About
Welcome to the personal blog of Johan van Mol.
I work at the Belgian advertising agency Duval Guillaume, responsible for the interactive business unit. On this blog I will write about interactive marketing, strategy and technology.
My story
In 1994 I did a summer job at an event agency – P&F productions in Antwerp, Belgium, as a graphic designer. Since I wasn’t too bad with the computer, the boss asked me if I knew anything about the internet. I’d read about it in the paper. So he showed me the website of Coca-Cola. “I want to make a website for Coca-Cola Belgium”, he said. So I designed my first website in 1994 for Coca-Cola.
In 1996, right after college – I graduated as Master in Product Development – I started working for iMOTION as multimedia designer and developer. iMOTION was one of the multimedia and web pioneers in Belgium. My development skills were way better than my design skills, so I soon became a full time (Macromedia Director) Lingo developer. Flash didn’t exist back then. After a while I became a freelance developer.
In 1999, I started Atomik Studios together with Lansen Walraet, a former classmate. Lansen was the designer, I was the programmer. The first 5 years we had a lot of fun with building games, websites, edutainment and e-learning tools, 3D animation, video, and so on. I developed in Director, Flash, Perl, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, C/C++, RealBasic, Java. Anything that could be shown on a screen, we would create.
After these first years, we were becoming too old to play around with a couple of friends in an attic. So we decided to become a little more professional. On december 24th 2004 we moved to a loft in the center of Antwerp, we grew our company from 5 to 17 people and focused on designing and building brand experiences on digital platforms: interactive and e-marketing concepts, design and production for web, mobile and TV.
In 2007/2008 we reached another crossroad. I was still a full time flash and web developer and manager in the after-hours. I felt we needed to professionalize the management and I decided to start my MBA studies at the University of Antwerp Business School, which was litteraly around the corner. Around the same time we wanted to take our company to the next level and build it into a real interactive agency. We didn’t have account managers, we were still a bunch of designers and developers with just one operations manager and one project manager.
We had the choice to either turn ourselves into an interactive agency or to team up with an existing agency that had a proven track record for attracting and managing big accounts. In the course of the existence of Atomik Studios, we’ve had a number of companies interested in us. But there were only two companies in Belgium that I wanted to work for. In the middle of 2008 Duval Guillaume – a client of ours – came along. Duval Guillaume was one of the companies I’d sell my soul to, because it is a top creative agency with a strong international reputation. On januari 1st 2009 Duval Guillaume integrated the activities of Atomik Studios.
At Duval Guillaume I am responsible for the interactive business unit and for interactive strategy.
View my bio at LinkedIn or follow me on twitter.com/johanvm
Me
iMOTION
