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Part Mom, Part Crusader: AKQA’s Kate Everett-Thorp

Written on

Jan 18, 2006 

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Jaime Gottlieb  |

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Part Mom, Part Crusader: AKQA’s Kate Everett-Thorp

Fortunately though, she had taken a few elective advertising courses in college that had opened her mind to other possibilities. “I decided I was going to go into advertising and I moved to San Francisco,” Everett-Thorp says. “I just went to the library and picked up The [Advertising] Red Book and started mailing letters and was gainfully employed in two weeks…by J. Walter Thompson.”

It was at JWT that Everett-Thorp got her first taste of the online space. After that came a stint at McCann Erickson, which eventually lead, in 1994, to her joining CNET as an “Online Crusader” (yes, that was her actual title) when the company had a mere 30 employees on its payroll.

By this time, Everett-Thorp was already knee-deep in learning her way around the pre-Google Internet. “[We] launched the CNET website in ’95 and then 9 of them after and four more television shows after that,” she explains. “My job there was called the ‘Online Crusader’, but luckily there wasn’t any raping and pillaging [involved].”

It was during this time at CNET that Everett-Thorp took note of some rather troubling holes in the nascent interactive advertising world—and decided to try to fix them. “While I was [at CNET], I founded the IAB and set the first standards for media measurement—what an impression was and all of that stuff—so that we could actually have something to sell,” she says. “At the time there were no ads; there was just AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. They gave me seven days to learn HTML. [Now], I actually know enough to be dangerous, but thank God I never had to learn Flash.”

Despite the success she was seeing at CNET and with the growth of the IAB, by 1998 Everett-Thorp had decided she was ready to move away from the backend; she was aching to stretch her entrepreneurial wings. Her dream was to launch a digital agency that she could call her own—and so it was that in that same year Lot21 was born.

“Lot21 was purely digital in a time when there [weren't] advertising agencies online,” Everett-Thorp recalls. “We were truly one of the first that concentrated solely on advertising.” And just like Everett-Thorp’s first foray into building something of her own (the IAB), this adventure too lead to great success: in 2002, only four years after launching, Lot21 was acquired by well-known, independent media agency Carat, which would later evolve into Carat Interactive.

And just to round things out, Everett-Thorp decided to take on one more challenge around this time: adding a set of twin boys to her growing family (she’d given birth to a daughter while running Lot21). “I stayed on for a year after the sale, and then I had twins—so I took a year off,” she explains with a laugh. “It’s really a joke to say you ‘take a year off’ to have twins, because there’s really no vacation in there.”