Mark Simmons (author)


Mark J.C. Simmons is a British business writer, brand strategist and consultant and co-author of two international business books:Punk Marketing: Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution and The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide.

Early life

Mark J.C. Simmons was born in Hull, England and spent most of his childhood in Berkhamsted, England, where he attended Berkhamsted School for Boys and then Aylesbury Grammar School. He studied psychology at the University of Bristol in the South West England. He graduated with an upper second BSc. in 1984.

Career

In 1986 Mark became a management trainee with Cargill UK, where he worked as a financial futures broker. He was in the same role at Bank of America before switching careers to advertising in 1988. He worked as an account director at London advertising agencies Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO and Lowe Howard-Spink from 1988 to 1997. In 1997 Mark became a Senior Global Advertising Manager at The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, Georgia. He ran advertising for Sprite globally and for all of Coca-Cola's brands across Latin America. From 1999 to 2002 he co-founded and ran, with partner David Hieatt, nontraditional London advertising agency Anti-Corp and clothing brand howies. In 2002 he was hired by advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky to run their Los Angeles office until he became a partner in branded content company Banjo from 2004 to 2005.
He co-authored Punk Marketing: Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution with public relations expert Richard Laermer, which was released in 2007 and has since been published in 13 languages. The paperback was published in 2009. He created The Useless Project in 2009. Together with Dave Stewart, formerly of the pop duo Eurythmics, he co-authored The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide, which was published internationally in 2010. In November 2011 he and Stewart launched the multimedia Creativity app for the iPad. He was a speaker at the 2014 Follow The Entrepreneur Annual Investor Summit. He is an advisor to creative technology startups FAB Financial, Music Gateway and Filmhub, which in 2017 successfully raised a seed round of funding and was accepted into the NFX accelerator program in Palo Alto.