So I made a new friend. A mutual friend said, “I think you’ll really get along with this dude, he’s so much like you.” It’s annoying when people say that, isn’t it? Like: “You don’t know me!” But, you know, you have to be polite about these things, so off I went to meet this dude. Matters were made worse when I discovered he was in The Biz. We spend enough of our life in The Biz, right? If I’m gonna have a beer on an off night, no clients or vendors in town, I don’t want to talk about The Biz.

But you know what? This dude turned out to be pretty awesome. He was super smart. And funny. He was a cool dude. We talked a lot about the German krautrock band Faust and argued over which Federal Reserve chairmen hadn’t been reappointed by a subsequent president (Arthur F. Burns, as it happens). An engaging conversationalist, my new friend.

And he was an interactive producer.

We all know the score - good interactive producers are like finding a mint copy of the Giorgio Morodor & Phil Oakey LP, a record so rare you spent five years looking for it before you found a copy. They are the white whale. There’s not been any traditional training for great interactive producers, so the people who end up in the business have usually taken a non-traditional, and thus non-replicable, path.

And the industry’s still young, so we’ve not built up sufficient supply. People are migrating from traditional, but the challenges are different enough that many of them take a few years to become usable, and even then they’re not usually visionary, genius producers. And, finally, we compete with Silicon Valley for great producers - the best often end up at Google or Twitter or Apple.

So I asked my new friend how he learned the ropes, how he got into it. It turns out, coincidentally, that he had learned everything he knew from an old Barbarian Group intern, who’s since grown to be a brilliant producer in his own right.

In the months since we’ve become friends, he’s also referred several great interactive producers my way. I asked him why he’s not hiring them himself, for he is at a well-regarded full-service agency ramping up on the digital realm. He said he was all set. And, strangely, so was I.

Now, you can attribute part of this to the economy, I suppose. We’re all in a bit of a turtle mode, and so perhaps we don’t blindly snap up every great producer we find like we used to. However, I would still probably snap up any great developer I could find, so I believe this only tells part of the story.

When I was originally planning on writing this article, I was going to talk my usual schpiel about how hard it is to find a good interactive producer. I was going to launch into a tirade about the lack of quality education. But it never felt quite right. And now I think I know why.

I believe we’ve turned a corner in the shortage of quality digital producers. We (I mean The Barbarian Group) have been at this for eight years, and the production techniques we’ve been using have been around for even longer. Salaries have risen. Schools have adapted. I recently spent some time at the VCU Brandcenter and this is a big area of attention for them, and of course let’s not ignore the auspicious launch of Boulder Digital Works. But more than that, the producers in the business have taught a new generation of producers. When we started, we started crafting some producers who were right out of college. After seven years, they’re some of the best in the business now. We obviously aren’t the only ones doing this, as my new friend proves.

The digital realm lends itself to a different type of producer. Because, let’s face it - the producer is an integral part of the team on digital. They don’t just shop vendors and manage time and money, they influence every fundamental aspect of the project - the tech, where it lives, how it works, how the user interacts with it. And that stuff is as vital as the creative, much to the chagrin of traditional creatives.

Dare I say it’s becoming cool to be a producer? That more of the action is landing in their laps? It’s not just money and time management anymore. This might be contributing a bit too as people learn about the job, what it entails, and are looking for ways to effectively influence what happens in digital.

It’s been an article of faith for me as long as I’ve been in the business that top-quality interactive producers are impossible to find. My director of production and I still talk about it constantly. And I believe there’s absolutely a shortage of great directors of production, also known as executive digital producers - people who can manage the producers and keep an eye on the general pulse of the projects coursing through a company. Those are still in direly short supply. We’re starting to develop a crop of producers, but to be a great executive producer means you’ve got to have been doing this for almost a decade now, have cranked out literally hundreds of jobs - from games to massive websites to rich media to content to podcasts. On top of that, you have to be a good manager, and, finally, they’ve got to have a willingness to spend a significant chunk of their time managing, and not doing what attracted them to the business to begin with: building cool stuff.

But I do believe that things are improving on the digital producer front. Green shoots, as they like to say these days. I’m not saying there have been drastic improvements, and when we do find good producers, I imagine we’ll still have to pay them an arm and a leg, but it definitely isn’t like it used to be. Agencies have cross-pollinated, and brought in experts to begin to re-purpose the more, shall we say, hungry of the traditional producers. This has begot homegrown talent. That talent then became the next wave of teachers. And the schools are catching up.

Let’s hope it survives the supposed “recovery.” Whenever that comes.

www.barbariangroup.com