Subscribe to this feedOnce You Go Web You Never Go Back

So, you ask: Did I start off as a web designer? Was I one of those lucky young art school kids who painted in Photoshop and did my own animations in Flash?

No, I'm decidedly more old school than that. In fact, I started my career in traditional advertising long before the web became a marketing medium. I was mostly a print designer and art director who also enjoyed some broadcast work. Back then I did sketches on a layout pad and traced type from a font book, then used the Xerox machine to enlarge or shrink the type to the right size...then traced it again for the final layout. The Mac came along (not soon enough!) and eliminated all the tracing and xeroxing and other antiquated designer maneuverings...

Then sometime in the late 90's, I noticed that a couple of scruffy Aloha-shirt wearing dudes started showing up at creative meetings. The agency had suddenly formed an internet "division," which was basically these two casual guys. I vividly remember my first project with them: We wanted to dazzle our client with a little web landing site that accompanied our grandiose print campaign. So I told the guy in the green Aloha shirt my "cool" website idea. Basically it was a little like the big dance finale of "A Chorus Line" with glitter and all kinds of synchronized moves and actions... Green-shirt guy looked at me and then proceeded to scold: Websites are NOT like doing TV! D'oh!

The two guys soon became many more guys in ironic tees and plaid shirts and the whole division was spun off into one, two and then more affiliates and boutique shops. Now the brand managers were demanding that we print, direct-mail, POS, broadcast and other traditional marketing disciplines work together with the web medium people (and their social marketing and search engine optimization subdivisions) to create one big holistic campaign. It meant there were a lot of people and egos at the table...

One thing I noticed at these contentious "holistic" meetings though, was that the web guys never seemed to drown themselves in marketing-speak as much as the traditional ad guys did. And many times, no one understood what the web guys were saying. Sometimes the web folks were criticized as "shallow" (behind their backs, of course) for their lack of enthusiasm for marketing-speak.

I look back at those bloated meetings and chuckle at the fact that I'm now one of those "shallow" web guys. I made the jump to the web medium because it was obvious from more than a decade ago that it was going to be huge. And, as with any new thing, it was an exciting new frontier that had room for different and progressive creative ideas that often defied conventional marketing wisdom.

Meanwhile, I wonder how I was able to stay awake during many of the long "marketing strategy" and "branding insights" meetings back at the agency. But I'm also curiously grateful for having suffered through them. Today, when I'm working on a website and branding assignment, I can channel everything I learned from those meetings, and — without too much "marketing-speak" — share the insights with my clients.