Our motives of starting an agency were questioned, but we believed in a better creative world – where an agency got back to its routes and produced great work without charging (let’s face it) the inflated and greed orientated fees of others. Work that benefited the intended audience, not purely the agency.

Our sense of timing was questioned, but we welcomed the recession, I know that sounds misguided, but in our industry great agencies are born out of recessions – There is a flick of the reset switch, the fat is removed – we remember it’s about great creative, marketing and communications. Simple.

So what has been the secret to our last 4 years? Well, I won’t give it all away, but…

…in the beginning we had no clients, no website and no folio. All we had is what all creatives dream of… A completely white piece of paper to do with as we wished, along with our hard won reputations. It was time to start afresh – to reinvent what an agency should be and remember why we got involved in this industry in the first place – align our ethos and ethics to an ever (rapidly) changing and demanding world – get out there and spread our message. One of creative love.

We went against the grain when others played it safe and employed top of game talent to deliver on our promises of great creative and management. Within this structure we fostered an environment that invested in staff, encouraged creative thought, and empowered individuals to take ownership and accountability of their work whilst developing the concept of the team and not rely on hero dependency.

We found a niche. We developed an approach to transparent management and communications – allowing staff to have voice and help shape the future of the company. There should be no secrets.

We worked hard. Often above and beyond the contractual agreements we had made… Even today, if it needs that little extra we will give it, meaning that we do it better, faster, cheaper, more honestly, and with a wider range than our competitors.

But most of all, we created an environment that allows people to work with a smile. Promoting people to look at things with new eyes, to not be afraid or think of limitations.

Things great and small

With each dollar having to work harder and the amount of channels now available it pays to stay small and agile. It pays not to be the ’800-pound gorilla’. It allows us to work under the radar of the bigger agencies.

By staying small and focussed we hold on to the things that are dear to us, our passion of ideas, our love of storytelling and the acceptance of making mistakes. Mistakes are OK… If we don’t make them, then we aren’t pushing hard enough.

And what of 2012…

As advocates of design and communication we will be thinking about how we can change the world. To make it that little bit more special and leave a legacy – gifting back to the audience we rely so heavily upon to love and be influenced by our work. Yes, we live and work within a commercially driven world and environment, but it’s evolving… And brands can and will be playing a central role within this communication evolution – To make the world a better place to live in. It’s not all about the financial rewards… It now incorporates the story we are telling and the smile we should be leaving behind.

Our mission

As always; To over achieve – to deliver time and time again on our promise. To change the world ever so slightly for the better. To make the complex simple. To love what we do.

Here is to what we believe is going to be a most excellent 2012. Have fun with it.

Mark Anderson / Creative Director and Founder

Happy Christmas to you all. Have a good one from all of us at We Love…

Is this a genuinely a new indispensable tool for creatives to replace our prized Wacom tablets or just another gimmick which just slows down the creative process?, it has a few draw back it only has ball point pen refills at the moment and according to a few reviews doesn’t deal with detail very well. We will have to wait and see with its official release date penned for early October perfect Christmas timing, I know it will be on many creatives Christmas lists this year.

Available on a limited release (only in the US this week) to users of the Sprint Nexus S 4G phone. Users can download an app that links through to a Near Field Communication (NFS) chip inside the phone. It currently only works with Visa, Citi MasterCards and Google Prepaid Cards.

Take a look at the Introducing Google Wallet demo video to see it in action.

Critics might ask why is Google jumping on this new method of payment if it is still some time away in the future to becoming mainstream. Well, tracking what consumers are purchasing will be hugely important to Google and advertisers – giving them a deeper understanding into consumer behaviour and opening up opportunity for sustained engagement through loyalty schemes.

“For retailers, the attraction is not just to ease the payment process for customers, but also to increase engagement with them – tapping on the readers can also add loyalty points or allow digital coupons to be spent”, noted Chris Nuttall of The Financial Times.

Google is also in talks with  major retail partners to install next-generation tills that work with NFC chips. One question everyone will be wondering though, is whether Apple will now release NFC for the iPhone 5?

This new software has huge potential but what we are witnessing are the very early stages of development. It is yet to have full retailer buy-in. Although, Google Wallet is available at various retailers, it is only available at select locations. As consumers we are used to our ‘shopping habits’ and changing these won’t be simple. It will take time for people to trust in NFC as a secure and efficient payment method. Consumers will need to own a smartphone with NFC capabilities and it may challenge and alienate the not-so-tech-savvy-consumers of the world.

Ulitmately, I think that this is a great step forward in NFC technology and an insight into the way we will shop in the future. While it seems as though the smartphone will soon hold all the details to our day-to-day functioning, I think we’ve only just had a glimpse at the future and how NFS technology will change our shopping behaviour. So, it’s not quite time to chuck your wallet away just yet…

I say dotBrand – you say What? So, let’s start with the basics. DotBrand is the moniker that’s been given to the new raft of impending top level domain names.

We are all currently aware of at least a handful of the 22 existing traditional endings to a domain address such as .co.uk, .com, .org, .net, .biz, .fr, and we get along quite nicely with them for the most part. People have come to understand that a ‘.co.uk’ site is the UK version of a website, or that ‘.edu’ is limited to use by educational institutions, and is likely to be the domain name for your childs primary school, or your university.

dotBrand opens up the top level domain names to ‘.anything’… It could be .coke, .london, .music… and so on, creating with it an entirely new online landscape. Brands could essentially have total ownership and management of their own unique name space. No longer would they have to check whether a domain name was available at the start of a new product launch, or advertising campaign. Instead they would simply just add it in their repertoire. For example if MGM studios launched a new film, lets say it’s called Violet… they could simply have www.violet.mgm (instead of a) not being likely to get www.violet.com as another company will probably already own it and b) not having to use something along the lines of www.mgm.com/movies/newrelease/violet). Obviously the latter is a lot less effective, less memorable and holds less retention with the audience.

All dotBrand domain name requests have a 90 day period to be submitted to ICANN – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, starting Jan 2012. After which time a review process will take place, and names granted or declined… More of this later.

So, next comes the fact that a new digital landscape calls for a new digital strategy. Obviously there are immediate pluses and minuses to the arrival of a dotBrand era, and questions to be considered.

• How will it be received by the public? There is likely to be early confusion and potential reticence to change.
• How will brands educate the public, and encourage them to use their new dotBrand top level domain?
• Will cybersquatting increase? Will dotBrands be bought up by people who have no right to them?
• Will dotBrands be perceived as more or less trustworthy?
• How will dotBrands affect the online search strategies and effectiveness for non-dotBrand’ers?
• Will dotBrands give a competitive advantage to their users, or will they be yet another top level domain name in the mix of the existing ones?
• Will the obvious simplified url’s create a noticeable amount of stickyness for a campaign?
• …And the list goes on…

One immediate problem is that credible and agreed names that are submitted for registration will not only be approved, but will ensure that similar names, or different versions on a similar theme will be declined. The example given in the recent webinar was for Deloitte – if registered, .deloitte will be acceptable, but .delloite / .deloite / .deloittr will all be declined. The irony for me is that dotBrand itself is a company name… Will ICANN buy the .dotbrand top level domain for all registrations, and if they do, do they have ‘more right’ over it than a company whose registered name is DotBrand?? Wow… the mind boggles. Gap is another great example, as a colleague pointed out. There is currently thegap / gap/ gapadventures / gapinc / gapantenna / gap-software… Who can lay claim, and who will be shoved out of a dotBrand world? Or will it come down to those that can pay will muscle out those that can’t and stake their claim on a name?

The digital landscape may also change more dramatically than one would first envisage. There is the potential that dotBrand websites will eliminate the need for a website hierarchy, as you will be pointed exactly where you need to go by a short, snappy, memorable dotBrand url (www.contact.amazon or www.soul.kia). No website hierarchy and a direct route of navigation potentially means no Homepage doesn’t it? – a concept that all website users are currently familiar and comfortable with using and navigating. Obviously the immediate question raised in my mind, is around the interconnectivity of pages within the same dotBrand domain, and how users will find their way from one place to another if the navigational homepage is made redundant…? This may currently appear to be one step too far.

Now back to the process of registering for a dotBrand, as promised. There will be an initial 90 day registration period, after which the current schedule is that further registration for dotBrand domain names will be closed until 2016. That is a long way away! My initial fear on hearing this, coupled with the fact that each submission for a dotBrand domain name will cost a whopping $185,000 (please don’t gasp aloud as I did upon hearing this figure), is that all of a sudden the internet will become yet another landscape of have’s v’s have-not’s. For me the beauty of the internet is that it allows everyone an equal playing field – whether you’re a small start-up, or a big fish in the marketplace; equally it has allowed some amazing entrepreneurial successes that may never have got that first break had it not been for a unified global online space…

And let’s not brush over the $185,000 price-tag itself. What exactly are brands paying for? I’ll repeat that. What EXACTLY are brands paying for? And frankly, aren’t we simply saying to companies over a certain size and turnover ‘welcome to a brand new web’, and to all you others ‘goodluck’…

Whilst you read this, there will be more Top 100 companies publicly setting their stall out (to register or not to register, that is the question?), with the likes of Deloitte and Canon quickly announcing that they would be buying their respective dotBrand domain names. It would seem that there are therefore two options – dotBrand, or don’t. A third, slightly questionable, route is also being put out there by ICANN: register and then retreat. You register and essentially ‘reserve’ a domain name so others can’t get it, and then withdraw your application after the 90 day deadline. This would mean that between April 2012 and sometime in 2016 no-one else would be able to get your dotBrand domain name, however it would also cost you $55,500 for the privilege (30% of the original fee would be retained)…

I guess we shall just have to wait and wonder…

A recent study has peaked my SuperMum interest here – definitely the very definition of modern day parenting in the era of social networking. The study reports that parents who sit and play videogames with their children are better placed to develop lasting bonds with their kids. Gaming firm PopCap and Goldsmiths University found that 4 out of 5 parents (of a polled 3000) consider time spent playing computer games with their children ‘quality time’. 1000 out of the total polled said that they do so every day, with children as young as two years old. In an age where it appears that social relationships are enhanced by social networking games this appears a logical conclusion to draw. ‘Game playing’ whether virtual or otherwise equates to investing and spending time together – whether you’re tackling real-world lego bricks, or virtual space pirates (or whatever it might be!). The parents and grand-parents are taking the effort to get ‘down with the kids’ and interact with them on a level, and in an arena, that the children are comfortable and confident operating within. Awesome! Whether the long-lasting bonds are born out of the social network / videogame aspect, or just the mere fact that they are obviously parents and carers willing to adapt and be flexible around the child they’re trying to develop bonds with is a matter for discussion. If gaming isn’t for you, here’s a brief run-down of some other ways to embrace new technologies to interact with your kiddiwinks:

• iKidApps – a techie mum’s perspective on what’s hot, fun, educational, and best of all, kid-proof in the world of apps.
• BestKidsApps – an alternative, easy-to-use run-down of the best free and paid for applications, broken down by age group, games, books & stories, creative and learning.
• KidSites – self confessed ‘best guide’ of the best sites for kids on the web. Broken down by Educational, Fun Stff and Grownups.

Now, if only someone could devise a way to ‘virtually’ get your baby to sleep through the night… Hmmm.

Facebook is accessed by just under 1 in every 13 people in the world. Given the number of babies and old folks (excluding the Ivy Bean’s of this world), as well as complete technophobes (fearful) or techo-illiterate (fearless, but also clueless)  that’s quite astonishing for something that started up as a support site solely open to membership from Harvard students (an approximate audience of 7000 people in total!). The number of Facebook users has now surpassed 750 million… with 2000 employees to manage it in 15 different offices worldwide… Phew!

Over 30% of users are in the ’35 years and over’ demographic. A marked shift from the original college student focus. Raising the question with some audiences whether Facebook has gone from cool to just plain cold… However, to counter-balance this the 18-24 year old audience is once again the fastest-growing segment, regaining the title from ‘women 55+‘ who snagged it briefly in 2009. Take from that what you will!

The average user has 140 friends that they are connected with on Facebook, and sends an average of 8 friend requests per month, during roughly 40 visits per month, in which they create approximately 90 unique pieces of content; 200 million of whom do this from their mobile device whilst on the go… Users have been dubbed the ‘Tell-All Generation’ with Facebook as the platform to air your views, your opinions…and in some cases your dirty laundry 24/7/365.

And that is all just for starters. Before we even mention how many millions of users follow how many thousands of companies in how many different languages, or not if the most recent article is anything to go by. Or the most and least popular pages on the site, and how many fans they gain each week (Texas Hold’Em Poker and the Kate Middleton page are way up there this week!)

The session was about the gaming culture developing around us in our everyday activities. From popular casual games like Angry Birds to fitness apps such as Nike+ (giving us encouragement), to the engrossing MMORPG  games such as World of Warcraft. Games aren’t meant to be easy, it’s their challenging and addictive (“just one more go”) nature that engages us and allows us to  escape from day to day life.

We spend alot of time gaming in its various forms, often without realising it. The presentations started with an amazing statistic on the hours spent gaming:

• The time spent playing World of Warcraft totals 5.93 million years. That is as long as we have been evolving as a human species!

Here are 2 more…

• 250,000 years spent playing Halo.
• 3 billion hours invested a week globally playing online games*

Then followed 4 quick fire presentations on the four M’s of gamification by the invited panel. The 4 M’s (in no order):

• Membership
• Meaning
• Mystery
• Mastery

Membership is all about how we define ourselves as belonging to a group or multiple groups. We also need to look at the opposite of this – exclusion. Sometimes being an ‘outsider’ is another form of membership that can drive behaviour. Tom Hopkins used the Stanford prison experiment to highlight how humans adapt and behave when in and outside of a group. He mentioned Abraham Maslow’s psychology theories on behaviour and how fulfilling the basic of needs motivates us to move on to more complex ones. We need to think about what drives membership, how it builds ‘friendships’ but also what is great about being an ‘enemy’. Just look at the Apple vs. Microsoft debates that rage on.

• Stanford prison experiment
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Meaning. Alex Lee mentioned the different motivations across gaming that can build meaning.  The way we reward users can be based on accruing things like status, collection of points, badges or credits. This can be achieved by completing new levels in a game, gaining badges for completed tasks (foursquare), enlisting your friends to join in an event like Movember. Meaning is not defined just by skill level. The differences between WoW and Angry Birds are vast on the skill level and game genre but both reward users for effort and involvement in different ways. The others Alex discussed were:

• Celebrity Pedigree - Fun and engaging way to accrue points and breed, buy and sell celebrity dogs. (OK, so I am a sucker for a cute dog that’s a mix of Clarkson and Geldof=Poppy Pooches)
• Nike+ –  An app that encourages you as you exercise. The voice of friendly encouragement when you need it.
• Movember – join a group, gather your friends and reward yourselves as well as others, like a charity. One takeaway Alex raised here was around gifting sites like JustGiving and how people feel about being compared with others on the value of their donations.  Is this a positive or negative meaning? Would you like to be compared to others on the value you have contributed?

Mystery. Matt Bagwell hates golf. Well I think he does   He took a simple game like golf as an analogy to explain mystery. The aim of golf is to get the small white ball into a hole. No mystery or mastery there but, when you add in more complex tasks to get it to the hole like distance, trees, sand bunkers, repetition, rules and skill level you begin to create the ‘mystery’. The core rule is to get the ball in the hole – how you get it there is up to you and there are many ways to achieve it. It’s about the freedom to make your own decisions, challenges and sometimes frustrations to get to the goal.

Mastery is the ability to master a task, level or activity and then build on it to maintain interest & increase engagement. Richard Sedley pointed out you have to make it difficult to master, but not impossible. Use obstacles and barriers to challenge users to find ways around a problem or environment. Reward often but randomly and build in different levels of complexity (easy to hard) to maintain the attention of users hope they will be repeat visitors or brand advocates. (I did not master the art of paper plane flying)

After our pep talk from the panel we went to work on brainstorming to help Cancer Research look at ways to use gamifcation to increase fundraising and awareness across their organisation.

Presenters’ links

• James Wallman – Future Lab
• Tom Hopkins – Fortune Cookie
• Alex Lee – Kempt
• Richard Sedley Foviance
• Matt Bagwell – EMC Consulting
• Microsoft Kinect – The gestural interaction demos looked pretty cool, but now we need to sweet-talk our boss to buy one for the office and see what we can develop for our clients. (due to increased beer consumption and noise this guy was a little hard to hear. Tough crowd and last session of evening)
• Further reading: 7 winning examples of game mechanics in action – Mashable

Special thanks to Matt Bagwell (@mattbagwell) and Michelle Flynn (@michelleflynn) and of course “DJ H” banging out the tunes! If your interested in this or future Taverners events head to The Fantastic Tavern site (or @TFTLondon). Photos on TFT Facebook page.

*(Jane McGonigal – The Gamification Summit 2011)

Microsoft’s recent release of NUad’s for the kinect platform brings the idea of minority report and personalised adverts one step closer. Using body control and voice activation, ads will be tailored to you, but just because we can develop technology like this does not necessarily mean it’s always a great idea. Do we really need an advertising platform that reacts to who we are, our preferences or mood? What will happen to those happy accidents where you discover something new?

A prime example is the spread of sat nav use. Everybody likes to know exactly where they’re going eliminating the prospect of chance findings or discoveries. If our advertising becomes so targeted that we now longer discover new chance products or experiences will it ultimately limit us.

Personally I think this is a direction that may be harmful if not thought through fully before releasing to the wider public. At present our obsession with social platforms and networks enable a voice and display mechanism to tie this personal advertising into, but what happens when social realms fall out of fashion? Will we still consume advertising as we do at present.

© Alex Slobodkin

Visa and Mastercard have already put together specifications and established payment standards, with Google creating the Google wallet (coming soon), an Android app that stores virtual versions of your existing plastic cards on your phone, so users can simply tap their phone to pay and redeem offers.

PayPal has also seen a niche in the market, after recently acquiring mobile payments provider Zong for $240m.

Although currently quiet on the scene, Apple could also be a strong contender, if it incorporates near filed communication (NFC) technology into the iPhone and iPad, it will have the capability to build an ecosystem around that.

Pushing mobile payment and taking the cash register into the future, Alex Goretsky, created Square, which allows companies to transform their iPad into an effortless checkout, where a pocket-sized credit card reader plugs into your phone’s audio jack, and customers can be emailed or text their receipts. (Visa recently made an investment in Square, which is now worth more than $1.4bn.)

Who will be the dominant provider?
They key for brands will be to incorporate current payment infrastructures into their platform in an easily accessible way. The system that comes out on top, will have to be open, available to different phones, on different networks, and cooperate with different payment brands.

For now, we‘ll just have to watch with anticipation as the mobile technology companies compete to get their devices to market first, to see how they shape the future of mobile payment, the effects it has on user behaviour at point of sale,  and who will be the prominent provider in the mobile commerce space…