For a decade Mr. Whitaker served in top marketing posts at media brands including Condé Nast Traveler, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Yahoo!, Men’s Health and Audubon, helping each to build revenues to record levels. Among his marketing achievements were helping Yahoo! Internet Life to grow from 200,000 to over 1 million circulation and more than 1,200 ad pages in just three years. He also helped create first-of-their-kind online music awards and film festivals, as well as new triathlon series. These successes earned him multiple industry accolades, including MIN’s ‘Savviest Marketing Award.’
Thereafter, as Managing Director of Marketing and Publishing for the National Audubon Society, Mr. Whitaker led many of the organization’s major marketing, publishing and video production initiatives. This included a business-side restructuring of its venerable Audubon magazine, which increased advertising revenue 40% in just one year. He also designed and implemented a multi-tiered educational program that netted Audubon its largest-ever grant from a corporation: the TogetherGreen program supported by Toyota Motor Sales US.
His greatest eye-opener at Audubon was seeing how effective video could be at telling a story and cultivating supporters. In that role, he wrote and directed award-winning videos (Remi Awards in ’07 and ’10) about Audubon and its supporters. That success inspired him to create CawsVideo, that today delivers video content to both non-profit and corporate clients.
He began his career on Madison Ave, at advertising agency Young and Rubicam in New York – in the waning days of the Mad Men era – after graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
