Interactive

Requiring a customer to actively participate in the selling process isn't new; catalog marketers have been doing it since the 1800s.

What is new is how the media have changed. Today, customers “interact” with the selling process in new, usually electronic-based, venues. Catalogs now sit, not on a shelf, but in cyberspace. The big buzz word is, of course, “e-commerce.”

Web sites (including this one), CD-ROM presentations, the promise of DVD-ROM, and the advent of two-way TV allow a customer to browse, anonymously moving from area to area, accepting or avoiding your offers at will.

Customers like the idea of having a certain amount of control.

These new electronic venues can take your customers not only into your catalog, but directly to your factory floor, on a virtual tour of your efforts to save the rainforest, or on a trip through the minutia of your latest technological breakthrough.

Because of the potential applications, we've moved strongly into the concepting, design, and execution of Interactive Media.

After all the site maps, icons, drill downs, and click-here-to-order technology is done, the purpose of Interactive Media is to make a sale; e-commerce is, quite simply, the newest version of the old presumptive close.