CEO Interview: David Gratton, Work at Play Media Labs Ltd.

David Gratton has made a career out of walking away from bad situations. In 1999 he was a globe-trotting investment banker with RBC, having lived and worked in Calgary, Toronto, Munich, New York and Singapore. He’d been offered a job in London, which was, in his words, “where you really want to be in that industry. But I knew that if I took the London transfer I’d be a banker for the rest of my life, and by that point, most of the job wasn’t helping clients hedge risk and build something, it was all about accumulating profit.” With a degree in art and economics from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, he moved to Vancouver to found ici Media Inc. A self-taught computer programmer, he was intrigued with both the world of marketing and the burgeoning interactive opportunities of the Internet. Today, he runs Work at Play Inc., one of the oldest and most forward-looking digital marketing agencies in Canada. Its revenue growth between 2004 and 2009 was 1,173%.

Tell me about the origin of Work at Play.

A company of mine called ici Media Inc. was purchased by another company called Totally Hip Software. I was with Totally Hip for one year as VP of marketing and sales and really, it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. It was a complete and utter disaster; it was my first experience with a stock deal and I got a bad deal. I ended up working as a salesman. I left them in 2002 and started my company again. Work at Play is just ici Media redux.

According to your website, Work at Play creates “online digital experiences.” Unlike a lot of companies that only work on the technical side, you also work with clients on the creative side to conceive marketing  campaigns. How did the company get to this point?

Well, again it comes back to ici Media, which was focused on interactive video work. We were working with Apple at Quicktime, and this was back in the late ’90s, well before Apple was cool. People would say, "I hate Apple, I’m never working with them." But we wound up doing this interactive video stuff which was very innovative at the time, and a lot of presentations for Quicktime at Apple events, including the BMW Films project at the beginning of the decade. That was the first big video deployment on the web. It was massive — putting real films up online. It had all-star directors… We did the technical solutions, but it was impossible not to get involved with concepts as well, and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.

Who are some of your most noteworthy clients?

MTV, BMW, BC Hydro, the Vancouver Canucks. … Mattel has been the biggest technical and mental challenge we’ve ever faced. It was a corporate website and all their products were on different content management systems. They brought in a team and we were charged with getting that all under one brand and one system.

You’ve been around since 2002. How has the market changed since then? More competition?

The competition is sort of everywhere, but it’s stratified into three general things: mom and pop shops that do branding ads, strategy, marketing plans and everything else. They're usually under 10 people, mostly low-budget local clients. Then you have something like us, digital agencies [who do] strategy and digital development and marketing plans. We work with larger agencies for clients like multinationals. And then there are the big agencies.

Where do you see the industry going in the future?

The concept of a digital agency is lucrative for a company our size, but it has no long-term life. You’re going to see the digital agencies moving up into directly interfacing with the major clients and at the same time you’re seeing the major agencies acquiring knowledge in-house … by partnering really tightly with digital agencies.