Novo Ironlight Interactive today unveils an updated identity, a new Web site and a new positioning as a strategic consulting group. The San Francisco shop will drop “Ironlight” and become simply Novo Interactive, and staffers will bill themselves as “digital commerce architects.”
Novo’s repositioning is part of an ongoing agency trend. On March 29, OgilvyOne New York announced the formation of strategic marketing consultancy OgilvyOne Consulting. Organic, San Francisco, has had a similar division since 1996.
Executives say customers are driving the changes. “Clients are not just coming to us and saying, “Build this.’ They’re saying, “How should we approach planning for this, spending against it, scaling it?'” said Novo CEO Kelly Anthony Rodriques, who said his company “saw an opportunity to define before we design, develop and engineer.”
Current Novo clients include Sony, Toyota, Levi Strauss, IKEA and E*Trade. Novo also won accounts from paper manufacturer Avery-Dennison, Pasadena, Calif., and online food and kitchenware retailer Digital Chef, St. Helena, Calif.
Digital Chef is the kind of highly-capitalized, pure Internet company Novo prefers to work with. “We think you have to service the client across their enterprise,” Rodriques said, “be able to consult on the strategic side, create, market and engineer. We think it’s a more sound business practice to embed ourselves across the businesses of our clients, for a smaller number of bigger, longer-term relationships.” Novo plans to introduce a new compensation model based on performance that may include taking equity positions in client companies.
Derrick Palmer, Novo’s director of Internet business strategy and research, will lead a new strategic group. Palmer, formerly a director at Cambridge Management Consulting, San Francisco, said a big part of the job is change management. “When a company puts in place a technical solution like a Web site … it’s not just about technology. It’s about internal processes, organizational design [and] having the people and skills to support it.”
Palmer hopes to include end-users in the concept stage. “Why not ask them at the outset what they’d like to see,” Palmer asked, “rather than developing something in the board room and then asking them?”
IQ News: Novo Sheds "Ironlight," Focuses on Strategy
