Vickie Lamb: What path did you follow to end up running a digital marketing agency?
Kaoru Sato: I went to art school, then had a try at film-making and didn’t do very well. I sort of stumbled into web stuff back in 1994 or 1995, which I’ve been doing ever since.
VL: Did you meet at a marketing agency?
Clint Golding: Yeah it was a really early digital agency that later became Razorfish [an internet consultancy].
It was my second career; when I was younger I worked in the music business, for a road management company. I used to organise the roadies, and made sure Suggs’ [from the ska-pop band Madness] jacket was ironed. I also had to help him up off the floor when he fell off the toilet, drunk!
I left that and went to film school. When I left a tutor said he had an ex-student looking for someone to work for him who knew about the internet. I went to an interview and they asked me if I knew what the internet was. I said “yes” and they said “can you start on Monday?”
Our story sounds accidental but there was a lot of drive there
Kaoru Sato, The Guild Network
VL: It’s strange that you both worked in film for a time?
KS: Well, at that time the digital media industry was full of people who hadn’t done very well in other industries – like film-makers, musicians and artists.
VL: So where did you go from Razorfish?
CG: We started to do follow-up work with an agency called Manifesto.
KS: It was a point where what we were doing [digital work] was gradually being squeezed out of the market, after the dot.com crash. They didn’t really understand what we were doing and eventually I was one of the first to leave.
I went to be a consultant on the Arts Council for a big web project that was about to kick off. They were tendering for an agency to do the work so I invited Manifesto to tender for it. They won, but when they decided to fold the digital side, we kept hold of the Arts Council job and formed a little company to service it – which was how The Guild Network formed.
VL: So it grew quite organically?
CG: Yeah, we never sat down and said, “right, let’s start a company”. And we’ve gradually picked up clients.
KS: It was opportunistic to a degree. Our story sounds accidental but there was a lot of drive there. If something feels natural and you have a good time then it’s going to go somewhere.
VL:So you have a really strong passion for what you do?
KS: You have to. A lot of the time you’re doing quite thankless work, the stuff that is ‘back-of-office’ and boring.
But we have fun working together – and if you don’t have fun working, then it’s not going to happen.
VL: Is it important to have staff who think the same way?
CG: Yeah, a lot of agencies we’ve worked for have been very po-faced and use a lot of management speak. We have a healthy disregard for that.
You should come to work everyday and act like you would anywhere else. It’s unhealthy to separate your social and home life from when you go to work. That creates a lot of stress.
