Creativity recently held a roundtable featuring the best and brightest of the agency world including: David Droga, Bob Greenberg and Gerry Graf.

The excerpts sound was as one would expect. People pumping their agency ego. Example - Tommy Means:

"I started
Mekanism about seven years ago in San Francisco, literally surrounded by this explosion of new media... We're fortunate enough to get invited very early on in the process to act as a sort of strategic and creative partner... We have a film coming out in May that we did with Mark Cuban and we have a couple of properties that we have in development as a joint venture with MTV that we are really excited about."

Yawn. Lots of that going on from Droga and Greenberg, too. Frank Lantz from the company we would love to be working at area/code taking about his company (surprise) and gaming (interesting):

"We are really interested in games that have some sort of interesting overlap with the real world. We do a lot of stuff about cross media game experiences where there's something happening online and it's synchronized to a TV broadcast. (We did) a game [Discovery's Sharkrunners] that's a persistent, browser based personal world with sharks in it, and the behavior of the sharks is driven by real world sharks that are tagged with location aware devices.... We have a Facebook game which has nothing to do with location or physical space but it's about taking the players' existing social network and mapping a game experience onto that."

Word up. Creativity goes on to ask them all the difference between a good spot and a great spot. You guys know the difference, right? Not going to excerpt that here. Save us all some brain space.

Eddy Moretti of VBS.TV got invited which is too hot. Love VBS. He said:

"And we are getting about 2 million people a month. One of our little series was called Heavy Metal in Baghdad, about this heavy metal band from Baghdad that we decided to go visit in the summer of '06. And then the guys escaped Baghdad and went to Syria so we met them in Damascus and shot more there, and we suddenly had a feature film on our hands. The film went to Toronto, to the Berlin film festival, it's going to be out in theaters here in N.Y. and in L.A. and three other cities. Now we go into a meeting and suddenly we have some leverage. For us I guess schmigital also means the age of the pitch is kind of over."

Then a random VCU Student asks: "I think "storytelling" has been mentioned at least 18 times, which is very reassuring because I'm a writer. I also accept how technology has to come into play in all of this. How will we make sure that our storytelling stays relevant when we go to these new things?"

Bob get all it's not all about story. It's about information, too. The Tommy was all like "I disagree totally." He said:

"I disagree totally. When you're inviting somebody to spend time with advertising, that's the important thing to remember, this is fucking advertising. You have to be really really smart about how you weave the branding into the storyline. I think that is the biggest challenge right now for directors that are working outside of the 30-second spot. At the end of the day you still have to deliver a message and if you're not making them laugh, if there's no drama, if there's not crisis, conflict, resolution, you are going to lose them. Period."

Oh word. Do you guys agree? You can check out all the drivel from the roundtable over here.