Hello Viking

One Show Interactive 2008

We attended the awards ceremony for One Show Interactive a few weeks ago. In a word: Impressive.

This year's award winners were very global. (Click here to download the Interactive winners list (PDF) from the One Club.) We saw lots of great interactive work from Brazil, Japan, Sweden and the UK. This year's show only confirms the necessity to consider global audiences, or at least the presence of them. Whatever you build—be it a campaign site, digital content or online display ads—will be seen by an audience much wider and more diverse than what you might have targeted. And that's good. Not just for general awareness, but for the practice of thinking beyond your own marketing "walls." What might an audience in Korea think of your project once they stumble upon from a Google link?

We also got spend time with old friends (and judges for this year's show) Benjamin Palmer and Will McGinness (who also chaired the judging committee). Nice to see those guys on stage.

Anyway, Best of Show went to the Japanese retailer Uniqlo and the production company Projector for the "Uniqlock" campaign. It's incredible and totally deserved the top honor. It's content and re-distribution technology wrapped in a simple idea.



You can read a ton about Uniqlo—its corporate history, successes, failures and resurgence—and the Uniqlock campaign here at Creative Review. Here's a few highlights from their article:

"Uniqlock is a downloadable ‘blog part’ created by Projector. It’s a simple clock that anyone can place on their blog to give the time and location of the blog’s writer. Each hour, it plays a specially written chime by DJ/producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, aka Fantastic Plastic Machine. Nearly 20,000 are in use worldwide. Uniqlo recently updated the concept with the addition of video: in the new version (shown), each hour is marked by a short dance piece performed by dance group, Core of Woomin, and directed and choreographed by Yuichi Kodama and AIRMAN."

"Launched in June, the Worldclock section of the imaginatively wrought Uniqlock site will inform you that more than 19,000 Uniqlocks have been set, and the site has been viewed nearly 46 million times by visitors from 204 countries."

Again, impressive.

Friends are fantastic

The past few months have been insane. Good insane. We've been terribly fortunate to be working with some marvelous agencies and marketers, as well as really awesome creative, media and strategic partners. And the results have been quite lovely as well. Here's a quick recap:

Persuasion Arts & Sciences and Brunswick/MerCruiser 360° Control
We just launched this promotional site yesterday to coincide with the Miami Boat Show. HV delivered strategy, design and development. Big thanks to Dion and Mark for the opportunity and to John and Aubrey and crew for their fine collaboration. We're implementing an AdWords campaign around this effort as well.

Kruskopf Coontz and 3M
We've been working with KC to develop strategy, media and creative ideas to enhance an existing product campaign in the digital space. Now we're moving into production on that stuff. Tip 'o' the viking helmet to Robb, Mike, Ann, Audra and the team at KC for the work, as well as our pal Alan for the big ideas.

Taxi Branding
We're in the midst of an ongoing strategic, media, creative and production project with our friends Tim, Richard and Debra. Thanks to Jamie, Alan and Shannon for their insights and energy.

Spring and PwC
Much love to our pals at Spring. We're currently developing their new website. And we just collaborated on strategy, then led architecture and development to launch a video contest for business students at pwc.tv/videocontest. Know any b-schoolers? They could win $3,000.

Fallon
And a shout-out to Al Kelly and Tom Eslinger for the opportunity to knock heads on digital strategy and creative ideas for a new biz pitch a few weeks back. That was fun. Thanks as well to Marc and John for their efforts with us.

Venables Bell and Audi
Late last year we collaborated with the team at VB on strategy, architecture, content and design for a "Truth in Engineering" campaign site prototype. (See the work here.) Thanks to Colleen and Lissette for the opportunity and Jamie and Marc for their fine aesthetics and work ethic.

1nteractive and Pinnacle Airlines
Last fall we developed an online strategy, media plan, AdWords campaign, banner ads, and a landing page to improve Pinnacle's pilot recruitment efforts. Over 4,500 unique users hit the registration page in first 30 days, eliciting 400 applications, of which 56.1% were qualified. Per-pilot recruitment costs dropped to $163 per applicant from, well, let's just say a much bigger number. Oh, and our AdWords CTR was 2.99% on average. See the work.

We've got some other great work in the pipeline and we're teaming up with even more awesome people. Work is grand.

This week in Inspiration

Every time we get a call to collaborate or bid on some work, we end up collecting a bunch of reference links. Looking across multiple projects, these links are totally unrelated to each other. But maybe you'll find something useful or inspiring in the list. Here's our recent grab bag-o-links:

k10k.net
Our pal Sung said, "it still holds its own even though the design is almost 8 years old. On the backend, it has lots of dynamic feeds so that's really nice." This is a great resource for design.

WebCreme
Got this from our pal Cole. A nifty resource for design ideas.

Schematic
Another great combination of intuitive architecture and great design. Love the metaphor. And the main control nav system is very smart.

CenterPlan
Awesome navigation interface. Thanks for the link, Jamie! (The site takes a bit to load, but it's worth it.)

Facebook | Volvo C30
Kristina at MIMA sent us this link. Good reference for the evolution of marketing on Facebook.

Firstborn
We dig their new site design. The info architecture is awesome. And if you don't hire us, hire them!

CSS Zen Garden
We love Flash, but we love CSS, too. This site does an excellent job of demonstrating how simple CSS can dramatically effect design. And it works great on the iPhone, too.

Web 2.0 how-to design guide
This is very well organized and thoughtfully written. Lots of useful insights and guides for strategy, architecture and design.

Panic
Really great product site design. So simple. Check out the download arrow, upper right. You just drag/drop one of their product icons to download it. (And it's not built in Flash.)

What's your inspiration? Please share a link or two with us.

[blank] killed the campaign microsite star?

You saw this coming, didn't you? Of course you did. Interesting piece in Adweek today on the eventual, obvious, presumed "death" of the Campaign Microsite.

"Digital advocates often proclaim the imminent death of the 30-second spot, but the interactive industry might now be witnessing the demise of its own version of the commercial: the campaign microsite.

The growth of social media is causing marketers to realize they cannot expect consumers to always seek them out. Web widgets and video-sharing tools make it easy for any user to take content that formerly might have lived only on a brand site with them wherever they go. And social media sites help them share that content with friends."

Our 2¢: Nothing dies in advertising. The campaign microsite will continue to play a strong role when and where it needs to.

If your audience isn't hanging out in Facebook or MySpace, then perhaps a microsite can act in that role quite effectively. And it's quite easy to provide many if not all of the social networking tools and utility within a microsite (AddThis, anyone?).

Given today's wonderfully complex mix of online venues, the campaign site is simply another option.

Perhaps it's a clearinghouse, or a jumping off point. At the very least, the campaign site does offer the greatest degree of control and distribution.

If you follow Jaffe's three (new) roles for advertising: To Empower, To Demonstrate and To Involve -- it's clear social media/networks are quite wonderful for involving and empowering; whereas the campaign site has unique strengths in its abilities to demonstrate. But it's all part of a coherent whole -- each element crafted or adopted for a specific role in the marketing mix.

To suggest the demise of the campaign site is at hand is quite sensational, but hardly accurate.

Hello, Feast

Nice to see Snickers acknowledge Vikings. Thank you, Snickers.

pwc.tv launch

We just launched our first project, for agency Spring and client PricewaterhouseCoopers. Huge thanks to everyone at Spring for the opportunity and their fabulous collaboration. And thanks to the good people at PwC. (And special thanks to Bill for the initial phone call.)

pwc.tv is designed to aid college recruiting efforts for PwC, offering news, entertainment and advice on how to start your career with the firm. We're very excited to see how it evolves and grows.

biz cards from moo!

We just started to get our first business cards. The entire process of creating, ordering and receiving them has been fantastic. All because of MOO. They've got an outstanding website, customer service and the product kills.

We ordered 100 cards each. The back side is the same for all. But we ordered 10 different images for the fronts (so, 10 of each). Printing is tasty, on thick non-gloss stock. And they have a solid upload interface. You can use their Photoshop templates or images from your flickr, etc. accounts.

MOO is a definite gold standard in digital-enabled business. Order yours today.