I did an interview with Brian Morrissey of Adweek a few days ago about the launch of our t-shirt program with CNN (which is off to a banging start) and he asked an interesting question: “you guys are known for technical innovation yet this seems more like an advertising or promotional idea, does this signal some kind of change in your thinking?” And, of course, there is a significant technical aspect to the seemingly simple idea of an on-demand t-shirt (just ask our printing partner, Spreadshirt!) but I said “not at all, we’ve always focused on ideas and simply use technology to deliver them.”

Working on the front end of technology and the web is tricky for sure because, well, you never really know what’s around the corner. To stay out front we continue to invest our profits into research so that our work remains relevant and fresh, to the benefit of our clients (hopefully!). In fact, I often say we are more like an HP or a Apple than a Goodby or an R/GA, although perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration. REGARDLESS there’s an interesting side benefit to all this that is the point of this post: agnostic ideas, ideas that solve client’s problems without filtering them against a pre-set media vehicle or creative skill set. It’s on the tip of the tongues of many clients and pitch consultants and media directors and the topic of many press articles in the advertising business: media neutrality, media agnostic decision making, etc. Adage even recently did an article about the omnipresence of the terms and their increasing meaninglessness. I don’t think it’s meaningless, or impossible. And I can’t blame clients for asking. I mean, all they want are ideas that solve their problems, period. And yes sometimes that’s a television ad, sometimes a website, sometimes an LED display on a blimp, sometimes all three. But, who the hell knows ahead of time?

Digital is constantly evolving and it is also portable and malleable, and because of these things we are forced to develop ideas in the absence of execution. I would imagine other digital shops out-front do this too. It’s a necessity. We really have no other choice. We don’t know. It could be anything. The good news is that technology enables almost everything. The Internet. A wall. Your phone. Something on Tivo. The moon. The key thing is to understand the problem and discuss solutions at a much higher level, and then figure out how to deliver them. This is how we operate, most of the time. Post the problem to the company, let ideas build, decide which ones best solve the problem, then figure out how to deliver them. It’s actually very sensible. And the more people we recruit from all walks of life the better the ideas are getting.

So, forget everything you’ve done before. Discard all your beliefs. Be agnostic. That’s kinda how we work. It’s actually pretty fun. And sometimes you’re making t-shirts.