Young Innovator Nominee: Chris Flynn, The Media Kitchen

Why he is nominated: Chris Flynn could teach a master class is never settling for what is available. When he has a vision of how something should operate he does not stop until it’s achieved. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the exhaustive search he started to find a client-facing dashboarding tool to share digital media metrics on an ongoing basis.

He met with everyone in the space and challenged each of them with what he wanted the tool to do and how he wanted to do it. After months of working with various partners he became convinced that not only the proper tool did not exist but that he could build the tool. Thus he went to work creating sketches of what he thought the dashboard should look like and crowdsourcing feedback to make sure it was useful to everyone. He then created a backend to the dashboard that allowed any employee to easily export the data from our third party ad-serving tool and drop it into the proper section, which would then auto-populate the dashboard on the frontend. It was easy to use, beautiful to look at, and most importantly helpful to our clients.

In brief, Chris Flynn was not happy with what was currently being offered in the marketplace so he set out to build his own, the cornerstone of a true innovator. Chris Flynn started his career at Publicis Group, after a promotion to strategist he came to The Media Kitchen. He has been working at The Media Kitchen since 2012, with a brief three-year stint at Media Storm. He lives in Norwalk, Connecticut and is an avid hiker and backpacker. He has climbed almost every major mountain in the US and has now set his sights on Europe.

The Young Innovator Award celebrates excellence and innovation by young professionals. See the other nominees and their backgrounds and check back to learn who has won this prestigious honor from The Advertising Club of New York and Google, with support from The Drum.