Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

One of the interesting subplots during the last couple of years of Super Bowl advertising is how well the "consumer-generated" commercials have fared against the big-budget spots created at traditional ad agencies. Last year, the "Crystal Ball" commercial for Doritos -- created and submitted online by two unemployed brothers from Indiana -- won the coveted top spot in USA Today's Super Bowl Ad Meter, which measures in real-time how much viewers like the game's ads as they air. And this year, another "homemade" Dorito's ad (featuring a dog's shock collar being put on its owner) ranked second on the Ad Meter (and garnered its Cary, North Carolina-based creators a $600,000 prize from Frito-Lay for the feat).
 
Statistical and contest measurements aside, my subjective take is that these low-budget spots stand up remarkably well next to agency-created work. But having worked at some of those large shops, I think I know why that's the case. When it comes to creativity, it's a good rule of thumb that the more people that get involved in a creative project, the worse the outcome will be. And when a client is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have an agency create their commercial -- and another $2.5 to $3 million running it on CBS -- you can imagine how many layers of approval come into play, especially in these economic times. In the process, many of these spots end up suffering a death by a thousand cuts. The consumer-generated ads, on the other hand, get created in a relatively unfettered creative environment, and get a simple "go/no-go" call from the client on their finished product.
 
It's the classic problem of Creativity by Committee. This isn't to deny the value of collaboration, of course. But it does shed a little light on the all-too-common inverse relationship between the "stakes" of a creative project and the eventual quality of the outcome. (See: Most Hollywood movies and municipal art commissions.)
 
What's the answer? Nurturing as much trust as possible between any creative "patron" and the actual creative team. That trust is built up-front, by a proven track record on the part of the creative folks, and healthy ability to "let go" (within limits) on the part of the client. When all is said and done, creativity requires many leaps of faith. Companies who excel at spotting creative talent, then giving them room to do what they do best, will usually be happiest with the end results.

If you missed Adam Cohen's Brand Bowl insights on the WRAL noon news, you can check them out here:

Co-authored by Todd Coats and Will Langley.

We’re honored to be part of PRWeek’s 2007 Book of Lists. They recognized capstrat.com as one of 5 agency sites that awed. PR Week writes, “Many agencies have tried to show its ‘people.’ Capstrat's ingenious panoramic view of the office succeeds where everyone else failed. Every single employee appears to have a bio, declarative proof that it's an agency that cares about all of its employees.”

Well, we believe they’re right. We do care about our employees. We also care about collaboration and innovation. I asked Will Langley, one of Capstrat’s programming ninjas to revisit our collaborative process that led to this unique approach. We decided to write our individual points of view since we approached the problem from two directions (me coming from the conceptual trying to understand the technical, Will from the technical trying to interpret the conceptual). Our mission was the same though—challenge through collaboration.

Todd starts: “Repeal the laws of physics. That’s what I want, Will!” We challenge ourselves to surprise and delight clients at every turn. Visitors to our office always talk about its openness and energy. So I had a crazy idea to create a panoramic view of our office as the stage to show our unpredictable energy and randomness. Strictly speaking, the content could be anything. Since I decided to use the office funkiness as a stage, it was easy to decide that our people and practice areas would be the stars. The challenge was how do they interact? How do we make this useable? How do we keep it interesting for repeat visitors? What is this crazy world we’re making?

I pitched the concept to Will as a place where randomness reigns. We didn’t want to give the impression people were on treadmills as they moved, though. They had to obey (some of) the laws of physics for believability. Otherwise the result would be too designy. It would just be moving pictures, no magic.

Having seen a few sites with Action Scripted parallax, I figured we could do that. When Will’s head didn’t explode I figured we could make it a panoramic illusion, too. Heck, while we’re at it let’s make it animated navigation. Will did a lot of experimenting with the black arts of scripting until we agreed the multiple layers behaved correctly. The design team experimented with backgrounds and people to present them at the right scale. That was harder than we thought. Again, to sell the illusion we wanted one foot in reality and one foot in this anything-can-happen world.

I wonder if Will thought I had a foot in Bonkerworld.

Will says: I did not think Todd was bonkers. A little eccentric? Maybe. Twitchy creative? Certainly. After much arm-waving and wild scribbling, we finally found ourselves on a common plane of understanding. Thus began a period of tense negotiation with the Flash authoring environment to bring Todd’s vision to life. Creating a believable parallax was relatively painless – but as Todd mentioned, randomness was mission critical. I’ve visited so many rich media sites and been wowed by the action—riiiight up to the point where my brain recognized the loop. Once that happens the knee-jerk response is to browse on, having seen all there is to see. By randomly shuffling our arrays of people and objects, we were able to break the “loop.” This created a more engaging experience for visitors to our site and enticed them to hang around and explore.

The panoramic backdrop of our office brilliantly highlighted all the pockets of individual funk and flare that make working at Capstrat such a rewarding experience. We share and evolve ideas and solutions with impunity around here, and the quality of our work shows it. The final panoramic is rich and seamless – you feel as though you could crawl into any corner of it and live the Capstrat experience. When we decided to follow up with a second banner for our Culture page, Todd accepted my offer to create a similar panorama. A print designer before taking up the dark arts of web development, this was thrilling! I was able to push and develop my Photoshop skills to new heights.

Our initial foray into the world of transparent video in Flash, design translation for this project uncovered other unforeseen hurdles. With all of our detailed image assets needing to be transparent, the use of the PNG-24 image format was a necessity. Running Photoshop assets through both After Effects and Flash, and meeting in the middle without color shifts, proved to be a major undertaking. Tears were shed. Hearts were broken. And ultimately, Photoshop actions were created to put us back on our way.

Use of the transparent PNG format presented us with our final major obstacle – file size. This beautiful piece of collaborative effort would be for naught if our baseline user had to wait an eternity for the experience. It’s common knowledge that, as developers, we have only a few seconds to engage our users before we risk losing them. The need to overcome our loading issues led us to rethink our loading and preloading schema. We decided to keep everything compartmentalized, remanding our preloaders to each individual asset. This allowed us to eliminate the use of a clunky and frustratingly slow global preloader. The result of this approach is a [relatively] large file efficiently removing itself from the experience, offering the user tasty morsels to distract from the heavy lifting taking place behind the curtain. The user gets to browse our office panorama almost instantly, with each piece of the parallax puzzle sliding into place seamlessly and quietly around them.

With all of our problems solved, we began the final Q/A process. We noticed right away that we had a little user-experience glitch, resulting in a slight case of “chasing the rabbit”, wherein the user finds themselves unable to keep their mouse on the clickable regions without interference. To eliminate this, we made our randomness conditional, so that each object weighed its randomly-selected starting position against all of its peers. When unacceptable overlap occurs, the position is tossed out and another selected. The process continues until an acceptable condition is reached. While the user is none-the-wiser, this little tidbit is perhaps my most triumphant of the entire project.

This project exemplifies what we’re about at Capstrat. Sure, we all come from different backgrounds and speak different languages. But, whether you say the sky is robin’s egg blue or hexadecimal 6FD3FF, we all agree that innovation is a full contact sport. Our management team understands, encourages and lives the spirit of collaboration. The result is personal and professional growth as well as development on a macro scale. Not to mention note-worthy work that we can all be proud of. Visit the PR Week posting.