Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

We won four W3 awards this year. I enjoy working at a strategic communications firm in Raleigh, NC, telling people, mostly potential clients, that we win awards for our work on the Web. The patent response is typically, "What? Capstrat does Web?"

Capstrat received silver awards in categories for work on behalf of:
•    Lenovo MicroSite – Computer Hardware category
•    Genworth Financial – Financial Services category
•    NoScamNC – Charitable Organizations Nonprofit category
•    Integrian – Consumer Electronics category

A while back we were asked by Lenovo to design an ad banner and landing page/microsite campaign.

What we learned was how flexible and adaptable our Interactive team can become to meet deadlines. While it is not how we "love" to work, we learn a lot about each other and our abilities when our clients ask us to do the extraordinary. Let's face it, clients we want to work with want an agency that gets them but almost more importantly they want an agency that feels like they're down the hall.

We operate in a competitive field and there are many firms that would really like to have the opportunities that we earn. How quickly we adapt has impressed me since I started working here.

I have also learned that adaptability is synonymous with abilty to produce a lot of quality in a short amount of time. We have learned that it also means being able to execute changes in real time to react to how A/B tests serve us results. Long gone are the days where agencies like ours have the courage to say, "we'll get to it..."

I think adaptability defines us. We measure our value by how "down the hall" our clients feel we are. In reality, some of our clients aren't in our time zone. We also measure our value in terms of how quickly our working relationship spreads from one business unit to another like wildfire within big corporations. We attribute this to being adaptive.