The Players Film Company is getting into the Internet game with PlayMedia, the Toronto-based company’s newly launched interactive arm. Headed up by general manager Harjot Dhatt and creative director James Starr, Playmedia is designed to help agencies and clients bring another dimension to their product by using the many facets of interactivity. Through this interactive consulting and practical Web-design company, Dhatt is hoping clients can expand their marketing and branding initiatives.

‘Players provides great creative, great execution, and people from the agencies know what they are going to get when they come to Players Film because they have a certain level of excellence that they provide,’ says Dhatt. ‘The thing with the agencies is that they’re very talented and they are coming up with TV campaigns, radio and print and everything like that, but the learning curve for the interactive is pretty impressive. Rather than developing a whole interactive department, we’d like to be a resource for the agencies.’

Dhatt says the difference between Playmedia and a standard Web-design company is the willingness of its staff to help out and offer clients ideas on how to improve its online image.

‘It gets complex because some agencies do have interactive departments,’ says Dhatt. ‘We don’t want to be a supplier. We want to be something where an agency will come to us and say, ‘We are thinking about this for a client; what do you think?’ We have the unique knowledge about the Internet and about how to further a brand, whether it be through a promotion or anything online that other people don’t.’

Dhatt feels it is silly for the people who have studied the latest technologies to merely take an order instead of offering opinion on how to improve an interactive component of a campaign or whatever is required.

‘Once companies get big in this industry, you walk into their place and everybody will be sitting there with headphones on and they’ll just be coding away. That isn’t what we want to do,’ says Dhatt. ‘We want to be the people who are coming up with the creative ideas in combination with the agencies or clients for the best combined idea. There has to be a link between art and commerce here.’

Some Canadian companies have already taken notice of Playmedia. Toronto post house Panic & Bob has been working with Dhatt and Starr on its soon-to-be-launched website. Playmedia has also been working with Players director Phil Kates for Philip Kates Productions and Globe Monkeys as well.

Dhatt says he is still a little reluctant to go public with Playmedia. He and Starr have been working at it quietly for some time now and he was hoping to have a solid portfolio in place before word started to spread.

‘It is important to us to have things that are really impressive for people. We are building our portfolio with every job we do and when we show it I want people to be blown away completely.’

The jobs, in fact, have been coming in so furiously that Dhatt and Starr have had little time to work on their own Playmedia site.

‘It is kind of frustrating, but these cool projects just kept coming through the door,’ says Dhatt. ‘It’s a neat bunch of stuff going on and I think in the next little while it is going to blow up some more and I can’t wait to see what happens. I’m going to ride this wave.’ *

-www.playmedia.ca