IAA Business and Briefing Lunch with Chris Carmichael, Director Media Centre of Excellence, EMEA of Hewlett-Packard. Blurred Lines: How to deal with the ever-changing landscape of roles, responsibilities, channels, data, global vs local markets, clients and agencies. Chris joined HP in April this year to establish the Media Centre of Excellence in EMEA. He spent the early part of his career at Media Agencies. Initially at Initiative, where he joined as a graduate trainee and stayed for 7 years, and subsequently at Mindshare where he worked on a number of high-profile international accounts over a period of 6 years culminating in him running the LG account globally.

Chris left Mindshare to join Nokia when he was offered the chance to be Head of Customer Marketing for the UK&I team. A whirlwind 2.5 years at Nokia proved an excellent introduction to life client-side, and a steep learning curve on subjects as varied as the commercial realities of a local business, the need to make an immediate impact, getting the best out of agencies and how to successfully run a high-performing team.

Chris is delighted to have joined a company such as HP during such an exciting time for the brand, and is dedicated to building the Media Centre of Excellence team and delivering the maximum impact on the business.

Read more: http://www.netcommunities.com/blog Speaking at the IAA Business and Networking lunch in September 2013, Joss Croft who is the Marketing Director of VisitBritain discusses how "Britain the brand" is marketed abroad. He describes how the United Kingdom is sold to the rest of the world as a tourist destination and what lessons can be learned from their strategy and how they might be applied to business and brand building.