Marketing Babylon

Doing what I do, and being the kind of guy I am, “How come you don’t have a blog/personal site?” is a question I’ve been hearing more and more since… well since blogs, really.This opening post is to some extent personal. If you’re more interested in what this blog is about, you should probably head to the next post, then come back here to read about me – if you’re still interested.
The final kick in the behind was administered in person, kindly but resolutely, by no other than Seth Godin & Malcolm Gladwell, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the same “executive-VIP lunch” at the “leaders live” conference in New York, June 2005. While I had a thought provoking chat with each one of them separately (both were criminally under-crowded in that event), when it came around to explaining why I wasn’t blogging, I felt truly embarrassed.It’s not that I’ve led an idle life in terms of public net activity, but I realised if I wanted to truly become part of the conversation I have to communicate in the language most of my professional community is using.

I work as a marketing strategy consultant, mainly on branding and customer experience oriented projects. Starting off as somewhat of an outsider, I’ve been doing that for over five years now. Before that I spent five years “client side”, mainly leading the creation of web products for major Israeli portal IOL.

Connected to the net roughly since 1993 (i.e. just in time to experience pre-web-browsers Internet), and involved with commercial & independent web projects since 1999 most of my web activity was conducted in the Israeli arena. A lot of love and hard work has resulted in a number of projects I’m quite proud of , and a certain reputation among the Israeli net digerati.
(more about my background here)

As you might have guessed, the reason you probably haven’t heard about any of these projects is they are all in Hebrew. This was an ideological choice, as me and my companions wanted to contribute specifically to the Hebrew web, which was quite small at the time we started. I don’t regret this choice, nor do I intend to stop trying to contribute to the Hebrew web, but with this blog I wish to join a more global conversation.
(Incidentally, I do have a low-traffic “sister-blog” in Hebrew, for more Israeli/Hebrew specific issues.)

So finally, I get to say: Hello world, my name is Uri Baruchin, I live in London and work with companies in the UK, Europe & the middle east. By day I’m a marketing strategy consultant with Brandinstinct, by night I work on various web projects, this blog being the most recent one.
I’ve started this blog to share my thoughts and experiences of practicing marketing and thinking about it on and off the web, in an environments/space increasingly affected by a reality I have nick-named “Marketing Babylon”, but since this is the title of this blog , it deserves a separate post.