Work History
Circa 7 years and 7 kilos ago. Unknown photographer.
Here's a brief work history for the early years leading up to the acquisition of White Sheep (Isobar Finland). Before working for any agency I did some freelance work whilst studying service marketing and the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki (Hanken).
Do check out my current affairs or hop over to LinkedIn for a complete role-based CV.
Post Dot-com (2003-)
White Sheep (2003-2008)
Founded the company in January 2003, worked as a CD/CEO, built up the business from scratch without external funding. Decided to join a network in 2007, handled the acquisition process and negotiations with Aegis Media & Isobar; White Sheep was acquired by Aegis Group (London Stock Exchange: AGS) in January 2008. Mariet and Hanna were my co-partners in the sheep adventure.
Unioni (2004-2006)
One of founding partners with responsibility for the creative direction and network. A B2B marketing consultancy with senior people (apart from me :) . Small in-house team, big network. Klaus Asanti, Hanna Aatola and Merja Salmi (RIP) were my partners in crime. Hanna and I decided to focus on developing White Sheep in January 2007.
The original White Sheep logotype from 2003.
Early Years... (1996-)
Eightball Media (1996-1997)
Highly skilled people from the demoscene with the right can do attitude (read: all nighters). Some great client-side Java work in an era before Flash.
Picked up my first Vuoden Huiput awards for the work done here.
Kekkis, Peppe & the boys sold the company in 1999 to Nedecon (which later merged with Endero).
KeyPartners (1997-1998)
Joined as the second Art Director and employee #7. Exciting project for big brands such as Sanoma, Veikkaus, UPM Kymmene and Fortum. Very talented colleagues, who most still work in the industry.
Olli, Numppa & the guys sold the company to TJ Group in 1999 at the height of the dot com boom.
BBDO & kliQue plus (1998-2002)
Joined BBDO as a creative in 1998 to setup a digital spin-off entitled kliQue plus with mr Sairio.
I was a partner, member of the board and responsible for recruiting and later leading the creative team. Also responsible for actively pursuing new business and handling account management. School of entrepreneurship and fun times.
Play History
Demoscene (1990-)
I bought my first C=64 when I was 8 years old and by the age of 12 I finally managed to save up for a Commore Amiga. I began fooling around with pixels in 1989 and joined the demoscene a year later. Man, those were some ugly logos back then. But you learn by doing and with the infamous Sonik Clique did some quite nice productions back in the OCS/ECS scene as well as some #winning AGA intros. Main focus was on design and the general audiovisual experience rather than the number of polygons and re-painted Boris V pictures. You'll find most of the stuff on Pouet.net. Most active during 1990-1998, but some random productions have been released in the 2000s (Flash, mobile) and many more are still unfinished.
Most of my team mates are nowadays working in advertising, ICT or startups so I guess it was time well spent – and we sure had great fun! (Well we still do but that's another story...)
“Vision without execution is hallucination.”