Based in New York and London, Last Exit offers a wide variety of digital services, showcasing a portfolio that includes strategy and research, campaign development, website design and search engine marketing. Since 2003, the agency has been servicing a broad range of local and international customers with an impressive client list consisting of both consumers and industry leading businesses.

DMB’s Contel Bradford recently spoke with Paul Newnes, Last Exit partner and commercial director, to gather some insight on the company’s inception, service offerings and outlook on the world of digital media.

How was Last Exit formed and what were the company’s initial goals upon being founded?
The company was founded by Nuri Djavit who previously had held senior positions in Deep End, one of the first and most decorated interactive agencies. I joined soon after and a vision was formed to build a marketing agency, grounded in the digital medium, but to be focused upon helping clients’ businesses grow in the face of a changing media landscape. There was no intention to do this through simply emulating the structures of other agencies, but to build something that operated more effectively, more transparently and ultimately aligned with the goals of the clients.

Your portfolio of services is quite extensive. Please fill in our readers on what you have to offer.
Our most successful engagements are where we have led the initial strategic insight for a client or brand and followed through with the creative and executional phases of an engagement. That holistic approach fosters ownership from the agency side and true partnership and collaboration with the client.

As a digital agency with aggressive competition and a ecer-progressing medium in which we operate, one has to have a broad capability set. Given the accountability of the digital medium, there also has to be a depth of understanding as well as the breadth of capability. So, there is definitely a challenge for us to stay informed and to hire people who are as keen to push the boundaries of what is possible. So, in terms of services we delineate between strategic, creative and production. This covers everything that might encompass a digital campaign from initial research and analysis, media planning, creative development, design, build and performance tracking.

Please give us some insight on Last Exit’s journey with mobile applications and streaming video. How do these features benefit your customers?
Last Exit was involved very early with streaming technologies, such that we were an Apple Computer development partner and developed some custom Quicktime applications. This grounding has allowed us to stay ahead of the curve as the online population’s consumption of video has increased and evolved. There are few projects we are involved in that do not have some video application built in. As the technology to capture, encode and deliver online video has become more effective and accessible, so has the expectation of how video is incorporated into the user experience of digital marketing campaigns.

The iPhone has been a total game changer for both user behavior on mobile phones and mobile delivery of video. We knew that we’d have to invest time and resources not only to understand the platform but to be able to create applications relevant to our clients’ needs.

We see smartphone development as another way of extending engagement with end customers beyond the decline of the ‘big idea’ peak. That’s a general philosophy for digital as a medium, but people are more attached to their phones than their computers. So if you can encapsulate real utility and brand relevance in an app, you have something really powerful that’s beyond the purview of the traditional marketing concept and can drive operational benefits in clients’ businesses.

The best till last though — m-commerce has never really gained traction anywhere outside of developing nations, but the latest smartphone software seems to going in the correct direction for delivering that through iTunes for iPhone and potentially Google Checkout for Android.

What are the most pressing challenges faced by professionals in your field today?
An overused term in the context of the zeitgeist, but ‘change.’ The way people are communicating and consuming information is changing and our industry needs to adapt accordingly. Companies from the same digital heritage as us are used to it, but still so many client-agency relationships are media led as opposed to problem/solution led. That’s opportunity in one sense for Last Exit but a huge behavioral change for clients to deal with smaller scale, yet highly capable agencies. The status quo has to change but the speed at which it changes is largely up to the desire of the professionals within our industry to embrace new ways of doing business. We are delighted to see smaller agencies win huge client engagements; it means that there is a collective opportunity appearing that wasn’t there before.

Web technology has evolved to the point where almost nothing is surprising. What does the future have in store for video streaming and rich media applications as they relate to online advertising?
If I knew the precise answers to that I might be out pitching VCs in Silicon Valley. The indicators to watch though are that video streaming is getting better and costing less. Peer-to-peer streams seem to have been largely adopted by pirate soccer channels, but the underlying technology dramatically reduces network load and hence costs for Internet broadcast. Insofar as rich media apps, then there’s always going to be a need for the flash-bang on sites, but I would say the big impact vs. ongoing engagement equation is favoring the latter right now. Having said that, anyone who’s played Quake online can see that there’s still plenty of life in rich media online.