Kyle Shannon and Chan Suh, the founders of Agency.com, attribute the success of their
award-winning online marketing company to honesty and plain speaking.
In 1994, when Web shops and interactive divisions were sprouting up all over
New York and lauding the Internet's virtues at maximum hype, Shannon and
Suh landed prize accounts with the likes of Sports Illustrated, Time, Inc.,
GTE, and Met Life because they dared to ask prospective clients the question
"Why?" as in "Why do you want to have a Web site?"
Then, even more than now, the answer was not obvious. In the mad rush to
the Web, companies were motivated more by fear of being left behind than
any expected benefit. So these two guys had a lot of nerve, asking
corporate executives who were already eager to pay big money for a Web site
if they really knew why they wanted it.
But, Suh tells me, "This hit a nerve among clients. We faced the
return-on-investment issue head on. We weren't overly technical, and we put
the business objective first. They knew what we said made sense."
Shannon says that being honest about what they could and couldn't do led
their clients to trust them, and over the years their relationships have
continued and deepened: "We didn't come in with preconceived notions of
what should be done, instead it was about exploration and what we could do
with them. . . . I like our clients. I like hanging out with them. Of all
the things we've done with this company, I'm most proud of the relationships
we've forged with our clients."
But what was the answer to the why question? According to Suh, "This has
changed over time. First it was because the Web was a curiousity, and it
could turn into something. Now we're discovering that we're helping
clients prepare for the coming world of digital commerce--when the
traditional value chain will lose its intermediaries and the makers of
goods and services will deal directly with consumers."
Agency.com's business has already changed from a first year (1995) in which
90% of their revenue came from implementation--coding and production--to
this year in which they expect that half of their revenue will come from
thinking and analyzing, doing things like audience research, product
planning, distribution
analysis, efficiency analysis, and business process consulting.
Shannon came to New York from Penn State as an actor, and his experience in
theater included founding and running a New York theater company, playing
token roles in TV and film, and writing seven feature-length screenplays.
Instead of waiting tables he supported himself by "Mac-geeking"--doing
desktop publishing work in the advertising industry. As a subscriber to
Stacy Horn's seminal New York online service Echo, he discovered the Web in 1993.
When he realized that he could create things in this medium, and that they
would be visible all over the world, he was inspired to found, with his wife
Gabrielle, Urban Desires, one of
the Web's first real art and culture publications.
"The first article written in a print publication about Urban Desires was in
Liberacion, a Paris newspaper. This gave me a sense of the
tremendous power of this medium--that I could create a Web publication in my
Brooklyn living room and it would have an impact on intellectual life in
Paris," said Shannon.
About the same time he was starting Urban Desires, Kyle became interested
in forming an organization for the growing community of people who were
working in this new medium. His motives where unashamedly selfish, there
was so much to learn that it didn't make sense for everyone to keep
reinventing the wheel.
A gathering place for people with the same problems and needs would serve
him and the entire emerging New York new media industry. This led him to
found the World Wide Web Artists Consortium
(WWWAC)--an organization that now operates a listserv with over 2,000
subscribers around the world and hosts bi-weekly open meetings attended by
some of the leading lights in the business.
It was through the WWWAC that Shannon met Chan Suh, then a marketing
executive with Time-Warner. Suh was responsible for authoring a strategy
that introduced the idea of putting Time-Warner's magazines on the Web.
Despite management skepticism, he created VibeOnline in 1994, which quickly became one
of the most popular 'zine's on the Internet. Time-Warner later invited him
to join the original group that conceived and created Pathfinder.
Suh had 10 years of marketing experience in the media industry, Shannon had
the creative talent to found Urban Desires and bring together the WWWAC.
Together they had passion and the belief that the Web would change the
world. They put up $80 to open two bank accounts and founded Agency.com in
December 1994.
In true American dream fashion, they started working out of Kyle's
apartment. Now they have 90 employees at offices in New York's Silicon
Alley and London. Current sites include: the American Express University
and Cards sites, Lehman Brothers, Lucent Technologies, MetLife, Nike, the
Sun Java
Workshop, and the Jackie Robinson Foundation.
What does Shannon think about the future of the Web?
It's a participatory medium, that's the key. What does that mean? I don't
really
know, but kids will get it before we do. Twelve-year-olds are growing up
on this medium, and they don't see it as a separate thing. For people of
our generation it's still something out there somewhere.
People expect that broadband will turn it into television, but sending TV
over the Internet is not the point; you can do a lot of mind-blowing stuff
over a
28.8 connection--like interacting with your TV. In the end people
don't care about the Net itself, they care about what it enables them to
do, i.e. communicate with others.
He thinks that Java, Shockwave, and stuff like that shouldn't be used
gratuitiously.
My response to them is--Who really cares? If you go up to
someone on the street and say "What do you think about Shockwave?", they're
going to say "Huh?" If you look at television today, no one talks about
the satellite transmission protocols, but everyone talks about "Seinfeld."
As an agency we absolutely have to know about all these things.
If you asked me if Java is ready for prime time I'd say not quite.
Shockwave is getting there, but it's still too complicated for the user to
install. But
when we're talking about what we're going to create for this medium, we
rarely start with the technology. We always start with what do we want to
do and determine which technology is the best way to do it. The
technologies are tools. Chan always says we are technology
agnostic.
What's Shannon's favorite technology? "White boards. That's where ideas
come to life, and it's all about ideas."
