Clever little stunt from Coca Cola, you can’t help but smile at it!

We are on the hunt for Front End Developers again!

We Love is a fresh take on what a creative design agency can be. Small but focused, driven and creative we design and produce unique digital solutions for a diverse range of international clients. We feel that the people that work for We Love are its most important assets. In fact, they are the DNA of the company.

Skill sets and Personality: You should ooze talent, have vision and can code the ass off Kylie. You know your way round flash and can animate better than the Warner Brothers, ActionScript better than Cyborg, as well as being willing to prove yourself in a fast growing, fast paced industry.

We won’t tie you down to PureMVC or any other framework – good OO design principles and high code standards are all that’s required. AS3, PHP/Python and a good knowledge of HTML/CSS a must – anything else will be a bonus and knowledge of the Gaia flash framework is favorable.

You use BZR/SVN/GIT regularly and have experience with issue tracking apps like Trac. You are someone who is mature enough to understand a brief, and can take direction as well as contribute and show initiative.

You must have a couple of years experience behind you and be Mac happy and PC proud.

Benefits: We Love offer an excellent benefits package which includes performance based bonuses and personal development budgets as well as the opportunity to grow and learn whilst working on leading edge and exciting creative projects.

Salary: Competitive Salary

Location: A beautiful Manor House in Maidstone, Kent, near mainline train stations.

If you think We Love is the place for you then email gavin@welove72.com

Now I’m always finding excuses not to wash my car… and when I stumbled across these car window drawings I actually found a GENUINE one!!! So, theoretically if I don’t wash my car for at least 3 months, then I can start creating artwork on the windows… although I’m not sure how I’m supposed to drive to work without hitting at least a few pedestrians

Further to my last post, I thought it would be worthwhile giving a bit of background information into the value of Social Media Marketing for those that have been living under a rock for the past few years.

Social Media Marketing, officially, is the creation of social interaction between a brand and the general public in a digital platform such as the internet.

So what does this actually mean to you?

Gone are the days of advertisers simply telling consumers their product is the best in the market, in the current climate consumers want to find out what products and brands are the best firsthand.

According to Forrester, nearly 45% of European internet users say that in the past three months they have researched a product online and then bought it in a shop (March 2009).

The time for creating an online presence and building your brand online is now. Many of the big brands are ‘having-a-go’ at Social Media Marketing, however very few are actually reaching their full potential.

A successful social media marketing campaign needs to utlilise a range of digital outlets, and effectively establish an online community for their consumers/potential consumers.

Setting up a Twitter account and hoping for the best is just not enough. The key to a successful campaign is establishing a connection between your Twitter account, Facebook account, your YouTube account and any other social networking sites.

Once a definitive network is created, it is important to initiate conversations, not campaigns, with your followers. You want to focus on 1:1 communication with consumers, and listen as well as speak.

Creating a solid relationship between your brand and your consumers gives you a captive audience who can be used for market research, consumer feedback, and ideally network building channels.

As important as Social Media Marketing is, it isn’t suited for every industry, so before you get caught up in the hype take a minute to assess whether or not it could benefit your business.

On a lighter note, and more an example of a viral video, the following is the latest Cadbury’s Ad… another stroke of creative brilliance, or have they just lost the plot this time? You decide!

After a nail biting reception and dinner last Thursday at the Affordable Housing Awards (Victoria Park Plaza Hotel), Sarah Beeny presented the award for Most Innovative Marketing Approach to ourselves and our client INplace, for our integrated creative and strategy for the Grand Ocean development in Brighton.

Going up against stiff competition in the form of London & Quadrant and Sentinel, the decision was reached by the evaluation of a number of criteria, most importantly that of measurable results – including sales, and customer satisfaction and engagement.

Needless to say we were absolutely thrilled by this – our thanks goes to everyone who was involved, both agency and client side: particularly Jenny, John and Debbie for trusting in our conceptual approach; and Dan, Mel and Gav for pulling the whole thing together.

See examples from the campaign, or visit the GO Enjoy website and blog.

As you can tell from the photo above, my restraining order restricts me from immediate contact with Sarah Beeny… but I notice John getting remarkably close…

The face of victory…

http://www.gestalten.com

German for design… has lots of intersting things on here and I love the book previews. Just encourages me to buy more and more…

Perfect.

In The Netherlands, IKEA is setting a great example of useful consumer generated content with the ‘Design Your Own Life’ campaign. A few months ago, they’ve launched Open Kitchen,

a user generated showroom of kitchens with IKEA products. With over 2000 entries, it instantly became the biggest kitchen showroom in Holland. Right now they’ve launched the follow up Bedroom Secrets, in which you can have a look inside Dutch bedrooms. Literally, because besides the user uploaded bedrooms, a webcam stream makes it possible to watch the bedrooms of Lonne, Sven and Manette, live.

After its Open day launch in May 2009 the Grand Ocean housing development has successfully sold all of it’s Phase 1 apartments and is now entering into the second part of it’s marketing push.

With over 20 apartments sold already, the response to this new development has been overwhelming. These positive figures highlight the obvious benefits of an engaging and highly targeted X-channel campaign.

Elements of the campaign include a concept driven website, social media mash-up, contextual outdoor advertising, and an array of local media activities and offline collateral – all of them strategically combined to create an overall story which prospective buyers can relate to and buy into…

So congratulations for Phase 1 and here’s to Phase 2…

Visit the site yourself… www.gograndocean.co.uk

It’s that time of year again… and it only feels like yesterday that I was preparing last minute coursework ready for the D&AD awards! This year they’re being held at Camden’s legendary Roundhouse in London on 11th June. So be sure to keep an eye on this years winners through the D&AD website and see the creative solutions for yourself. There’s also an abundance of information on the website, particularly for students and people who’ve graduated over the last 3 years… offering a range of different design workshops (which you need to apply for), graduate placement schemes and details on the annual New Blood Exhibition which will run from Monday 29 June to Thursday 2 July at the Olympia National Hall.

Good luck to all those who’ve entered and check out the scale of the judging process for yourself…

Judging process for D&AD

There’s nothing like some positive feedback to end a long, hard week… and that’s exactly what we got from the London Advertising and Design Group regarding the new Digital Guru’s website that we launched last Friday. It’s only been live a week and already it’s had a huge number of hits and the ‘kinetic light writing’ seems to have gone down a treat amongst viewers.

Congrats again to the team… and thanks for the feedback! Now go check out the link…

Positive Feedback