Changes in Technology

Technology has changed many things about the way an advertising agency works. We used to do things called paste-ups. When you put an ad together, it went through a paste-up stage, then it was engraved, then it was sent to a publication. Things that took days going back and forth from a typesetter to an ad agency are today done in minutes on a Macintosh where we have a choice of a thousand type faces all available on a moment’s notice.

We have an extranet between our office and every client’s office. One client, Pergo, a laminate flooring company, came to the United States seven or eight years ago and has been very successful. Pergo’s offices and marketing director are in Raleigh, North Carolina and our offices are in Dallas. When we do a shoot – and we do a couple a year – we usually shoot in the Dallas area. We are now at a point where Pergo’s marketing director can stay at her office in Raleigh while we set up the shot. When everything is ready, we put a digital camera on the tripod, shoot digitally, send the information through the extranet, and she can say (watching the process on her computer screen), “Yes, I think it’s great,” or tell us whatever she thinks would improve the shot. Then we take the digital off and replace it with the film camera. We have saved her days of being out of the office. The next step is to do away with film altogether and shoot everything digitally, which is coming very quickly.

As another example, we can edit a TV spot for Home Depot, located in Atlanta, then send that image through the extranet to our client, who can O.K. a rough cut while sitting in his office. Think about the time and costs saved in travel expenses. Things like that happen every day and make us infinitely faster and far better than we were before. Back when we had to edit with film, we would put the film on a Moviola machine, crank it through, and if we wanted to edit we literally took a razor blade and inserted a scene by taping it together. That process took about five minutes. Now that same edit takes three seconds. It has revolutionized the way we edit. We can be much more critical of editing and try things just to see if they work, because there is no detrimental consequence in trying it four, five, or six different ways.