James Cooper

James recently joined betaworks as Head of Creative. His role is to explore creative opportunities for betaworks products and to help tell the betaworks brand story. Some of the betaworks brands include the no.1 game, Dots, which has been downloaded over 30 million times and recently won a One Show Silver pencil for a campaign with GE. Other betaworks brands include Digg, Instapaper, Poncho and Giphy. James also recently led the successful betaworks rebranding.


James betaworks joins from the Emmy winning production company Tool of North America where he was an Interactive Director. There he created the ‘Help I have the Flu’ facebook app, which appeared on both Jimmy Kimmel and Jay Leno and won a One Show Entertainment Silver pencil and the Nature Valley ‘Quietest Show on Earth’ program that won the audience award at SXSW.


Before joining Tool James was a multi award winnig Creative Director in the advertising industry. He won the first ever Cannes Gold Lion for Mobile with a Band Aid augmented reality app featuring The Muppets, as well another Cannes Gold for Mobile in 2014 with Google. He was the Creative Director for the London based agency Dare; sold for $50m in 2008 and named Digital Agency of the Decade by Campaign. Campaign also called James ‘one of the brightest stars in digital advertising’.


Recently James has been taking a more active interest in the start-up world. He signed an innovative agency sponsorship deal with TechStars New York in 2010 and continues to be a TechStars mentor and an advisor for a number of start-ups including ADstruc; a digital marketplace for outdoor media. He is also a mentor for R/GA’s accelerator program and will teach a module for Google’s 30 Weeks program that aims to turn designers into founders.


James is also known for founding Celebrity Ping Pong magazine in which he interviews celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Judah Friedlander over a game of table tennis and launching Thompson Punke the world’s only badass ping pong clothing line. However good you think you are at Ping Pong James will almost certainly beat you.