EPISODE 3 - Dec. 4th | Scott Mager (Deloitte Digital)

9:20PM Jan 23, 2021

Speakers:

Kyle Shannon

Ritesh Patel

Scott Mager

Keywords:

people

work

remember

big red button

office

scott

site

creative

pit

deloitte

big

figure

created

building

british airways

ritesh

agency

kyle

clients

ogilvy

In a short stretch of time, from the mid 90s, to the early 2000s, a relatively small group of people started playing around with this thing called the World Wide Web. They had the audacity to think they just might change the world. This project introduces you to the big players from those hallowed days, and let them tell you what it was like and how you should have been there.

Episode Three conversation with Scott major. He was the builder of the original big red button. ritesh. Good day to you, sir. How are you?

Oh, you know, I'm doing amazingly well, on a Friday afternoon. I think there's this thing called a pandemic that's still going on. I'm not sure what's happening, but I haven't heard of it. Yeah, it's amazing. Right. So we were able to get Scott major to join us today.

That's I know we got Scott major. Now we can we can talk about him behind his back before we bring him on. Anything you need to reveal before he can get himself?

Well, we could but then possibly afterwards anyway. So yeah,

it wouldn't be fair, right. All right. Well, let's bring him on.

Let's bring him on.

Scott Mager!

how are you?

From the massive past so so for those that don't know, Scott was employee number four. There was Chad and I and then we heard Paul galley or pu. B. And then I think you were the next next in line of that that massive thing. You were there from the beginning. Yeah. Now's the time life building and file and these days, you're, you're running? What? 8000 people like a massive group at Deloitte.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I've got I've been out doing Deloitte digital for the past 20 years. So since I left agency, so

millions of pages got on it.

You know, we used to make fun of companies like that.

You're here wearing your sports jacket?

Yeah, this is my in honor of dress up Fridays, I put on my.com uniform, which is a blue blazer button down shirt and jeans. And

no, it wasn't No, it wasn't what he just just taught for the Well,

that's how we got to this was remember, we were in the time life building. We came up with dress up Fridays, because all the timing people, you know, we'd ride up the elevators, and they get all excited about dress down Fridays. And they were like, but I don't have a wardrobe for that. And we're like, well, we don't have a wardrobe to dress up. So we did dress up Fridays.

We make fun of them all on on Friday for wearing suits and stuff.

It's amazing. How things going you Well, yeah, great

ones good

on on my side, you know, daughters in college and my other ones still in high school. And you know, spending lots of time in front of the screen. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Well, speaking of that, let's get to it. So So you were there from the very beginning. So so where we like to start these things off is just the origin story. Like, you know, what were you doing that that, you know, sort of got you that led you to get into this business? And then sort of give us some of that the the early sauce from

how he found agency.com? Yeah, exactly unique. This is how I found agency.com. So yeah,

well, you look, I mean, I was it was agency.com was my first job. So I was in college, I was at the circus School of Visual and Performing Arts and I had just graduated, you know, in, I guess, May, June of 1995. I had a degree in 3d computer animation and modeling. Oh, that's right.

I remember, we were all really impressed with that, because we didn't know crap.

I hadn't really thought through life. So I wanted to be a 3d animator, but I didn't realize all the jobs for that. We're on the west coast. And I was in New York. So I was running around trying to find a job and interview with places and they're like, you should. There's this guy, Kyle Shannon, I have no idea who it was. But I was interviewing and they're like, yeah, we don't really do that. We don't do that. And they're like, you know, there's

this guy, Kyle

Shannon, who's doing this thing with the web. You should get in touch on it. I don't know. I got your I got your email. I sent you my resume and you actually invited me to come in, which was shocking. Wow.

It is because ritesh sent us like 20 emails that we never replied to and he had to fly from London to New York to sit on our doorstep. So we would notice him

for five hours. Somebody told me

it was one of the coolest interviews though because I think I showed up and you're, you're wearing like a T shirt and flip flops and I was like, I want to work with this guy.

We were in the time life building that night. You were

Yeah, you were and it was at that

point it was just I think Chad and Paul galley and I so it was probably just a bunch of like cubicles in this empty dark windowless office, right?

Yeah, for the most part, you know Chan had on his blue sweater with a hole in the elbow.

That is a legendary sweater. I wish we could find a picture of that.

But yeah, you know, there were a bunch of random freelancers, you know, you had it was at the beginning of agency. But but but Gabby had urban desires. And there were some people in and out right. There were some freelancers there as I remember a freelancer named a street and you had I think I was coding next to Clay Shirky.

Which Oh, that's right. Yeah.

You don't see Clay Shirky coding on his Wikipedia page. At agent calm I checked. But

we should send him an email to say hey, you need to correct your wiki page play.

Yeah. You missed the professional credit,

but coding a 95. But uh, yeah, you guys hired me as a freelancer for the first couple weeks because I had that 3d experience I was creating. He asked me to create a 3d spinning logo of the Hitachi bud. Right. They call it the? That's right. All right. For the centerpiece of their website, which was the very was one of the first websites on the internet. And it was the very first Hitachi website for Jerry Corman, I think, right.

Yeah. For Jerry Corbett. And in fact, I got you may talk about this. So

I think he's finally they

look at what a work of art that was

looking at Scott is coming through all the way on this web.

Yeah. Look, we grabbed credits, looking at the bottom produced by agency Comm. film credits, like we're putting up a film. So yeah, we used

to get credits on all our websites. And then when we didn't get credits, I would still like comment it into the code without telling anybody.

Oh, that's right. Yeah, we do that. Yeah, this was and I think at some point, we did actually spin that logo in the center of this, right?

Yeah, Bill Murphy wrote a Perl script that actually animated This was before the GIF. 89 animated. Oh, that's right. That's

right. This was this was early days. And this was, you know, to put it in context, their site prior to this, like I guess they had, you know, some it was just text and like, hyperlinks to annual reports and things like that. So so we I don't know if we created this thing. I think they had this thing called the museum but we created the digital version of it. And yeah, this was that was Those were some

was like the first couple of weeks for me. And then after that, you guys brought me on full time. And you know, I sat with Paul Gali, you know, aka poopy King. Yep. And we worked on you know, whole bunch of stuff. The the first MetLife website, a bunch of, I think Amex and Titanic magazine properties, and we're doing sweepstakes for for for I think it was for time life.

Oh, timing, consumer marketing. That's why we had those offices. Yeah,

yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

On that on that design, that first one. So you arrive, and then you've got these crazy guys with, you know, holy sweaters and flip flops and, and you they give you this job? How was it working there in creating that page? How long did it take?

Oh, gosh, I mean, come on. ritesh. Oh, it's 25 years ago. But, uh, yeah, it probably took us It probably took us a couple days to and then I just had to try and figure out how do I get these guys, this is so cool. How do I get these guys to keep me around? And so I was trying to demonstrate different ways I could, I could, I could prove my value. So I was doing design. I was doing some of the coding and the pages, you know, a little bit of those are two different disciplines. We were I was doing a little bit of all of that back then. And yeah, and then, you know, Kyle, and Jen just started you know, convincing other companies to give us work and the plant garden growing like it was like, you know, by week three, I had a full time job I think by month two we had hired like another six or seven people and by like, six months out there were like 20 of us there and yeah, growing and I was you know what, you know, Paul and I were like, you know, first people in

So tell me about tape net. It's apparently famous. isn't true.

Yeah, tape net. Well, you know, the Time Inc building wasn't really set up for the internet. Somehow we got we got an ethernet cable into the office and then just started like, like from one and I think the servers were like literally underneath someone's desk for the clients but is

your bill Murphy's Law Go Morris Fillmore worth. It goes under Gilmore's desk. I remember cuz he was like, I'll protect it. It's here and then yeah, the cables came from the computer under his desk, duct tape to the to the ceiling. Right. We ran it around the ceiling drops into everyone's cubicle.

Yeah, Tapenet™ and.

Right. Yeah, that's true.

That's right. There was no Wi Fi. And the cool thing about tape net was that when we moved offices, I think Kyle actually preserved tape neck and framed it in like a shadow box.

I did a big shadow box with a big chunk of it. Because by the time we moved, I think there were 46 people working there. So it was 46 Ethernet wires, or we just would like duct tape another wire 46 times. Ball of tape. So we were literally duct taping the internet.

Yeah, someone kicked the wire out like the site went down.

Yeah. I remember. I remember a conversation because I think it happened once. And I remember a conversation like, we might want to like put the internet where someone can't kick it. Now I also kind of remember, you might have been the originator of the geek Intel. Were you the one that came up with individual GIF images where we could space? Remember, there was no center tag. And I think it was you that came up with a set of different lengths and visible

gifts. Yes,

I remember you get he said, Hey, everyone gets her. And you showed him how to do it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. He can tell. That's right. I forgot about that.

Yeah. What What else from the from from that early office from those early days? Like, what were the like, what, what was it? Like? We ultimately nicknamed that that sort of working area, the pit because of 665. Broadway, but like the spirit of that happened in those early days. Like what what was it like, sort of doing the development with that group? Yeah, it was just, it was cool.

You know, we were all doing something that there were no rules for it. Right? There are no standards. We were trying to take, you know, best practices from other disciplines and apply it to this new internet thing. Right. So we were, you know, always looking for things that other people had done online, or we were I remember, you know, following Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman, right. The who that created the Nielsen Norman group, but they were, they were applying, you know, usability and heuristics from other disciplines. And you know, it was just, it was just a period of time where we're doing things new, and it was a great group of people. And we were there all day, all night. Sometimes we slept in the office, we would you know, we would eat together. We drink after work and play video games. It was just, it was a blast. It was a it was a cool culture.

Yeah. And then and then we've moved to, to 665 Broadway, I think after like, I think it was less than a year. It was right around a year. Like it was pretty quick. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. It'll be much. Yeah. And that was a that was a great, that was a great office, it was a great neighborhood. And that's when, you know, the the scale of the company just sort of exploded, right? You, you know, you went you went from 20 or 30 people working on a couple of websites and urban desires, which you know, I don't know if you've introduced urban desires here yet, but that was just that was like urban desires was Kyla was your wife Gabby's sort of content project. It was Yes, thing per se, that was a paid project for the organization. But we were we used to come up with, like some of the cool new things, right. And we used to test new things out on urban desires. And so we went from urban desires, and this innovation site and a couple of clients to this new office, and it just sort of exploded, you know, couldn't hire people fast enough. We I remember interviewing people, I think we interviewed and hired like, 30 people on a weekend once just because we had picked up probably like MetLife and British Airways. And I remember interviewing people and it was kind of like, you know, can you type it?

Can you type Do you type?

theater? You know, Can you spell HTML? Awesome. You got a job, We'll train you. And, you know,

yeah, yeah. The the urban designers thing was was interesting. It was it was definitely not a paid project. It was it cost a lot of money. But it was because a lot of the work we did was was for, you know, fortune 500 companies, they're fairly conservative. Things took a while. And because we didn't really necessarily know what we were doing or what was possible urban desires was that place where you could just do anything and you know, it was where a lot of the innovation happened. At some point we'll do a we'll do an urban desires one of these where we have on some of the designers that Did that and are there any pieces you remember from urban desires that you worked on? Or any any innovations? You did that you thought were interesting? Are you too old now?

I didn't go back to the Wayback Machine to pull up any of the episodes. I remember. I remember there was like, some wacky content like, like Barbie dolls BB, like a BDSM Barbie doll piece that I remember I had it I had the code and I was like, Yes. This is an interesting. This is an interesting bit of content.

Yeah, that was the that was the famous photo expos A of the lesbian Barbie scene that that cease and desist it from Mattel for I don't know. Yeah. So. So it was this photographer named Maria vullo. And she did all these poses of Barbies, you know, having lesbian sex as you do. And and so we get the cease and desist order from from Mattel. And it was actually kind of our first thing like, do we bow to censorship, and we actually kind of did. So we had a new Photoshop at the time, we had them silhouette out all of the Barbie figures. So we kept the pictures there. But it was just pink silhouettes where the Barbies used to be so yeah, that was a that was our first scandal.

But but but I do remember on urban desires using Java for the very first time to create interactive buttons, right? We had never done that before. That was one of the first times that we were embedding Java in a web page. And you know, it was it was kind of cool.

Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. What were the what were the when when we made that move to 665? You know, was there? Was there a shift in clients? Like, what were the clients like? What was what was you remember any any of the work from, they got bigger? I

mean, British Airways was British Airways and MetLife. Were the two big accounts that I focused a lot of my time on, I think food television network for a bit also, but always really, I think I worked on for for a number of years. And that was a pretty extensive site. It was one of the first online ticketing platforms for an airline. And, you know, we were doing that for a couple of years. It was a big site. You know, pretty, pretty cool stuff. There was some great innovation. I remember, you know, you actually, I don't know if you're gonna bring it up. But in the title of this thing, I think you had credited me with the big red button. That's right. The big red button was, was the launch vehicle for when British Airways went live? Right?

Yeah, well, that was I remember, we, we kept launching these first ever sites for these big corporations. And at some point, it hit me like, this should be a bigger deal. Because Because like when you launch a site, like you literally hit like, upload, or like, refresh, right? I mean, it's done. And I'm like, it's such an anti climax. What if it were a party? And then I think you said, Well, I kind of know a little bit about electrical engineering. So I could probably hack a mouse. And I said, Why don't you go down to a radio shack and see if you can buy it right. And then you came back and you hacked together a literal, big, red, big red

button? That's right. And we had a we had a party with the client, and everyone was gathered around. And the big red button was basically a mouse. Yeah, it was attached to a computer. And on that computer, the cursor was on the Upload button. Yeah. We had the client come in and hit the big red button, and it uploaded the front refresh. Front Page and the site launched.

Amazing.

Party, it was pretty cool. That created more of a launch experience. Yeah,

let me ask you a question. Scott. You know, so you go from 1271 to 665, bigger offices, you know, the pit arrives all of these things. And I remember the cabinet sness of the pit, you know, walking past Aaron's office and going downstairs and you know, all that sort of thing. Yeah. How was the culture? Because the culture continued. I mean, there's fun. We're inventing stuff. We don't know what we're doing, but we'll make sure we make it happen. Let's go figure it out culture. Did that continue?

Yeah, the culture definitely continued. And I think it really got he got a lot better even when we moved into the pit because we had our own little like, Video game area. Yeah. And I brought some beer. We were allowed to have beers after after hours. And there wasn't a whole lot of reason to go home. We were a bunch of young, young, you know, young creatives on the front end of something brand new doing this thing together. And we were just felt like we're onto something. And we spent like, all hours of the day in that in the pit in the office. And I mean, I slept there a couple times. I remember we were allowed to smoke in the office back then. I remember back then, right? Like you you always walked by Chan's office and

it was like it was just a

really interesting environment. And it was a blast and Kyle used to come down and do all these like, unbelievably like inspirational pep talks, he'd come down to the pit and get us all riled up. Pretty, pretty awesome.

But you know, it's fascinating that if you think about it, that was 1996 97. And yet today, that's one of the things that big companies espouse you go, look, we've got a foosball table, we've we're gonna give you food, you know, we're gonna give you this open culture. And we were doing that back then. And it was amazing. Yeah, but I think that's the missing some of it was forced today. Yeah. And it wasn't forced. I mean, we did it right.

I brought a full table into Deloitte. And people were like, if I use this will a pink slip pop out?

Yeah,

exactly. I felt that that the, all of those perks kind of emerged naturally out of just the energy of what we were doing. It was more like, you know, the video games in the beer were more like, you know, a response to what was actually going on anyway, rather than let's put this in there to try to generate that kind of enthusiasm. Like, there was. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we talked about this with with Chad last week, but there was, for me, there was this really palpable sense of like, how lucky we were, and that we were really at the beginning of something. And yeah, like you said, we were inventing. And

yeah, and it was just like, we're gonna spend some more time in the office. So we're gonna need video games and beer. Right, right. Yeah.

Like he went to get some permission from some president of some office, but he just did it.

Yeah. Now, were you didn't you? You had an office in the pit? Right?

Yeah, there was only two offices. Not initially, but you had it was your office. And then I had an office in the pit. And that, that came about after some time. You might remember or maybe not. But you know, I was a designer and I was I'd be you eventually convinced me to sort of play a larger sort of management role in running the production team.

We needed we needed someone to herd the cats.

Yeah. And I was just had been there the longest. And I was, I was also colorblind, which was really hard for me, as a designer, and I was I was getting very frustrated with it. I remember you sitting me down in that tiny little office, at one point in time giving me the everybody's creative pep talk and how you could apply creativity to any role, as long as you're around the creativity. And so yeah, I ended up taking an office and sort of ended up running the pit for you, at some point in time, which was sort of my foray into practice building and management roles, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

You know, you're trying to hurt creatives. Right? Yeah.

Well, then that that idea of the of the creative piece was that that? I mean, I don't I actually don't remember that conversation. But I kind of do now that you mentioned it. But I remember.

It's great. It's great. It was like the most pivotal conversation of my career. But God.

How could you bloody

well, I remember you being colorblind. And I remember, I remember the little thing being like, oh, maybe that's why some of the colors have been weird. But remember, like, well, that shouldn't matter. Like, so don't do stuff with color. Like there's all this other stuff to do. But I also remember, there was there started to be like, as the company grew, like, once you go past 20 people or so there starts to become camps, like the account camp versus the creative camp, right? And I remember there being kind of a resentment of the creative department where other people would say, well, like, I'm creative, too. I remember that being a real a real palpable thing. So I bet it was around that time. So so when you said that to me, like it makes sense that I would say there's this other creative stuff, because I remember we create it, we we came up with a distinction. We said, the creative group produces a creative product, but everyone can participate in the creative process, right? You can be creative in how you solve client problems, and this and that, and that, for me was a big deal. Because it it it allowed us to find a way to include people that weren't in that cool. Kid club, you know?

Yeah, well, you know, what happened was the pit that we had the whole floor of that building, right, and it was a split floor. So it was three steps down, you know, the entire floor was split right down the middle. So there was a high side of the floor and a low side of the floor, right? It was like three or four steps down into the pit and a little brick. Yeah, three or four steps up. It was like all drywall and you know, nice office and that's the pit got filled up with all the creative and production people. The near do wells here and all the account people in the technology people ended up three steps up. On the other side there became this like weird Yeah, yeah there'll be cultural rift because of those three steps. Yeah.

Remember when when I first walked in the first person you saw was the first thing you saw was a dog under Ralph Siemens cubicle Okay, where do I come because I came from a corporation with you know boardrooms and carpets and wooden, you know, wood panel walls and all sorts of things. And you know there's bad threadbare carpet and a dog who greets you folks and there's Ralph with his guitar. Okay? Lynskey was down in the pit, wasn't he with Anna McInerney and those guys?

For Yeah, for a little bit? Yeah. That was when we were experimenting with with doing multi disciplinary teams where you'd have account project management, tech and creative all sitting together. Yeah. That was where we started playing with that.

I mean, we still struggle with the same stuff today. I mean, at least up until zoom.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Nobody said sitting together yet everyone is. So let's look. Here's a bit so. So one of the things that I think is really interesting from those times, like, like, what what do you feel were the big significant either tech innovations or like an account that we have? That was a really big flippin deal. Like, like,

before you go there? Yeah. Lauren stanovich is on so let's not say anything bad about Lauren. Oh.

Let's see. Hey, Lauren. Good to see you, buddy.

So it's significant. Yeah,

yeah. Yeah. So I mean, look, some of the significant things. I don't know. I mean, like a really small thing I remember like where we were sort of almost ruined the internet in 1995 when Netscape Navigator two Dotto came out, it supported animated GIFs. Right. So up until that point in time, you were you know, it was not a very interactive internet.

And you had to program the stuff

in Perl program off of an IRC channel that created Oh, my God, and like, within, you know, an hour of, of the browser being released, we had animated ad banners out for Apple Computer through clarus, which is one of our, you know, one of our clients and Dre you know, and then animated ad banners, and then we started making ad banners with like, interactive ones with drop downs. They

don't remember the drop downs. Yeah.

Kind of not so cool days, but like back then that was like, that was like a big deal.

That was a huge deal. Yeah, I remember that. Like, yeah, the fact that you didn't have to program an animation, right? You didn't actually have to code it.

Yeah. That was kind of cool. I think that what we did with the British Airways with the Concorde was super fun.

forgot about that.

Yeah, that was

remarkable. Yes. So you know, British Airways put a one quarter scale Concorde up on top of the Time Square brewery in Times Square and

when was this was this like 96? No, no, I

think it was 97 Yeah, maybe no 96 I think it was not You may be right

I mean, I remember it was early because nobody google it so we we did a we did a live stream of them putting that plane on that building so that that was what we pitched them and then we had to figure out how to do it so you do that yeah. About how we did it.

The crane putting this thing you know in Time Square and I think you Paul galley and I you know Don hard hats and somehow convinced the building to let us up on the roof across the street, in Times Square, and we brought with us a tiny little connectix quickcam it was the first generation of any kind of webcam that was ever been created. And we literally plugged it into a modem up on top of the roof and we dropped like 150 foot or 200 foot Ethernet. No, it wasn't it was it was a phone cable, no cable plugged into a modem. And down the side of the building around the

dialer, up the we, we were we figured out how many frames a second we could send over dial up because we cut the video to what 240 pixels, right? And I think it was like a frame every like two frames every second or something. But it's the plane coming down time.

It was the lowest red stream in history, but it was like the first one I you know And it was just pretty cool that we were we was like bubblegum and you know, you know, paperclips but uh,

but that was the thing the inventiveness, right. You have to go figure this out. So it's like a MacGyver episode. Right. And hot hats. What can we do? You know?

Yeah, yeah. But it's Didn't we put it? Did we put it on the it was on the British Airways website, right? It's streamed on the site that we had built streamed live

on the site, and then it got archived eventually. But yeah, it was that it worked that off.

Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Well,

what else? What else were were some of the some,

obviously, the big red button is the big one. achievements.

You know, what I have I have a, I just have a memory about the big red button. The original source of the big red button this this was from when you first started, one of the things we always joked about was, if you want someone to click on something, put a big red button on screen and put below it do not click that, Alice? So we all said this joke. Absolutely manipulate people to do stuff.

Say you came up with that immersive thing that Nielsen?

Yeah, I think that was, you know, again, thinking about things back then that, you know, translated. We created this thing called the Immersability Index. It was came out of Carnival Kyle's mind, and I'm not sure if you guys are getting an echo I am but I'm not. Okay. Sounds like it's gone. Sorry. Um, yeah. So I think it came out of Kyle's mind. And then Paul galley. And I worked on it. And we actually worked on it with the Nielsen Norman group. And it was basically, you know, it was, it was a light heuristic across, you know, for different. It was, you know, it was a measurement of brand and functionality and content, and usability. And it was like, yeah, some, some sites were like these giant catalogs of content and some sites where they just like beautiful pictures and brand with no content. And then you had like, e commerce sites, or something that was high functionality and transactional, we were trying to come up with a way to rate websites on this concept of immersive abilities. So there's some sweet spot between those four things that that made a site more sticky, and really help people achieve, you know, the what they were going for when they landed on that site. And so that was kind of a cool thing that I think, you know, none of these things existed back then these standards didn't exist. And I think this translates to stuff that we do today. I mean, we do things differently today, we don't always design things. As intentionally by hand, we use AI and content platforms and things now to drive experiences. But I think this, this was kind of cool and translates, I think this was, you know, I remember sitting in the back of the pit working on this. So it had to be like, you know, I don't know, 9098, maybe 9797.

Cuz I remember my first couple of days going through this with you, Kyle, you were showing me how we do that, because I came from the tech background. So I know about the front end stuff on the creative stuff. So you will take me through this in your office. Yeah, this is how we measure things.

Yeah. And I remember, you know, what, the the, I think a lot of the thinking of this came out of, you know, we started doing work for everything from like British Airways was a ticketing site, but they also had like, travel destination content, which was super sexy. And then, you know, we would do work for, you know, Gucci or Calvin Klein or things like that. And those, they didn't need much functionality. They could be super sexy. So depending on your goal, as a company, you could sort of dial up. Did you want this to be more of a functional site than a sexy site? Or? Or do you want it to be a balance? And so there was Scott, you also sent me this thing, which is this, this usability guy, somewhere out of Canada took the immersive ability index, and incorporated it into sort of a more sophisticated version. He did like this. What was mind blowing to me is you said that you you saw something like some colleges had referenced the immersive ability. I only remember we did this reversibility index. And I don't remember it going anywhere. Like I knew it a site but but that's kind of cool that you remembered it.

Yeah, we did put it up on a website, we did allow anyone to go in or rate themselves and it actually created a stream for us, like people re set up the immersive building their own website, and then we got their email address and said, Hey, do you want to make it better?

Yeah,

we can help you, right? Yeah. Yeah.

It's kind of cool to see that people have used it and it's, it's Shut up in, you know, a whole bunch of different places.

But what's fascinating is, you know, to your point, Scott, while we have new tools today, and you know, you've got design systems, you've got content management systems, you've even got AI, the tenants are still the same. They still are the same, right? You're still talking about content functionality. How do I get you engaged? You know, Jonesy did a speech maybe four or five years ago, and I was getting tired. I don't know, one day rule renting and I was getting tired of the slide where people put up at at big meetings where, you know, humans only have the attention span of a goldfish. Yeah. You know, and they actually they don't if you give them good news, the heck out of it. Right. So. So it's still resonates today, I think I think it still applies today that in most ability index, I guarantee, if you took it out today and put it in a slide, somebody will think, Wow, that's amazing.

You know, a lot of the thinking back then still applies, like, like, it's almost like, the downside of the of the industry maturing, is that because there's standards, and because you can look at all these sites and go, Well, that's how you do an e commerce site. No one's really saying, Well, how should we do an e commerce site? Right, like no one? It's, it's too easy just to sort of follow what's already there as opposed to having to invent it. So burger navigation. Right. Exactly. The hamburger menu was until like, six conversations in and like, Oh, it's a standard. And you should absolutely do that. And I'm like, Well, why, like, you know, that's just because, you know, I have Tourette's with asking that question. Well, I think,

you know, going back to one of your, you know, your old sayings, which I thought was so cool at the time, you know, we were innovating, right, we were trying to figure out what to do and how to do it best. But you would come down and get us all riled up and your, your speech, I think our mantra became, you know, figure out what sucks and don't do that.

It's relatively simple, really perverse of like, figure

out what's amazing. But figure out what's amazing until you keep doing all these other things and figure out which ones work which ones don't work. Yeah, totally like, so it was, it was a bit of a, you know, anti innovation, crier and innovation cry, you know, wrapped up.

Yeah, kind of kind of a reverse psychology. Let's go innovate by like, it doesn't flippin matter, because, well, that was the whole, like, I think it was just an acknowledgement. Nobody knew what the hell they were doing. And so that gives you a lot of freedom, right? You don't have to be an expert. So

it's fascinating. Remember, we still get together and Jerry Newmark has consistently been coming to this curry club thing I was doing every month before the pandemic hit. And we used to do introductions that Jerry would say, Oh, yeah, you're the guy who always promised clients stuff, though we could never do. Yeah, I would always respond with, but we figured it

out. And we always we always

did it. We fit. It was painful. There was a moment in time when Mitch golden would go oh my god, what are you? Yeah, we figured it out. Right. So yeah.

So so this is a really good segue. I so for me, Scott. Like, just where you are today from where you started? Share, if you can, you know, share what you carried forward from those early days or like, you know, talk about your journey from Okay, you know, you have to just calm or whatever, like, but it's been 25 years.

Where are you tears? Kyle, when when Scott left? Were you like depressed? And you go into your office and close the door and down a bottle of whiskey that Scott was leaving?

I get? Well, actually, I did. Because Because, but I'll do this in all seriousness. The group of employees probably the first, I don't know, 50 employees, maybe 75 employees, it was very much a family and, and it was such a cathartic bonding experience, kind of on a weekly basis. Like we were working massive hours, right? We were inventing this stuff. We were getting our asses chewed out by British Airways when we screwed something up and you know, just trying to, you know, just trying to survive. And so yeah, so anytime anyone left from those early days was was, uh, I, you know, I took it personally because it was like someone from the family go and you know, I'm leaving the club, but you know, but so, so what have you What have you carried forward from there? Well, yeah,

like I'd say, I think before I get to that, just to sort of like it, you know, it was it was probably the most pivotable pivotal, pivotal, pivotal, pivotal experience of my professional career. We're, you know, with both of you and the entire, the entire team. It was the gist. You know, it's like my, you know, my high school football days. It's just the most amazing memories and the stuff that I learned to take forward. And then it got a little weird towards the end, right? Yeah, we had acquired a whole bunch of companies out of a lot of new culture. I'm sure someone else will talk about that on one of your, your shows, you're talking

to Ayman and Andy, next week. So

the online magic folks. You know, there was a lot of new cultures that came in and things change. And then as the run up to the IPO happened, and you know, you had to sort of harden the management team and bring in process and people are doing timesheets, and there was compliance and, and then the market was just going apeshit, in 1999, you had graphic designers day trading and making millions and millions of dollars on the side of their desk, and everyone's focus was on, on anything bad. Yeah, but the great stuff that we're doing, and that's sort of like, you know, you know, I think why I left, it was just there, the stuff that we started to do, we weren't really doing anymore, and that I loved the innovation, the culture that, that we're all in it together that bonding sort of, you know, it was it was sort of gone. So, I went off and did a questionable start up right afterward.

Got it funded,

as we all did, yeah, it was funded. And, you know, it wasn't like we didn't make money. But what did you that? Was it online financial services company, okay. You know, and it was, it was an interesting, you know, couple of months experiment. And, you know, I ended up where I am now through that. So we ended up hiring Deloitte as the auditor of that card up, and I got to build a relationship with my audit partner and he was like, you know, you should you should, you should explore Deloitte as this thing is tanking in the market crash of 2020. I was like, yeah, who can you introduce me to and so, you know, sometime in late 2020s, early to late 2000, right, late 2000, as the market was crashing, I was talking to Deloitte and I ended up here, late 2000, early 2001, I think was like January 2001, that I ended up fully starting here. And, you know, it's been an interesting journey, I was hired at that moment in time, by this guy named Dean Nelson, who hired me to help build an agency inside of this big consulting firm, they wanted to be a creative studio and do all this stuff. And I got there. And like, none of this stuff was actually there there no infrastructure to do it was in there. And it literally took 10 years of remaking myself learning the firm learning the culture, to get us to a point where I could actually get back to doing that kind of work again.

Amazing.

And you know, what I, what I loved about Deloitte was that it was a private company. It was a an LLP. So it was a partnership model. And the culture was one that I just absolutely loved, even though the thing that I wanted to do wasn't necessarily here at the time. And over my first 10 years, the firm at Deloitte, we call it the firm, we, I met a whole bunch of like minded people, and we started building websites again, and doing interactive stuff, and creative stuff and content management stuff, and CRM. And in 2012, a bunch of us got together and brought our little respective groups in, and we, we formed what's known today as delight digital. So I've been sort of one of the, you know, original members of that team, since 2011 2012. And, you know, we, we built it from, just like, at an agency, a ragtag group of really near do wells, yeah, you know, people trying to do something different, but we were doing it on a platform, you know, one of the largest professional services platforms in the world. So the things that you struggle with in a startup, we're all there for us. So we were building this agency on top of amazing industry, depth and management consultants and people that knew every function of every type of business and people that new technology. And so we had all these other things that I think were a real benefit to us and, you know, between 2012 and today, we've just continued to build and grow and scale Deloitte digital as I think a pretty big global global entity and what I love about it is the things that I always wanted, you know, that I loved about agency are the things that you know, I felt I feel like for a lot People we have, we have, you know, in this organization because it is a big private organization where, if you're good at what you do, and you love to focus on the craft, and you love to, you know, focus on client outcomes, there's a great sort of long term career path for you, and the opportunity to invest in things and innovate has just been awesome. So it's been a great, it's been a great run. Yeah, you know, I, I have a bit of a, you know, a new family, there are some people from the old days that are that are here and, and and at at Deloitte digital, you know, from the agency.com days, which is, which is always a kind of cool thing to do bump into them. and retest, you know, you and I have a connection point between Andy main, who was the previous, you know, global leader of delight digital is now working with you over at Ogilvy.

Yeah, he's our new CEO globally, we're happy to have him. You know, I've not had much interaction with him. But I'm seeing the moves that are being made. And I'm very impressed. I think he's exactly what we needed at this time that we're in. But, you know, I want to go back to what you said, which is the most important thing. And then we have to say a quick Hello. So you talked about the one statement that you made that for me epitomizes what agency comm was, which is perfecting your craft, focusing on your craft? Yeah, we were getting people in, you know that remember the 30 people in 30 days thing like Kyle went on? Crazy, right? Yeah. But we interviewed people who had no idea, but they were really good at one thing. So I remember for the tech department, the thing always was, you know, Mitch would interview them first to see if they would be a fit. And then if they were a Java developer, we had david Barton a check or, or James will queue interview the person to see Do they really know what they're talking about? Right. And then if we really liked them, I was thrown in to try and convince them to join us because they probably had six other offers, which will probably lower than what we were offering, and didn't have all the benefits of free cars, or 100,000 options and all the craziness that was going on. But it worked. It worked really well. And the people, people that came in were really good at what they did. And if they didn't, they went and figured it out, like Jason and Volker would flash, you know? Quick hello to Eric porous.

Eric, how are you, sir? Just Just briefly, Scott, because I think it could be instructive for folks. How do you? How do you translate the spirit and the, that that energy of what we had then now you're in now it's even though it's a privately held company, it's a big organization, right? and stuff changes as you scale? So with 1000s of people, how do you like what are the I don't either one of the lessons you brought forward? Or how do you how do you maintain that spirit to the best you can in a big organization?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, look, there's the lights and interesting place, it's a giant matrix, right. And so you try and break the organization down into smaller parts for, for people, right. And so people work on their project teams, they have an affinity to, you know, if I'm a creative part of the creative craft, if I'm a designer, I'm part of the design craft, if you know, if I'm a marketing tech person, I'm part of the the marketing technology group. So we have, you know, almost look at it, like I use this example all the time, I think people are sick of it and hate it. But it is like a giant thing about an enterprise service. bus, right. And with all these micro services, so you create teams of people that that can have their own sort of micro culture and relationships. And then over time, the whole organization just gets smaller, because everyone gets to know who each other you know, who people are. People tend to stay here for the culture a bit longer. So I think even though there's a lot of people in in each of the groups, people know each other really well.

Yeah, that's great. I remember we got to that, that place. When we when we got really big. We finally hit on that team size of between 25 and 35 people that if we could find a group of multidisciplinary people in that kind of pod unit, yeah, that we're good at travel, they could do British Airways, and if they were good at fashion, they could do all the crazy, you know, sexy sites and, but But yeah, it ended up being that that's, that's really fascinating.

So right. I mean, we you know, it's the same principle. I'm applying individually at Ogilvy is what I learned at agency so many days ago, years ago. But you know, now I've got this informal group of folks around the world so if I need something in Australia, and I can call If I need something in India khorana and we've built that crazy, you know, a global organization like Ogilvy, it's still small in my world, because I've got a core group of about 30 that I can always reach out to you just put Rajiv in Latin America around in India to Australia, Pierre in Singapore. So it's sort of a same concept. It lives inside you. And you take that with you. And it works.

Yeah, that's, that's awesome. Well, Scott, this is this has been great. I mean, it's just been, I don't know, every one of these shows is just like, it just I leave these things with a giant smile on my face, because it's just, you know, I don't know, we've got these shared memories, but like, like, you know, you come at it with such a different point of view. And, you know, everyone has their different memories from it. And it's great to

hear this because, you know, some of us have joined a little later. So, you know, you heard the legends of the red button. Coffee and chance winter, I swear to God, we gotta find a picture, I'm

sure, you know, I have these two old and, and Lawrence on. So he's probably the one that got these two old scuzzy drives that I can't figure out how to get the data off of, but it's all of my work from the old, the old, the old office, so I got it, we got to figure it out.

You know what, I may have some scuzzy cables down in there. What's happened to anymore? Wait,

that's a cigar drive?

Oh, here you go.

Web server only.

Just for that. Okay.

I don't have a drive for it anymore. But I

don't how many zip drives I've got downstairs. Man, that was amazing. Oh, wait. Lauren says there's an online that you could send, you could send this stuff to somebody who can do it for you. I'm sure there's a service out there.

Yeah, that's good.

I never thought of that. I got somebody to convert all my VHS to DVD. So why not? Right.

Yeah, yeah, I have a bunch of debt drives and jazz drives and cyclists. I, you know, they probably don't even work anymore. But you know,

but you remember, across the street from us at 65. There was a guy, a Chinese guy who had a company with all these drives setup. I remember when they when they were done a GM port, because we needed something converted from something to something. Yeah, you walk into this office, this guy had like every drive known to man hooked up to this one master computer, you know, reminds

me of those those, those sort of clickbait farms in China, where they've got like, 1000s of devices on shelves that are all this sort of self clicking.

So Jason Crawford has joined us too. And he's asked if we have any zip 100 Jason, I've got about 50 of them.

I have a bag of them. Yeah. Probably within reach that, you know that that's also just one of those stupid things. Like, I can't bring myself to throw them out. Because I may need to go back and get those files. Like, I know that we have a show. There's actually maybe a reason.

Yeah, that'd be fun. Yeah.

So much fun. Scott, thank you for joining us. We do have to get together one of these days is over because you're only one or two towns over. So where are you? I'm in Montclair.

How are you? Really?

Good. Yeah, I've been here since the winter. Yeah. When I came to agency, we had to find somewhere to live and we stumbled upon Montclair and bought a house. I've been here

10 miles away from me. Yeah, exactly. Go grab some socially distant coffee.

There you go. That's great. I'm stuck in Denver. But I'll get back to the east coast. All right, Scott. Thank you. This is great.

Thank you, Eric. Thank you for joining us, Lauren. Jason, big shout out to you guys. We've got to get you guys on next. I don't know we got so many people to go through. But we have to maybe what we'll do is the earliest people will do this individually. But then as we get going, maybe we get two or three of us together. Yeah, I

think we I think that's a great idea. Yeah,

yeah.

I'll certainly join some of the future ones and set them aside sidebar. Like, we'd love

it. That would be amazing. We got to hunt down Paul galley was

poor. Yeah, well, yeah, he's he's he's doing

Lucasfilm or somebody.

I don't know. Yeah. So furniture designer. Yeah.

We definitely have to do that. We'll have to track him down and have Paul you. Here's what I think we should do.

We'll do the pit.

Yeah. Dominique Elner.

Yeah. That's a pit episode.

That's right. That's awesome. Fantastic. Thank

you. Not great.

Oh, ice is a blast. Thank you Have a great weekend. You too. Take care

and thus ends our show.