Barbairan Group, Fantasy Interactive, Huge, Big Spaceship, R/GA and Organic all have non-flash sites.

Why isn’t Flash the best platform for an interactive agency to present their work? If you look around these days it seems that all of the leading interactive agencies (from my perspective in NYC) are switching over their Flash sites to rich-but-not-flash sites (AJAX, XHTML, etc.). I did it. A lot of my designer friends’ did it. But why? Have we, as rich-media/interactive/digital designers, fallen out of love with the once dominant platform? I kind of have, and I think my reasons are the same as the interactive powerhouses pictured above. It essentially boils down to the ability to tell and share your story.

With and all-Flash site you can certainly tell a story effectively. The level of interactivity and immersion draws the user into the experience like no other rich media platform. But doing so asks a lot of the user from a time perspective: transitions, load times, learning to interact with new paradigms, etc. Now with all of the open source javaScript tool-kits out there you can achieve a decent level of immersion and interactivity with little negative impact to the user from a time and learnability standpoint. So with an HMTL portfolio site you have most of the immersion with little or no negative impact. It’s a safer choice.

Because of the fragmented-by-design digital footprints we leave, aggregating posts, shouts, tweets, images and videos into one filtered and cohesive experience is extremely important to tell a story. It’s beneficial to share not only your experiences (as an agency/agency employee) but also to show the impact of your work (think CP+B). Flash does not do this well. If I want to fire off a quick news item or blog post highlighting a YouTube video of someone using a product I designed or a testimonial of customer-impact of a campaign I executed, I’d have to write that explicit use-case into the framework of the Flash portfolio site I’m executing. Not so with HTML – the web 2.0 APIs are already there by design. Therefore executing an agency’s portfolio site in HTML assures that no matter what new platform or API takes hold, snipptes, widgets, blogrolls and cross-links can always be sucked in.

I also think that how something is executed should tell a lot about what the thing is. It has to do with tone-of-voice as it relates the platform (not just the design). And with a Flash portfolio, seeing the load bar, the user’s first impression is to prepare for something. It’s loading. Wait for it. It’s gonna be dope. But portfolio sites should be simple and easily understandable. Your work should showcase all of the richness you claim to be able to deliver, the site need not be a portfolio piece in of itself. And while the user is waiting for the thing to animate and initialize itself, the user has to make a mental commitment to go on the ride that you’ve prepared for them. You’re asking something of them. Whereas an HTML site doesn’t carry with it that sense of commitment. I never thought I’d advocate this, especially considering the numerous Flash portfolios I’ve executed for myself over the years, but right now – where interactive is at – Flash is out.

Stamen keeps impressing with the narratives they’re able to put together by visualizing and manipulating data in new, interesting and engaging ways.

When going to a trade-show it’s natural to feel hyped about the products on display. Every car show I go to I leave convinced that now is the right time to buy that 2-seater I’ve always wanted – but it never is – it’s just the hype. Trade shows have been honing the craft of making you want what they’re hocking for years and they’re quite adept at it. The thing is, Adobe MAX was a little different. Of course I left wanting to run out and buy CS4, but not for shop-therapy or wanting something shiny or new.

When Apple launched their new Mac Books I wanted a new one – for about a minute. Then I looked down at my year-old MacBook with 4 gigs of RAM and thought how silly wanting a new one was when the one I have is bad-ass. Not the case with CS4. There are actually new tools to be used, new and easier workflows for creation and faster performance. We live in Adobe products and we make our livelihoods using their tools. Upgrades are key. The following is my recap of my thoughts at Adobe MAX this year:
Day 1 Keynote

• Flash 10. They’re gunning hard at making the Flash Player as richly interactive as possible. They showed a 3D cloth model with video playing on it and the presenter fully deformed it in real-time with physics. Minimal pixelation. Looked amazing.
• Air 1.5. Now Air is getting special. They demoed an application by the New York Times and International Herald Tribune of a newspaper/newsreader. Some highlights: Full copy-flowing from linked text-fields in Air (finally!). Better multi-language and font support. I missed the particulars, but they greatly improved their text rendering engine somehow.Since Air 1.5 now runs on Linux and most MIDs run Linux, this app seemed to have a smart way of re-laying itself out based on screen size. Not that difficult to implement 3 or more page templates based on browser size, but I loved the thoughtfulness of the output with regard to screen display.
• Hobnox. OMFG. Just play with it. That’s all I have to say.
• California Museum. Maria Shriver showed up to talk about their site. It looks like a content-browsing front-end with nothing too new in terms of content display. Maps, videos, audio, text, etc. They’re called Research Trails. What’s cool is that for educators, you can build a curriculum for your students and have a prep-center right there in the site. So students can take tests, write essays and then print out their “trail”, which is physically mapped to a route in real-life. They didn’t show this, but I think the next logical step for the California Museum is to make some location-based mobile site/app so that as user’s walk around certain cities in California their mobile provides information about points of interest. Its a push vs. pull mentality.
• acrobat.com/photoshop.com now have APIs & Web-Services for developers.
• Tour de Flex. An Air application for download that provides code samples and live filters for flex developers. If I were a flex developer I’d be VERY excited about this.
• Salesforce showed up and talked about their SAS/PAS services on AppExchange.
• Adobe Cocomo. Social Media web-services. Its a PAS for flex developers to add social components to their projects: shared whiteboards, crowd-sourcing, etc.
• They spoke about a shift in computer usage: mobile now outsells all others (PCs/Laptops/MIDs) therefore mobile is adobe’s #1 priority. People consume internet on mobiles when they don’t own or have access to a PC. Air is their mobile content player platform. Flash lite seems like it’s being phased out although they didn’t mention that. Air for iPhone isn’t ready but AIR for WinMo and Android are. They demoed some apps. Looks like it ran OK.

10 After Effects Tips for Designers Who Use Flash.

This wasn’t the session I had expected. The presenter was extremely knowledgeable about AfterEffects and could have no doubt gone on for hours dropping some crazy knowledge on me but I was expecting to hear tips and tricks for integrating AE more tightly in flash. Sure he covered alpha track-mattes for screen-wide wipes, but beyond that it was mostly AE tricks. I guess I was looking for more idiosyncratic tips from someone who builds heavily video’d flash sites daily (think Big Spaceship). He seemed like he lived more in AE than Flash. Some takeaways were:

• Art Beats sells clean stock video footage of smoke and explosions that are good for use as track-mattes.
• The Wiggler is your new friend. I saw this guy make a star-field out of nothing but the wiggler and some period characters. Very cool.
• Expressions add code to your AE movies. He demonstrated how to use randomization to make repeated clips look different and less robotic.

The Holistic Design Process (by Ivan Todorov of Blitz).

This session was pretty much what I was looking for – a very process-centric look at producing and project management.

• He mentioned that for new projects, discipline leads from Blitz get matched with their counterpart in the client-side. He called it matching “Furbys”.
• A sales lead isn’t considered a sales lead until there is a $ amount attached.
• Place “–” before empty folders in the folder structure.
• He showed an awesome project-life-cycle info-graphic that everyone at Blitz has access to.
• They have adopted MS Share-Point for their intranet. I wonder if it’s better than Confluence.
• Training Videos: They took 2 weeks to produce training videos for every discipline so that new-hires all start with the same requisite base-line of knowledge about their process ,how to set up files, where to put things, etc. I think that’s a fantastic idea although I think we might have more of a shift in the knowledge base-line more rapidly than Blitz. But it’s worth entering a discussion about this. I can see integrating the videos with the new Adobe Configurator (more on that later).

Introduction to Adobe Thermo – Now Called Flash Catalyst.

This is a big one, Adobe has been listening to us say this for years now: we’re not just segmented into graphic designers and web developers, we’re more like 3 segments (if not more): Graphic Designer, Designer/Developer Hybrid and Developer. Adobe understands that developers are no more in a position to motion-direct interactions and interfaces than pure graphic designers are. Enter Flash Catalyst. Fc is a rapid prototyping tool for Creative Technologists (AKA Hybrid Designer/Flash) can use to import PSDs, add interaction styles and interface motion to, then hand off to Flex developers. Projects from Thermo get saved out as Flex projects using a new FXG file format thereby making round-tripping projects easier. Fc makes it easy to connect to Web-Services and APIs galore (Flickr, etc.) to sync-up with server-side data for richer, more accurate prototypes.

Playful Design.

This was by far the coolest session for me. The two Creatives that gave this session are individuals I greatly admire. Gaining insight into their process of creation was exactly what i was looking for. Marcos Weskamp and Remon Tijssen really blew me away with their process at XD (Adobe’s experimental design lab). It’s literally all about playing in Flash. They seem to receive a brief and begin by with visualizing the data-set. Then they add interactivity and refine from there. They showed some early prototypes of Newsmap, Spectra, S-W-H, etc. What struck me was that their early prototypes were really studies into very high-level concepts like 3D chips flying through space, text-input as navigation and visualizing very large data-sets. There was no polish at this stage. They then showed the different iterations they took to arriving at their final destination. It was like they “comped” in Flash. Totally foreign way of thinking but how can you argue with their results? Takeaways:

• Index – XD @ Adobe, their internal design group.
• Born Magazine, The Smell of Roses at Night – beautiful.

Day 2 Keynote.

• Adobe User Groups (groups.adobe.com) – I MUST become more involved. It’s silly that I’m not. It should be mandatory to go.
• Thermo/Flash Catalyst can do some nice out-of-the-bod 3D stuff like motion and transitions but it’s very buggy. Not ready for prime-time.
• The Flash Client 10 can connect media streams from one browser directly to another without server by creating a social mesh.
• Dreamweaver CS4 has a live JS toolkit tool palette. Users can now grab live AJAX code and slug it into a widget within Dreamweaver for a live preview.

Air Boot Camp. 3 hours of WTF is going on and all I have to show for it is a chrome-less cross-platform executable application. Wait, that’s freakin’ cool. I just wish I understood how it’s made a little better.

End of Day 2: Sneaks.

• Flash Player – to – Player media streaming.
• Some crazy image compositing tool demoed by some Greek guy. He’s a genius. This thing actually knocks out any background no matter how complex nondestructively, so that you can place the image anywhere on your canvas and you have seamless edge-quality.
• Video tool for auto-creation of metadata. Essentially as a video plays metadata is logged for:
• Face recognition queue points
• overall color tone values of the frames
• whenever “movement” happens (think of security camera footage that has nothing new for hours on end only to have short bursts of motion when the burglar shows up)
• Auto transposing of audio speech to text.
• This has so many applications. Pretty soon the machines will be making our content for us.
• Photosynth/SeaDragon-like application. It was cool how the software found ways to stitch seemingly incongruous images together, but I really don’t see this going beyond a cool slide-show plug-in commercially.

Building 3D Environments in Photoshop

Ok. It’s here. Photoshop can now do 3D. Not just importing models and surface painting. You can create a scene of multiple objects and lights and then render out an animation. Wow. So for all of those micro-sites that require a 3D house or trees or a car or whatever to slide a little bit in perspective as a transition, our software solution pipeline just got infinitely easier. One tool. Done. Highlights:

• You can drill into the texture map while painting and toggle on/off the wireframe-map of the object. This will increase the accuracy of painting the object’s texture.
• You can composite multiple objects/lights into a 1-camera scene.
• Can render using ray-trace.
• Sketch-up is a free 3D modeler. So is Blender.
• Adobe acrobat supports the 3D object from photoshop as a live object. Meaning you can open Acrobat and spin the 3D model right there in the page. You can also embed the motion in Acrobat so what you’ve just animated is viewable.
• Export to any popular video file format.
• High quality 3D models will become the new “hot” stock item. Mark my words.
• There is a new auto stitch feature in Photoshop CS4 for you to create full 360 panoramas from multiple photographs.
• Different camera lenses are supported in the 3D camera.

Photoshop Deep Dive

The geeky highlights:

• Direct upload and packaging from Adobe Bridge to a web gallery. Easily make client-review areas from an image collection in bridge.
• Change brushes on the fly with option + control + click. Hardness with option + control + command + click-and-drag.
• Download pixel-bender plug in and use with open GL in photoshop. You can also download and install other plug-ins from photoshop.com to extend photoshop. These extensions are just a flash/flex file that slugs right into the application.
• Edit camera RAW properties in nondestructively in Adobe Bridge.
• Better filtering and image-set-creation in bridge. Also a new carousel view that allows you to whittle-down your selection visually.
• You can warp smart objects now with bezier warp-maps (like a cloth).
• Acrobat connect now supports live screen-sharing from within the Photoshop IDE!
• Adobe Configurator is live on Adobe Labs. Configurator allows you to create any tool palette from any tools available in the entire Photoshop tool-kit. You can also include web content and video. Meaning I can create a palette that has the move tool, some color swatches, a you-tube video and the 3D tools if I so wanted. Then I can download the custom palette and load it into photoshop and use it like any other palette. But the real trick comes when you think about training. Now educators can create a how-to video on youtube and package that with a custom palette which includes all of the tools necessary to complete that tutorial. Lynda.com will not be the same. You will also see agency-specific palettes for internal training and mentorship.

Introduction to AS3.

It’s all about the Class-Path, no more “_” before attributes (like alpha), small “v” for “void” and passing even stricter data-Types in functions. We ended just as we got to external classes which just happened to be exactly what I needed help with. Then again it was the last session of MAX and my mind was mush. Maybe it was for the best.

So that’s it. That’s my recap. As I was leaving the conference I thought if I didn’t know Adobe was also a serious player in the prosumer video-editing software market, I would think they were only a web-software company. Hey, with a limited amount of resources you have to make tough decisions. I’m glad Adobe is going in the direction they’re going with their web content creation tools. They really seem poised to raise the bar for all of our web-experiences. Globally. Adobe, keep pushing the envelope and we’ll keep running out an d buying your software the next day.

We might as well brew a pot of coffee – we’ll be here a while.

Adobe has made great strides in recent years to eliminate application crashes in their Mac suite of applications. Remember running CS/CS2 in Rosetta and Illustrator simply shutting off when you used the pathfinder – and viola you’re back at the desktop and out an hour of work because you forgot to Apple-S? Ya well Adobe on Macs is about where it was on PCs under CS1 – your machine will think really hard for a really long time – you may lose fidelity in your OS GUI – meaning some panels will go white and not refresh until Adobe is done thinking – but 99 times out of 100, if you wait long enough, the application will recover.

Back to the studio…

(speaking in a sarcastic tone) “Dude, I can’t wait for CS4” I hear from the guy sitting next to me. “Can you say application bloat?” he says.

Mmm. Application bloat? I don’t know about anyone else, but I feel like I actually use 90% of the functionality built into Photoshop. I’m in Photoshop every day, all day, and only leave the application to perform more specialized vector tasks in Illustrator or to work in Flash – something I’m doing increasingly less of as I specialize more as a Visual Design Project Lead. So is the software bloated? Maybe for some – but then again maybe not.

Microsoft has been encountering this feature-set critical-mass issue for quite a while. On one hand their engineers (and marketing folks no doubt) keep finding new (and sometimes) useful features to add to the considerable list of capability MS Office already offers. Aside from being a reason to shell out for another upgrade round, these new features and interface paradigms (Office 2007 toolbar ribbon) are sometimes a useful and welcome addition to modernize their software offering, but they come at a hefty price. Lots of overhead is needed to do seemingly simple things like WRITE A DOCUMENT. It is for this reason buzzword (Adobe’s web-top document writer) and Google docs have gained so much traction.

Are there lessons that Adobe can learn from the Microsoft analogy? Yes, but first let’s look at where Adobe is with their software offering. Right now Adobe controls the media pipeline from content creation to the delivery on your computer screen. And soon we will be getting AIR for mobile phones which (should) deliver a similar level of content richness to your mobile as exists on your computer. Adobe also runs the show in the print world, owning font libraries, post script profiles and color calibration configurations that are industry standard. Professional video is a slightly different animal, but for the prosumer segment Adobe After Effects is THE motion graphics software of choice. About the only software Adobe doesn’t own the authoritative voice on is nonlinear video editing (people seem to still like Final Cut over Priemere). Adobe’s move to CS4 also marks an unprecedented level of 3D control in their applications – an actual 3D software offering is only a software-generation or two away. So adding features and risking “bloat” is clearly in Adobe’s foreseeable future. But how should Adobe manage that risk going forward?

With so much computing functionality going into the cloud, hardware and software are becoming more specialized. Right now the appliance model is taking hold for mostly mobile usage. Net-books and Mobile Internet Devices are defining a whole new model of computing on-the-go. On the flip-side gaming rigs are a consistent hot-seller. What’s left out is the content creation segment. We’re (I’m a content creator) all supposed to choose from the one-size-fits-all Macs, Dells, HPs and others for the machines we spend most of our waking hours interfacing with. But that’s all about to change with Adobe’s move (in CS4) to take advantage of GPU bandwidth to accelerate the UI responsiveness of their applications. This move will mark a shift for content creators to demand their own specialized computing appliances, machines markedly different than the generalist machines sold to suits and the general public. It used to be RAM and CPU that differentiated one content-creation box form another. Now we’ve added the graphics pipeline/subsystem to core hardware points of differentiation from one computing experience to another. I’m reminded of the SGI boxes of the late ‘90s that were THE price of entry for 3D animators to adequately perform their trade. Are we next in line for the appliance-computer model to make a comeback?

I think so – if Adobe thought of their application suite as something of an OS. And I think it wold be a good move on Adobe’s part to embrace this course correction because it will address the looming beast of software bloat – it will be Adobe’s way of enacting a certain degree of “bloat-control”. Here’s how.

Remember Mac OS 7/8/9? Remember when the OS booted up you would see certain extensions that the OS initialized for use (they looked like puzzle pieces on the loading screen)? Why isn’t every panel in the Adobe UI loaded on an as-needed basis? Whether a camera in After Effects or a vector manipulation filter in Illustrator, at a certain point the core of the Adobe content creation UI model is a canvas, tool palettes and a timeline. I’ve often thought about why I need to go from Photoshop to Illustrator to get a line with a stroke on it for an incomplete, non-closed vector shape. Unless I’m missing a very obvious technique in photoshop, if I want to create a bezier curve and apply a stroke to it I can’t do that in Photoshop – even though I can create a complete vector shape in photoshop and have my choice of stroke options. With the Adobe OS, what I’m describing is a very small footprint application base and the ability to load functionality/modules on an as-needed basis.

To understand why this does not happen we need to look back to my Photoshop example. If Adobe made Photoshop too feature-packed it would cannibalize Illustrator sales. And if Illustrator had pagination it would be InDesign and there would be no need to sell that either. The disaggregated software experience worked for Adobe – up ‘till now. Adobe’s software offering is growing so robust, and their control of the content creation pipeline so complete, that they need to look to another model for what the future will look like precisely because there no longer exists a sensible explanation for why Photoshop does not allow me to create a non-closed vector shape with a stroke – other than software bloat. Enter the case for an aggregated experience – with a twist.

Invoking the cloud computing model once again we see Sales Force making quite a profit form the metered Software as Service/Platform as Service (SaS/PaS) model. Can Adobe do the same? Imagine the Adobe footprint/OS as a (relatively) low cost software that bootstraps the ability to use other Adobe content creation modules at a metered rate – let’s say yearly for instance – with an integrated way to dynamically load modules from the cloud, as needed/wanted to your local machine through a subscription service. As a content creator I benefit because only loading the modules I’m going to use at that time (if I’m animating in Flash I do not need 3D cameras from After Effects loaded) saves me from beach-balls (on a Mac) and allows me to create content appropriate in proportion to the power of the rig I’m using (laptop vs. desktop/on the road vs. in my studio). As a software vendor Adobe wins because they get a constant stream of revenue from subscribers and they allow for a la carte customization of their software environment which fosters a sense of personalization and responsiveness to a user’s need (good for PR). Not to mention the benefits of instant software upgrades and all user’s working off the same version of their applications.

This is where the appliance computer model really comes into focus. Adobe could team up with hardware manufacturers to create specialized rigs sold for certain uses – the way they package their industry-specific software suites today. Or they can start to manufacture their own – heck I’m in Adobe software literally all day and only escape it for email/web browsing – both take place in a browser. Why do I need anything else other than the Adobe OS? Either way, I hate the beach-ball in OSX (Save for Web kill anyone else other than me? I thought so), I hate having to purchase three different softwares (and have them running simultaneously) when I use one 90% and the other two 5% each and software bloat I hate the most. The aggregated approach/Adobe OS solves all three while making good business sense for both Adobe and the consumer.

 

Sure, the “obstructionist” argument I’m advocating can’t really be taken to the interactive space (unless you’re making a critical statement about interstitials – which I’m not), but I feel that the type of growing up Advertising needs to do to survive in the ATL space needs to be carried over to the BTL space in order for a far more meaningful connection between the consumer and the brand to take place. Let me explain. Some of the most memorable online experiences are the ones where the user is offered something. A service. The service could be only tangentially related to the brand or its core values. What is important is that the experience is “sticky” (and, obviously, it goes without saying that there is an experience there to begin with). It isn’t enough anymore to reach the savvy consumer with a pretty design and catchy copy and have that stand alone in the interactive space. You need to interact in the interactive space.

Building a more whiz-bang, zippy, masky photo gallery of your product (I’m looking at you Motorola Razr 2) just won’t hold my attention anymore either. OK, they’re pictures. Now what are you going to do with them? Did you make some sort of photo-manipulation application right here in the Flash site? Should I be sending them to someone? Submitting my own? Anything? Oh, I’m just supposed to look at them? Next.

Likewise, building a site that acts as one very long ATL commercial doesn’t do it either. The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet campaign comes to mind. It was a very long, very well-made, very cool video that was put online with minimal interaction. A passive experience better suited to the medium of TV, or a content channel on other media serving websites like You Tube. Making a website whose primary purpose is to simply play a video is like using a tank to buy groceries – sure you can do it – but you could also be using it for so much more.

So what is needed is not just more interaction in the interactive space – although that’s a part of it, but more purposeful interaction in the interactive space. What is needed is a brand that understands that in order for any brand to stand out in the interactive space in the consumer’s mind, it needs to be seen as a friend to the consumer. It needs to offer the consumer/user something. A service. Essentially a brand’s interactive arm needs to atone for the sins of ATL, to help dig the brand out of the hole ATL has put it in.

I can think of a few such examples executed by Firstborn Multimedia, that accomplished this. The first was Nationwide’s “Life Moves at You Fast” site where users could submit a special “moment” of theirs in the form of a camera phone picture or digital image and have it displayed in the Reuters board in Times Square. Another was the Ford Motor Company + American Cancer Society, Mother’s Day breast cancer-awareness quilt – where users could send a heartfelt message of strength to their loved-ones (as well as donate to the ACS). And possibly the most successful, the Borders Giftmixer 2000, where users could quickly (and entertainingly) receive holiday-gift recommendations from the vast catalogue of Borders products. There are so many more from all over the interactive spectrum, some that take interactive out of the box of the computer and into other realms. Crispin Porter’s Burger King X-Box game comes to mind as an example of this. Others use installation and the interactive space to work in concert. Whether the final product is entertainment as in the Axe campaign (pranking your friend with a hot letter from a mysterious woman), or an actual service (like shoe-customization on Nike-ID), the point is that there is a final product in the end to be offered.

On a personal note to the CD making the next EPK: Enough with “Cast & Crew Bios”, “Episode Synopsis”, etc. If I want to know what happened in Season 1 I’m going to google it and your little stand-alone Flash site isn’t going to show up in the results. And Cast Bios are only in there because publicists are nut-jobs. Just say “no”. Seriously. More sometimes isn’t more. Distill down the overall creative arc in the movie/show and execute that simply with a high degree of user-involvement. Let interested, tuned-in, turned-on users be your word-of-mouth. But begin with a site that eschews the “usual EPK” approach and does something different. Please.

I think many agencies understand this need. I think they possess the vision to understand what needs to be done, but they lack the will to push back against the ho-hum briefs and say “no” or at least say “not unless we do it this way”. Very infrequently can memorable experiences be created by a limited team with limited time on a limited budget. Its the old triangle of “Fast, Cheap or Well: Choose 2″. In addition, now that iPods play flash movies, iPhones are connected directly to YouTube, xBox has made their SDK publicly available and google and flickr continue to leave their APIs tantalizingly open for mash-ups, the technical skill required to orchestrate this symphony of languages, protocols and delivery methods is becoming harder and harder to master. Therefore it is making the decisions from business leaders that choose the “cheap and fast” approach all that more glaringly obviously driven by quick turnover and high profits because there are so few individuals that, given such a limited project cycle and budget, can pull something truly great out of their ass under those circumstances.

The solution may lie in a simple shift of semantics. Instead of “websites” maybe we should think of the product of our work in the interactive space as “applications”. Maybe briefs should request “experiences” not “communications”. Or the solution may lie in simply being able to command the respect and leeway from your client to craft a memorable experience. I’m also not sure the food-chain as it exists now works either: Client –> Large ATL/BTL Agency –> Interactive Shop, given that by the time the people with the most experience in crafting the final product are involved, key decisions and expectations are already set (there lies the paradox of direct-with-client vs. through-a-larger-agency which is a whole essay for another time). This is NOT some coombaya-lets-all-hold-hands-and-make-it-better manifesto. It’s an argument for why consumers and brands would both be done a service if a few key steps in the process of making interactive communications were changed and the people with the vision and the training were given greater control. I’ll never forget something Jim, co-owner of now-defunct Zowie Media once told me, “You don’t walk into the doctor’s office and tell him his prescription decision is wrong. You shut up and do what he says. He’s the doctor.” I wish he had said that to a group of top Brand-Managers.