BRIAN KIEL · CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIST · OMAHA, NEBRASKA
Five platforms have died under my work. The work kept shipping. From the Flash golden age at Chiat\Day to modern builds, marketing tech, and devops for names like Amazon, Nike, Apple, and ImmunityBio — twenty-six years of turning ambitious ideas into things that run in production.
The timeline
Every layer below is a real chapter. The dashed one at the bottom — Invalid Sequence Labs, the studio of one — has been running underneath all of it since 2000.
The web-development arm of Bozell-Omaha, back when agencies were still deciding whether the internet was a department or a fad. Client sites, paid media, internal presentations, and a ground-up rebuild of the office intranet.
Founding member of the interactive production team at Chiat\Day Los Angeles — helping establish how one of advertising's most storied agencies would make things for a brand-new medium. Supervised production and design, advised creative and account teams on what the medium could and couldn't do, and shipped award-level work on deadlines set by clients who did not care that Flash 5 had just come out.
In 2002 the interactive department was split off into TEQUILA\'s LA office. Same building, same desk, same people — new business cards. Along the way: spearheaded "Agave," the agency's baseline Flash tracking initiative, years before ad measurement was a solved problem.
A short, sharp run at Avenue A | Razorfish — standalone components and full microsites for Sony, Visa, Microsoft, and Breville — then three and a half years leading the Flash platform team at Agency.com.
The specialty was something I had to name myself, because nothing existed to describe it: "dynamic, polymorphic" ads — units built on runtime compositing and live API data that assembled themselves per viewer, multiplying creative permutations, cutting production time, and putting the right message in front of the right person through real-time retargeting. Every ad that follows you around the internet with something custom to your history is doing what we wired together by hand in 2007. I believe ours were the first of their kind. Sorry about the rest of it.
A representative story: an eBay Motors campaign that pulled live data from the Yahoo Maps API went live overnight — and was offline before the next morning, because Yahoo said the ads were overloading their servers. Not exactly something to brag about. But the ads worked hard enough to take down Yahoo, and only one of those companies is still standing.
Also from that stretch: a team win at Adobe's Flash Camp — Best in Show, a category that didn't exist when the scoring started.
Back home, and off the browser. API-fed components and kiosk applications at Corporate 3 Design, then immersive work at Phenomblue: desktop, mobile, and environmental installations built with whatever the job demanded — Flash and AIR, Away3D, Sencha Touch, PhoneGap, early HTML5, and natural user interfaces like the Microsoft Kinect.
The one worth remembering: Daydreamer, an R&D project that turned physical movement into sound — a way for hearing-impaired people to take part in making music.
Joined the Republic Project team as it was absorbed into DG | MediaMind and spun out as Sizmek. Wrote JavaScript and ActionScript for the social product, provided UI/UX guidance, and worked both ends of the admin stack.
Then the main event: led a small R&D team building dynamic creative optimization templates in HTML5 and Flash simultaneously — VPAID video and all — while the industry crossed the bridge from one platform to the other in real time. Backbone, Marionette, Bootstrap, the occasional Laravel detour. Flash's death had a scheduled date. The deadlines didn't move.
Eight years and counting as lead developer for Sagehaus: the person between the client and the code. Builds, launches, and long-term care for marketing sites and campaign infrastructure — WordPress and Elementor at production scale, Pardot and the surrounding marketing stack, and the devops that keeps it all standing: AWS hosting, deployment, monitoring, the 2 a.m. things nobody sees when they work.
Less spectacle than the plugin years. More things running in production, for more clients, with fewer surprises. That's the job.
The studio that spans the whole timeline. Full-stack development and consulting under one name for twenty-six years — HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Ruby, PHP, WordPress, mobile, and whatever the decade required. When the day job changed cities and platforms, this layer never had a blank frame.
Symbol library
Apple/ Nike/ Sony PlayStation/ eBay/ Adidas/ Nissan/ Infiniti/ Absolut/ Visa/ Microsoft/ Miller/ Del Monte/ Energizer/ Earthlink/ Ask.com/ Mutual of Omaha
Amazon/ In-N-Out/ Charter Spectrum/ Lexar/ Prestone/ Blue Diamond/ Caltrans/ Bellator MMA/ Assurex Health/ Harman Kardon/ Indian Motorcycle/ Breville
Amazon Publisher Services/ ImmunityBio/ Nextracker/ Fair Trade Certified/ Guidewire/ Alation/ Natron/ Mazama Energy/ Rhythmos/ Jencap/ Earlens/ Mobileforce
Current frame
Lead developer at Sagehaus since 2018, working with clients from first call to last deploy. Four things, done well:
Marketing sites and campaign infrastructure that ship on time and hold up in production — WordPress and Elementor at scale, custom front-end work, and twenty-six years of instinct about what breaks.
Pardot and the Salesforce ecosystem, landing pages, forms, tracking — the unglamorous wiring between a campaign and its results, done so it actually measures something.
AWS infrastructure, deployment, monitoring, and long-term care. The 2 a.m. work nobody sees when everything simply stays up.
The person between the client and the code. Scoping, straight answers, and the judgment to say what's worth building — earned across agencies, ad tech, and a studio of one.
Final keyframe
Available for contract and consulting work — builds, rescues, retainers, and the odd impossible deadline.
Tell me what you're making and where it's stuck. I've probably shipped something like it on a platform that no longer exists.