Beginnings.
An ethnographer and a multimedia storyteller meet on a ship and a business is born. Two Midwesterners, by way of California, end up in New Orleans, where they call home.
Meg Kinney
Meg is a Sustainability Communications & Brand Strategy executive with more than 20 years’ experience creating brand value and market differentiation across consumer goods, retail, and non-profit sectors. She leverages the tools of social science and design thinking to understand stakeholder behavior, identify relevant cultural context, and develop strategy. Meg is an intrapreneur with natural curiosity about people and what inspires willingness to change.
It is her gift for storytelling and her ability to make complexity approachable and actionable, that inspires others to embrace change. She has built a reputation for being collaborative and shifting mindsets across functions and stakeholders.
She is an executive marketing veteran who came from the heartland of America and subsequently worked on the frontiers of just about every kind of agency specialization: design, branding, digital, activation, shopper. Clients have included Fortune 500 CPG brands, Climate Tech startups, traditional retailers, and emerging sectors.
Meg founded Bad Babysitter – a brand strategy consultancy focused on using an ethnographic approach to illuminate market opportunity and to inspire human-centered solutions to business challenges.
In 2023 she completed a Masters in Global Sustainability Leadership to help brands develop their narrative relative to circular business models, environmental justice, and resilience in the value chain.
Hal Phillips
I am a storyteller at heart who passionately believes in multimedia as a means to foster human connection, reaction, and participation in the world around us. I studied Philosophy and started my career at CNN International putting together news packages for international audiences, before moving to China and embedding in a culture diametrically opposed to our own. I enjoy hanging out with people who are not like me.
During the first dotcom boom, I moved to San Francisco where I worked for CNX Media – a startup that provided news-style packages with robust, customized web components on the topics of health, travel, and consumer finance for local television affiliates. From there, I ran the public access TV studio in Berkeley, CA that facilitated the efforts of local citizens to create and broadcast stories, content, and programming that mattered to them, in their own voices. Here, I developed and ran workshops that educated the public on news-magazine style shooting and editing, as well as fostered a community for storytelling and activism.
Throughout, I’ve molded myself into an ethnographic filmmaker, editor, and digital storyteller using the mediums of video and photography.