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Posted by Mary Ellen Miller, Director of Marketing

In our second installment of our getting-to-know-us series, David Siepert reflects on n-tara’s history and future.

What is the most significant thing that you see coming down the pipe here at n-tara?
n-tara works has some new and exciting technologies that solve people’s communications challenges. What’s exciting on the n-tara interactive side is the strategic and long term relationships that we have established with new client companies like Hunter Fan Company and Edwards & Associates (Bell Helicopter company). I also think that our Sales Enablement solutions are going to continue to draw more and more attention and that we will be doing plenty more in the near future. We have been providing Sales Enablement solutions (interactive sales tools) for our clients since before I started at n-tara but we have evolved, and so have our offerings.   I think the market has finally caught up with our capabilities and we are seeing more and more demand for these types of solutions.

What is unique about your role here?
I was the first account manager hired into n-tara in April of 2002.  Previously to that the founders and principals did all the selling.  Then they would project manage the job and there was the production talent who would produce the deliverables.  I was the first extension arm of the company other than the principals.

Currently, I’m very excited about being the team lead for our Sales Enablement solutions practice.

What is the hardest thing you have to deal with pertaining to clients?
Sometimes clients make it difficult for us to help them.  They do that when they withhold information; they don’t give us enough information to help them.  We have a few relationships with customers that don’t withhold or filter information and we are able to help them a great deal.  But then there’s some that hold back, like they have been through some sort of vendor management training from the 1950s…it just prohibits us from helping them achieve their goals. That’s the difficult part. But once you start helping them win they open up more and more to you because you gain credibility and they start to trust you -- that’s when we can help them more and more. 

What’s the most significant thing you’ve had to deal with pertaining to a client in the last six months?
The most significant thing in terms of helping a client in the last six months, from my perspective, is the customization of the npowered Enterprise platform to meet Lexmark’s field sales model. To go in and really understand what they are trying to do and make it work for them, overcoming some challenges in the way their technology is set up and the way they run their business. n-tara’s provided them with something that is really, really helpful and we will continue to do so.

In your time here, are there any client visits that stand out as a unique experience?
Yes, the Iams / Eukanuba sales enablement tool for Procter and Gamble. Their famous mascot, a golden retriever named Euka, was usually in the lobby to greet me. The dog would sit with me as I waited in the lobby. Sometimes the receptionist would give me treats to give to Euka.  Also, employees were allowed to bring pets to work and every employee had pictures of their pets all over their work space. It was a fun working environment to visit.

We also supported them with their interactive kiosks at their big national dog show. Their display vendor had configured the hardware inappropriately and the wireless data capture wasn’t working. Shane (McCown, VP, Production) and I stayed up all night the night before the show started, making trips to an all night Wal-Mart to get stuff to hard-wire the network. All of the dogs were asleep (thousands of them) and we walked in the back door. Slowly the dogs woke up. First a few barked, then some more, then even more. As we walked to the exhibit the noise of the barking got louder and louder until all the dogs were awake and barking. It was really loud. It was like something out of a horror show.

How have you watched n-tara evolve?
The best way to describe it is to go back and look at our tag lines and the evolution of our tag lines.  We started a marketing department a month after I got here.  That’s when Thomas (Eorgan) came in. Our first tag line was “High tech visual storytellers.”  We centered around three skill sets that we were excellent in:  one was 3-D visualization and animation, one was digital video (it was newer back then) and the other was interactive technologies. It was Web 1.0 at best then.

People would come to us with a communications problem and we would develop a solution that was usually a combination of those three components.  That’s the logo – the original n-tara logo.  The three arcs represent the three skill sets -the magic is in the middle, a combination of the three; something in the middle is created that solves the problem. As we evolved, we then became a “high impact visual communications company” then a “digital media communications company.”

As we continued to hear different customer’s needs and problems and providing solutions for them we developed as a company.  In the beginning we had the front end design work.  Then we would hear from clients that  “we want to measure that, we want this to do that without having to do the other thing, we want to have administrative control, we need several permission levels” etc.; we kept building up all this technology base behind the presentation layer which was really when we started developing rich internet applications.  That was the birthing process of both n-tara works, and our Sales Enablement solutions practice.

In terms of n-tara interactive….we have evolved into a full service interactive agency.  As companies got to know us, they started to utilize n-tara as experts in interactive marketing and sales strategy…..we have evolved from an interactive job shop to a long term strategic partner.
There is one thing that has not changed. I said this a long time ago and it still holds true. If there is an interactive communications challenge that needs to be solved for, no matter how complex, I would put our creative and production people up against anyone. They are truly world class talent. They are brilliant.

Next year is our 10th anniversary. Do you have any predictions?
By our 15th anniversary the world will be very different than it is today. We will be speaking in a new language about new technologies and new business models. n-tara will continue to evolve on pace with it all because our focus has always been on solving client problems. The only thing that will be the same is that everyone will still use TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms), they will just be new ones.

What is your favorite n-tara memory?
My funniest n-tara memory is when we were working for UPS and we had to mail assets back and forth during the production phase of the project (back then the ftp sites weren’t as robust) and we had to ship media back and forth; and we shipped something using FedEx. 

How did that go over?
It didn’t go over very well.

Did you keep the account?
Yes. It was a great project. And we quickly setup a UPS shipping account.

What is your favorite sandwich?
A good chicken parm.

Where do you get that around here?
Well they closed.  Philly’s had a really good one.  Philly’s had a New York chicken parm that was terrific.  I haven’t found one that meets it but I haven’t tried all the places.

What is your home town?
Nutley, New Jersey.

What is something about you that we might not know or that might surprise us?
I was a college basketball coach for 14 ½ years at five different universities. I changed careers in 2000 because that profession was incongruent with my life goals and values. In college I installed underground sprinkler systems as a summer job. In high school I delivered pizzas in a 1978 Volkswagen bug (in Nutley, New Jersey, a suburb of Manhattan, just 12 miles from the Lincoln Tunnel.)