Reflections on Culture, Teleseminar with Gordon Pennington, Managing Director of Burning Media Group

Gordon Pennington is the Managing Director of Burning Media Group, a boutique marketing communications firm providing creative direction with strategic solutions for enhanced impact to a select worldwide client base.

As a marketing communications and advertising professional Gordon Pennington has worked as a corporate director of marketing as well as an advisor to some of the world's largest companies. He is also a communications theorist and practitioner with a particular interest in the impact of contemporary media and its effects, both conscious and subconscious, on individuals, families, societies and global culture. Beyond critical analysis, his work is focused on the creation of effective strategies in the development of media and cultural content while seeking to understand constructive ways to evaluate, discern, interpret, and respond to the communications and media onslaught in the technologically focused West as well as in the developing world.

He has been described by The Wall Street Journal as "a Hi­Tech Traveler in Lo­Tech Countries." If "the media is the message" as Marshall McLuhan asserts, Pennington seeks to better understand messaging and assist clients in making their communications more effective in reaching mass markets or highly target audiences.

Pennington views the subject of media and cultural change not as an academic, or an observer, but as a communications insider. After developing award­ winning marketing communications for Citicorp and serving as a consultant to both Chase Manhattan Bank and J.P. Morgan Bank, he turned to fast growth consumer product markets, serving as Director of Marketing for Tommy Hilfiger, where he helped position it as the fastest growing menswear company in the world.

Working with The United States Council on Economic Development, Pennington led the team to assist American CEO's in assessing emerging Soviet investment opportunities at the end of the Communist era.

He has also managed marketing and strategy assignments and been advisor to Apple Computer, British Airways, the CBS Television Network, the Coca­Cola Company, Equinox Fitness, the Oxford Analytica, Meyado Investment Bank of London, Her Majesty’s Ministry of Defence in the UK and the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University where he is also a board member.

Along with his career in marketing and communications, Mr. Pennington has a keen interest in education. He has been a trustee of The Universal Literacy Project and gained a rich understanding of the significance of literacy as a fundamental necessity in the development of sustainable cultures and economies, with particular interest in the international educational setting. He has appeared on television and lectures in the United States and abroad where he has been a speaker on media, culture and communications and other related subjects at Columbia University, New York University, Yale, Princeton, Michigan State University, The University of Virginia, Universite de Montreal, Guelph University, McMaster University, McGill University, Oxford University and Cambridge University and the National University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru. He has provided briefings on media, culture and communications to The White House, members of Congress and the Senate in the United States and members of the British Parliament and the Peruvian Congressional leadership. He studied international human rights law at the University of Strasbourg and has been a visiting scholar at the Wolfsberg think tank for Union Bank of Switzerland.

Pennington was co-Chairman of the Aldous Huxley Centenary in conjunction with the BBC, has served on Carnegie Hall's Second Century Council, was co-chairman with George Plimpton of the Tanzania Wildlife Fund's benefit initiative for the African Rainforest, has been a featured speaker and advisor to the International Arts Movement working with Makoto Fujimura, member of the board of the Jose Limon Dance Company and Foundation in New York City, and founding vice president and board member of New York City based non-profit organization charity: water. He has addressed screenwriters at ACT One and members of the USC Film School in Hollywood, California on the theme of culture and media Influence in the film industry. His photography has been published in The New York Times and he has produced and directed four documentary films.

Pennington was a Senior Strategist at The Marketing & Planning Group, Inc. where he headed strategy and creative development and marketing communications in New York and London under the founder Malcolm Whittier Pennington. He serves today as Managing Director of Burning Media Group in New York and Owosso, and until recently as a caregiver for his mother Anna Pennington in their century old family home in Owosso, Michigan. He now leads a team that is actively serving clients internationally with a suite of strategic marketing services including branding and positioning for the new opportunities and challenges of the digital century.

Gordon and his team have successfully helped introduce new products and technologies in a variety of markets and sectors. They focus especially on helping clients better define strategy and marketing channels and building brand presence -- while connecting brands to audiences through creatively empowered new uses of both traditional and social media.