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 became General Manager from 2000 until 2002, when he founded Cherry Interactive.
While running Cherry Interactive, David has held a range of additional roles: From 2003 to 2006, David was Director (Production & Multimedia) at ID Society, managing accounts including Crown Royal Whisky, and developing rich media and interactive marketing campaigns for clients including Disney and AMC.
In 2006-7, he was 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.
Over 2007-8, David filled the VP, Marketing Technology role at Wunderman, where he worked to introduce digital media across their client base, including Social Media campaigns for CitiBank, HP and Johnnie Walker, developed best practices around email for Nationwide and Microsoft, defined the approach to the redesign of the Wunderman corporate website, and played a role in new business wins with EMI, Activision and LandRover.
He is currently VP, Director of Technology at Sudler & Hennessy's New York office.
David's speaking engagements have ranged from "Search Engine Optimization for Rich Media Websites" at a number of Pharma conferences in 2007, to “Rapid Development of Multimedia” at the 1997 Macromedia Users Conference. 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, and the Internet on various aspects of the “digital revolution”.
He is active on these social networks:
