Agency.com

» see agency.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Chan Suh and Kyle Shannon incorporated Agency.com in New York on 10 February 1995, which is early enough that most of their future clients did not yet have a website to redesign. They had been making a web magazine called Urban Desires with Gabrielle Shannon since 1994, and the agency was the thing that paid for it. Within eighteen months Omnicom had bought a significant minority stake, and the capital went straight into buying other people's shops.

It got serious in 1998. Agency.com took Online Magic in London, which DDB had set up, giving it a first office outside the United States. It merged with Eagle River Interactive and came out of that the largest interactive marketing agency in the world by the measures of the day. Spiral Media in New York and Interactive Solutions in Boston went in the same year. The following year it took iTraffic for online media buying, then Digital Vision Communications to open Chicago. An Amsterdam office arrived the same way, by buying a Dutch firm called Twinspark Interactive People. In December 1999 it listed on NASDAQ under the ticker ACOM, three months before the market that made all of this possible stopped working.

What followed was the standard shape of a dot-com survivor. A take-private deal started in 2001 and closed in 2003, after which the company was sold on to Omnicom outright. It went on buying smaller things and winning awards, and by the late 2000s it described itself as around five hundred people across eleven offices on three continents. Chan Suh came back as chief executive in 2008.

In late 2009 Suh resigned along with an executive vice president, because a merger with TBWA\Chiat\Day was already in motion. The next year Omnicom put the dismantling into effect: San Francisco was spun out as a new company called Signal to Noise, Chicago was folded into an office of TBWA's production arm to do web development and search, and New York had already been absorbed into TBWA\Chiat\Day New York. The international offices were to follow into TBWA over time, with the name disappearing as staff were integrated. By 2011 most of what remained had been gathered into The Designory.

~ the record ~

~ how big it got ~

It is difficult now to convey how much authority an interactive agency carried around 1999. A traditional advertising firm could not build a website and did not want to learn, so for about five years the shops that could build one were in the rare position of selling something their clients could not evaluate. Agency.com and its peers charged accordingly and expanded by acquisition, because buying a staffed office was faster than hiring one.

The weakness in that arrangement showed up as soon as the skill became ordinary. Once every agency had a digital department, the specialist's premium disappeared, and a holding company looking at its portfolio saw two firms doing the same work for the same clients. Omnicom owned both. That is the whole mechanism of the 2010 decision, and it took no malice at all.

~ when we roll, we roll big ~

In 2006 Agency.com made a pitch video for the Subway sandwich chain and put it on YouTube, apparently to demonstrate that it understood viral media by documenting its own pitch process and releasing it to the public. It contained an employee saying the line "When we roll, we roll big." The industry reaction was close to unanimous and not kind.

Out of sixteen years of this company, the pitch video is the single piece that ever got as far as me, and it arrived the way such things arrived then: a link from somebody, no context about which agency it was or which account was at stake. An ad firm's internal swagger escaping onto the open web was novel enough that year to be worth forwarding. The supply of that particular joke increased a great deal over the following decade.

~ the leftovers ~

The pieces went on under other names. The Belgian office stayed inside TBWA with the Agency.com brand attached for a while. The Italian one was split, partly absorbed by TBWA and partly bought by its own management, then merged into Draftfcb. Signal to Noise went off on its own in San Francisco.

The domain is the clearest marker. Through the first days of October 2011, agency.com still answered with a small page describing ten offices and a copyright line that had not been updated since 2010. A month later it was returning a redirect, and it has never served its own site again. Urban Desires, the magazine the whole thing grew out of, had stopped publishing ten years before that.

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