What the World
Is Saying.

The Kennedy Firm hit the big time in 2003, when Clear Channel Radio hired the interactive animation studio to create an online video game to promote top New York City radio station Z100 and its lead DJ, Romeo. More than two years later, the game, Romeo on the Run, is still getting 1 million hits a month from listeners who head to the station's website for entertainment. "It's a commercial that will go on forever," explains Justin Kennedy.

Husband-and-wife duo Justin, 34, and Carmen Kennedy, 32, founded their Brooklyn-based company in 2003 after leaving their jobs in entertainment law and interactive media production, respectively. Recognizing the looming opportunities in online games, they used a $3,000 investment from a business associate and $1,000 of their own savings to secure their first Manhattan office — then wooed an animator and a programmer to join their new firm.

Today, the firm employs 12 and boasts an impressive client list including Cartoon Network and FedEx. Fees from custom advergames totaled $550,000 last year, with revenues projected to hit between $650,000 and $800,000 in 2006.

The company recently expanded into e-learning services, now accounting for 50% of its business. After being contacted by Canon — a manufacturer of cameras and imaging products — to develop interactive employee training, Canon's assistant manager of curriculum development praised the firm "because of the interactivity they build into their programs."

"We want to be the Coca-Cola of online gamers, where everyone thinks of us first when they think of online games."

Canon just quietly declared war on the corporate training manual — and it may have fired the first shot in a revolution that's been decades overdue.

The imaging giant has been building something entirely different behind the scenes: a fleet of casual puzzle-style games engineered to train its technical and support staff. By April, 11 titles will have rolled out across its operations, each one developed in partnership with The Kennedy Firm, the New York-based interactive studio that brought the vision to life.

The timing couldn't be more pointed. Enterprise learning has been broken for years — everyone in corporate America knows it, and almost no one has done anything about it. Canon is betting there's a better way.

What makes this different isn't just the format — it's the philosophy. These aren't gamified versions of the same dull content. They're lightweight, intuitive experiences built in the visual language of the games already living on employees' phones.

For a company operating at Canon's scale, across product lines of staggering complexity, that distinction matters enormously. The people who support those products need to actually know them — and knowing requires learning that sticks.

The broader signal here is impossible to ignore. If one of the world's largest imaging companies is walking away from static instruction and betting on interactive experience design, it's not a pilot program. It's a diagnosis.

New York's Z100 has turned its on-air talent into a fully immersive experience — sending listeners on a guided adventure through Manhattan alongside night jocks Romeo and Niko, both voiced by the DJs themselves. Developed in just four months by The Kennedy Firm, Romeo On The Run gives Z100 a direct line to a generation that lives in browsers, streams content on demand, and rarely touches a radio dial. It's not just an engagement play — it's a new broadcast format built for where culture actually lives.