We’ve been very busy over the past few months on our Top Secret Project, namely designing, migrating and building the new Number 10 Downing Street website! What’s significant about this is that we have used blogging platform Wordpress (also used here) to do this.
We can’t say too much at this stage but the site is due to go live very soon. For a sneak preview you can take a gander at some screengrabs of the Homepage, Communicate page, Meet the PM page, History and Tour page and the Number 10 TV page on the Downing Street Flickr channel.
We will post again once the site is live with our shiny new press release and more info so watch this space…
Ever since Heroes hit our screens it has become something of a cult phenomenon, so we focused our creative campaign for the release of the Season 2 box set on engaging the fans and giving them content to share. Firstly, we created a widget which plays to host to an exclusive clip. The hook? The more people who embed the widget, the more of the clip they are able to see. We also created a snaggable video MPU which allows the users to grab it as a widget and place on their own social network profile or blog, along with a standard leaderboard and wide sky to be used on the Film channel on The Sun website. Finally, we built an expandable video banner for MSN Messenger which has been used to target the audience demographic and reach out to Heroes fans.
Ahh, thongs and snogging, we remember being a teenager…But enough of the nostalgia. Our new media toolkit for said British teen flick is based on the doodle-esque key art and, with our extra Flash-based flourishes and animation, we are pretty proud of it. Alongside the standard formats are some lovely expandables which, upon expand, lets the user navigate Georgia’s pin board to find a host of movie-related information and content. There are ‘quiz formats’ which calculates which movie character the user is most like and a ‘fan kit’ of embeddable ads so that users can essentially place them on their social networks or blogs and advertise for us. All clever stuff.
If we may so ourselves! With some 1970’s, retrotastic key art, our new media toolkit for Paramount’s The Love Guru is really standout, and even the standard formats are full of colour and life. I don’t think I need to say anymore, just take a look yourself.
Here is our latest toolkit for UPIE for Step Up 2 The Streets. Especially nice is the expandable sky, which makes excellent use of video, filling up the entire space upon expand for a really high impact effect. This is perfect for showcasing the slick dance moves captured within the video content. Recently we have been using Gigya technology to wrap up and widgetise pieces of content, just as we have done with the video MPU here. The great thing about using Gigya is that it is relatively simple to code and can be used to post to the majority of social network profiles and blog systems.
As featured on this here blog recently, our Carrie’s MacBook content piece for the Sex and the City movie has not only done phenomenally well in terms of visits and user interaction, it has also won us a few awards! We received e-creative’s Website of the Day on 21st May and Design Licks Site of the Day on 31st May, as well as 1st Runner Up in the IAB Creative Showcase for May 2008. Last, but by no means least, it was also crowned New Media Age’s Campaign of the Month. Grab a copy of NMA this week to see the feature, and a lovely photograph of our Head of Strategy, Mr Christian Edwards. Alternatively, you can click here to download a PDF scan of the pages. Congratulations us!
Our creative team are always looking to extend their skills, so for the Battlefield: Bad Company toolkit we have used new techniques to create some really stunning creative. Firstly, the grenade that features across all formats was designed and built in 3D Studio Max. The motion path of the rolling grenade was set using the Dynamics feature and then the very cool, impactful explosions were created using Particle Illusion. All of this was pulled together using Adobe After Effects. Sounds a bit technical? Just take a look at the toolkit containing MPU’s and communicating leaderboard and skys, and the bespoke ‘horseshoe’ format and it should all become clear. Please note, the ad units you are looking at here (and for all our other synced or communicating ads) are not served through an ad serving partner so you may need to refresh your page for it to sync up properly. In ‘real life’ this would be set up and served through the likes of Flash Talking or Eyeblaster and would sync up automatically.
Take one Ryan Reynolds. Add in three beautiful ladies in the shape of Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Banks and Isla Fisher. Finally, mix in a precocious but cute child (cue Abigail Breslin) and you have a match made in heaven. Not Maybe, Definitely. Take a look at our beautiful yet effective new media toolkit for UPIE’s Definitely, Maybe which contains a mobile toolkit and some nice downloadable content pieces.
Continuing our good work for EA, we have created some excellent linked leaderboard and sky/super skys for the recent PC release of Mass Effect. There is also a video MPU which shows off the trailer and incorporates a large ‘sound on’ button to encourage user interaction. Clever clever…
I happened to catch the front page of Marketing Week this week which drew me into their article questioning whether ‘Buzz Marketing’ (hate that name) can survive this week’s introduction of the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 legislation (the online version is here if you care to read it). I found the whole piece to be myopic and naive, completely ignoring the best practice disciplines of viral marketing, (overt) community engagement and user generated content as effective (and legal) forms of generating ‘buzz’.
Buzz Marketing (can we call it Peer to Peer marketing please… p2p, sits nicely alongside b2c and b2b n’est pas?) is about getting consumers to talk to each other about your brand (preferably saying nice warm cuddly things). If your agency’s only weapon in it’s arsenal for generating this discussion is to pose as a consumer in a forum, sack them.
More than happy to kill off the name, but the best-practice discipline is alive and kicking thank you very much.
As reported back in December, we’ve spent the last 6 months working on a viral for the theatrical release of the Sex and the City movie. Now hosted on the official movie website is ‘Carrie’s MacBook’. This cleverly designed flash interface gives users ‘access’ to Carrie Bradshaw’s personal desktop where they can snoop around her calendar, emails, pictures, musings and more. Challenges are set through a series of ‘chats’ with other SATC characters and once all have been completed, the user can unlock access to exclusive content in the hard drive. The campaign is currently getting lots of press and blog coverage. We also created a lovely SATC expandable MPU, take a look at it here…
We have recently been working closely with Vodafone to help push their mobile advertising services. Using Flash Lite, a mobile enabled version of Adobe Flash, we created an application for the Nokia N95 phone and a CD Rom which showcases Vodafone’s mobile advertising opportunities and case studies. You can see an online demo of the CD Rom presentation here (bear in mind the graphics were produced to run off a CD ROM and not off the web… could be a bit slow to load and the animation may be a bit jerky for you).
No, not a suicide pact, this month we have created a new media toolkit for Untraceable, the movie about a crazy guy who murders people live on the Internet. Alongside the standard leaderboard and MPU we have used clever video editing and Adobe After Effects to create the uneasy and slightly disturbing enhanced leaderboard. Click on this link to see, if you dare…
Director extraordinaire Steven Spielberg has reportedly signed a deal with EA to release three console games. His first foray into the world of gaming is Boom Blox, an addictively crazy puzzle game, out exclusively on Wii. As always, we were on hand to help out on the digital advertising creative and built a synced leaderboard and skyscraper which, we think, successfully captures the high energy, colourful game play and is pretty tricky to ignore!
We’ve just launched an international site for Square Enix for the launch of DS game Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, part of the hugely popular Final Fantasy franchise. The site is build in flash and with international localization being facilitated through xml files. Learn about the characters, magical abilities and immerse yourself in the fairytale world of Final Fantasy here…
Not the plastic surgery type, that’s still a couple of years off. Unless it’s your first visit, or you’re completely blind, or have a really bad memory, you’ll notice we’ve freshened up our logo. After weeks of navel gazing, we’ve come up with the new look and feel which is implemented across the site. I could go into huge detail as to why the choice of font, colours etc, but it would be post event rationalization of the first order. I’m just strangely drawn to pink, ok?
Set to be one of the biggest releases this year, we have been beavering away on the international new media toolkit for the latest Marvel movie, Iron Man. To reach out to the core fans we created an iGoogle skin and Google gadget, as well as a video clip banner builder which lets users create their own personalised embeddable banner. For the mainstream, movie going audience the advertising toolkit focuses on highlighting the all star cast and video clips. Take a look…
Play our treacherous river raft game and see if you can reach the centre of the earth without hitting the rocks or being attacked by the sea dwelling monsters! You may also notice that we have widgetised the game so that users can grab it and place it on their blog or social network profile to play and share with others – the perfect way to create a natural viral spread online. This was created for New Line Cinema (RIP) to help promote their forthcoming release, Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
Back in 2006 we created the UK’s first magazine ‘website as a blog’ for stylish men’s mag Arena. This month, we have given the blog a bit of an overhaul, refreshed the design and improved the usability, both from a content producer and reader perspective. Take a look at the new stylings here: http://www.arenamagazine.co.uk/
