NEW YORK Whenever media changes, new agencies spring up to serve needs not filled by existing players. It is the story of how the most influential interactive shops were born, built by focusing on the Web when the traditional agencies, for the most part, were not.

Now, a new crop of digital agencies is quietly asserting itself in similar voids created by shifts in digital media. They are typically smaller than the established stalwarts of the industry -- R/GA, AKQA and Tribal DDB -- and more often independent. They are thriving by taking fresh approaches to serving clients. This is through a focus on metrics and search, distributed digital content over microsites, technology interface design or the latest in social media.

"I look at these guys and think 'Thank God,' because it's a return to the kind of ideals we had when we went into the business," said Colleen DeCourcy, chief digital officer at TBWA Worldwide.

Here, we have selected five shops to watch, based on their success at leading innovations in the marketplace.

360i

Less than two years old when the dot-com meltdown began in 2000, 360i nonetheless made a prescient bet on search marketing.

At the time, five years before Google went public, paid search was mostly a curiosity in the ad world. But for CEO Bryan Wiener, who joined the shop in 2005, after its acquisition by Innovation Interactive, 360i was well positioned for the emergence of auction-based ad systems. At the time, media agencies were ignoring search.

"We thought the auction media format was going to spread to other forms of digital media," Wiener said.

The shop established itself as a leader in the fragmented search marketing landscape, concentrating on metrics-focused campaigns for big-name clients. In 2006, Wiener's team noticed something: Social media sites, particularly blogs, were having an outsize influence on search results. The shop set up a social media practice to help clients improve their "search equity."



360i is now building out its creative services, scooping up application specialist i33 in March. The shop wants to specialize not so much in destination sites but shareable content and widgets.

For this year's tax season, 360i flexed its social muscles on behalf of H&R Block, which wanted to tap social media environments like Facebook and MySpace to change brand perceptions. It created widgets for the sites and blogs, and even used Twitter to interact directly with consumers who mentioned taxes. For example, a Twitterer lamenting doing her taxes would get an H&R Block offer to help. Though the campaign bought media, it reached consumers well beyond regular ad messaging.

"I think the interactive space is moving from media buying to a broader landscape of customer connections," said Paula Drum, vp of marketing for H&R Block. "Agencies have to evolve how they're organized and go from being media driven to strategy driven."

Founded: 1998
2007 Revenue: $35 mil.
Employees: 200
Key clients: NBC Universal, H&R Block, JC Penney



BIG SPACESHIP

When Michael Lebowitz thinks of the model he wants his agency, Big Spaceship, to follow, he talks about architecture, not advertising. There, he noted, "nothing is forced on you. It's about the overall experience."

That's the guiding principle behind Big Spaceship, the digital shop Lebowitz began in 2000 after working at thoughtbubble, an interactive agency of the dot-com era. "It was a function of having seen how to do it wrong and having a little bit of hubris and naiveté to think we could do it better."

Big Spaceship soon landed projects with Miramax, earning a reputation as an innovator. For Bridget Jones's Diary, it took a humble movie site and reinvented it as an experiential site through the eyes of the title character. Studios took note, and more work quickly followed.

One of its standout projects was work with BBDO on the HBO "Voyeur" project, a video-rich site that creates the feeling of peering into the lives of strangers in their New York apartments.

Known for its Flash expertise, the shop is doing more projects that don't rely on the latest and greatest technology. For A&E's upcoming showing of The Andromeda Strain, it embarked on an ambitious campaign that extends the movie experience through a combination social media, narrative and scavenger hunt. It plays off the sci-fi movie by inviting users to solve the mystery of a fictional town in Utah whose residents have disappeared. "What Happened in Piedmont" is accessible to the casual participant through a fictional blog, Facebook group and Twitter feed.

Big Spaceship has used its foothold in entertainment to branch into brand work for the likes of Corona, Gucci and Royal Caribbean. Entertainment is now about 50 percent of its business, Lebowitz said. Those clients are coming looking for something other than typical agency work, he said.

"We're driven by innovation, and I don't mean that in a tagline way," Lebowitz said. "We're not interested in doing things that have been done before, and it's not in clients' interests to do that."

Founded: 2000
2007 Revenue: $7.5 mil.
Employees: 45
Key clients: Sony Pictures, Adobe, Royal Caribbean



DEEP FOCUS

Few could doubt Ian Schafer's belief in social media. The Deep Focus founder blogs and uses Twitter daily to connect with others and share his thoughts.

This close affiliation with social media flows throughout the New York digital shop, which boasts an array of social-media firsts for clients: the first MySpace and YouTube film promotions, a Google Maps mash-up and a campaign on Photobucket and Gaia Online.

"If we see something we think is going to pop, we can turn it around really quickly," Schafer said.

The willingness to experiment is paying off for Deep Focus, which Schafer, a former director of new media at Miramax, started six years ago. He saw agencies siloed around specialties. They were not structured well for a world where consumers control the brand messages they receive. Deep Focus was formed with not just creative and media together, but also public relations, drawing on Schafer's experience marketing films, which rely heavily on PR.

The approach has helped the indie shop attract attention from movie studios and media companies, and marketers like Nike, Johnson & Johnson and Glaceau. It is typically called in as an innovation SWAT team. For Glaceau's Vitamin Water, for instance, it crafted a Facebook campaign in March that integrated Vitamin Water into Slide's SuperPoke application. It led to the brand being passed along 9.7 million times in a week. Offline, Deep Focus caused a stir in 2006 with a billboard in New York, seemingly from an irate wife to her unfaithful husband. In truth, it was part of a campaign for Court TV's Parco P.I., a reality show about a New York private investigator.

Currently, Schafer is rethinking the primacy of the ad campaign, which he said social media is rendering irrelevant, and calls for a deeper commitment to communities. "It's the agencies that are in it all the time that need to step up," he said. "Those agencies haven't gotten so big that they've gotten conservative."

Founded:  2002
2007 Revenue:  $12 mil.
Employees:  75
Key clients:  HBO, Estee Lauder, Dewar's



EVB

Although it goes by EVB nowadays, it was founded as Evolution Bureau, an apt name for an eight-year-old agency that has evolved into a hot shop known for its knack for creating viral content.

When CEO Daniel Stein and partner Jason Zada founded EVB, their vision was not a Web version of an ad agency, though both worked at Saatchi & Saatchi. Instead, they took inspiration from a different experience: filmmaking. Stein worked under Francis Ford Coppola at his production company, and saw an opportunity, even with the era's clunky dial-up modems, to use the Web for broadcast.

"Everyone else was producing GIFs and information Web sites," said Stein. "We wanted to create an entertainment experience that was immersive."

Along the way, EVB has gone with the flow, doing Web production work for the likes of Crispin Porter + Bogusky ("Whopperettes" site) and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (Goodyear Eagle F1 site), while building up a client list that includes Wrigley's and Leapfrog.

In 2006, Omnicom bought a 51 percent stake in EVB. Two years ago, Stein and Zada repositioned the agency to focus squarely on distributed digital content. Take its Criss Angel campaign for A&E. EVB combined hundreds of video shots to create the illusion of Angel reading user minds. Its viral calling card, though, is the OfficeMax "Elf Yourself" holiday push, which this year attracted 193 million visits.

For Adidas, EVB recruited popular video mash-up artists to create executions using music videos from alternative bands and footage of Major League Soccer teams that could then be embedded in social networks and blogs.

"The agencies who have grown big have done so on the back of simple and efficient executions like banner advertising," said Tara Moss, global head of digital marketing for Adidas. "That's attracted a less innovative group of creatives."

Founded: 2000
2007 Revenue:  $15 mil.
Employees:  65
Key clients:  Adidas, Alberto Culver, Major League Soccer



SCHEMATIC

Trevor Kaufman has never considered himself an adman. Unlike interactive agencies in San Francisco and New York, Schematic, the agency Kaufman founded, didn't shift to online marketing. Instead, it focused on solving distribution problems for media and technology businesses. Before it became a buzzword on the conference circuit, Schematic helped clients create digital platforms.

Clients like Disney, ABC and Intel "didn't come to us to market some offline product but to create products for them to distribute media or establish a community or build an e-commerce experience," he said. ABC, for instance, tapped Schematic to build the broadband video player when it began putting its TV episodes online, along with helping it figure out an ad model that balances the user experience with business imperatives.

Its experience with media companies has paid dividends as more companies look to content and customer experiences as a pathway to building brand loyalty. Target hired Schematic to figure out a new way for teen girls to shop. The agency created a digital flipbook site that felt more like a fashion magazine than a typical e-commerce experience.

"People often confuse two different things: the shift to digital and the realization on the part of marketers that the best way they can improve their brand value is to improve their customer experience," said Kaufman.

Schematic attracted suitors last year, eventually striking a deal with WPP Group in September. It's now the digital cornerstone of Project DaVinci, the WPP-created Dell agency. (See story on page 8.)Technology and media segments have decreased to 30 percent of the shop's business, as more traditional marketers concentrate on their digital strategies beyond banner ads.

"Marketing will always be a cost center," Kaufman said. "We're looking for ideas where clients can make money."

Founded: 1999
2007 Revenue:  $30 mil.
Employees:  260
Key clients:  Dell, Target, Comcast