after finding a lump in my neck, I was diagnosed with Stage 2a Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a type of Cancer that affects the Lymph nodes (the glands in your neck, groin and armpits).

In a split second, my life was turned upside down, destined never to be the same again.  I am a positive person but the thought of having and battling cancer was a massive shock to the system and more than I thought I could handle.
What does this mean? How will this affect me? Will I see my next birthday? How bad is it? Why do I not look sick? These questions muddled through my head one after the other.  While Cancer is very rare, I couldn’t help but ask ‘Why me?’.

However, straight away, wonderful things started to happen and I couldn’t help but feel that actually, I am a very blessed, lucky girl.  In the early days of my diagnosis some truly great friends and family gave me so much love and support, that the bad thoughts slipped away.

My friend Lucy rushed to my bed side and took on the role as my PA.  My friend Mary turned up at the hospital unannounced to be with me.  My brother sat by my bed, ready to provide whatever I needed.  My Mum and Boyfriend dropped everything and raced down the A1 to get to me.  My fellow Mashers in the office made a card with Jack Bauer on it.  My housemates packed up some of my belongings and hand delivered them to me.  And then there were the flowers, the gorgeous flowers that arrived from so many supportive faces.

The night I came home from hospital we had a mini party with some of my friends and family.  All I wanted to eat was duck, so we got duck.  All I wanted to drink was wine (unsurprisingly!), so we got wine.  I started to think maybe if I was going to start getting my own way all the time, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad (!).  As I looked around the living room, I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of happiness to see all the faces of wonderful people that were rallying round me.

From that moment on, I was determined to stay firmly on the bright side of life and fight for the silver lining at the bottom of all of this.

At the same time, my housemate Holly went to a Craft afternoon and made a sock monkey.  When she got home, Holly gave me her monkey and it was love at first sight.  The monkey just made me really, really, really laugh – it was so cute!  It put such a huge smile on my face and made me so happy that I took it everywhere with me,  everywhere.  It was my good luck charm, my mascot, my friend.  From then on, it was me and the monkey against Cancer together.

I found out I would have to have chemotherapy treatment which involves 6 hours in the hospital so toxic drugs can be fed into me and attack the cancer. 6 hours? How boring! Holly suggested that I start making sock monkeys while I was going through treatment to keep me occupied and keep me occupied.  When Doctors told me that I would need 4 months of chemo, we realised that not only would I lose my hair, but that a lot of monkeys could be made!

Everybody needs a sock monkey...

The NHS kindly offer one free wig for all cancer patients but they made me look a bit like a shop mannequin (!) and were not very nice.  I discovered that a beautiful looking wig could cost anywhere from £500 – £3000, a lot more than I could afford.  And then it dawned on us.  Everyone we’d shown had loved the sock monkeys and wanted one of their own.  We could sell the monkeys to help raise money for the wig AND raise money for the Lymphoma Association AND spread the joy of the monkeys!

And so it was…Monkeys for Maddie was born…and I haven’t looked back.

The message behind the monkeys is that behind every dark cloud, there is a silver lining.

I’ll be keeping you updated on my progress through the Mash blog but in the meantime, please do visit us at http://www.monkeysformaddie.com/ to order your own sock monkey. We also NEED MORE SOCKS to monkey up so please post them to me at the address given or if you just want to say hello then please do at: monkeysformaddie@googlemail.com

The more colourful the sock, the more personality your sock monkey has!