Hi. I’m Keith Patterson. I’ve had the good fortune to collaborate with Susan Scrupski in a wide range of creative and strategic endeavors. Recently, the planets aligned and presented the opportunity to work together again—amplifying voices of people out to change the world.
Writing to engage, inform, and entertain humans has been my beat since undergraduate days, when I wrote stories and served as editor of Voodoo, the MIT monthly humor magazine.
I learned the ropes by creating advertising—mostly for tech accounts—at ad agency gigs, including Creative Director for Ketchum’s San Francisco technology shop. Working on all those startup businesses was contagious, so I co-founded the Patterson & Glen agency with a college friend. We rode the video game wave into a quick acquisition by Madison Avenue agency DMB&B, and suddenly I was working for “the man.”
I soon returned to entrepreneurial life, starting KPA Advertising in Silicon Valley, later adding an office in Santa Monica. Our clients included Kao, TRW, Lucasfilm Games, Pioneer, Xerox, many startups, and CMP Publications—which is where I first met Susan. We were placing a lot of ads in CMP’s Computer Systems News, where Susan was heading up marketing. Apparently she liked our our work, because we were soon invited to join their agency roster.
When the Internet arrived, I saw an opportunity for a new agency model—web design and marketing. The AdScience team created and marketed an innovative product of our own. Forrester Research described our ‘wikis on workflow’ software as “moving the goalposts for business process management vendors,” and Gartner named us a “cool vendor in the high performance workspace.” Cool, but creative is more my game, so happy to be back in my wheelhouse.