Digital Design Blog

Creativity ‘On The Side’: How Interactive Agencies Stay Fresh

Creativity Magazine has a great piece on how ad agencies (both traditional and interactive) are increasingly building innovation muscle by pursuing a range of different ventures “on the side.” No longer just focused on ads, the piece focuses on how agencies cultivate a host of different creative side projects — some to stay sharp, others to generate revenue. Firms like Mother, Wieden + Kennedy, TBWA and JWT all have interesting programs from creating documentaries like ‘Nimrod Nation’ to running a hot dog stand (of all things).

Avenue A | Razorfish gets the nod for our Idea Lab program, where we try and predict where the digital industry is headed by building out and testing emerging media concepts. Here’s the what Creativity had to say about it:

Razorfish Idea Labs

Spearheaded by its VP of User Experience Garrick Schmitt, Avenue A | Razorfish’s Idea Labs allows its staff to take a breather from client accounts for a few months to build and develop new media concepts and services to promote client brands, with the hopes of generating new income. “Basically, we solicit ideas from the organization so it’s a very grassroots thing,” says Schmitt. “The goal is to really come up with things that our clients haven’t begun to think about yet. We’ll put a really small team, typically a developer, a creative director, maybe a copywriter or an experienced designer, and say let’s give them 90 days or so to bang it out and see what happens.”

Among the current creations (most still in alpha), the agency’s Smartpox site(www.smartpox.com) is community-run and based upon the development and distribution of mobile bar codes, a tool which has been used more recently on a campaign for Red Bull. Using what’s actually a 2D barcode filled with data, visitors can decode the barcode with a Smartpox reader and create Smartpox tags using either a URL, an email address, a telephone number, or plain text. Basically, with the camera on your cell phone, it takes a picture of the barcode and then it translates whatever that is into an image, a movie, a music file, whatever has been encoded in that two-dimensional image,” Schmitt explains. “Apple did some neat stuff with it in Asia, the BBC’s played around with it in the U.K. We get great international traffic, and it gets about 500-1,000 people a day hitting that site. A lot of our clients have also played with prototypes of it.”

There’s also MMOD, an internal prototype of a dynamic ad-insertion platform for podcasts, videocasts and other downloadble media; Newsbreakr, a community site, this time for journalists, allowing users to post text, image and video via mobile devices; and more recently, BuzzMap, an RSS subscription service focused on people versus content. (KA)

You can read the full piece here at Creativity Online.