Who is this Brad Berens guy, anyway?

I'm 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.

The internet has changed and will continue to change how audiences do that voodoo that they do so often, and tracking those changes is a big part of what I do at iMedia, in the Mediavorous Blog and in talks I give all over the country.

I spend most of my professional time working at iMedia Communications and ad:tech Expositions, where I am the North American Chief Content Officer and Editor at Large. From 2004 until recently, I was the Editor in Chief and Chief Content Officer for iMedia, which is an events producer and daily trade publication with a mission: to advance how interactive media and marketing can -- and must -- work together. In September of 2007, I was promoted to oversee content for both iMedia and ad:tech, its sister company with an identical mission. Where iMedia events are intimate, there's no bigger show in the interactive marketing arena than ad:tech.

Before iMedia, I spent four years as the editor of all things digital at EarthLink, the ISP. There, I 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 touchpoint with a circulation of roughly seven million.

I 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. Six years later, a lot of what Lineup was trying to do companies like YouTube, Google, Yahoo (the ones you've probably heard of), BrightCove, Revver, Roo, Neave, The Fifth Network and many others are actually doing. Prior to Lineup, I 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. I also wrote a regular "Script Doctor" column for a company called ScriptShark.

It surprises some people to learn that I got my start thinking about media, culture and what audiences do with them as a bona fide Shakespearean scholar and stage historian. I have a Ph.D. in English from U.C. Berkeley, and spent years as a 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 my academic work concerns how Shakespeare invented the modern audience -- how he created the way we watch movies, TV and other forms of mass culture today -- my weird career trajectory starts to make a bit more sense.


But who am I as a person?

I was born in Los Angeles and have lived here for most of my life, although I took a long excursion away when I went to college at Brown University and then grad school (for -- yikes! -- most of the 1990s) up at Berkeley. I'm a family man. I live with my wife, son and daughter in the San Fernando Valley.