Hasta La Creative!

Walk into Keep Holdings’ Park Avenue South office in New York, and you’ll find a seemingly happy group of 20 people working on Keep.com: a Pinterest-style e-commerce site that lets you “keep” products you like and purchase them later.

Keep is, by all indications, a small but solid company: It is well-funded, with perhaps half of the initial $20 million it was started with in the bank; it’s run by a charismatic leader; and it recently launched an iPhone app that’s drawing rave reviews. But while Keep may be functioning well, it’s hard to believe that this company, originally called AdKeeper, once thought it could spark an online-advertising revolution.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Scott Kurnit, AdKeeper failed in its original mission, and it failed spectacularly. But this is more than a story of a massive flameout; it’s a case study of how lots of very smart people can make the same bad bet and do it with relative ease. All it took was a proven founder, a big problem for digital marketers (banner ads don’t work) and a somewhat plausible and scalable tech solution.

Continue reading at AdAge.com