HANGING WITH: MARK PYTLIK

"After several weeks of hunting Stink Digital's jet-setting EP Mark Pytlik across Japan and China, we managed to track him down back at his desk in London to pick his brains about technology, the death of the viral, and the future of digital advertising.

Could you tell us a bit about your move from journalism into production?

It wasn't a particularly easy move in the beginning; there are a lot of practical but not immediately obvious things to consider with production that only really become force of habit with time and experience. Luckily Stink were incredibly cool about letting me go at my own pace for the first year or so; that spin-up time was really important and allowed me to get a better lay of the land, which in turn gave me more confidence in helping to define Stink Digital's offering in a way that complemented Stink's.

Daniel [Bergmann]'s management style basically involves giving you the tools and resources you need to be successful, but ultimately leaving it to you to take the initiative; there's something very sink or swim about it that I appreciate. As far as the move from advertising journalism to production, I'd be lying if I said it was a planned path, but by the same token there was always something about the production world that appealed. And while the lack of frontline production knowledge made that first year interesting, it helped to be able to make up some of that ground with more practical skills like writing and presenting.

The other thing is that when you work for an industry magazine, it's basically your job to have a top-down view of the industry - to know as many people, as many facts and as many pieces of work as possible - and that obviously helps a bit too.

Over the past year or so have you noticed any changes in the assumptions and expectations of clients with regards to digital?

Generally speaking, I think there's probably still a lack of understanding when it comes to what kind of time and money goes into a good interactive experience versus what goes into, say, a film. I have a theory about this: even if the average person doesn't know what a gaffer or a best boy does, they still have a vague idea of what goes into a video or film production because of film credits. People see those things rolling up after a movie and even if they don't think much about them at all, they still intrinsically understand that an average film production requires a lot of people.

Obviously there's no equivalent for digital, but the difference is that sometimes those costs that aren't immediately relatable for a client get cut out of the process as a result, even though they're every bit as important.

All that said, we do notice that things are changing, almost on a monthly basis. If I compare the interactive market now to what it was a few years ago, the shift becomes pretty dramatic. It's happening, and pretty quickly.

There was a lot of noise a couple of years back about agencies bringing digital production in-house. Do you think agencies have managed to incorporate digital production into their offering in any meaningful sense?

Some do production in-house, some don't, and others find a balance between the two. It really depends on an agency's offering and their output. One simple fact of digital production is that it's time-consuming and expensive, so I can understand why a lot of agencies feel like it's more pragmatic to work with partners and specialists.

In the course of doing what we do, we get regular insight into how lots of different agencies work, and although everyone is basically moving towards the same general model (i.e. de-siloing and integrating their ATL and BTL departments), they're all taking unique paths there. Beyond that the current outsourcing model also engenders healthy competition amongst companies like ours, which I think is good for us and good for the work as a whole.

Why do you think it took so long for agencies and clients to understand the difference between viral used as a noun and viral as an adjective?

I think you hit on the root of the problem with the second definition. A viral started out being a thing that happens, but somewhere along the line people started using it as shorthand to mean a film on the internet, and I think the gap between those two meanings has created a lot of problems.

Maybe this is the writer in me talking, but I really do think that inexact language is dangerous. Calling something 'viral' absolves people from having to really think about what they're trying to achieve. We see a lot of things that are branded virals even though the agency knows that what they want to make isn't really the sort of thing that would normally go viral. And it makes you want to push to properly redefine what it is they want to make, because even the process of naming it answers some important questions about the job that it's meant to do.

At this point, 'viral' is one of those weird superwords that means everything and nothing all at once; 90 per cent of the time, I think it would be helpful if we avoided it.

In your opinion, what have been the most interesting tech developments of late?

Well, Google Wave is interesting; there's something there, although I admit to being less than enthused by the beta product, and I'm a bit nervous about what Wave uptake will mean for our attention spans. Other than that, we've been messing around with Arduino boards a little bit in the office lately. I don't know that they're new but they're interesting; I think tactility is going to become a bigger thing over the next few years. One of the reasons AR took off like it did was because it offered up an extension outside of the screen; one of our mandates for 2009 is to experiment with more technologies that you can actually feel and play with.


And what's been keeping you so busy!

We've had plenty of projects going on. There was the Shelter House of Cards site which we launched in Sept, Cadbury's Nibbles Boutique which launches tomorrow, our 20 documentary films for Sky Sports which launched last week and a new site for Playstation 3 which launches next week.
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