Paul Matthaeus
Chief Creative Officer / Founder
Digital Kitchen
TOPIC: EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING: Creating Brand Theatre >>MORE
BIO
With nearly two decades of experience in the advertising business, Digital Kitchen Founder, CEO and CCO Paul Matthaeus is on a never-ending quest to cultivate experimentation and creativity at his hybrid media company that creates TV commercials, Emmy®-award winning main titles, and non-traditional content for advertising agencies, marketers, and Hollywood. Understanding that companies want more than what a traditional 30-second spot can deliver, Paul and his team develop ideas as they also look to the growing sector of experiential marketing.
Armed with a degree in Photography and double majors in Ad and Graphic Design at the University of Washington, Paul made his way into the ad industry, eventually starting his own ad agency, Matthaeus Halverson, in 1992. While Paul pushed the limits of traditional advertising, he knew there was something bigger in store. Just beyond the kitchen in his agency office was a derelict 20-foot square storage space. Paul renovated the space and built a collaborative adjunct he coined “Digital Kitchen” – a studio with the explicit objective of integrating digital experimentation and “post-visualization” into the creative process.
In 1998, Paul took a leap of faith and devoted himself full-time to Digital Kitchen. Joined by talented artists, filmmakers, musicians and animators, Paul built an experimental branding think tank, blending the best of a movie studio with the focus of a branding firm. Since then, Paul’s work has been shown in over 100 countries, and is part of the permanent collection at the MoMA in New York. He has produced and directed work for national television spots for clients such as Coca-Cola, Ford, Nike, Microsoft and Sony, and main title and effects sequences for Columbia Pictures’ The Sixth Day, Nip/Tuck, and Rescue Me.
He has garnered awards in every major industry forum, and has been featured in general and trade publications, including Adweek, Chicago Sun, Entertainment Weekly, Fast Company, New York Times magazine, Print, Time, and Wall Street Journal. In 2001, DK was voted best by the AICP and in 2002 won the Emmy® in Best Main Title Design and Production for HBO’s Six Feet Under. In the last 5 years, DK has been nominated for more Emmys® than any of the companies in their industry. 2007 saw another Emmy® win in the category of Outstanding Main Title Design for Showtime’s Dexter.
Matthaeus has been a guest speaker at BDA, ‘boards Summit, Flash Forward, Graphic Artists Guild, and Siggraph. He was the keynote speaker for the AIGA/NYC, AIGA Minneapolis, and the Registered Graphic Designers Association of Toronto. His regularly published commentaries and book on marketing and creativity have earned him a global reputation as a thought leader.
