Seeds Of Change

Brandweek, Sept 21, 1998 by Adrienne Mand

Organic's Jonathan Nelson is helping e-commerce take root.

Tibetan birthing methods. Internet banner ads. One's loss was the other's gain as Jonathan Nelson, founder and chief executive officer of San Francisco-based interactive shop Organic, canceled a 1989 trip to Asia to study exotic birthing methods. Democracy got in the way, in the form of the Tiananmen Square riots, which ended the notion that he would travel Asia with his aunt, a "New Age goddess"-a route that surely would have diverted him from becoming an Internet pioneer.

But Nelson isn't a native, mystic-loving Californian either. Born in Cleveland and raised in Wisconsin, the self-described "Midwestern, corn-fed, milk-drinking kind of guy" graduated in 1989 from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in history and art history. "I was very qualified to read books and go to art museums," jokes Nelson, 31.

Instead of China, he moved to New York and worked at the Knitting Factory night club, which a friend's brother had founded.

While working with musicians is not exactly the same as working with techies, Nelson became well acquainted with Macintoshes, which were used to run all of the club's business operations.

"It just became evident that multimedia was going to be pretty interesting," he says.

Nelson moved to San Francisco, where some of his roommates were in the technology industry, and read up on the topic. He participated in The Well, an eclectic gathering of online communities and an early incarnation of the community-oriented medium the Web would eventually become. Though he initially wanted to create CD-ROMs, it soon became clear the Web was the interactive future, and Nelson founded Organic in November 1993.

Always innovative, he was involved in a seminal moment in the young Internet's history. While working with Yahoo's lead designers on what would become the directory service's first homepage in 1995, the issue arose of how to integrate ads along with the logo on the page. Nelson suggested a smaller version of what the standard ad banner is today, and voila, a new course in advertising was charted.

Organic now has 140 people in its San Francisco office and about 130 in New York. This year, Nelson has focused the company on electronic commerce accounts. He wants to make creating online stores Organic's primary business, an endeavor he believes goes beyond marketing. "It's more in line with the [client's] business," he explains. "Advertising drives media, transactions drive advertising." The agency has created commerce sites for retailers including Barnes & Noble and Cosmetics Counter, and it will launch a store for Starbucks Coffee this fall.

He says online stores should prove to be effective business models for their clients. "On the commerce side, everything should be accountable. Everything should have a return," he says. "It's whole new way of doing business Here's one of the first global channels to do direct sales."

Nelson predicts the advent of e-commerce will alter, though no] replace, traditional retail.

The success of Internet stores can be credited to the global mar ketplace. "All of a sudden the work got a lot smaller and more efficient,' he says. "It's going to turn a lot of industries upside down."

While Nelson sees Organic becoming a leader in creating e-commerce sites, he plans to keep the company, part of Omnicom's Communicade unit of interactive agencies, independent. He has resisted the surge of consolidations that have swept the industry this year, as fellow Communicade shops Agency.com, Razorfish and Think New Ideas, as well as others, have gobbled up companies at a frenetic pace. "The speed of acquisition is just unprecedented on some levels,' he says. "They want to be big, but it doesn't make them better than us."

Felice Kincannon, a consultant to Communicade, says Nelson's independence is fine as far as the company is concerned. He has great patience and consistency, "which I also think comes across in terms of how successful he's been in building the agency"

And the wholesome kid from Wisconsin believes his strategy will work.

"I won't say that we'll never do acquisitions," he says. "But I don't plan on being assimilated into anyone else's company We'll stick to our knitting and build."

Organically of course.