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About the company
Kerb are an independent digital marketing agency. Simply speaking - we use our skills in electronic entertainment and our understanding of online behaviour to sell things to people.
Our philosophy is simple - we don't believe in spending advertising budgets on media buying. We maintain that by spending the lions share of the advertising budget on actual creative you negate the need for a huge media spend in order to get an advert in front of the user. By making something of value to the user - the user will find the advert of his own accord.
Kerb started life in 1996 and the case studies and awards achieved over the last decade serve as testaments to our methods.
The team at Kerb consists of strategy and production staff, working out of our offices in Brighton and Tokyo for big name brands in the UK and Japan.
Kerb's management team are:
Jim McNiven
Managing Director
Jim has been building online content since the mid-eighties when he produced Commodore 64 demo's along with other geeks back in the mid-80's on something known as “Compunet” - a bit like a UK version of the Internet only a lot, lot slower . He “lost” nearly a decade of his life working for investment companies including Citibank, where he quit his job in the marketing department to return to his first love by doing a BA in Electronic Media design at Wolverhampton.
Jim started Kerb in 1996 and when he is not hatching new schemes, he is busy judging industry awards or giving talks on viral marketing.
Dylan Van Loggerenburg
Art Director
Dylan has been rocking the world of web design since the very beginning. An incredible 12 years ago Dylan was putting together web sites and games at VWV who were possibly the first digital agency in South Africa. 6 years ago, he was working at FCB Electric Ocean as senior designer on Toyota, Energade and Compaq accounts when his work exploded on to Kerb's radar and we successfully tracked him down and lured him to the UK. Kerb's distinctive look is based entirely on Dylan's own inimitable style and everything that leaves Kerb HQ is vetted by him to make sure that it has his own personal seal of approval.
Jon Heffernan
Financial Director
Jon joined Kerb directly from Uni in 2001 with a Degree in Business Studies and Cheekiness. Snapped up in the pub to explore marketing opportunities within Kerb, Jon’s all round commercial sense saw him running projects as well as counting the company beans within 2 years. Jon now oversees projects and takes a keen interest sharing his strategic knowledge with clients to help their and our businesses develop, by being responsible for seeding and promoting all Kerb campaigns to the mass market. With all that weight on his shoulders he doesn’t sleep, he just waits.
Eric Funk
Technical Director
Eric started programming back in the times of the Iron Curtain. He was taught to program Basic on a Russian KC 85 micro computer for his country in order to create a better world . When the socialistic dream expired he convinced his parents to buy a 286 which he used to crack games and build demos in Assembler. After a recreational break with the German army, he studied media engineering in Mitweida. During his time at University he started to work as Flash developer for Kabel New Media – one of the biggest stars of the German new media scene which imploded shortly afterwards. The scraps were bought up by BBDO where Eric worked for 5 years heading up the Flash development team on accounts for BMW and Mini before joining Kerb.
10 little known facts you probably didn't know about Kerb.
1. We were the first company to discover how to convert frame-by-frame Flash animation into smooth broadcast quality TV.
2. We built a "political" game live in Austria that involved smashing down corporate skyscrapers in a reaction to George Bush pulling out of the Kyoto agreement on Sept 2-5th 2001. We received phone calls from worried TV broadcasters on Sept 11th 2001
3. Our MD has given talks about our work in front of politicians in Westminster and in front of marketing types in Tokyo.
4. We run an online game that averages over 20,000,000 page impressions per month
5. We have our own clothing label called Wrong that is a little more subversive than our client work
6. Our vinyl toy range has been delayed after the prototypes were stolen from TOY2R in Hong Kong in Oct 2004
7. We had an animated short included in the Tokyo-London OneDotZero animation festival
8. We share a building with the Levellers, Phil from Orbital and DJ Adam Freeland
9. We created a Flash animated promo for Macromedia that they showed on the big screen in Leicester Square (London)
10. We have a TV series that is popular in Finland and Israel