Title: MD
Company: Kerb
URL: www.kerb.co.uk
D.O.B: 30-05-70
Number of employees: 20
Offices: UK/Japan
Jim’s career history
A lifelong interest in digital technology has made Jim the consummate “early adopter”. He has been building User Generated Content online since back in the mid-eighties when he produced Commodore 64 demo's along with other geeks on something known as “Compunet” - a bit like a UK version of the Internet only a lot, lot slower. He “lost” nearly a decade of his life working for investment companies including Citibank, where he quit his job in the marketing department to return to his first love by doing a BA in Electronic Media design at Wolverhampton.
He started Kerb during his second year of university in 1996 when the initial internet boom began, juggling a full-time degree course and business start-up. In these, the internet's formative years a great deal of his time was spent trying to convince marketing departments not to transfer his cold calls to their IT dept. and instead understand that this opportunity to create a worldwide advert for their company ought to be their domain.
Kerb won it's first national award in 1997, for a website that won the Yell.com Award for E-commerce. In a time when ecommerce websites were form based monstrosities, the seminal Mathmos Lava Lamp site one was a intuative point and click shopping experience.
In 2000 Kerb extended it's online service to include digital marketing and created their first interactive viral campaigns for a variety of brands including Pepsi. Since then Jim has been the creative behind scores of campaigns applying a philosophy that he refers to as “Digital Engagement”. This concept sits at odds with traditional marketing and relies on the strength of the advertising creative to disseminate a brand message in front of its target market, rather than the traditional method of buying huge amounts of media space and shoving it in front of the audience. He has shown again and again that this non-interruptive approach gives better returns on the both an emotional level and also in audience reach.
This way of thinking has resulted in over 15 campaigns that have achieved more than a million unique visitors.
As well as a long list of awards, Jim's viral success stories include;
a viral campaign that was engaged with by over 60 million unique visitors,
a viral campaign that increased a clients sales by 127% in its first month
and a viral campaign that has been accepted as the fasted growing campaign ever tracked by the UK's leading independent viral charts.
Kerb regularly work for exciting brands including Playstation, Disney and Microsoft.
As well as talking at marketing events Jim has also spoken to a variety of different audiences including:
Animators/animation lovers at One dot zero, Tokyo
VC's/Entrepreneurs at 1st Tuesday, London
Broadcast media at MELIA, Cannes
Flash developers at Flash Forward, Amsterdam
Microsoft developers at Microsoft Mix07, London
Jim was born in Manchester and currently lives in London with his wife, a Chinese born fashion designer. Despite having been exiled in the South East of England during his formative years, he remains an ardent Manchester City supporter.
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