About

The Magic Bean Laboratory

The Magic Bean Laboratory is currently the personal project of Mat Morrison (see below.) It’s intended to give some focus and background to his research and experimentation.

The Magic Bean Laboratory is founded on the premise that ready (and inexpensive) access to web-based infrastructure, new kinds of workforce and falling costs everywhere means that (these days) the prototype IS the business plan.

That is — it’s so cheap to get things running, that one may as well start building and then work out what the problems may be. It’s the logical extension of the “release early, release often” thinking of the Open Source crowd that has informed all the developments in the Web over the past decade.

Things that interest The Magic Bean Laboratory

The Magic Bean Laboratory is ultimately interested in developing products for advertising and marketing communications agencies. At present the areas of focus are as follows.

  • Crowdsourcing, UGC, Human-Based Computation, and On-Demand Business Process Outsourcing; and
  • “Where atoms and bits meet”: Robotics, Location-based Services, AR, Video

Mat Morrison

Mat Morrison is a senior digital comms planner with leadership experience at a regional and global level. He has held board director roles, or been a director of his own companies, since 1999. You might think that he’d have picked something up by now.

He began his career almost 15 years ago at AKQA, going on to help set up Tribal DDB London as Commercial Manager then Head of Strategy. Before joining Porter Novelli as Global Digital Planning Director, he helped found the digital comms planning agency RMM where (among other clients) he worked for Buckingham Palace.

He is particularly interested in how networks of people make decisions, how we can model and measure “influence” and whether (in the final analysis) this is actually such a good idea.

He greatly appreciates the opportunity to talk about himself in the third person, if only for Google’s benefit.

Specialties

Mat has had a wide exposure to different agencies, client verticals and digital marketing disciplines: from web build and SEO, to media planning, to eCRM and Public Relations. He has a special focus on planning, pitch doctoring, analysis & reporting, and a personal interest in Social Network Analysis (SNA).