All the posts Aaron Bateman has been tagged in.
WheelMate – empowering a community
Every now and then, a project comes along that provides both client and agency with a chance to work together to make a meaningful difference. At Advance, the most recent of these opportunities has reached fruition in the form of WheelMate – a digital platform commissioned by our client Coloplast to help wheelchair users find accessible toilets and parking spaces.
Hyper Island – the movie
We put together a little film to document our time at Hyper Island:
A short film about our neighbourhood
It’s bugged me for a while that agencies aren’t very good at getting more involved in their communities. I think W+K London do a good job, using a ground-level window for interesting installations and exhibitions. But they’re the exception to the rule. MORE>
Community Conference Denmark & social business
I first heard the term ‘social business’ about 18 months ago. Initially, the notion felt a little hard to pin down and was often misunderstood as ‘companies embracing social media’. It’s since gone from strength to strength as a discipline with notable practitioners including Dachis Group and Headshift (now owned by Dachis). IBM have also entered the fray with their Connections offering, which features consultancy and a range of software tools designed to help companies benefit through internal and external social collaboration.
Around the agency
The occasionally homesick Brits in the office (me, Chris and Trudy) have established a new afternoon ritual – tea and biscuits.
Agency Future – one year on
Our Agency Future project is a year old now. The grant I won last year from the Danish Association of Advertising Agencies has been spent and I’ve presented my findings. But that doesn’t spell the end for the project.
With over 900 Twitter followers and a well-established blog, Agency Future has clearly struck a chord. The communications industry is still undergoing massive disruption and creative agencies are evolving at a terrific pace – reinventing their business models, racing to stay abreast of new channels and getting to grips with people’s changing relationships with the media they consume (and increasingly create) and the companies whose products they buy.
The past year has been fascinating for me personally and I think informative for the agency too. Getting to meet the founders of such awesome agencies as Anomaly and Made by Many and picking the brains of smart folks from BBH and W+K has been massively stimulating.
Wrong all along?
MDW NY | Faris Yakob_Strategy for the Post-Digital Age
Boulder Digital Worksheld an impressive two-day conference in New York last week called ‘Making Digital Work’. We couldn’t be there but the conference’s live stream gave us a way to follow along.
Faris Yakob‘s keynote – ‘We’ve Been Wrong All Along’ (deck above) – was a pulsating opening to the conference and once he’d posted the deck on his site, I shared it with my colleagues, along with some of his accompanying text:
‘So, even though we know, and all the academic research confirms, that decision making is primarily emotional, and that rational messaging in advertising doesn’t really seem to help, we persist in structuring briefs around the core proposition, a model we all derive from Rosser Reeves’ model of advertising, which insists communication is primarily about message transmission – which it’s not – and that advertising is the same as selling, which it’s not.’
In my mail to my colleagues, I asked if we’d ever be able to convince any of our clients of the truth of Faris’s conclusions, especially given how crucial testing is in the preparation of their communications.
This sparked a response from Gavin, our senior Art Director, which I thought I’d share:
Listening skills
The agency asked if I could come home from London a day early this weekend in order to make sure we were ready for a big meeting later this week. I said ‘no problem, just cover the new flight and I’m all yours’.
It was short notice and the only seats left on the SAS flight were Economy Extra or Business. Work booked me the cheapest possible and even that was the best part of 4,000DKK (about 400 pounds).
Economy Extra gets you a few perks – bit more legroom, Fast Track check-in and a cold meal and a drink. Perhaps naively, I’d imagined it also got you access to the lounge but I soon discovered that remained solely for the use of Eurobonus Gold Card carriers and Business passengers.
Again somewhat naively, I tried to argue at the SAS lounge that I should be granted access as I was a Eurobonus Basic member, a reasonably frequent flyer, a holder of an Economy Extra ticket for which we had paid a LOT of money, and their plane was going to be an hour and a half late.
No dice.
My last resort was Twitter. What followed was a textbook example of how to handle a customer grumbling about your service on a social network. Here’s how the conversation unfolded:
Up the wall
We invited our friends at White Walls of Decay to come and paint the big, boring white wall in the creative department this weekend. They worked all weekend and produced a strikingly lovely, understated design that complements the (dis)organised mess of the room.
Ten Reasons Why This Is The Best Time To Be In Advertising (according to Sir John Hegarty)
I was lucky enough to get a last-minute ticket to see Sir John Hegarty’s talk at Mediehøjskolen earlier this week. It was pitched at the students so was quite ‘macro’ in scope, but still contained plenty of illuminating quotes that got the grizzled old ad pros nodding and smiling.
Sir John, one of the founding partners of BBH, began his talk by telling students to pay no heed to the doomsayers’ pronouncements of the death of the industry. His view is that while the broadcast-only approach to advertising may be on the wane, the industry itself had never been more alive.
And it was while warning against the folly of pronouncing the ‘death’ of anything that he revealed his core communication belief: “What most people in his industry seem to forget time and time again is that a brand is made not just by the people who buy it but also by the people who know about it.”
Thoughts on Podio
Podio, the Copenhagen-based start-up formerly known as Hoist, has received a lot of attention in recent weeks. Techcrunch gave them a glowing write-up, and the New York Times followed suit, albeit with a slightly more tempered appraisal.
Here at Advance, we had some experience with the platform having signed up for Hoist early last year. We’d been looking for a plug-and-play system that enabled the creative department to share inspiration and work in a more collaborative way. But there were clearly teething problems and the inability to embed video was a major drawback.
That, and a number of other issues, have now been rectified, while the introduction of the much-talked-about Apps functionality has given Podio fresh momentum.