The Direct Response Agency

I was brought in to be the technical lead for a new department at The Direct Response Agency, focussed on using the nascent web to enhance direct marketing techniques.

My role was to take traditional creative and develop it for the web, exploring many ways to make the content more engaging. The arrival of Netscape Navigator 2.0 ushered in a new era of Java, JavaScript and browser plugins, all of which I used to explore new ways for the user to interact with the machine across a network. Looking back, I cringe at the lack of standards and accessibility, but it was an era where anything was possible, and it taught me many ways of not doing something.

It was a time of firsts — I produced the first-ever media-rich web promotions for several large brands, such as Christian Dior, Intel, Equitable Life and Tower Bridge. I won my first award, an Innovation Award from Direct Marketing Magazine, for a mailable, floppy disk-based pension calculator linked to the internet.

Building a team, we brought our hosting in-house, requiring me to learn how to work from the command line as much as using visual tooling. I worked hand-in-hand with a Perl hacker, both of us learning how to work full-stack, from hardware to database to the plentiful restrictions and workarounds of delivering solid front-end code.

My partner worked at a small design company, Denovo, in North London, and I would often head up there after work and help out with CD-ROM, music and web design work. Then one day the phone rang — it was David Bowie, wanting to employ Denovo to produce the artwork for his album 1.Outside. I got involved in my spare time — creating the innovative Bowie Booth, an interactive kiosk placed in record shops across North America that let fans explore the album and sign up to a mailing list: a mechanism now regarded as a precursor to the BowieNet project Bowie launched a few years later. Little did I know where this would lead at the time — or that the story would have a sequel thirty years on.