I generally break the evolution of interactive marketing strategy development into four eras;

1)       The ‘hot sh*t’ era, other wise knows as the first bubble.  This is when every .com start up was an IPO away from glorious riches. Accountability, for both budget and strategies, took a back seat to industry buzz and popularity.  The money and BS flowed freely and everyone was trying to be the next one to cash in/out.

2)       The ‘we are a serious business, seriously’ era.  This is the void between the first bubble and then now ubiquitous Web 2.0 establishment where interactive agencies and ideas had to fight for credibility, and budget, to prove that online marketing was more than putting .com at the end of your name or asking for something ‘viral’ in the campaign.

3)       The ‘seat at the table’ era.  The bubble burst, we proved that interactive marketing could work, we had the metrics to prove it, and now we want to participate (even lead) the creation of marketing strategies and not just be the production shop building a cool website.

4)       The ‘what are you going to do for me online’ era.  This is the next big step for digital agencies.  We’ve gotten our seat at the strategy table and now we are expected to do something that pure play digital agencies haven’t been equipped to do…think like traditional marketers.

This last era is where the simple questions start to get complicated.

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I first came across the Matterial paper line during an open studio party, over the course of the night a good portion of the crew at Matter was hard at work, printing and packaging up some of their goods for the Matterial line, there were samples of each offering displayed. The entire range of products are designed, printed, and packaged in-house at the Matter studio. The line uses recycled paper, packaging, along with reused/repurposed elements. Other adornments are also done in-house, such as letterpress and the silk screening. It’s a pretty wild and energetic set-up, the products being produced as a result of it, are just as inspiring to draw in as they are to look at.

Outside of helping to organize your week, or simply helping you squeeze out that little burst of creative joy, Matterial also helps to draw the connection that we all share, in the products we consume and their direct impact on the local environment & economy. With these products the Matter studio has cranked out a body of work that is aesthetically pleasing & engaging, along the process of creating they have also managed in a small and unique way to do their part in contributing a solution to some of the larger issues we face today.

Check out the Matterial website for their line of consciously created tablets, drawing pads, composition books, and an assorted collection of other creative driven oddities & blunt objects!

Created by designers, for designers and other thinking persons.

Josh Wills, Creative

Although I’ve practiced my Oscar acceptance speech in the bathroom mirror a thousand times (”I can’t believe I’m the first one on stage to thank the Weinsteins”) I am fairly certain that this blog entry is as close as I’ll ever come to actually delivering that kind of speech to an audience.

For geeks like us, the Webby Awards are our version of the Academy Awards. This week texturemedia was honored to have two of the websites we produced win People’s Voice awards for the Webbys. Pentax Photo Gallery won in the Best Use of Photography category and King Tut won in the Events category. A third website, Politics West was an Honoree in the Politics category.

We are delighted to have clients like Pentax, AEG and the Denver Post that give us the opportunity to do really exciting work.

And in the case of Pentax Photo Gallery, we are also delighted to have an enthusiastic community of Pentax photographers who have contributed their art to make the site so visually rich.

It has taken hundreds of hours of work done by dozens of people to create these sites. I am certainly honored to be working among a group of hooligans as talented and dedicated as the bunch here at texturemedia.

I can hear the music playing. I think they’re pulling me offstage.

I’ll see you at the Vanity Fair party.

Dan Fox

The Olympic torch reached the top of the world Thursday in the hands of a Chinese mountaineering team. Political controversy aside, what’s really impressive is the investment by China’s state broadcaster CCTV, who apparently built a television studio at basecamp, then several relay locations throughout the ascent. All in the effort to broadcast it live. A live broadcast is cool, but a live interactive broadcast via the internet would have been even cooler. After all, it’s a global event, right?

Here’s the full article.

David Schell

If you’ve ever spent time with an interactive agency defining a digital experience (website, integrated campaign, web application, etc), you’ve most likely seen the results of several developed personae - fictitious representations that encapsulate targeted, prioritized user types. Historically, personae have been touted as a key deliverable when developing any user-centered product. At texturemedia, we certainly subscribe to this belief and have found them effective in allowing clients and project team members to “think like an end-user.” (more…)

These seemingly perpetual issues make client management challenging.

To address these challenges we have several options we can employ. We can bury issues. We can solve them before the client finds out. We can address them indirectly by getting some unrelated quick wins, building credits elsewhere. We can even deflect and make excuses. To us, these approaches are tired and they only push out risk. In the end they do a disservice to the client and agency relationship.

How about trying something new?

Be a good partner for your client. Be honest with your client. Even if it means the relationship may hit rock bottom.

Hitting rock bottom with a client means that all issues and potential issues have been flushed out, documented, discussed and understood. It’s big bang with nuance. And while it may seem risky and unattractive to disclose unknown issues to clients, the reward of proactive transparency is significant. It builds trust, credibility and partnership on both sides.

After hitting rock bottom the only way to go is upwards.

Ivan Perez-Armendariz

www.thebeastisback.com

Matt Schreiber, Creative

As I wrote in an earlier review of Google’s “iGoogle” home page feed aggregator, my biggest issue with the tool was its limited design options (”themes”). For those that remember the earlier days of iGoogle, a max of about 10 themes existed, all of which were rather campy and poorly designed. While I’ve always admired Google for its ability to show restraint in design (and therefore promote simplicity and ease of use), I feared that these new themes were sending a signal: Google was headed in the direction of AOL, or, design for the masses. (more…)

In particular, Flex 3 and ActionScript 3 have made it possible for we programming geeks to create visually rich internet applications using a strongly typed, object oriented programming language and a decent markup language. And the AIR runtime engine has enabled us to extend these type of applications to the desktop using the same programming languages and skill sets.

Now that Flex 3 is open sourced I expect we’ll see even more progress in terms of documentation and API’s in Flex 4 (code named Gumbo).

But this isn’t meant to be cheerleading camp. So here’s my hint of the day for flex developers wanting to create RIA applications. Both Cairngorm and PureMVC are strong frameworks for creating Model/View/Controller applications in Flex and Actionscript. But if you are creating something relatively simple, both of these frameworks can add unnecessary complexity and overhead to your application.

For a simpler application, I highly recommend Tom Bray’s EasyMVC recipe (unfortunately you have to log into Adobe to view his screencast). Just to keep you confused, there is a second actionscript framework calling itself EasyMVC written by Simeon Bateman. I prefer Tom Bray’s explanation and approach. He refers to his EasyMVC as a recipe. There are no source code files to download, only a explained methodology for how to structure a well organized application. It’s also a nice primer for Cairngorm development for anyone interested in learning more about that framework.

- Dan Fox, VP of Technology

We’re all familiar with the ideas of backwards compatibility and graceful degradation. Now it’s time to embrace the idea of progressive enhancement.

Like backwards compatibility and graceful degradation, progressive enhancement is not a new idea. At its simplest, progressive enhancement means that a system will provide a base level of performance, with higher performance provided for clients which can handle it. But the base level of performance must be such that it provides everything necessary to achieve the goals of the system.

For the web, progressive enhancement means providing a basic level of content for everyone, even the most primitive browsers, and then adding in more content (like multimedia) and capabilities (like fancy Flash navigation or form auto-complete) for those who want it and have the resources for it.

Progressive enhancement is surprisingly easy to apply to web projects. The industry best practices of semantic markup and separation of presentation from content provide a great foundation, and from there you can apply some simple techniques to progressively enhance that base. AJAX techniques, for example, are excellent choices for progressive enhancement, though it’s very important not to rely on AJAX as the sole provider of necessary function.

The biggest myth about progressive enhancement is that it severely constrains design and creativity, requiring a sort of “least common denominator” approach to producing websites. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. With a solid foundation of semantic markup and standards compliance, it’s easy to use progressive enhancement to create amazing websites with rich interaction and multimedia capabilities.

The benefits of progressive enhancement come directly from the basic level of content it provides, which is aimed at everyone. Progressive enhancement assures that even simple user agents can access your content and parse it correctly, which assures accurate search engine placement as well as a basic level of accessibility. And you’re still providing a top-notch interactive experience for the majority of users who have modern browsers and the resources to handle it.

- Jon Reid, Interface Development