Porn Star

Q: Introduce us to yourself and your company.
My name is Rock Darlington, I’m an Interactive Producer at Domani Studios in Chicago. My name is really Rock, it’s not a porn name, and my parents weren’t hippies.

Q: Interactive Producers come from all walks of life, they are a hybrid of talents, tell us about your background and how you got interested in digital production?
I grew up like every other producer wanting to be in creative, copywriting was my passion in school. Unfortunately I sucked at it. Since I didn’t want to go to portfolio school, I decided to take a job as an Interactive Media Planner at StarcomIP in the meantime to pay the bills so I could work on my portfolio. A small interactive shop was blossoming under Starcom, named Pixel. I knew the Director well and she gave me the opportunity to move into creative and production. We were all young and had a lot of fun, it was also a lot of hard work. I eventually moved to DRAFTFCB which was much larger and much more a traditional agency. After a while I missed having multiple brands and cliens to work on. I also missed the family environment of a small shop and wanted a new challenge. Luckily enough, Domani Studios opened shop in Chicago and the rest is history.

Q: How do you stay on top of emerging technologies and keep your team informed and motivated?
The best way to stay on top of emerging technologies is to try and emerge yourself in those technologies. As a producer, you owe it to yourself to sign up for accounts on the new web 2.0 sites and try them out for yourself. It makes you look smarter in meetings if you already know about how things work and especially how they will help your clients. You also look stupid if you don’t know how something works or if it’s possible, especially if your clients already do. You also need to literally look at every cool site that comes out, learn what they did, learn what they did wrong, and let them inspire you.

As for the second question, I don’t think it’s just me who keeps my team informed and motivated, but we all keep each other informed and motivated. We all drive each other to make shit cooler.

Q: What does your ideal client/project look like?
A. Wow, this is a trick question right? One thing I’ve noticed in my tenure is that every client and every project is different on so many levels. But to make it easier on a producer, an ideal client is someone who you’ve worked with before. It’s a lot easier to manage client expectations if you’ve already been through a project before and have an understanding of how they react in different situations. If I had a dream project, it would be with a client who was a prior producer. I think that would be awesomeness.

Q: How do you educate your clients and set realistic expectations for a project?
The best way to set realistic expectations is to provide the client with options. You should never go to a client and tell them what they are asking for is impossible, rather you should just communicate what IS possible based on the restrictions of the project and give them options. Let the client be the one to decide which path they’d rather take. Most of them will make a decision based on their options, the ones that don’t budge, well…those are the difficult clients to deal with.

Q: What was the best project you have ever worked on?
This is a toughy, there’s a ton of work that I’m proud of. One of the best projects I ever worked on never even made it into production. It was for a social community site that was targeted towards Grill Masters. We had a brilliant idea for a BBQ sauce to create this community that offered both entertainment and a social networking twist where there were multiple levels of users based on a ton of interaction rates, etc. It was a lot of fun to figure out all the moving pieces needed for the site. It involved a ton of vendors. It was a logistical nightmare, it was perfect for a hungry producer. The client killed it. Unfortunate.

Q: How many projects are you comfortable producing at one given time?
It really depends on a ton of variables…the scope of the project, the timelines, the amount of client management, the available resources. You could have a very small project with a client who’s not that knowledgeable in the space and it could eat up a ton of your time. You could also have a brilliant client on a huge web build and it could run a lot more smoothly then the prior. But if I was to add a figure on it, two medium to large websites interwoven with some banner work and other smaller projects.

Q: What does your dream production team look like?
I’m going to base this on a sweet web build because it depends on the project for the team. But I would say an EP, CD, Tech Director for oversight. Tech Director needs to start being called TD I think to keep them on the same level…anyways we digress. A kickass producer, like myself, a jr. producer, someone like myself 5 years ago, a badass flash developer, an after effects/3D/Kick-Ass motion graphics guy, a very good AD, and a designer. Last but not least, a brilliant IA who has to be smarter than me. Oh and one more thing, a very close Dunkin Donuts. That’s the team.

Q: How do you ensure that your client's best interests are met?
I get the brightest people to work on my projects. I also keep the client close and involved in the project. As a production team, you shouldn’t really tell the client what is best for them. All we can do is provide our best recommendation. Plain and simple truth is we don’t understand their brands as much as brand managers do, they live and breath that brand every day, we live and breath many, many brands from day to day. So what we can do is offer our recommendation based the things we know like technology and design.

Q: What is your vision of what the next phase of our industry is going to look like?
If I had the correct answer to this question, I would probably a very successful entrepreneur. It’s a very interesting time these days. I have had the opportunity to work at a smaller creative agency that was owned by a huge holding company, an opportunity to work at a large agency (also owned by a huge holding company), and a small studio, so I’ve experienced every company’s vision as to what they are striving to become.

You see a ton of agencies who are trying to “combine” interactive and traditional people into the same group and expect for them to totally just bounce ideas off of each other. In my experience it’s still like oil and water, it doesn’t mix well.

I personally think that more and more agencies will outsource production work to smaller studios much like their broadcast counterparts. Agencies will still want to own the creative idea and that is where the lines are blurred. We’ve already seen this with a couple of different campaigns.

Q: Please share a snippet of wisdom that you would like to impart on our readers.
If you find yourself stressed over a project, take a step back and remember…it’s only interactive advertising.

AND some advice from my media planning days. When a publisher tells you that it takes 5 days to traffic an ad, they’re full of shit. That shit takes like 2 minutes, honestly.