David Cherry is the founder and President of Cherry Interactive.
He is an interactive media industry veteran with a strong track record of technical
innovation and design excellence.
Born in Summit, N.J., David grew up mainly in Australia, and was educated at Melbourne University. During an extended and unfinished Law/Computer Science (combined) degree he was elected co-editor of the student newspaper, Farrago, where he introduced Macintosh® typesetting and produced what were amongst the first color separations from a desktop computer.
Building on this newspaper experience, David did a typography apprenticeship and worked at a variety of media enterprises in Australia — including DDB Needham — introducing desktop publishing to the typesetting industry and running color separations through high-end imagesetters. He also became involved in publishing an array of independent pop-culture magazines. David moved to Manhattan in 1992.
While working at J Walter Thompson's New York office, in the early days of Silicon Alley, David co-founded Blender magazine. With funding from [Felix Dennis] (of poetry and [Maxim] infamy), Blender was the first digital music publication and has been honored in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Blender produced some of the very first interactive advertising for clients including Nike, Calvin Klein, Toyota, and Apple.
In 1996, with [Jason Pearson], David formed Dennis Interactive, an interactive advertising agency. Over the next six years, clients included Mercedes Benz, Levi Strauss, Coca-Cola and Disney. The company pioneered Flash development, received many awards and was profiled in Communication Arts and on [Design Interact]. David was General Manager from 2000 until 2002, when he founded Cherry Interactive.
From 2003 to 2006, David was employed as Director (Production & Multimedia) at [ID Society]. At IDS, he supervised accounts including [Crown Royal Whisky], and developed rich media and interactive direct marketing campaigns for clients including Disney and AMC.
He spent much of 2007 as Director of Technology and Project Management at [Greater Than One], developing sites for Novartis, BET, Medtronic, Amerifit and MedPointe, as well as emails, banners and SEO/SEM for Eli Lilly, Genentech and Cytyc. He is currently employed by Wunderman, as Director of Technology Strategy.
David spoke about "Search Engine Optimization for Rich Media Websites" at a number of Pharma conferences in 2007, and at the 1997 Macromedia Users Conference on “Rapid Development of Multimedia”. Over the years he has been interviewed by the New York Post, Sydney Morning Herald, (Melbourne) The Age, (Australian) Rolling Stone, and New York Digital News, as well as on film, TV, radio, the Internet and other print publications on various aspects of the “digital revolution”.