Ryan MacMillan

Jeff Dachis says wha?

This is an excerpt from an September 2000 article in Wired magazine. It was written by Warren St. John (now at the NYT) and describes an interview on CBS 60 minutes between Bob Simon and Razorfish’s Jeff Dachis and Craig Kanarick in 2000. This is - in many ways - one of those “when it changed” moments.

Simon praised Razorfish as “one of the most successful companies on the Web,” but then his tone abruptly changed.

“Successful at what?” he asked. “Good question.”

The camera was now on Dachis.

“We’ve asked our clients to recontextualize their business,” Dachis managed. “We’ve re- … recontextualized what it is to be a business-services … and that’ll continually … ”

Simon’s face went blank. It wasn’t the look of helpless confusion millions of Americans were experiencing as Dachis stuttered at them through their TV sets. Rather, it was the sedate, self-satisfied gaze of a 60 Minutes reporter about to yank the lever of the show’s legendary trapdoor.

“You know,” Simon said, “there are people out there, such as myself, who have trouble with the word recontextualize.” Anyone who had ever watched the show knew where this was going: “People out there, such as myself” meant “the rest of the goddamned United States.”

Dachis was on his own now. Even the chief scientist stood mute.

“Tell me what you do,” Simon insisted, “in English.”

“We provide services to companies to help them win,” Dachis offered.

“So do trucking firms!” Simon snapped. Dachis seemed taken aback - the trucking remark was really uncalled for.

“What is it you do?” Simon pressed.

“Our talent is to do a certain thing, whereas the trucking firm …”

“Yes, but what is - what is it you do?”

“We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them,” Dachis said. It was his best shot.

“That’s still very vague,” Simon said cheerily. He looked as if he might high-five his cameraman. A pause of several aeons ensued - too much for even the scientist. Kanarick stepped in to summarize the professional services sector in a way that Bob Simon, and perhaps the rest of America, might understand: “Business strategy,” he said.

For television, this was really rich. Here was the whole generational and cultural chasm between those who “get it” and those who don’t, perfectly dramatized in prime time. Millions of viewers could click off their TV sets, confident they weren’t being left behind after all. So much for the phenomenon of dotcom gazillionaires - these so-called geniuses of cyberspace couldn’t even tell you what they did for a living!

I draw this to everyone’s attention because - as professional communicators, we’re bad at explaining exactly what it is that we do. I normally fudge the truth slightly, and say “I work in advertising. Sort of.”

It’s taken us a long time (and lots of work on our wiki) to get to something as simple as “digital planning agency” and to define what it is we do.

What finally helped us was understanding that we needed to narrow ourselves down. It’s hard to say “we do this” because, of course, there are lots of things we can do or want to do.

What helps, in the end, is to focus on what the prospective client wants from us. We want to be the answer to a question they’re aleady asking themselves. Cross-referencing those wants with our own plans helped us come up with something that (in something approaching English) describes what we do. But I still find it hard to explain to people.

The temptation to resort to impressive-but-meaningless jargon is always there, of course. But we have to stick to plain English.