Spotlight

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

Written on: January 18th 2006
Author: by Jaime Gottlieb |
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After a year of diapers and baby food, Everett-Thorp was ready to get back in the saddle and (you guessed it) jump another few hurdles. So in 2004 she joined the award-winning global interactive agency AKQA, becoming their president of interactive advertising. And by hitching the company to her star, she has helped them land some of the hottest clients around. “We’ve just had a great time launching the New York office and bringing in some massive new accounts,” she tells me. “We won Coke globally, so we were excited. We were pitching brands within Coke, and then to get it globally, that was just wonderful. With NY here, we’re working with the Jets, and [doing] some Clinique work.” (AKQA’s client roster also includes such heavy-hitters as Samsung, Nike, Palm, and XBOX.)

You might think that with three kids and a resume with more bullet points than you can count on both hands to her credit, Everett-Thorp would be ready to kick back a little. You’d be wrong. Kate Everett-Thorp is still thinking the same way she did when she picked up that red book of advertisers. She’s thinking ahead.

“[We’re] looking at 2006 and all the major changes and opportunities that [are] in the industry,” she says. “Fundamentally we’re looking at changes in the ways that we’re communicating, and I think some of the work we did with XBOX kind of highlighted some of the huge opportunities. Basically, we don’t tell you any more, ‘We have to entertain you and engage you.’ [Instead], I’ve kind of been talking a lot about a concept called ‘participatory marketing’… I’m really trying to get the message out that you just can’t yell your message out there to everybody.”

Rather than relying on yelling out slogans and messages, Everett-Thorp has concocted her own ideology, which she has infused into her practices at AKQA. “It’s not about an offer, free shipping and things like this. It’s more about finding a way to employ what I call the ‘Human Media’…In the early days it was [about] taking the things we knew in traditional and exploiting them online. Now, some of the ways we’ve marked that communication online is going the other direction. The hiding, almost, of our advertising and teasing [an audience] into an atmosphere where they discover it and then they voice the message. [That’s] the ‘Human Medium’ part.”

Encouraging communication will increasingly be the key to advertising success, according to Everett-Thorp—particularly when it comes to innovations related to mobile, social networking and user-generated content. “I think these are really the [places where] we’re going to [learn] how we can communicate well… because God forbid we just throw a banner up in those atmospheres and call it a day,” she says.

“We need to challenge ourselves to become part of the conversation—literally—and that’s when we’ll see a major difference in how to harness that communication ability.”