About Me
About Me (Keith Butler)
I wanted to be a college professor. But after finishing graduate school and looking for a teaching break before starting my PhD, the only teaching jobs available paid less than starting salary at McDonalds and were located in the remote reaches of Montana. So I moved to San Francisco, coincidentally just as the Internet was being born.
After a lengthy corporate stint working in telecommunications, I landed a marketing job with a small bridge-router company. Great product, great people. And here I first encountered the Internet, something in the router’s protocol stack called TCP/IP. Interesting, but at the time it seemed like just another layer. Communications were still text-based, no graphics, mostly file sharing among educational and government institutions.
A time later I was lured away to join an even smaller marketing communications agency, one that would launch me fully into the world of digital marketing. Redgate Communications, founded by a soon-to-be leader in the industry, Ted Leonsis, persuaded me to join their ranks. Redgate took full advantage of the emerging ‘new media’, eventually becoming the first acquisition by another about-to-explode Internet company, America Online.
The Internet explosion happened, I spent the next several years developing websites, online advertising campaigns, marketing consulting and more, with both start-ups and Fortune 100 companies. From working with clients like VisaUSA, First Interstate Bank, and Cisco while at AOL, to helping grow Previewtravel.com into a public company, to running Office Depot’s consumer e-commerce unit as a separate P&L and making it the fourth largest e-commerce business. And more recently, I’ve moved to the agency side, leading the Interactive Services team for EvansHardy + Young Inc.
I direct and lead from a strategic viewpoint, applying digital programs and capabilities however and wherever they support the business needs. I’m constantly on the lookout for new ideas, methods, insights and approaches to interactive marketing and Internet advertising.
