Shane Atchison

Shane Atchison is a Seattle-based digital-marketing entrepreneur and agency executive whose career spans more than 25 years in advertising, analytics, and technology. He co-founded the web agency ZAAZ in 1998 at the age of 26, and served as its CEO and co-founder. Under his leadership ZAAZ built digital experiences for major brands including Microsoft, Bing, AT&T, Disney, Fox, National Geographic, PBS, Warner Brothers, and Boeing. He holds a degree in Psychology from the University of Washington.

ZAAZ was acquired by WPP, and Atchison went on to become global CEO of POSSIBLE (WPP Digital), a role he was formally appointed to in 2012. At POSSIBLE he directed the agency's overall strategic and creative vision, working with financial-services organizations, consumer brands, startups, and nonprofits. He is a recognized thought leader on performance and data-driven marketing, and co-authored two books with Jason Burby: *Actionable Web Analytics* and *Does It Work?: 10 Principles for Delivering True Business Value in Digital Marketing* (McGraw-Hill, 2015). His writing has appeared in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Ad Age, Adweek, CMO.com, and The Drum, and he keynoted Domo's Domopalooza conference in 2015.

After POSSIBLE, Atchison served as Chief Marketing Officer of Domo, the cloud-based business-operating-system company. In December 2018 he returned to WPP to become the first North American CEO of Wunderman Thompson (the agency formed by the merger of Wunderman and J. Walter Thompson), a role he began in January 2019. He also joined the advisory board of e-commerce accelerator Netrush during this period.

Today he is listed as CEO of Zaaz Collective, based in Seattle, and remains active as an angel investor in Pacific Northwest technology startups.

• Invests as an individual angel, concentrated in early-stage (seed / Series A) technology companies, often in the Seattle startup ecosystem he knows well.
• Focus areas align with his operating career: marketing analytics, AI, data/SaaS, and consumer-facing digital products — areas where measurable business value is central (a theme of his book *Does It Work?*, whose thesis is holding digital marketing accountable to "true business value").
• Tends to back founders/teams he has prior context with — e.g., he invested in both Placed and, years later, Read AI, which was founded by Placed alumni.
• Relatively low-volume, selective deal activity (a small, curated personal portfolio rather than a high-frequency angel program).