NEW YORK Goodby, Silverstein & Partners has lost its director of digital strategy, Mike Parker, to ad network Betawave.
Parker, 37, has departed from Goodby after two years to join Betawave, run by former Tribal DDB CEO Matt Freeman since last June. As its vp of strategic solutions, Parker will work with clients and agencies to develop ad programs on the Betawave network.
Freeman is hoping to transform Betawave into an alternative to portals for brand advertising online. In his nine months on the job, he has renamed the network from GoFish and shifted its focus from solely children and teens to include women. It has plans to branch into other demographics. Its network includes casual gaming site Miniclip, kids' entertainment site Cookieville and virtual environment WeeWorld.
"One of the major challenges for digital marketers is it's so hard to connect with the consumer," Parker said. Brands for a long time have realized there's an opportunity to drive engagement online, but the challenge is how do you do that and drive any scale to it?"
At Goodby, Parker helped craft the shop's internal digital strategy, bringing in an analytics team and adding information architecture to its design capability. He also worked on the digital initiatives of clients like Sprint.
A Goodby rep said it has no plans to replace Parker.
Prior to joining Goodby, Parker worked for Freeman as CEO of Tribal DDB Canada. Parker spent nearly a decade at DDB, the last six years with Tribal. Earlier, he spent two years on the client side, working at Cathay Pacific Airways.
Freeman led Betawave in raising $22.5 million in a venture-capital round last December. The company's vision is to offer advertisers customized programs that go well beyond banner ads, moving from offering impressions to providing venues for attention and engagement.
"There's a whole new arena of performance branding," Parker said. "It's not just branding for branding's sake. It's brand advertising that drives some kind of interaction."
In a recent campaign, Betawave worked to promote Sears as a fashion choice for teen girls during the back-to-school period. In addition to running display media, Betawave digitized the Sears fashion line and introduced versions of its clothing into virtual worlds.
The company is based in San Francisco and has 45 employees. Its network boasts monthly reach of 89 million users worldwide and 25 million in the U.S.
