• by Christine Champagne , September 21, 2006

Adventurous for the Long Haul

Kirk Drummond, Vice President of Creative and Innovation, T3

When Kirk Drummond takes a vacation, he isn't one to sightsee or lounge on a beach. Instead you'll find him adventure-racing - a sport that has had him kayaking through crocodile-infested waters, traversing terrain crawling with vipers, and mountain biking down steep slopes.

"When I come back from a vacation, I need a vacation," cracks Drummond, vice president of creative and innovation at T3 (The Think Tank), an Austin, Texas-based integrated marketing services agency.

Drummond is seemingly tireless, according to Gay Gaddis, T3's president and founder. "I've seen him burn the midnight oil too many times, but he's striving for perfection, and he wants his work to be the best it can be," she says.

A math major who once ran his own special-effects company, Drummond recently helped T3 launch ExperienceMarriott, a Website packed with rich media and designed to lure visitors to explore one of the hotel's newly redesigned rooms, and ChaseBlink, a Flash-rich Web site offering training in the on-the-go tap technique required to use Chase's next-generation credit cards.

Drummond formulates his ideas and approaches through T3 Labs, an internal research and development group he leads that explores emerging technologies and platforms. This enables T3 to be proactive with clients, assessing their needs and then pitching ideas, as opposed to waiting for briefs, says John McGarry, T3's vice president of client services.

Case in point: While researching how hotel chains feature their rooms online, Drummond and his team noticed a lot of humdrum virtual tours and photo galleries. Drummond proposed to Marriott a vibrant interactive site that enables visitors to close blackout curtains, set an alarm clock, and even turn on a shower, among other features, ultimately getting a real feel for the space.

The investment has paid off. Tom Previ, Marriott's director of marketing communications, says users spend an average of eight or nine minutes on the site, and their interests can be tracked. In addition, 74 percent of the visitors are potential new customers.

"The ideas he brings to the table for us are typically practical, and they have residual benefit to them. They're not one-shot wonders," says Nick Bomersbach, vice president and director of JC Penney direct technology and e-commerce. A holiday shopping-themed Web site Drummond produced for the retailer in 2005 successfully converted browsers into customers. It remains active and can easily be redeployed for major shopping periods, Bornersbach says.

And next? "Mountaineering," Drummond says. "Mount Rainier and Kilimanjaro are on the short list."