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“The only thing we did is we refused to accept that fate and tried to do it well, even though we never did it before, and we tried different combinations,” said Barrett. “We felt that agencies weren’t formed to concentrate on one medium. We believe that digital is just another platform. In fact, anyone who considers themselves a traditional or a digital agency are just being marginalized. I mean, why would a client with substantial resources and needs want to work with an agency that has limited capabilities? To arbitrarily say we can’t do digital seemed self-defeating. At one point we were considering sub-branding, but then we just got busy, and before we knew it, 50 percent of our work was interactive.”

Because I had spent a lot of time working at places that couldn’t detect a paradigm shift if its epicenter was directly under the ergonomically perfect wheels of their Herman Miller office chairs, I asked him to elaborate on the process that led to the interactive transformation.

“We [Barrett, the co founders, Rich Silverstein and Jeff Goodby, and the partner and creative director, Steve Simpson] thought, why can’t we play? We’re relatively smart people who know how to solve problems—why can’t we do this stuff? Partly that is stubbornness, and partly it’s not wanting to go to the trouble of sub-branding ourselves. If you start doing that, they’re ultimately going to have to work together. So rather than create some clusterfuck, logistical nightmare later, why not figure it out now?

“What we did, and we’re still in it, is, if you’ve done terrific interactive work, we’ll hire you, but as a creative person. If you’ve done terrific television, we’ll hire you as a creative person. We made the assumption that a good creative person can get any creative challenge done.”

That’s not a particularly sexy creation story, I told him. No “aha!” moment, no proprietary process?

“People ask Jeff and Rich and Steve and myself, ‘How did you do it?’ and we usually answer we just came in every day and wanted to do better. None of us would be so pompous as to say we had a vision for it. Recently I was part of a workshop about the future of advertising. Everyone seemed to want to be anointed a visionary. But 99 percent of us aren’t visionaries. We get where we’re going because we dive in and enjoy it and stumble forward as we go. Just stay curious and let the business stimulate us to go forward, and if we have more success than failure, we get to be the Ad Age and Adweek and Creativity Agency of the Year.”

Because interactive seemed to transform the industry overnight, I asked if he gave much thought to what the next big shift might be.

“None of us have the answer to what it will be like five years from now. What’s important is that we be good at it.”

Maybe this is how a small great agency becomes a big great agency, I thought. It’s led by people smart enough to admit that they don’t know when the rest of the industry seems to be drowning in its own visionspeak.

Before I left, I asked Barrett if there might be a piece of work or a campaign in progress that I could observe as a fly on the wall. “Well,” he said, “we’ve got this awesome campaign for a new-business pitch that we’re presenting in New York next week, but I can’t discuss it.” As he spoke, my eyes wandered to the tissue drawing that covered the wall behind him for the new-business pitch that they would ultimately win and that I’m still not allowed to discuss. Every few weeks Barrett will give me an update, and according to the client my fly-on-the-wall status is still pending.

A year after my first visit, I spoke with Barrett as he prepared to go to Cannes. In the interim, Goodby was again named Adweek’s Agency of the Year, and its work for Hewlett-Packard’s PC division was named Advertising Age’s Campaign of the Year.

The last thing I asked Barrett (besides for a status report on the mystery client) was, what is the most interesting trend in the industry right now?

“Don’t know that I know,” he said. “If there is one, I know I’d want to stay away from it.