Hmmmmm… that real world address is mighty familiar… 1 Alfred Place?
Ahh the good old days.
Nice enough flash site - very ATL showreel - but most of all very interesting that they choose to do another spin-off rather than provide an integrated solution, which most other large agencies seem to be doing right now.
Howard
–
howard | 
Business, Information Architecture, Information design, Statistics, Usability, Web/Tech, advertising, digital marketing | 
08 24th, 2007| 
No Comments »
OKA Direct, the last site I produced whilst at TEQUILA\ London, just got reviewed in the NMA this week. It scored a pretty healthy 88% overall. Congratulations to all the team still at TEQUILA\ as well as those moved on to different strokes.
OKA was actually three sites produced at once, RAPT direct and Cath Collins (although CC appears to be down at the moment for some reason) being the other two, all based on a common architecture.
NMA particularly liked the idea of being able to buy a whole room at once, rather than selecting items individually. Good - that was my idea 
Well done OKA and TEQUILA\
Howard
–
Blogged with Flock
Tags: nma, oka, ecommerce, web site, rapt, cath collins, tequila
How many times have you heard a creative director, MD or other senior manager say in an all agency pep-rally meeting “We’re all creatives in this agency - no idea is a bad idea”?
Quite a few times I’ll guess.
Well, I want to add to that. Expand on it if you will…
We’re all planners in this agency. No strategy is a bad strategy.
Now, I don’t mean literally we all sit around blogging all day waffling on about the planosphere (vincent! 
)- no, what I mean is that in some ways, planning is as much a group activity within a healthy agency environment as is creative thinking. As is good client relations. As is wanting to make a profit. The list goes on….
I was chatting with a planning colleague of mine, and we were talking about the relationship between different departments, and how, to borrow from Logic+Emotion a bit, we all need to overlap, not be silos. Planning and digital, for example, can work amazingly well together, and insight into the ways people use digital in their daily lives really is something both “departments” can add to. There’s a lot going on right now about combining creative and planning. Everyone is merging them together again in some way or another.
For me, the best results on any project happen when you get excited, passionate and informed people together from the start and they all input into the big idea.
Something I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently is that, for me, digital strategy in terms of planning a campaign falls into two distinct phases. The first is the more traditional channel planning phase, overall marketing strategy - what is it we’re trying to do, who are we talking to, what’s going to fire them up, all that stuff. The stuff that helps good planners and good account teams write creative briefs that really help creative teams come to life. The kind of brief that creative teams so often complain they don’t get. It’s during this phase that it’s driven by planners but with others adding value.
The second phase, is the one where we look at digital itself and the whole host of different channels and executions it can contain (see the previous digital ecosystem chart I made which is, quite probably, already out of date!). This is where digital teams, planners and creatives can all add value, working out what specifically it is in the digital field that is going to best address the requirements identified in phase 1 - the part where we already worked out we want to use digital, but were not sure how exactly. It’s in this phase that it’s driven by digital specialists with others adding value. See the subtle difference? Both (digital?) strategy phases, but with slightly different drivers.
Phase 1 - what are we doing and, by association, do we want to do it in digital?
Phase 2 - what bits of digital do we want?
To many people these stages can appear to be one and the same - often, when I talk to people about marketing strategy in relation to digital, the distinction isn’t clear for them to make. But make it I believe we must. They do two different tasks. Both of them essential to good creative output.
We’re all planners in this agency. No strategy is a bad strategy.
Doesn’t mean we’ll use yours though…
Howard
–
Blogged with Flock
Tags: digitalmarketing advertising planning planners planosphere silos overlap skill sharing communication
A long time ago, pre-dotcom bubble burst (*sniff*) I won an award during an agency summer party.
It was an odd award. It made me appear geeky (geekier?) than I possibly would have wanted to in front of an all agency audience, not just a digital audience, at a time when TV, Radio and Print types thought the internet was a passing fad that would never take off (not much has changed! *kidding*)
It was “The Bluetooth Award for The Excessive Use of Technology” and I won it for my ability to keep my then-boss aware of my late arrival in to work by emailing her from the train - a feat I achieved through a combination of a Palm V and Nokia “Matrix Phone” (you know, the combat green one with the WAP-wheel and “big” screen) handset linked up via infra-red.
I had to stand up, in front of a whole agency, and basically admit to being a complete geek. I am sure most of the people there had no idea what it was even for and just thought something along the lines of “those crazy digital guys” or words to that effect. Bluetooth? Crazyness.
Still, I got a bottle of champagne out of it (and the good stuff too! not like we get nowadays!)
Many years on, and the person who created that award for me, bless her, had a conversation with me today on IM where she said I should get another one award.
Why? Well, I happened to mention to her that if she wanted to IM me at almost any time, she could get Google Talk, as I now had it on my blackberry, which, because of the wonder that is unlimited data, I leave on all the time.
Doesn’t strike me as such a geeky thing to do any more, but there we go.
What’s the difference betwen having a blackberry and having a blackberry with 24/7 IM. The devices give you 24/7 email - which is what I won the award for in the first instance. What’s the big difference between that and IM?
Not a lot as far as I can tell.
Howard
–
Blogged with Flock
Tags: geekaward blackberry mobile email google talk gmail gtalk
howard | Television, Web/Tech, advertising, digital marketing, future | 08 20th, 2007| No Comments »Someone I know recently moved into a new role split across two agencies. Once of the agencies is below the line, the other well above the line and they are going to be working with both.
What interested me in this move was that one of the big reasons why it was so interesting to them was that they wanted to get solid industry experience in an ATL environment, something this person had not had before, and they were very keen to take this up.
ATL is an interesting thing for me, as I’ve often chatted to people about how those in the TV side of the ATL world have not really been exposed to the benefits and features that we in the digital world have taken for granted for some time now - and yet this is going to change for them almost overnight at some time in the very near future.
A big thing for me, and something I’ve been talking about for a fair few years, certainly since 1999 (I distinctly remember a heated debate at an agency bash in Covent Garden when the digital team were speaking with some of the TV creatives and it almost got out of hand), is that when TV starts to get delivered over an IP network, TV people are going to be suddenly thrust into the world we now inhabit and will have a massive learning curve to grab hold of.
I know of many large integrated agencies around London who are, at this very moment, cross training a lot of their staff in all aspects of marketing, digital and not digital, to make sure everyone knows and understands how to work together.
I don’t think any of us, back in the day, imagined that IPTV would mean anything like P2P and Joost, or the BBC iPlayer (NO MAC VERSION!!! ARGHHH!) but even so, the way TV advertising is going to change, and therefore the TV people change with it, is a massive leap forwards. I know it’s not mainstream yet and we’re still glued to our Sky+ and Freeview boxes, but it can’t be too far off now.
I personally think TV is going to be a very exciting place to be in the next few years as those people grab hold of the space we inhabit. I mean, let’s not beat around, TV still takes a whopping great percentage of the ad spend in most client’s budgets, and it’s still seen as a very effective medium by many a marketing director. We should not ignore this, and the fact that they will soon be playing in the same space as us is something we all have to think seriously about.
This kind of leads me on to a point I also discussed with some people recently - the fact that in agencies we still have specialist people in relation to digital - Head of Digital, Director of Digital, Digital Strategist etc.. The list goes on.
How long do we see this happening? Surely we’re all going to end up as just marketing experts in the long run? We don’t split creative teams up into PRINT CREATIVE or TV CREATIVE etc., but for some reason we still specialise in digital. I know a lot of this has to do with the current level of skills and experience but this surely won’t always be the case.
I firmly believe that ten years from now the role of Director of Digital will cease to exist and that separate digital teams within integrated agencies will have disappeared.
“New media” isn’t new any more. “Digital marketing” will become just plain old marketing.
Howard
–
Blogged with Flock
Tags: digital-marketing, digital marketing, digital, marketing, above-the-line, above the line, atl, tv, advertising, iptv, future