• by Kate Kaye , May 13, 2004

Who says playing in a rock 'n' roll band isn't a solid career move? This week's In the Trenches subject, Beau Hall, creative services architect at weather.com, is living proof that strumming a six-string can reap more than just a few coins tossed in a guitar case.

Basic Training
Back when Beau was creating promotional flyers for his now defunct band Headquake, little did he know that he was taking his first step on a meandering trail toward interactive ad country. That was fifteen years ago. Along the way he made a pit stop at design school, took a turn at creating traditional marketing materials, and later moved on to develop user interfaces for online applications. He was even dabbling in Macromedia Flash when it was first introduced, long before it became the Web mainstay it is today. "Back then nobody knew about it," Beau recalls. "It was more of a hobby for me."

Daily Drills
After a layoff, Beau decided he'd rather find a job in a corporate environment than juggle multiple clients at a design house where the work is, as he puts it, "fast-paced, exciting, stressful, and hair-reducing." He landed his job at weather.com two years ago. And while he technically works for just one client (i.e., weather.com), he still gets to mix things up, creating rich media ads for the site's advertiser clients and doing the back-end Java and DHTML programming for the ads, as well as developing applications to assist other weather.com staffers in implementing ads.

"I get to do all the fun stuff," Beau says. This entails a host of tasks, from working with clients on ad creative and developing creative plans for the design department to vetting video streaming and 3D technologies. Whether Beau is creating an ad from scratch or simply refining creative provided by a client, he makes sure to "steer clients in the right direction about what would make a good out-of-banner experience." One weather.com creative rule: snowflakes, raindrops, and other weather-related ad elements are not allowed. After all, site visitors could mistake it for actual forecast imagery.

Tough Battles
Beau's biggest concern is a common one in the rich media advertising space. "The challenge," he says, "is always trying to find a perfect mix between polite and invasive. I don't want to be a carnival barker hooking people off the street to come and look at something."

For Beau, it comes down to respecting site visitors. But it must be balanced with a necessary respect for the advertiser client designers he works with. Although he stresses the need to educate advertisers on what's best for users, he's careful not to step on any toes in the process. "A lot of times I feel like I don't have the room to point these things out," Beau explains. "I'm not going to go to an agency that's been in business for 25 years and tell them what to do."

Of course, if things get frustrating, he can always blow off steam jamming with his current blues/funk band, Blind Slim.

Base Camp
Beau works on the seventh floor, where he can gaze upon the city of Atlanta from the windows of the weather.com offices. "It's not like the design firms you see on TV, where everybody's wearing party hats," proclaims Beau. Regardless, he's able to maintain a "pretty colorful" workspace, complete with posters and anachronistic Halloween decorations.

When he needs more sensory stimulation than his Bo Diddley poster and ghoulish décor provides, Beau leaves the office and cityscape behind to soak in the natural parkland surroundings that stretch along the Chattahoochee River.

Mission Possible
Beau has a bit of a bone to pick with advertisers who don't take full advantage of what rich media ad formats and technologies have to offer. "You have an opportunity to do something much more interesting and memorable" through out-of-banner ads, he emphasizes.

Do you know someone who deserves a salute from MediaPost's In the Trenches? Let us know! Contact Kate Kaye at kate@mediapost.com.