About Eric Holter
After graduating from Rhode Island School of Design in 1991, I began my career as a freelance illustrator (wood engraving and letter-press printing). Soon after I took a full time job with Pagano, Schenck & 
Kay Advertising (Woody Kay had commissioned a few engravings from me while I was an illustrator and liked me enough to give me a job in the bull pen). It was an interesting time for advertising agency studios, as we went from cutting Rubylithe, shooting stats and kerning type with X-acto blades and rubber cement to full digital file preparation with a disk hand-off to production (humphf, remember SyQuest and Zip Disks?).
In 1995 I moved on to Leonard/Monahan where Bruce Leonard asked me to get the agency up to speed on this “world wide web thing” he’d been hearing about. I did that, and loved it so much that I left Leonard/Monahan to start Newfangled Web Factory, a website development company that specializes in helping advertising agencies build sites for their clients. That was thirteen years ago.
In the past few years web strategy has expanded from planning a great website into a level of engagement with the web that reaches far beyond the corporate website itself. In fact the Internet is radically impacting business and marketing in unprecedented ways. Control is shifting from brands to consumers. How companies respond, either with engagement or ambivalence, will be a defining moment in the life of their brands.
AgencyCritique is my consultancy for creative services firms. I offer strategic guidance in web strategy for advertising agencies. I like to start with the agency’s own web strategy as it’s reflected on their agency site. But I do this in a way that will translate into sound web strategies for their clients.