Commentary

Agency Profile: FCBi

just a few short years, the interactive group within FCB Direct has become a leading player with a prestigious client list.
Two and a half years ago, when John Keck signed on as media director of the San Francisco office for then FCB Direct, a True North company, he set about building a best-of-class interactive group that could meet the needs of such high profile clients as 3Com and Seagate.

“At the time, all of the interactive shops were just kicking butt against the big agencies; we hadn’t gotten it together, so we had credibility issues. Clients didn’t really believe that we did interactive,” says Keck, an 18-year advertising veteran with previous stints at Young & Rubicam, a number of midwestern firms, and Ogilvy & Mather Direct, where he worked with its nascent web group. Today, Keck thinks the pendulum has definitely swung the other way, with the market favoring established agencies with their own interactive groups or entities over exclusively interactive shops. And the San Francisco outpost of FCBi, as it is now known—the interactive group within FCB (an Interpublic company following the recent merger with True North)—has established itself as a leading interactive player, with a prestigious client list that includes Compaq, Taco Bell, Janus, Siebel, and Microsoft’s UltimateTV.

Being able to offer an integrated approach to online and offline campaigns is one of FCBi’s key strengths, Keck says. “I remember one of my first presentations, where we walked in, arm in arm, online and offline together, and said, ‘Here’s the target, here’s the print, here’s how interactive fits in and workoc_ith the print campaign, and the creative is all together.’ And the client said, ‘Thank god’—because she was getting tired of being the traffic cop between the offline shop and the online shop.

“Clients want to say, ‘Here’s my budget, be creative in how you think these things fit together,’” says Keck. “And that’s what we do. With my background and the people we have hired, we have our departments all together on the same floor, we do training together, we think about things together and we don’t fight over budgets. It just makes such a difference in delivering solutions to clients.”

As an interactive group, however, FCBi maintains an intense focus on domain expertise. Keck’s people maintain a historical database of site responsiveness, stay on top of competitive spending, “surf and turf” for new media opportunities, and constantly weigh the abundant, conflicting data from reporting organizations. Keck has also taken an active role in industry groups to resolve outstanding billing issues. And then there’s the firm’s future thrust.

“In presentations we say that we spend 80 percent of our time looking at what’s coming and 20 percent of the time on the current environment,” says Keck. “It’s really a talking point to address the fact that this industry is still changing so fast that unless your eye is on the future, you’re not really doing service to your client.”

Two new media that require particular scrutiny, he says, are wireless and interactive TV. “One of the advantages of working with FCB is that it’s a global agency, so I have counterparts in Hong Kong and London, and they’ve been feeding us a lot. Especially in Asia, they’re way ahead of us when it comes to wireless.”

Wireless standards in the U.S. are still in their infancy, he says, and FCBi has not yet been successful in using it for clients, but the group is working closely with Yahoo and other big sites to conduct experiments.

“In general, clients don’t like their money used for experiments, but our suggestion is that we want to use their money wisely and spend it well, but that we need to be pushing the envelope in some areas. And we do have clients, like Compaq, that have put aside a certain budget for us to go crazy with—within limits.”

Interactive media supervisor Chris George, who joined FCBi fresh out of Michigan State two years ago, has been intimately involved with the Compaq account. “We relaunched their brand last September, and part of our objective was to show that Compaq is everything to the Internet by surprising people and doing things that have never been done before online,” says George.

“Launch week, we bought out some of our core IS/IT sites; and in one unique ad unit, when somebody logged on to hotwired.com, instead of going directly to the site, there was a Flash creative that said, ‘Welcome to the new IT—Inspiration Technology,’ Compaq’s new brand. After 7 seconds, the actual site would push that down and the front door had all Compaq ads on it.”

On ZDNet, FCBi highlighted Compaq’s wireless LAN product by creating a banner and a button at the top and a skyscraper unit that interacted with each other. “When someone rolled over the button,” says George, “it would trigger changes in the vertical unit. We were going for the wow factor to generate buzz, and the log files demonstrated a huge increase in site traffic when the campaign started.”

In general, he says, the Compaq online brand campaign, which ran for more than three months, focused on home pages, and product specific ads were placed deeper in the sites as IS/IT people drilled down to learn more about servers, storage, or other technology. And the whole effort was linked up with print and TV, in terms of look and feel, to hit the same techies on their off hours.

George was also involved in the development of a plan combining online, print, and TV, for the launch of Microsoft’s UltimateTV, where the target audience is the broader TV-loving public. “With online,” he says, “we’re able to get in front of the consumer when they’re researching purchases on interactive TV or digital TV recording, so we’re able to reach the person who is further along in the sales cycle.”

“One neat thing is that we’re now able to report beyond just click-through, so that people who saw the ads, didn’t click, but then show up at the site later, can be attributed back to our campaign,” says George. “Online advertising, after all, is really the gateway to bringing people to the Web site, which is where you get the true branding experience. And from there you can do anything.”

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