Head New Media

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

~ the goodbye ~

Felix Velarde and Jason Holland opened Head New Media in February 1997, after three years running an agency called HyperInteractive. Nobody had settled what a digital agency was for yet, so Head sold both halves of the question at once: websites for brands, and the interactive television work that everyone in 1998 expected to be bigger than the web.

In 1998 the agency became the UK digital arm of Lowe Worldwide, part of Interpublic and the fourth largest advertising group on earth. That sentence explains most of what followed. Head stopped being two founders with a client list and became a line item inside a holding company whose other lines were television and print.

The same year it set up Head End, a wholly owned subsidiary that Wikipedia describes as the UK's first specialist interactive television creative agency. Head End made one of the first interactive television ads on Flextech, for Tesco, and interactive advertising for Unilever on NTL's cable network. The client list eventually ran through the BBC and General Motors, and the agency was at one point the most awarded in Europe.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the agency actually sold ~

The Snickers MegaBite site is the entry that dates the era. Mars Confectionery wanted a website for a chocolate bar in the late 1990s, and the answer was a standalone destination with its own name, built by an agency out of a brand budget. There was no feed to post into and no app store to ship to. If you wanted an audience you built them somewhere to go.

Interactive television was the other bet, and it was the one the forecasts loved. Flextech and NTL were building British cable platforms with a return path, which meant a viewer could press a button on a remote and have something happen at the other end. Head End existed to make the something. The platforms never reached the scale the projections promised, and an agency that had specialized in them had nowhere else to put the skill.

~ the lowe years ~

Lowe's name on the door let an agency eighteen months old pitch against anyone in London. It also meant the agency's future sat inside somebody else's strategy review. Wikipedia's citation for the closure is a 2001 E-consultancy feature titled "Head closes after ad partnership crumbles", and Campaign's headline from the same year is "Head New Media to close down as Lowe pulls plug". Neither of those is about the work.

~ august 2001 ~

Velarde's own site supplies the month. "In August 2001 we decided to close Head," he wrote, and the creative side moved into Underwired, a company he and Holland had helped start in 1996. Wikipedia records the fate as liquidation. Head End outlasted its parent by about a year before Underwired acquired it too, which Creative Match reported in December 2002.

There is no DNS record for headnewmedia.com. The agency ran from February 1997 to August 2001 and spent its last three years as somebody else's digital division, and what ended it was a decision taken above its head about whether digital was a business the group wanted. A subsidiary never gets to answer that question about itself.

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