Adweek on Yahoo! News: The rebirth of online advertising and its growing respectability as a creative medium is attracting more traditional creative talent to interactive agencies. But many Web-shop executives are skeptical about how well creatives steeped in traditional advertising can adjust to the interactive medium.
“What’s happened in the last year is the Web’s gone from being a curiosity to being mainstream media,” said Chris Wall, co-chief creative officer at WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather in New York. “The investment will get bigger, and the production values will go up.”
Still, interactive is an inherently more complex medium, said Bob Greenberg, CEO of Interpublic Group’s R/GA. While the agency has hired traditional-agency creatives, Greenberg said he doubts that most with long careers in TV or print can thrive in a medium that values inbound messaging as much as outbound. “Generally speaking, I would not be looking for creative people from [traditional] agencies because I think their background is too limited,” he said.
Other interactive executives echo Greenberg, cautioning that while interactive needs storytellers, it also has a steep learning curve. “You need to know the medium in order to communicate through the medium,” said Lars Bastholm, ecd at independent AKQA. “Many really don’t.”
Greenberg predicts the emerging digital media world will force traditional creatives to learn the language of the Web. “They’re going to have to do it,” he said. “They just don’t know it yet.”
[via Not Billable]
