writing » renaissance man
At 6:30 on a Monday evening, the offices of the Toronto multimedia firm Digital Renaissance feel a bit like a college dorm.
While a dozen or so employees are still hunched over their terminals, quietly tapping and coding away in the open-concept, chalet-style office, an aging German shepherd wearing a red bandanna greets visitors with an unconvincing growl before trotting away. Upstairs in the employee lounge, two twenty-somethings are sprawled on bean-bag chairs, playing Nintendo on a large screen television. It's clear this is not Peat Marwick.
Digital Renaissance is one of the more successful firms to hang out its shingle on the infobahn, proudly stating that it's "been around since 1991" - a lifetime in the still-in-the-cradle multimedia industry. Dozens of multimedia companies have popped up like mushrooms over the last few years, each trying to define a niche presence in a niche market that keeps threatening to explode into the mainstream.
The successful ones have mastered the delicate balance of both oozing sexiness and staying ahead of the industry's vertical learning curves. Multimedia types have to face down still- sceptical CEOs in their boardrooms, and speak to them in their language while appearing hip and on top of leading-edge digital culture.
Twenty-eight-year-old Keith Kocho, founder and CEO of Digital Renaissance, is well-suited to live in this schizophrenic alchemy. He sports a dagger earring, a permanent five-o'clock shadow, and a casual dressing style, which belies his impressive knowledge of both the technical and design sides of his business-he has the confidence of one who has pitched to a lot of suits, and brainstormed many a creative meeting on the shop floor.
Widely regarded as a "multimedia expert," Kocho was named one of the top 100 most influential communications professionals in Canada by Marketing magazine last March. He was one of the first people to teach a multimedia design course at the Ontario College of Art and Design, sits on a number of boards and committees, and has been a contributor to government studies on new information technology.
Not bad for a guy who began authoring new media programs out of his apartment over six years ago, adapting and evolving with the medium while the industry was still in diapers.
His company now boasts a staff of more than 50, and an impressive list of clients and partners, which includes Microsoft and Young & Rubicam. It may not pack the creative wallop of a traditional ad agency or boast the technical clout of a seasoned software development shop, but it has just enough of both to produce the kind of products that either of those would be hard pressed to create.
As he walks around the office, talking about network technology, bandwidth issues, and TAG (DR's new network multimedia hyperlinking software), Scout the German shepherd ambles over wagging his tail, looking almost like he's smiling. Must be a digital effect.
We spoke to Keith Kocho last May.
Gord: How does one become the President of a hot multimedia company at the age of 28?
Keith: Lie (laugh) ... A lot of the folks around here refer to me as an
engineer wannabe. I have an arts background, not a design-specific
background. I went to Ryerson and took Radio and Television Arts, which
qualifies you to do everything and nothing. 
I have spent a fair amount of
my time on both the cultural and design sides of media, and a substantial
amount of time in the technology world. I think that's the way I've been
able to maintain the respect of the troops here-I have a lot of hands-on
knowledge. I have to read incessantly, I have to have at least a level of
understanding that allows me to communicate with both the creative and
technical people in the company and the industry.
Gord: Is this a young person's game?
Keith: Our average age around here is in the area of about 30, and they're getting younger all the time. But I wouldn't say it's necessarily a young person's game; I'd say it's an open minded person's game.
Gord: How do you respond to the large segment of the business community that is still waiting for the Web to grow up and become truly relevant to their businesses? Has the business community gotten more educated about what they want from the Web?
Keith: Actually I'd say the opposite. Now they're farming out a lot of the decision making process to specialty shops like ours. When we first started doing this stuff we had all sorts of clients who said "we have to have a Web site," and I think we made some mistakes. We never tried to counsel them out of the idea. We should have asked 'Why? Why are you going to spend $300,000, buy all this hardware and slam something up, if you don't have a business driven reason and understand why you want to be there?' We just kind of waded in and say 'yeah, we'll produce sites.'
We don't do much of that kind of work any more. Companies like ours are not cost effective for doing that kind of design work anyway. Ad agencies are big time into that kind of stuff. They throw tons of resources at pitches and we refuse to do that.
Gord: I wanted to talk about the relationship between "hot shops" like yours, and the traditional agencies, many of whom have set up interactive departments in the last few years. What does a specialty shop bring to the table that a traditional agency can't find within itself?
Keith: From my perspective, it would be technical competence. We've got depth here for doing things across a wide variety of technologies that agencies would have a hell of a time trying to integrate into their environment.
They would have a hard time doing what I call industrial grade software applications that require a large amount of systems engineering. Ad agencies typically don't have that kind of management skill. We don't have producers or art directors here, because you get into this situation where the ego drives the vision. That said, although we have been positioned as more of a technically-oriented company, we do lots of design, and we've won lots of awards.
Gord: But do you end up soft selling the creative side?
Keith: We absolutely soft sell it. We'll pitch the creative end of things but it's more of an undertone. We'll pitch the business strategy first, which I think agencies try to do as well, but if you scratch their surface you'll find they don't have hard core consultants who have actually done business re-engineering. We work with companies to develop emerging lines of business that they're not currently in.
Gord: Can you describe your relationship with Young & Rubicam?
Keith: The Y&R relationship is primarily centered around TAG (see box on page...). Several months ago Ted Boyd, (Director of New Media Technology, Canada) got a look at what we were doing with TAG, and got excited, and decided he didn't want us running around to the other agencies and pitching it, so we structured a deal with them where we gave them exclusive access to the alpha and beta of it so they could integrate it into their stuff and have a head start.
Gord: Do you think Web TV is going to fly?
Keith: I try not to make predictions. I think there's a niche for an appliance like that.
Gord: But don't you think the two are about entirely different cultures? The sort of passive vs. active experience. Instead of the act of going out exploring and finding things on your own the TV culture has a spoon-fed quality to it.
Keith: I rather doubt that in the future you're going to have five people sitting in the living room, each with their own remote, surfing the Internet. But there are times when I could see myself sitting in front of my TV and surfing if there's a commercial with information I want more of, TAG gives me the ability to get more depth. Architecturally, that's what we're trying to do.
There's a problem with television in terms of presenting the additional information-how do you give it to them? We're doing things with broadcasters now where you provide visual clues and links to Web sites relevant to the content, or TAG will allow you to choose in depth information to be e-mailed to your computer. All broadcasters do now is slap up their Web address at the end of their shows and commercials and hope you'll remember.
Gord: Tell me a little bit about the course you taught at OCA.
Keith: It was primarily multimedia and interface design.
Gord: What kind of students were you getting?
Keith: A broad cross section-a fairly large number were from the advertising industry, lots of people from the Communication and Design faculty from within OCA, print design professionals, traditional agency creative types. It had no prerequisites which was actually a pain in the ass because you didn't know what you were getting in terms of level setting.
I focused on project based stuff rather than going through the basics of how you use Photoshop or Director. Because the college had very little computing resources and I only saw the students once a week for three hours, if I had to teach the students all the facets of the various packages we'd get nowhere.
What we did was to focus on basic disciplines, and then break people into various project teams. Someone would be the writer, someone would be the graphic developer, etc., to work towards a specific project. We did a portable sales tool, a Web site, a Kiosk product, and a promotional brochure type thing on a CD.
Gord: So were they learning hard technical skills, or more project management skills?
Keith: OCA's traditional focus has been design for design's sake and we were trying to teach design that is delivered on the platform that you create it on, which is totally different for them-they're used to the flexibility of paper or video. So we went through the basics of the computer: video, memory, bandwidth, how images and audio and video work and what you can and can't do.
We tried to get the students into an entrepreneurial mindset. In order to do anything in our business you've got to have that. You've got to sell yourself to get a job, you've got to sell yourself to set up a company. And we taught the interdisciplinary skills that you need to work in a team environment. For every project you had to go through a concept, basic story-boarding exercise, and then a task breakdown. It was a basic synthesis of what we do as a company.
Gord: With the kinds of things DR does, do you have to involve the client more than a traditional project, like a magazine ad?
Keith: Yeah. Typically with traditional media, you'll pitch the concept and go. Then there will be checkpoints along the way as you're doing it. This stuff is quite a bit more complicated because there's functionality, unlike a print ad or a video spot where you've got a beginning, middle and end. With this stuff, some of the functionality that drives the application is dictated by the client. We have all the pitches, design reviews etc. of a traditional television program, and it's gotta work within this much bandwidth, and it's gotta add this onto the thing, and go through here with the layout of this, and end up there.
We like to define everything up front and get the client to sign off on it. They say that's fine, we understand, so we go forward. If you make changes after that, we go back and renegotiate hourly, otherwise you never get finished, and it ends up costing way too much and either you eat it or the client ends up unhappy.
Gord: With all the people hanging out shingles in multimedia development, the bottom line must be fairly good for a lot of people in the interactive game.
Keith: The bottom line? (laughs) The top line's pretty good.
Gord: The learning curve is pretty daunting in this business. How do you budget your time?
Keith: I just get grabbed. My life is a bit like an episode of ER (laughs)
Gord: (hospital paging voice) "Doctor Kocho you're needed in Neurosurgery..."
Keith: Literally. It's frustrating sometimes, because it's hard to schedule things. Everyone else's priorities are mine. How do I do time management? Well, I don't have a life; I'm here on the weekends, I read incessantly about this.
Gord: So you're a magazine and periodical junkie?
Keith: Oh yeah, technical manuals too. I read a lot of Web resource material.
Gord: Do you do research on the Web?
Keith: That's all I do on it. I don't surf per se. I don't understand that really.
Gord: You don't go looking for the latest cool site?
Keith: No, not really. Some of the gang here will always be looking at "Cool sites of the day." If we have a client and we're involved in a pitch, I'll go and look at all the relevant sites for that, or approaches that may be relevant to what they do.
Gord: This company has morphed a few times, hasn't it?
Keith: Not really. People say that to me all the time. Some guy a year ago said to me that I was the Lucien Bouchard of the multimedia industry. But our metamorphosis has been purposeful. We operate under what I call "Trojan horse business development," which is essentially roll out the thing, and if we're successful at that, it's "Guess what else we've got!"
Gord: So you're chameleon-like?
Keith: Well no; chameleon sort of suggests to me that we change what it is we're offering, when in fact we're trying to be skillful from a sales proposition of what we're offering to the customer. I find most of the time you try to tell someone you do all these things, they get nervous and think you can't- they only want to hear about what they're interested in.
Once we understand the business objective, then we move forward. We have three core competencies: the "creative earring wearing types", the animation and audio visual production areas, and the software and systems design folks. The last one to me is the most important: the instructional design, education, and usability issues. You can design the hell out of something and put it on a platform, but does it actually achieve any business objectives?
Gord: Content is really pivotal to the success of any interactive experience, but it's often secondary to the bells and whistles. How can designers teach people to adapt to new ways of moving around multimedia products?
Keith: Well I have an obvious bent toward the storytelling paradigm, and what we're trying to do with TAG is about that. You can layer on elements to tell someone there's something there. They can just watch your video clip if they want, and it won't tell them there's something there unless they pause and ask for it.
Gord: So you choose your depth level.
Keith: Exactly. People ask me what I think of "smart agents," and I hate the idea of agents. You have this thing and you send it out to get what you've already defined as your interests, there's no novelty. I'm not going to find out anything new, I'm not going to meet any new people or broaden my horizons. It has a lot of functionality for utility, but for general learning it's a poor model.
Gord: How much does technology intrude on the creative process?
Keith: Too much. We sell our products into a space that's conditioned by television and print. The computer just doesn't have the richness and can't do the things that TV and films have taught us to expect from our media.
Gord: I was more thinking about the anatomy of a demo or pitch faze, where you can show the client a product in a controlled environment, without worrying about platform and hardware issues, browser differences or bandwidth-issues that will surely be present in a final roll out.
Keith: I don't know about the other guys, but we don't do that very much. When we pitch people, we generally show them actual stuff we've done before. Even when we pitch, we pitch based on the delivery capabilities of the platform, and we've lost business because of that. You know Bulldog and ICE used to kick our ass on that stuff.
Gord: Is it an integrity issue?
Keith: Well, it's not integrity so much as knowing what the client wants. If they want to see that you can do all singing and dancing that's fine, but if they come in and ask you to show them what practically can be done with this stuff and you sell them on some huge massive site and can't deliver it, that's an integrity issue.
We get the calls, you know: 'I'm coming down with my troops and we want you to give us a demo of the biggest kick-ass Web site we've ever seen.' And our general approach is, unless there's some sound business reason driving the idea we're not interested.
I think that kind of stuff has done a huge disservice to our industry, and advertising is littered with those kinds of misconceptions. The way TV spots for The Discovery Channel or TSN present their Web pages with full motion video right in their interfaces; if you get people to sign on with that, then you also have to deal with the backlash from people who bought that idea, went on the Web site and tried to run the video, and it took forever and they're pissed off.
That's a fine line, and I think our industry crosses it way too much. We lose business because of it but I don't lose sleep over it. We're not very good at dealing with the kinds of clients that just want that glitz. We can show them great things, but it's not going to be Dreamworks. It's not going to be 3-D dinosaurs running around. We could show you that, but why get your hopes up?
Gord: What skillset do traditional designers need to have to adapt to new media? People who have been trained in the rigorous precision of layouts, fontography, and images tend to be frustrated by the limitations of html and the Web.
Keith: This was part of the reason I was teaching at OCA. I don't think traditional design education does enough to broaden the minds of students in this area. I think for the most part these people just think about creating a design and then just stamping it.
Not "am I designing an experience or am I just designing an esthetic?" The only way you truly get a good foundation in this stuff-and there are a few exceptions lately in the training world-is to work with people with complimentary skills. Our education system is terrible at that. It's not outcome based, it's just skillset based. It needs to be project focused, force you to think about a whole bunch of different things at the same time which is what you would face in everyday life anyway.
Our education system has been more inclined to teach you specific disciplines and tools. So you have this person who is a masterful typographer, but doesn't have the slightest idea what an interface is.
Gord: So does one need to be a Renaissance man to be on top of this business?
Keith: To excel, you need to have a much broader understanding of a lot of different things then you ever needed in a traditional design setting. In our business we do our best to dash the idea of creative directors. We refuse to let someone drive the process, because traditional designers tend to tell the client what the look and feel is because they're "the designers." We try to work more collaboratively with clients. We will suggest certain design accents and such, but it's not done like "we are the authority on what design is supposed to be."
Gord: Would you describe yourself as a left-brained or right-brained thinker?
Keith: I'm definitely a lot of both. It depends on what I'm doing. For me that's the challenge of this business because I have to constantly exercise both ways of thinking. You have to understand the eccentric nature of both approaches.
Gord: I think the agency approach is perceived as more right brain and the new media shops such as yours are perceived as more left brain. The stuff that you do is so much more technology driven, and new media companies are struggling to find some sort of creative face to present to the community, to offset that geek perception.
Keith: I think you're absolutely right there. I know a lot of the people we have working here are extremely right-brained and have to be pulled back a lot of times to think rationally about some of their decisions.
Personally, I would like to have a more creative influence in what we do, and more interaction in what we do on a day to day level. And actually a lot of the newer stuff we are doing is not a client/contract deliverable thing, but more of a brainstorming/collaborative endeavour, and I think that is the way our business will be in the future.
Gord: Whereas a few years ago you could have a business plan in place for a couple of years, and grow into it, the chaotic nature of the multimedia industry precludes any kind of navel gazing. Is it hard to run a business in this kind of environment?
Keith: Oh yeah. It would be very, very difficult for me to do what I've done if I just started now. The main thing that's changed is the pace. There are a lot of people getting involved at very high skill levels and there's a lot of capital behind it now. I know a lot of people who have tried to start their own shops lately, whom we've worked with on a freelance basis, and it's tough.
I mean you can pick a niche and try to exploit it, and a lot of these boutique type shops can be successful at that. But you'll hit a point at which your general stress level, concern about paying your bills and overhead etc, and this decision about to grow or not to grow, will kill you. My decision way back at the beginning was GROW-go after as much business as you can. Not to become a huge megalomaniacal corporation but to pursue the potential of this industry. I don't think we've scratched the surface of what we can do here.
Gord: Get into a time machine and describe your core business in a year or two years.
Keith: All the success stories and flash-in-the-pan-CD-ROM stuff is just bullshit. If TAG succeeds, it kind of puts us on the map in terms of networking software innovation. We'll create products, we'll license technology, and we'll use those products and that core knowledge to feed our service business. I think a large change that may come, in terms of how we're perceived, will be on the consumer content development side. We've always wanted to do that, but we could never find a sustainable development model for it.
That's about to change. We work with a lot of publishers, like AOL and MSN, a lot of the big studios in the U.S. We've maintained a lot of connections in those areas from over the years that are very senior. These are playing out quite well for us now. It's the whole idea of where content on-line is going that drives the other collateral media. If the on-line experience is good enough then they'll consider it as a video, or a film or a book. Those are the kinds of things we want to do.
