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As the principals of Milt Associates, Victor and Kim Milt are still very much involved in the business of making traditional
and direct response commercials for clients such as Time Inc., American Express Publishing and HBO. Throughout his career,
Victor, 56, has written, shot, directed and edited, and Kim has produced some of television's more memorable spots. Who could
forget the sqeaky-clean, whistling couple who skipped across the screen and merrily sliced up a bar of Irish Spring deodorant
soap? Or the first time Juan Valdez led his saddlebagged donkey through the Columbian coffee fields? Victor Milt has also
earned his share of industry talismans along the way, including several Clios, Cines and dozens of International Film Festival
Awards. But when the Milts founded interActive Publishing Corporation three years ago, they had another goal besides creating
professional, award-winning and profitable work: They saw the future of corporate marketing and wanted to lead the way.
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Milt first pitched his idea of a monthly interactive video magazine to Citibank shortly after finishing his first interactive
project for a 35-year-old educational consulting firm. He aimed his pitch at CitiGold, the bank's asset management program
for customers who have a minimum of $100,000 in deposits. Despite a working prototype featuring full-motion QuickTime video,
impressive 2D and 3D graphics and an informed understanding of the CitiGold message (Milt is a CitiGold client), the bank
wasn't interested. He persisted, taking his pitch to as many executives within the company as he could.
Several years, several loops around the bureaucratic block and several prototypes later, Milt finally found a receptive
audience in Correne Rizza, an assistant vice president for CitiGold in New York who has a background in PC banking. She and
her boss at the time, Eric Panepinto, were all too familiar with the overwhelming amount of printed material CitiGold showered
on its clients. "Correne and Eric understood it instantly, and they flipped," says Milt.
Rizza and Panepinto recognized a rare opportunity to reach out to their clients, many of whom were already part of Citibank's
online banking program, in a sophisticated and computer-savvy way. Says Rizza, "We knew that all of our clients,if they didn't
have a computer at home, had access to one throughout the course of their day. I thought it would be professional and cutting-edge
to take a lot of our publications that we'd produced on paper in the past, and present them ina multimedia format."
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Milt met with Rizza and Panepinto in July 1997. By December, after more than a dozen additional meetings with various
Citibank personnel (inlcuding Mary Rosales, a Chicago-based CitiGold vice president of marketing who came on board as project
director for the bank), Milt had a contract to produce one stand-alone disc. In just under 11 weeks, Victor and Kim Milt and
a geographically diverse creative team produced CitiGold Live, an interactive CD-ROM featuring 62 minutes of full-motion video
on investment advice, economic overviews, special loan and incentive offers, home-improvement tips and travel ideas.
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At A Glance
Milt Associates / interActivePublishing
HEADQUARTERS:Putnam Valley, New York
FOUNDED: 1984; interActive, 1995
PHONE:
914.528.4117
FAX: 914.528.7184
WEB SITE: www.interpubco.com
E-MAIL: vicmilt@bestweb.net
CO-FOUNDER,
CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Victor Milt
CO-FOUNDER, PRODUCER: Kim Milt
FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES: 5
FACILITIES:
2,800 square feet
PRINCIPAL BUSINESS ACTIVITIES: producing traditional and direct-response broadcast commercials:
developing interactive corporate communications and marketing applications
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