Digital Media Buzz > Archrival

Archrival

• Location: Lincoln, Nebraska
• Number of Employees: 17
• Clients: Microsoft, Red Bull, Honda
• URL: www.archrival.com

Headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska, Archrival is a marketing agency that puts a special focus on consumer brands that engage young adults.  Understanding that the youth culture of today will lead us into the future, the company has committed itself to developing innovative strategies geared toward the Generation X and Generation Y audiences. Archrival has worked with a number of well-known brands during its tenor, directing the advertising initiatives of companies such as Microsoft, Red Bull and Honda.

Contel Bradford of DMB recently spoke with Archrival co-founder and president Charles Hull and Archrival interactive director Bart Johnson, to get their outlook on the industry and learn more about what makes this agency tick.

Your company initiatives are very unique.  What made Archrival decide to become so involved in the youth movement?
Charles Hull: My business partner Clint Runge and I started the firm when we were both still in architecture school in our early 20s, so youth culture was not just  something we were interested in, but actually lived on a daily basis. In addition, the intense architecture schooling gave us a strong foundation for creative problem solving, which we quickly found gave us a big edge with the youth market who tuned out traditional media. Therefore, we quickly found that the work we enjoyed most, and were the most successful with, was work for consumer brands that targeted youth. We found we were very good at concepting and implementing guerilla campaigns, buzz tactics, and experiences that generally created word of mouth for our brand clients. So about three years into the business, we decided just to focus exclusively on youth brand marketing, and establish Archrival as an expert in developing youth oriented brand strategies. Over the years, that focus has remained the same, but methods and tactics have definitely evolved.

What has been the most exciting and challenging aspects of working with world renown brands such as Microsoft and Honda?
Hull: Working with big brands is exciting because the work we do makes a big impact. For example, we recently developed an online game for a major brand that was a global viral smash hit — with hundreds of thousands of players from over 200 countries. It’s very satisfying to see your ideas come to life and be successful at such a massive scale. At the same time, we like to balance our client base with small regional companies as well like Lucky Bucket Brewing Company, who are often startups who come to us with nothing but a fledgling product or service, and rely on us to develop their brand identity from the ground up, often starting with the name.

Probably the most challenging aspect of helping large brands engage young consumers is that the speed at which trends move and popular culture shifts is a lot faster than most corporate marketing departments move. This is why you often see big brands roll out programs well after an idea or trend has already been beat to death by every other company in the marketplace. These brands always seem out of touch.  So a big part of the way we help big brands roll out relevant, fresh ideas to young consumers is to be very far ahead of the curve on trends. This requires a lot of research and understanding where youth trends tend to originate, and the ability to identify the ones that will make it to the mainstream. We identify these trends early on and base our strategic recommendations on the ones we believe hold opportunities for our brand clients, and then develop and implement the ideas just as the trends are moving into the mainstream, or slightly before.

What emerging technologies have been the most useful in developing websites for some of your clients?
Bart Johnston: Javascript frameworks have made it MUCH easier for web designers/developers to add very rich functionality to their pages.  It used to be that if you wanted to implement some really cool dynamic feature on your site, you spent the vast majority of your time coding to account for all the slightly different behaviors of each browser.  The big benefit of most Javascript frameworks is that they smooth over all those inconsistencies, and present the developer with a consistent way to do do things in the browser.  There are tons of great frameworks out there.  We’re partial to jQuery, but there are lots of other full-featured, mature libraries out there — like YUI,MooTools, Dojo, and EXT.

Could you please enlighten our audience on the benefits of third-party branding?  Why would someone want to hire a company like Archrival opposed to launching the same campaign internally?
Hull: This is easy … expertise. We make it our business to know the youth market forwards and backwards, and we staff our firm with the right talent that together as a team, can formulate and implement programs that will be effective at engaging youth. You hire Archrival, or a firm like Archrival, for the same reason you go to a doctor, or hire a lawyer  - we have the knowledge base to diagnose your problem, recommend a solution, and implement it.

Technology has taken us so far over the last few years.  In your opinion, what viable innovations can be made to improve the fields of web design, advertising and digital media?
Johnston: Specifically, one thing we¹d like to see is improved handling of embedded/custom fonts on the web.  There’s been some really great innovation lately, like sIFR and Cufon, and more recently TypeKit, but what’d be really great would be to see the standards for font embedding come together and become widely adopted.  The other major hurdle (which TypeKit is trying to address) is dealing with the font licensing complications that enter into the mix when you are embedding fonts.

Another thing -  Internet Explorer — kill it.  Really.  It would improve web design (and the lives of web designers) immensely, overnight, if IE went away and those users replaced it with any one of the new flock of excellent, standards-compliant browsers out there.  Firefox, Safari, Chrome, take your pick, it’s hard to go wrong, they’re all great, and light-years ahead of IE when it comes to speed, security, and support for current and future web standards.

Contel Bradford is a professional freelance writer who produces Web content to help numerous clients achieve optimization and organic search engine rankings. You can learn more about his freelance writing services www.contelbradford.com.