New York, 1997.

Firstborn is a digital creative studio from New York. A press release issued by Dentsu Network West on 1 February 2011 says the company was founded in 1997, and names Michael Ferdman as its founder and chief executive. In the same release Ferdman described the studio’s history up to that point as being about two things: the work, and the people who make the work.

The trade press of the time placed Firstborn in a particular corner of the industry. Adweek, in a report by Brian Morrissey dated 31 January 2011, called it a New York digital production shop known as a specialist in web animation and in highly creative websites. The magazine said the studio did production work for outside advertising agencies, but that the greater part of its work by then was commissioned directly by clients, naming Aflac, Wrigley and PepsiCo’s SoBe.

The Dentsu release set out the range of services the studio kept in-house. It listed live-action video production and post-production, 3D and motion graphics, research and development, creative direction and design, digital strategy and planning, and front-end development and software engineering. The company said it built experiences across the web, mobile, broadcast and digital out-of-home screens. The address on that release was fborn.com, a shortened form of the name; the studio later used firstborn.com.

The leadership in 2011 was a trio. Alongside Ferdman, the release named Dan LaCivita as president and Joon Yong Park as chief creative officer, and said the three would continue to run the business under its new owner. ClickZ, reporting the same deal on 1 February 2011, also said the three senior executives would remain in place. Ferdman said in the release that Firstborn had attracted outside interest for years, and that it was only with Dentsu that a partnership made sense for both sides.

The name itself is a single compound word, Firstborn, written with one capital letter. The studio used the full word in its own materials and on its later website, and the trade press used it the same way across the reports cited here.

From an independent shop to a Dentsu company.

Firstborn was independent until 2011. ClickZ reported on 1 February 2011 that Dentsu had bought the New York creative agency for an undisclosed sum, following its earlier purchases of mcgarrybowen in 2008 and of 360i and SearchIgnite in 2010. The magazine said Firstborn would sit inside the recently created Dentsu Network West division, the Japanese holding company’s arm for North America, Latin America and Europe. Dentsu’s own release said Firstborn would become a wholly owned subsidiary of that division. Dentsu has owned the studio since 2011.

Adweek placed the purchase alongside Dentsu’s other Western businesses at the time, the larger digital agency 360i, the digital agency Attik and the advertising agency mcgarrybowen. Business continued under the new owner. Adweek reported on 26 May 2011, in a story by Gabriel Beltrone, that the Dentsu-owned studio would lead digital creative work for PepsiCo’s Sierra Mist after a competitive pitch that began in April 2011. The magazine said Firstborn had handled digital work for SoBe, another PepsiCo brand, since November 2009.

The next structural change came within Dentsu. By 27 June 2018, Adweek’s AgencySpy column, in a report by Erik Oster, was describing Firstborn as a New York-based design and innovation agency within the Isobar global network, the Dentsu-owned digital agency group. The same report named Dan LaCivita, president in 2011, as Firstborn’s chief executive, and quoted him on the studio’s appointment as experience agency of record for S&P Global, a client it had worked with on a project basis before the appointment. AgencySpy also listed Jägermeister, Adidas, Mountain Dew and Chevron among the accounts that a newly hired art director would work on.

The studio’s own web address tells the later part of the story. Captures in the Internet Archive show firstborn.com live in September 2022, when its home page carried the line “We shape modern brands for a connected future” and showed projects for Adidas, Beats by Dre and Royal Caribbean. Captures from June and July 2023 show the same address redirecting to dentsucreative.com, the site of Dentsu Creative.

A one-word name on screens of every size.

Digital and interactive studios rarely have a product on a shelf, so the name and the website carry the identity work. Many of the names are made up rather than descriptive: a word with a numeral attached, a film-industry term borrowed and hyphenated, a phrase that hints at a way of working. The same name can also be written several ways over the years. Trade magazines may print it in lower case while the studio’s own site sets it in capitals, and a hyphen or a numeral can become a distinctive part of the mark.

The studio website is usually the main brand surface. It works as a portfolio, with full-screen video and case studies in front and the typography kept plain. Office cities are often written as short codes along the top of the page, and project credits, director rosters and archives are treated as part of the brand, because they show who made what and when.

These identities also change shape as the business changes. Studios open and close offices, split a film arm from an agency, or fold their work into new ventures under the original name. When reading them, look at how the name is set across the website, the credits and the trade press, how the studio lists its cities, and what it keeps from earlier eras in its archive.

Packs, headsets and race cars, dated.

Firstborn’s projects appear in the press as dated pieces of work. ClickZ reported in February 2011 that Wrigley had chosen Firstborn in 2009, together with EVB and Big Spaceship, as digital agencies for its brands. For Wrigley’s Orbit gum, the magazine said, Firstborn created image-recognition technology that let people scan logos printed on gum packs, in a tie-in with the DVD release of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.

Virtual reality followed a few years later. The Drum reported on 1 May 2015, in a story by Minda Smiley, that the tequila maker Patrón had introduced an Oculus experience made in partnership with Firstborn. Titled the Art of Patrón Virtual Reality Experience, it took viewers on a tour of the Hacienda Patrón distillery in the Highlands of Jalisco, Mexico, seen from the point of view of a bee, the brand’s symbol. The Drum said it began in the agave fields, followed production, ageing and bottling, and featured the distillery’s own employees rather than actors.

Mountain Dew was a repeat client for the same kind of work. Digiday reported on 25 May 2016 that the soft-drink brand’s Nascar VR experience, part of its “DEWcision 2016” campaign, had been developed with Firstborn. Viewers rode along with one of the brand’s Nascar drivers and chose between two routes, a California beach and desert for the Baja Blast flavour and a neo-Tokyo cityscape for Pitch Black, with the route counting as a vote for the flavour. Digiday said Mountain Dew planned to gather the virtual reality pieces it had made with Firstborn in a hub on its website.

By 2022 the studio’s home page showed sportswear, headphones and cruise-ship work for Adidas, Beats by Dre and Royal Caribbean.

For a design guide, Firstborn shows how a studio name can stay constant through a change of owner and a move inside a larger network, until the address itself points somewhere new. Compare R/GA, another New York digital agency in this collection, and UNIT9, a production studio for interactive work. For this guide we use screen blue, slate and night with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Firstborn’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.