Unless you’re a magician, palm reader, or priest, transparency is your friend.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/10288261 w=500&h=281]

The long winded, largely self serving, debate over Traditional versus Digital agencies is still alive. It should have been beaten senseless years ago, but the home fires are burning with most traditional shops chasing the market, adding the word digital to their tagline. Good grief, Digital isn’t even the correct term!

Moving on… It’s time for a new debate.

This debate centers around what your interactive agency should be doing for clients. At a minimum, it should be serving clients’ every interactive need, creating engaging experiences, and most of all, helping them make money. As a means to this end, I suggest it should be doing more: imagining, designing, developing and launching it’s own products. What better way to sharpen the skills necessary to make a brand famous online than to practice with your own? Every step of the product creation and deployment process translates to deep learning, applicable to all clients.

Reasonable people will say developing products can distract from the core business of helping clients succeed. I can’t disagree with this. Instead, I assert that the benefits outweigh the distraction.

The benefits to the interactive shop go beyond acquired knowledge for client projects. While it can be difficult to justify the financial investment it takes to have your team concentrate on an experimental product, the rewards can also cover the cost. Example: your team builds an API that can interface between your product API and Twitter. This API can then be used in a client project, streamlining development, increasing profit.

Design and interactive strategy is another area in which knowledge and muscle memory will increase with product development. Typically, a client will already have a product that they’re looking for your agency to promote. An interactive agency that is not creating its own products is missing a vital capability. Without the experience of imagining, building and pushing its own products how can they effectively do the same for clients? There is an entirely different skill set that emerges in product development that wouldn’t arise otherwise. 

Finally, aside from acquired skills, the potential for one, or several, of these products to develop a revenue stream is real. These additional revenue streams afford interactive agencies the opportunity to be more selective about client projects. More selectivity leads to more successes. More successes lead to more clients. Rinse and repeat.

Some shops, including theGOOD, have done this with Sell Simply, theGOOD Uploadr, and most recently Centamental. We have created products and released them into the interactive ecosystem with success. We’ve then been able to parlay them into client work, acquiring valuable IP, while creating alternative revenue streams for ourselves. Other shops have also done this successfully, including The Barbarian Group, 37Signals, and our neighbors Instrument.

While this is not an entirely new concept, it is a concept I’d like to see widely adopted until it is a standard. Interactive shops should make things. Their own things. Clients should seek out and select interactive agencies that have leveraged product development. When this occurs, both client and agency win.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

Today is my last day at North. I’ve decided to leave my current position as Interactive Director to start my own business. The new business, an Interactive think tank with a focus on the experimental, is being developed and formed by myself and two other partners. In one short month we’ve gone from barely knowing each other to formally signing papers, creating our brand identity, designing our website, organizing business processes, locating and acquiring office space as well as the acquisition of new business. In short, it appears that we know how to get shit done. Instead of a long winded paragraph about our plans I’ve decided to break it down into some handy faqs. I’ll certainly be posting more as more developments occur, and as I can get some free time away from the madness that is the initial steps of creating a business. I’d like to thank the talented folks at North for the opportunities they afforded me, and moving me to the amazing city that Portland is. I wish them the best of luck and hope to work together in the future on a project basis.

Why would you start a new business with people I barley know, are you insane?
I’ve started a business before with close friends. I feel that a business can succeed or fail in either scenario. Each has it’s advantages and it’s disadvantages. Previous personal baggage vs. not knowing how to properly convey opinion to complete strangers. Therefore, the decision to dive into a business with strangers seems as logical to me as the alternative. That said, I indeed just may be insane. However, I seem to have found partners who fit the same diagnosis.

Where is your new space?
We are going to be located on the first floor of this building in the Pearl. Coming from Boston, where I lived and worked downtown, I’m excited to get back to a bit of my roots and the industrial feel of the location.

What is the name of your new venture?
We shall be called “The Good”.

What do you mean by experimental?
Interactive concepts that may not currently be widespread that we see as ubiquitous in the future. Some of my experiments here lean in that direction. We will also be focused on more ‘traditional’ interactive production such as mini sites, content management systems, development, design, online branding, social media and applications. Finally, time given, we’ll be creating our own software and applications which we hope to release to the public.

What new business have you closed?
These shall be revealed using traditional communications means. Meaning, we’ll be showing off the work on our site and across the many social media outlets we pepper.

What’s your url, let’s see the new site!
We have not completely settled on a domain and are in negotiations for one possibility that has been previously taken by a third party. The website has been partially designed but not developed. The Good is coming soon.

Who are these other two partners?
Jon MacDonald and partnerX*. Like myself, both have extensive experience and knowledge in the interactive domain. Both are also seemingly clean upstanding earthlings.

Why are you calling yourself a think tank?
We’ve gone with think tank in a response to industry changes. We feel it’s not ‘alright’ to call ourselves just a development shop, or just an agency, anymore. The industry has grown up a bit and people should take notice. People are taking notice. Interactive projects require more than just production. They require strategy, brand insight, technology chops blended with creative thinking. To use a political reference, they require someone to guide policy. We feel we are best suited to be the drivers of interactive policy.

More FAQ’s will be added here as I see fit. Thanks for reading!

*parnterX identity protected until he is free from his current position.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2566287&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=1&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1
Snow – Interactive Installation from chris teso on Vimeo. Commercial produced North.

Project Client

City of Portland Downtown Marketing Initiative in conjunction with North.

Project Goal

Create an outdoor reactive environment in which passersby could interact, based on their location and movements, with artists interpretations of snowfall in Portland.

Project Strategy and Equipment

Display – Custom made acrylic panels lined with photosensitive film built and erected to exact dimensions of installation window
Projection – Rear projection with flipped signal using a 5200 lumen Sanyo PDG-DXT10L Projector
Video Capture – Logitech QuickCam® Vision Pro
CPU – Mac Pro Quad
Application – Flash AS3
Industrial Design – Two large tarps sewn together to create light blocking canopy. Lining to seal off windows and acrylic. A shitload of Velcro.

Project Synopsis

As part of a larger campaign to brand Downtown Portland North was charged with creating an outdoor reactive environment in which passersby could interact, based on their location and movements, with artists interpretations of snowfall in Portland. Three traditional artists were commissioned by The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art to create their interpretation of snowfall in downtown Portland. These pieces were then transformed for use with my motion detection and tracking application built entirely in actionscript. The application was built to display 3 different scenes with randomly generated snowfall. The three scenes were set to rotate on a time interval. The application used motion detection to make the falling snowfall react and animate based on the location of an individuals movement. The application also incorporated and automated snapshot function that took a photo every 10 minutes and posted it to a private flickr account. This function was implemented solely for remote monitoring, ensuring the application was up and running. After going to the installation location and taking careful measurement of everything from window frame to projector distance, the installation was built and staged at North. We built a ‘to scale’ model of the window in the back of the office. This was necessary for accurate calibration of projector, and optimization of motion detection and tracking code. The staging was an extremely helpful and necessary step in eliminating early stage bugs such as projector calibration and camera positioning. We quickly learned the maximum distance for a USB signal, the proper use of DVI vs. DHMI to projector and the challenges of doing motion detection in every possible light range from complete darkness to bright sunshine. After testing stage was complete we moved the entire rig over to the installation spot located at 6th and Alder in Downtown Portland. We went about setting up a canopy to block out all extraneous light leak. The interior of the installation space was two stories of extremely large windows. The canopy we chose was a homemade compilation of two tarps strung up to the surrounding walls with rope. Since there was very expensive equipment residing under the canopy, the fear lingered of canopy failure collapsing down, resulting in devastating loss. We next set out to install the panels into the window frame. Since they were pre-cut to exact dimensions these flowed right in smoothly with only small light leaks needed to be sealed. We then hooked up the projector, cpu, camera, monitor, and application and set to testing. Testing in a staging environment is one thing. However, most tests are rendered moot when on-site. I quickly learned that reactive environments are just that, entirely dependent on their environment and all the challenges that come along with it. The motion detection is to run 24/7 for six weeks during all weather, lighting situations, and process location accurately with varying levels of distractions. Since the installation is located on an extremely busy downtown street corner, distractions ranged from traffic movement, pedestrians, bikers, storefront lights and weather. For testing purposes I built many functions that allows the system to be calibrated without actually going into the code, but rather using an external UI to update blurring, light detection levels, contrast, and other variables. After several days of calibration, code tweaks and testing the application has been running uninterrupted and has gained quality exposure for Downtown Portland. Many fine citizens of Portland have had a unique interactive experience, and have consequently spread kind words about the project. Furthermore, the project is a successful case study on the implementation of new technology and reactive medium into a larger branding campaign.

Project Challenges

Development – Create a motion detection application that worked in every possible light and weather condition.
Design – Making traditional raster art work work in a complex location detection application and animation.
Industrial Design – Create an environment that optimized presentation and functionality in varying environmental variables.

More information on the design and development process

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