Senior Research Fellow

Head of programming for three events companies focused on the intersection of interactive media with marketing and advertising -- ad:tech, the iMedia Summits and the CMO Executive Summits – Brad Berens serves as Chief Content Officer for dmg world media's Digital Marketing Sector. He joined the company in 2004 as the Editor in Chief of its daily media property, iMedia Connection, and was later promoted to his current role.

Brad is an editor, writer, critic, public speaker and thinker-- mostly about media (new and old), culture (high and low), marketing (traditional and interactive) and how the things that audiences do with what they watch have a huge impact on who they are. In addition to his work with dmg world media, he also writes at the Mediavorous Blog.

Before coming to dmg world media, Brad spent four years as the editor of all things digital at EarthLink, the ISP. There, he led the charge on redesigning the company's main corporate website (everything from the information architecture to the copy on every page) and later was tasked with transmogrifying the company's bLink Magazine into eLink, an online newsletter and primary customer touch point with a circulation of roughly seven million.

Brad came to EarthLink from Lineup Technologies, a path-breaking but sadly-ahead-of-its-time dot-com that suffered the fate of so many such companies in the big 2000 bubble pop. A decade later a lot of what Lineup was trying to do online video companies like YouTube are actually doing. Prior to Lineup, he spent a few years as a story analyst in Hollywood, working for companies like DreamWorks, CAA and New Regency, as well as for directors like Ridley Scott and Sydney Pollack. He also wrote a regular "Script Doctor" column for a company called ScriptShark.

It surprises some people to learn that Brad got his start thinking about media, culture and what audiences do with them as a bona fide Shakespearean scholar and stage historian. He holds a Ph.D. in English from U.C. Berkeley, and spent years as an award-winning teacher and scholar, giving talks about Shakespeare all over the world. From Shakespeare to the internet can seem like a crazy transition, but when you learn that much of Brad’s academic work concerns how Shakespeare invented the modern audience -- how Shakespeare in many ways invented the way we watch movies, TV and other forms of mass culture today -- his weird career trajectory starts to make a bit more sense.

Born in Los Angeles, Brad is a family man currently living in Portland, Oregon with his wife, daughter and son. You can learn entirely too much more about him at www.bradberens.com, the Mediavorous Blog, or on Twitter where he posts at www.twitter.com/bradberens.