Jay Schwartz takes a deep breath when I ask if there’s any difference between working on the East and West Coasts. It’s a topic on which Schwartz has intimate knowledge: his advertising, graphic design, and website development firm, IdeaWork, has made moves on both coasts. Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, and New York City are all radically different places with radically different business needs. Santa Barbara is close to Schwartz’s Southern California roots, and it’s where he founded IdeaWork in 1999. Five years later, Schwartz moved to Vegas to get closer to the hospitality industry in the city’s famed hotels and casinos. He got a first-hand look at the new revitalized downtown there, watching and helping the city change. From there, IdeaWork eventually got enough contacts on the East Coast to feel confident pushing out to New York. “In terms of culture, New Yorkers think people on the West Coast are lazy because we get up at noon. Actually, it’s 9.”
Schwartz hasn’t built an agency around waking up at noon. Rather, it’s a simple premise that can be found on IdeaWork’s website: cutting through agency “bullshit.” “Traditional agency bullshit is layers,” Schwartz explains. In a big agency, “you have your principle that’s going to come out for the pitch, you have your senior account staff, and when you get the job as an agency you turn it over to more middle and junior staff. You know, account people who are continually rotating in and out who have to be brought up to speed every six months to a year, and that just eats into the client’s budget.” The IdeaWork differences, are, to be blunt, Schwartz and time. The two are intertwined. Schwartz takes a personal role in each project. This means that IdeaWork can’t take on everything that comes its way, but guarantees a higher quality for the projects it does take on, and “allows them to maintain a greater control” over everything.
One thing IdeaWork specializes in is microsites, discrete entities that can compliment existing web activity. “The shelf life of a microsite is much lower,” Schwartz says. “It’s not designed to be there forever. It’s designed to be there for an event or a specific purpose. So, the expectations are higher in a microsite. You have less time to capture something and get your message across.” The pressure generally builds up around a microsite, because there’s a need to showcase how special the event, be it an anniversary or a sale, is. “When you have a big flagship site that does a lot of e-commerce, you have a lot of processes. We can try out little modules, we can try out balancing traffic or testing messages. We have more flexibility. Because a microsite’s shelf life is not as long, you have to be right the first time.”
Having worked with a variety of companies, large and small, the one thing Schwartz has seen happen over and over again is for companies to look at his work and see it as something they could do themselves. It’s a familiar position for creatives, for people outside of their industry to assume that they could come up with ideas as easily as the professionals. “Scrimping on getting it right, you’re being pennywise and pound foolish,” says Schwartz.
Is it possible that an unknown road could lead a company straight ahead, towards the right path? Sure, anything’s possible. But the time it takes, and the chances that you’ll just be led on a full circle are high. There’s every reason to believe that you are best focusing on what you’re best at while letting Schwartz focus on what he does. “It’s just a bad use of your time,” he says with a laugh. “Unless it’s your job.”
Photographs by Lauren Kallen