Who?
Early innovators in our specialities, our paths crossed on various campaigns and we discovered that we complemented each other and worked well as a team.
Rather amused (ok, highly irritated) by the antics of the so called social media experts, coaches and ‘gurus’ who self appoint after a couple of months of using Twitter, we discovered a mutual passion…
et voila, The Funky Agency was conceived, born and delivered in less than a month, making it possibly the quickest brand birth in the history of the net – but then that’s our specialist subject, just knowing what we are doing, getting on with it and sorting it out. Quickly and brilliantly.
About the Team
Claire Burdett – Publishing and Marketing Passionista
Always to be found playing somewhere at the cutting edge, Claire did Media Studies at PCL when Media Studies evoked a “wow” response rather than a “oh dear…” reaction, probably because it was the ONLY media studies degree course in the UK (found it referred to in an advert for video training in Cosmopolitan, of all places, got one of 38 places on the course. Saw Wham a lot as their studio was next door).
After graduating she went in to Advertising and Marketing at Bayer, ending up running the Advertising Sales Department after a disgustingly short amount of time. Soon getting bored with the lack of technical and creative hands-on stuff she jumped ship into Publishing, editing magazines and illustrated books before finally being headhunted by DK MultiMedia to be Senior Ed on their CD-rom Eyewitness Museum series at a time when they were sweeping the International Awards’ board with their brilliant CD-roms.
Shortly afterwards DK fell over the Star Wars debacle and Claire became the Editor of dot.com medical internet site, WHN, creating teaching videos and presenting on satellite and radio channels. Following the dot.com crash, she moved to a Marketing Comms Agency, further honing her commercial publishing expertise and consolidating her integrated marketing skills, while giving her a cast iron excuse reason to spend hours researching future trends and getting down and dirty in the application of the explosion of Web 2.0. She launched her own home business site, www.funkyangel.co.uk, as a sideline to her day job in 2003 at a time when most of the UK still thought email was challenging, qualified as an nlp and business coach shortly afterwards, and writing and editing a huge library of published books, magazines, websites, articles and eBooks along the way.
Helen Moore – The PR Queen
Having done a degree at London University in History (specialising in the Medieval period – don’t ask!) and not fancying spending the rest of her days in a classroom or a dusty archive, she decided to seek a more interesting career path. Attending a social event one day, she saw some people in expensive suits ‘sorting things out’. “Who are they?” she asked. “Ah, they’re the people from the PR agency”. On further investigation, she decided PR was a good match for her writing skills (which she had honed writing lengthy essays) as well as her general ability to get things done and ‘sort things out’.
Unfortunately the standard career advice in those days for women was to ‘become a secretary and try to get noticed’. Helen thought “b*****r that, I’ll just go and get a job in PR.” Having been given the (excellent) advice to use the skills she thought she would need in the job, to get a job, she produced a typeset and printed CV, a professionally taken photograph and set about pitching to every MD of a PR agency that she could find in the phone book (pre-internet days obviously!). Having secured a job in a full service agency (of course it worked!), she took on PR accounts as well as doing client liaison with design clients – this mainly involved walking around with giant pieces of artwork, with overlays flapping in the wind, not to mention taking the thrice-daily deliveries from the typesetter – oh, how things have changed!
After a few years of servicing a range of Thames Valley tech clients, having risen to the giddy heights of Account Director, she decided that she could probably do this on her own. A few phone calls later she had rustled up enough business to keep the wolf from the door, and her own agency was born. Working primarily for tech clients (but also a healthy selection from other markets) she landed some lovely clients, notably a New York-based software company who handed her responsibility for all of its international (anything outside of North America) PR and Marketing. This role took her to lots of lovely locations and 5 star deluxe hotels around the world, where she organised events for important tech folk from the four corners of the globe.
When they were bought out by IBM, she was keen to pursue the opportunities presented by the internet and was active in several projects including setting up www.femininezone.com as well doing PR for other tech companies.
These days, Helen splits her time between London and France where, thanks to technology she is able to carry on business as normal, while also being able to service her increasingly European clientele.
Sally Walker – The Technology Empress
Starting in banking straight out of school, Sally soon discovered a passion for IT, qualifying as a financial advisor before joining Citibank’s Fraud Investigation Team as the resident geek. Sometime later she found herself thoroughly bored, so learnt sign language and spent some time within voluntary organisations working with Autistic, Asperger and Down Syndrome children, which inspired her to set up children’s entertainment business Funkalicious Faces. It went off like a rocket, at its peak doing large-scale gigs, such as Walt Disney’s ‘Finding Nemo’ UK launch and The Lord Mayor’s Show in London During this time Sally also studied complimentary health and became a qualified practitioner in 1999 and advanced practitioner in 2007. In the end the lack of geekiness got to her, so she retired as the Funkalicious Faces clown, Dottie Donut, in favour of concentrating on GraphicLeigh, her design and web company, which had also been running along in the background (yes, she does sometimes appear to have six arms!).
Sally became one of the first people to do software applications with mIRC’s scripting for chat rooms and channels, and in 1995 she wrote to mIRC saying “did you know you can use this for business networking?”. They said, “What?” and “No thanks”, so she started writing bespoke scripts for the 16 or so different channels she owned or moderated at that point, a breakthrough moment for social media. She also now writes and creates modules and applications for Facebook, InvisionBoard, phpBB, SMF, designs websites, creates social networks and produces blog templates and themes that are as unique as she is.
Sally’s business GraphicLeigh, soon evolved into her own branded company ‘Sally Walker‘ and she works everyday within the geeky world she once dreamt of being a part of. With her writing and journalism, she has had her articles featured in such publications as Reuters, USA today, FOX news, Eva Magazine, Chicago Post Tribune, ABC Magazine and many more. With a passion for writing, new media, scripting and coding, Sally is constantly creating and being involved in cutting edge social media technology. Geek girls really do rock!
Welcome to our Funky World.