Interactivity and the 2.0 Agency
February 4th, 2007 by Hugh Kennedy“Cryogenics aside, ideas are our best shot at immortality.” – iShares ad
Why would I descend so low (or reach so high) to quote an ad headline? In this case, it helps me to make a point: a great interactive agency is not based on its Flash bandwidth or the clickthrough rate it got on last month’s campaign for Purina. It’s based on the quality of its ideas and how it brings them to life. Witness R/GA, the New York-based agency that AdWeek named as Agency of the Year. How interactive is an agency founded 30 years ago as a film production company? How interactive is an agency that preaches ‘engagement neutrality’ as one of the core tenets of its ‘interactive’ vision? How interactive is an agency whose site touts its strenghts in film, print and broadcast? To pull from the AdWeek piece, excellence in interactivity today is really about trying things that haven’t been tried before, never playing it safe and pushing the boundaries of what advertising is. To quote R/GA’s evp of strategic services, “We want to be asked to solve business problems.” With what? New ideas, in short.
Ideas about effective marketing must change as they move from analog to digital. Narratives fragment and reform around group-telling and collaboration. End-users get a larger role (sometimes the starring role). Technology itself becomes part of the idea, which is why technology mastery is so much a part of the digital marketing equation (check out R/GA’s nike.com/nikeplus for a real-world example; a site so good it makes me want to take up running again).
Within PJA, we think of interactivity on several levels to help ourselves become more interactive. A few of our ideas:
* Integrate interactive into strategy, account, creative, and media. Interactivity can no longer be tossed over the wall to the balding guys in the black pants.
* Interactivity is about a screen, and it’s smaller (and smaller). Mastery of the small screen allows us to work the same wonders for clients as mastery of the large did for the traditional agency.
* B2B deserves an at-bat in the interactive game. Business consumers may not want to be titillated or to remix music at work, but they do want to condense the timeline of learning a lot of content. We should be all over helping them to do that.
In fact, that last point gives me an idea…
February 5th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Amen, Hugh. I’d add to this our focus on measurement and accountability. Interactivity in the digital age has the unique ability to provide quantitative results that can be tied to business objectives and outcomes. When we’re able to identify clear objectives and measurable strategies, then we’re able to measure our impact on a business’ marketing efforts. For B2B, where long sales processes create a need for visibility into how well marketing efforts move a person from prospect to lead, measured activity is a high priority.
February 13th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Hey, RedHotKiln,
Thanks for reading, and for your response.
The intent was not to cast R/GA as not interactive. Quite the contrary. I think they’re possibly the best interactive agency in the US. My point was that you can’t only be an interactive agency, and they’re not. Just as Goodby realized that they had to vastly improve their interactive game to be relevant, but that it’s all part of a larger picture of how to reach your targets.