Stop the Fight

It was an ordinary task, really: i-traffic Inc., a fast-growing online marketing agency for merchants, had a conference room that needed painting. But Scott Heiferman, 26, the company's founder and CEO, had vowed that his young company would never be ordinary. So he hatched an idea. Five recruits were scheduled to start work in a few days. Why not let them paint the room?

"I thought it would be a great way to get our message across," says Heiferman, an intense, restless, self-described computer geek. "We'd get the new hires together and hand them a brush: 'Your job is to make your mark on the company. Start today!' We don't want people here to do things the way they did at other places."

His two partners - each more than a decade older than Heiferman, both refugees from established advertising agencies - thought that their colleague was sniffing paint fumes. "Shouldn't we get a professional?" worried Peter Meluso, 38, i-traffic's chief service officer. After all, the company's funky loft space in SoHo had ceilings that were 18 feet high. "Do we really want people climbing ladders?" he asked.

But Heiferman had already bought the paint (bright orange, same as the company logo). So he and his older colleagues compromised. No ladders - people would paint only as high as they could reach. It made good sense for safety, less sense for finishing the job: A few days later, an impatient i-traffic veteran finished painting the wall on his own. But for months, the image of that half-painted wall lingered - a small reminder of a big challenge that the two generations at the company wrestle with every day.

"There's a reason that old-time agencies haven't done well online," Heiferman says, sitting at an orange metal table that serves as a conference table. "They stuck to their old ways while an entirely new medium was emerging. On the other hand, how much do you really need to reinvent the wheel? Sometimes I wonder how much bigger this company would be if we didn't debate everything."

Scott Heiferman has always done things differently - and always without apology. Back in 1994, shortly after he graduated from the University of Iowa, he worked at Sony Electronics, where he helped build some of the company's first Web sites. He was a Web-commerce pioneer, and he relished bucking conventional wisdom. He even invented a job title, Interactive Marketing Frontiersman, to reflect his role. "At Sony, I was reprimanded a few times for working late," he marvels. "I was trying to change the world, and the company was talking about my hours!"

These days, Heiferman is so convinced that i-traffic is without peer that he keeps inventing new, one-of-a-kind taglines to describe it. Early on, to win credibility on Madison Avenue, he called his company an "online media-planning agency." Then it became a "traffic-driving agency." Later, a "linking agency." Now it's an "online merchandising agency." What Heiferman won't call it is an ad agency. "We don't do advertising," he insists. "We are crusaders for targeted marketing. Advertising wouldn't be so despised if its messages were more meaningful and relevant."

What everyone else calls i-traffic is a roaring success. The company has more than 70 employees, annual revenues of more than $5 million, and a client list that includes Disney Online, CDNow, and Eddie Bauer. Indeed, for Heiferman, success almost came too fast. He launched i-traffic in February 1995 out of a cramped apartment in Astoria, New York. Within months, he had eager clients, glowing press - and a strong suspicion that he was in over his head. "I was playing around," he says. "I didn't know what I was doing."

Enter the grownups: Ed Dintrone and Peter Meluso. Dintrone, 37, i-traffic's chief team officer, spent eight years at Bates USA, where he held positions in media buying, media planning, and account management. Meluso, i-traffic's chief service officer and Dintrone's former boss, spent nine years at DeWitt Media Inc. and worked as well at Backer & Spielvogel and at Grey Advertising.

Meluso and Dintrone were established players inside established agencies. They knew how to design procedures, control costs, meet deadlines. They were what i-traffic needed - and what made Heiferman crazy. Still, he made the two industry veterans his partners. "I had visions of building a great agency," Heiferman says. "I thought it might be nice if we had people here who had some idea of what an agency was."

But what looks good in theory doesn't always feel good in practice. The new arrivals had deep philosophical differences with their young partner, and those differences spilled into every decision. Meluso and Dintrone "came from the traditional ad agency world," Heiferman says, "where people begged to get into the industry and were treated like dirt. I came from a world where talented young people have lots of options." Meluso had his own misgivings: "We've argued over such basic things that sometimes I can't believe we're even having the conversation."