Browse the Big Ideas archives by year:
As we find ourselves well past the halfway point in this decade, I began to reflect on where we were around this time last decade. (Cue dreamy flashback music)
The Skinny on Some Fat Times
The ‘90s were drawing to a close and many companies were booming. The Gulf War memories were fading a bit, as was grunge music and enduring the “Macarena” at weddings. Kids were into Pokémon and PlayStation (and little else) while this thing called the Internet was making some people big money. Few knew what really lurked behind the veil or what it took to “Discover, Design, Develop and Deploy” large web engagements – or what it took to build one of these new fangled Web sites.
We were trailblazing then, as we are now with all of us confronting challenges daily and with few rules - like real pioneers. Many interactive agencies, like the one I belonged to in ‘99, were attempting to apply best practices from larger application development gigs to marketing Web sites and the result was often a very big price tag for a pretty light, static Web site.
Some late-‘90s interactive agencies spawned from larger companies or from smaller shops acquired by the big guys and just as some of us were beginning to figure out how to provide smarter and more budget-conscious solutions for our clients – BOOM. The infamous bubble burst and all those trendy stocks plummeted, some people cashed-out, some hunkered-down and others just ran for the hills. Layoffs began and some even opted for “the package,” while others left the biz altogether ~ suddenly, being a restaurateur, landscaper or small business owner sounded a lot cooler than being in an interactive agency
Post-Dramatic Mess Reorder
For those of us who lived through it and didn’t revert back to jobs we had in high school, there were some tough times and most projects were painful. The need to back into scrawny budgets and timelines became a necessary evil. To add insult to injury, many clients didn’t trust interactive agencies because they assumed that, much in the way stocks were over inflated in the dot com biz, so were the prices. Distrust was rampant.
So, as we heard “Clear!” in the distance (circa 2003?) and life was getting zapped back into the industry, many traditional agencies and general ad shops began to add an interactive arm the their suite of offerings. As someone who soldiered through in the digital space, it was become increasingly apparent to me that solid interactive design requires an incredible team effort between client services people who ‘get it’ and their ability to help the client do the same; project managers who aren’t simply traffic cops; user experience people and interactive architects who understand users, content and logic; creative teams immersed in the space and who know the difference between good design and decoration; media people; SEO/SEM folks; business analysts… the list goes on.
From a creative perspective, interactive agencies need to blaze new trails in brand extension using a variety of digital avenues. Customers are proving that they absorb what they want more and more on their own time while using the methods of their choosing.
No Burst in THIS Bubble!
This time around, however, there is more than just vapor expanding the bubble. The content, devices and platforms are beginning to work together and people have specific expectations as they manage their digital lives. Digital marketing professionals like me and my colleagues are figuring out how to give our clients’ brands a much larger digital footprint and we’re literally inventing it together every day.
Looking ahead, it will be the ability to connect these dots and design well for multiple platforms that will begin to truly differentiate interactive agencies and give rise to more hybrid approaches in the years to come. Alliances to meet these challenges are already afoot and some very smart people are getting together. Pretty exciting times – kinda like the ‘90s all over again… without the mullets.