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As Wasserman & Partners Advertising was building a reputation as a solid Vancouver agency over the last six years, George Pytlik was honing his skills as an interactive adman. When the stars aligned in March, Pytlik joined w&p and the result is a new division of the agency – Wasserman Interactive.

Pytlik explains the wealth of experience that led him to this juncture: ‘I ran my own boutique agency in Vancouver called Venture Communications until the mid-to-late ’80s, moved to the client side in 1990, and after that went back to kind of working on my own as an independent creative director. Throughout, I was focusing on interactivity and doing more and more online work.’

Pytlik’s strategy for involving potential product users in an interactive way involves more than rebranding an existing campaign (logos, tag lines, etc.) for the Web. It also includes interactive kiosks and a strategy for ‘integrating the traditional media and the branding messages with the interactive media.’

Realizing w&p is not the only agency scrambling to figure out some kind of Web strategy, Pytlik spent his first two months at the agency taking a ‘good look at what the challenges were, what agencies are facing right now and what the clients want.’

One of his first realizations was that extending brand strategy onto the Internet – reusing tag lines and such – is ‘not enough.’

‘First of all, clients are demanding more integration. And the way agencies traditionally have done this is now working against them. A lot of agencies have acquired a Web group. They’d usually buy a company that already existed, that had some design smarts and technical gurus in there. But it’s a different kind of culture. They’re not advertising people as far as their background goes. A lot of these people crank the music up, they’re running around in shorts and bare feet, and there’s wild dart-throwing going on. So [agencies decided] it would be more comfortable having that group off in their own building or on their own floor – away from the agency.

‘We decided to integrate the Web team with the rest of the agency staff,’ Pytlik continues. ‘We’re essentially part of the agency and training everyone in the agency to think interactive and to understand it and be comfortable with it. I think it will make us a leader in short order.’

According to Pytlik, the immediate benefit of this integrated approach is that it ‘is quicker: as soon as the campaign launches, we can have a website up, even on a short turnaround.’

Wasserman Interactive has already completed interactive advertising campaigns for the Savings and Credit Unions of b.c. and for a client called Smart Tire Systems. In the case of the Credit Unions, Pytlik’s interactive strategy includes offering users two streams to follow, one for those who have already switched their business to the credit unions and one for those still considering the move.

‘I wish I could point to a whole bunch of things that we’ve done that can really demonstrate the power of this new convergence thinking,’ he says, ‘[but] we’re just getting started.’

Nevertheless, the integrated approach to the creation of the interactive campaigns has already yielded w&p results that have Pytlik ‘excited.’

For example, on the Smart Tire Systems job, ‘it turned out the Web art director actually created the idea that we ended up putting on the print collateral,’ he says.

In terms of flexing some of the Internet’s other muscles – namely the ability to track potential customers at an alarming rate – Pytlik is cautious about how far they can go.

‘Data mining is almost like a mine field,’ he says. ‘Right now we’ve been doing mostly just statistical information gathering. To get into data mining, there are still some big issues that have to be worked out in terms of how do you use that information without getting a black eye in the process.’

The process of integration and increasing interactive awareness at the agency ‘is ongoing,’ says Pytlik, who regularly holds ‘Interactive Lunches [where] staff members bring their lunch into the boardroom and talk about a particular aspect of interactive production and everybody gets really comfortable with what the details are.

‘I believe excellence is in the details,’ says Pytlik, ‘and when you focus on the details of one particular challenge – and how it was solved – then everyone becomes more knowledgeable and able to recognize the difference between something mediocre and something great.’ *

-www.wasserman-partners.com