New York, September 19, 2012 – BuzzFeed announced today it has named Jeff Greenspan as Chief Creative Officer. Greenspan will be based in New York and lead deep collaboration with key BuzzFeed clients like GE, Virgin Mobile, and Microsoft, as well as partners like Facebook, to advance the quality and shareabilty of social advertising. Greenspan was most recently a Communication Designer at Facebook, helping brands and advertising agencies develop "social by design" marketing efforts on the Facebook platform. Before Facebook, Greenspan was a Creative Director at BBDO NY.
“Agencies have been making creative for 100 years that targets individuals, but the social web requires ad creative to be re-envisioned for sharing among groups,” said Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s Founder and CEO. “Jeff is the perfect leader to work closely with a small group of leading brands to push advertising creative into the social age.”
Based in New York City, BuzzFeed has a 15-person, dedicated creative team focused on working with brands and agencies to create social advertising content. Greenspan will lead and expand this team, starting with social media creative talents Chris Baker (Google, BBDO) and Mike Lacher (wonder-tonic.com). These new additions to the BuzzFeed team have pioneered web hits including: Hipster Traps, unbaby.me, World’s Most Exclusive Web Site, Internet Time Out, and M. Night School. They will now bring their expertise in social web content to BuzzFeed’s brand clients.
“Jeff, Chris, and Mike were key players in several defining moments on the social web,” said Tanner Ringerud, BuzzFeed’s Director of Creative Services, “I couldn’t be more thrilled for them to join BuzzFeed’s Creative team to help us take social advertising to the next level.”
“BuzzFeed is a rare technology and publishing platform that recognizes the importance of great creative in social advertising. I’m excited about innovating on the company’s current ad products and creating big ideas that can act as a new kind of ad creative. I’m thrilled to join the team,” Greenspan said.
BuzzFeed offers only content-driven social advertising solutions to its Fortune 500 brand advertisers, who want to go beyond the banner. Client campaigns run on BuzzFeed.com (which sees 25 million unique visitors a month) and are seeded onto Facebook and Twitter, using BuzzFeed’s proprietary optimization technology.
“Social changes all the rules of advertising; social ads need to be shareable and the creative can’t be an afterthought,” said Jon Steinberg, BuzzFeed President and Chief Operating Officer, “We did this for our best partners, to take them to next level, to help them have the best social content marketing in the industry. Advertising can be great again. Social opens up the opportunity for another golden age.”
Media Contact:
Ashley McCollum
BuzzFeed, Press Manager
ashley.mccollum@buzzfeed.com
347.977.1411
Alice Suh
BuzzFeed, Director of Communications
alice@buzzfeed.com
646.599.8652
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About BuzzFeed
BuzzFeed is the leading social news organization, intensely focused on delivering high-quality original reporting, insight, and social content across a rapidly expanding array of subject areas. BuzzFeed’s technology powers the social distribution of content, detects what is trending on the web, and connects people in real-time with the hottest content of the moment. BuzzFeed.com is growing rapidly and reaches more than 25 million monthly unique visitors. Jonah Peretti, founder & CEO of BuzzFeed, previously co-founded the Huffington Post. Ben Smith is its Editor-in-chief.