Hello! Burin

Last week I attended Design Thinking Dallas at IMC². Overall, the event was pretty good. We had lunch, beer, and other free stuff. I think the tour was the best part of the event haha (thanks Mr. Capone!).

In my last post, I mentioned how some advertising agencies and marketing firms were slow to realize the potential of interactive media in their industry. Now I know who’s benefiting from that. IMC² really hit a niche, and they’re exploding by doing everything right.

The culture there is just amazing. Scooters in the halls, employees bringing their pets in to work with them, chairs & tables on the ceiling (upside-down room), and $1 “root” beer fridges goes to show how employee oriented the place is. I even saw a family-of-four in playing Nintendo Wii together there. They also have a culture club where people sign up for events and activities, like rock-climbing and biking, to promote life outside of the workplace.

Amazingly enough, they actually get stuff done.

Over the past couple of months or so, ALTA (Ad League at Texas Arlington) has been touring some ad agencies and not-so-ad agencies. Today we toured The Richards Group! The experience has been pretty enlightening.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that to these agencies, “the internet” is this magical medium that is exploding and bursting at the seams. Like, wow, it’s so awesome, it brings us all together like a nice bowl of chili. Ripe for the freaking picking. But only the people in the Dungeon of Doom (IT dept anyone?) manage anything to do with it. What?

Whether the companies outsource it to a web-dev shop or send it to their “interactive” department, the development and publication of a website seems to be totally separate from the rest of the “campaign”. Yey for the red headed step-child of advertising :(

Come on guys! Web developers aren’t that scary. We can join the team! Not all of us speak English as a second language, or third, or fourth (after xhtml, css, javascript, and the like, of course!) like the other mysterious programmers.

I say we mingle. Mmm. Mingle.

P.S. Thanks Amanda and David!