The firm whose first eight employees were all engineers turns banners (and other units) into interactive high art. Imagine sitting at your computer while you are surfing the web at work. You
are staring at your screen, trying desperately to sink a golf ball at or under par. Actually, you’re playing nine holes of miniature golf within the confines of a 468x60 banner. This was how many
people first came across Freestyle Interactive’s work, in 1999. It was an amazing Java-based creative unit meant to work strictly as part of a branding campaign. To this day, it stands as one of the
best, most creative, and most engaging uses of a 28,080 pixel piece of real estate on the web.
Founded in 1997, Freestyle was actually born from Node8, a web design and development house founded
two years earlier by Karim and Rebecca Sanjabi. When they realized that there was more they could do than just build sites for their clients, they decided to add marketing to their stable of
services, and Freestyle Interactive was born.
Some of their first clients were Sun Microsystems, Electronic Arts, and 3Com. They now can count Progressive Auto Insurance, Beverage Partners
Worldwide (a Coca-Cola subsidiary), CBSMarketwatch, XO Communications, Microsoft Zone and MSN Advantage Marketing, and Showtime among their clients.
This past year, Freestyle Interactive has done
a lot of work for a lot of recognizable brands. They were responsible for much of Sega’s Dreamcast online creative and both creative and media for CBSMarketwatch.
What is different about this
particular interactive agency is their development and use of technology in developing creative for their clients. “We have our own technology to make great creative,” says Toby Gabriner, COO of
Freestyle Interactive. “In a take on the GE tagline, ‘We use our technology to bring great ideas to life.’” So you understand just how important technology is to Freestyle Interactive, and how much it
is a part of their heritage, the first eight employees were all engineers.
Freestyle sees technology as essential to the creative process for online advertising. “I mean, you don’t have your
print ad or TV ad crashing, and neither should your online,” Gabriner quips. “I think our team really knows how to execute creatively as well. Mike Yapp [Creative Director] always says that he always
feels bad to call his team the creative team because engineering and creative working together are the real creative team here at Freestyle Interactive.”