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Young Innovator Nominee: Ben Clarke, The Shipyard

December 2, 2014 | 3 min read

Ben Clarke

Current gig: president, The Shipyard

Why he is nominated: Ben Clarke defines Innovation. He studied molecular genetics in college and graduated with honors – which makes advertising sound easy. He is a founder of The Shipyard and serves as the lead digital strategist. Previously, Ben was founder and CEO of one of the early cloud application development firms in the US, which sold in 2010, and a co-founder of an ad tech company capable of localizing digital marketing for thousands of small companies through automation.

Ben serves as one of a select group of advisors to the US Chamber of Commerce on big data and innovation. He also serves on the technical advisory board of the largest federated network of clinical healthcare data, which aggregates and analyzes data from large cancer networks. He has previously been on the advisory board of the largest aggregator of digital automotive shopper data feeding every significant DMP/DSP in America.

Over the past year, Ben was key architect of Mediopolis’ successful launch in using data to engineer a media driven customer acquisition machine that reaches consumers with mass personalization. He serves at Chief Strategist and believes that to achieve the apogee of media engineering means having a totally new set of technologies and talents than media agencies ever imagined. His innovative approach at Mediopolis is displacing traditional media planning and buying as we know it.

Ben’s ideas consistently break through. For example, his perspective on Experimentation was brought to life in an important piece recently published in FastCo. His in-depth article explores why Netflix, P&G and Facebook conduct 1000s of failed experiments each year. It examines how experimentation engines change how decisions are made. He believes experimentation engines change how business is done because it changes how decisions are made. It does this by resolving the tension between creative teams who want to try big new ideas that are unproven and senior business executives who want guaranteed results fast. Using real-world data in the article, Ben explores how experiments make it possible to break decisions down into their core assumptions and to test those in bite-size chunks, thus de-risking large parts of the decision-making process.

Ben is beyond worthy of this honor and I am delighted to nominate him so that he might have the opportunity to share his thinking with the broader ad & marketing community.

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.

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