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

The humble sprout – affectionately known as the vegetable of Christmas, is largely overlooked the other 364 days of the year. So, we decided to give them their moment to shine…

We don’t want to give anything else away. So don’t delay – check out the humble sprout now.

As part of a new three-year plan, MSIF aims to implement a new creative next year: ‘1000 faces of MS’, which will put people with MS at the heart of a campaign, targeted to create awareness and understanding of the disease amongst the general public leading up to World MS Day 2012 on May 30^th.

The campaign will creatively push the global MS movement and will include digital, social, video and print content.

Mark Anderson, Creative Director at We Love 72 commented:

“We are delighted to have won the pitch for MSIF and to work towards a greater awareness of Multiple Sclerosis, by connecting up personal stories, experiences, messages and support from around the world and highlighting the great work MSIF do as a charity.”

Typo Talks has been running for about 16 years in Berlin and this year was the first of hopefully many set in London. There were a broad range of topics covered over the three days from animation, art, signage, digital, print and of course typography. They were all loosely based on the theme of ‘Places’ but some more loosely than others. I can honestly say, there wasn’t a talk I didn’t enjoy and I even got to try a bit of calligraphy although I think I need a bit practice. I do plan to do a few detailed posts around some of areas covered, but for now here is just a few of my favourites from Typo.

Nat Hunter from Airside, ran through of a few of their latest projects but with particular focus on storytelling. I really liked the work they did for the Virgin Airlines inflight entertainment system, showing that a better design solution aids in a better experience, which then makes people happier, and then leads to other outcomes (such as drinking less from the free bar on Virgin flights, which then saves money).

“Pain is temporary. Suck is forever”. This is what Michael B Johnson from Pixar told us on Friday morning. I have always loved the way Pixar approaches a project and the attention to detail they put in. He gave an overview of a few stages of the Pixar process such as storyboarding and animation lighting, and finished on talking about the software they produce within Pixar just to ease the process and removing tension. After all, Pixar produce a playful product.

The talk that really stood out for me was from Karin von Ompteda. She did a very interesting experiment on typography, first conducting a survey to find the top 100 most popular typefaces and then analysed the individual letters with each other to find the areas of similar density. I won’t go into detail but I thought the images of each typeface placed onto of each other were really cool. I’d have then as a print on my wall.

An entertaining talk from Chip Kidd was a great way to end the conference. Briefly going over some book covers he had worked on over the years, he then told us about his obsession with Batman and the opportunity he had been given to write a Batman comic. All good stuff.

Like I said, I plan to do a few more posts on what I learnt at Typo so stay tuned. For now I’ll leave you with a few statements from Joachim Sauter on how to stay creative that I liked:
Reinvent yourself (every 7 years or so). Have the courage to fail. Share your experiences. Inspire rather than motivate. Teach.

Due to a number of exciting projects in the pipeline, we currently have our eyes peeled and on the lookout for some seriously talented creatives to come and join the team! Including:

Senior UX / IA
Senior Designer
Creative Traffic / Project Manager
Senior Project Manager
Junior Front End Developer

Come and be a part of these exciting times at the manor! Visit our jobs page to find out more and get in touch.

What we are looking for…

The daddy (or mother) of Project Managers! You have dealt with large and small clients alike and understand the variables in each. Be technically aware… We are digital after all. You keep your head at all times, can manage clients and staff, and keep projects on track and on budget. Agency experience is a must.

Find out more and get in touch >

Visually it reminds me of Flipboard, TED talks and other apps that organise feeds. Organising content into a flexible 8 column grid, giving content a sense hierarchy, it is easy to scan the articles to find what you want, but also I find it much more about the discovery of new content.

What do you think of the new BBC homepage?

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…

At its root, Google+ is all about sharing, and connecting with others in a humanistic way. It integrates social services such as Google Profiles and Google Buzz, and introduces new services: Circles, Hangouts, Sparks, and Huddles.

Yes, it has received 20m users in its first weeks with us, but I don’t think people should be comparing this to other social start-up stats. Google is an established brand; other platforms such as Facebook grew with its brand, while at the same time creating a new social world. Google has this foundation to learn and grow from, as well as the added comfort of being a global name.

I am also a bit dubious about the stats. I think that some people (like me) will sign up out of curiosity to have a look around and see what all the fuss is about. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are active users.

In its premise, I like the idea of Google+. I like the use of circles to create groups of friends who only see certain content. In a world where social and work can overlap, this makes thing easier. But all these elements seem like simple Facebook tweaks. I’m not sure if I need another platform to sign into, another profile to keep up-to-date, especially in an already saturated market. I know that I will still turn to Twitter to find out what’s going on in the world, YouTube for videos, Skype for instant messaging and Facebook for updates with friends, but I am not sure where Google+ will fit into my life.

Grouping friends, family and work colleagues into circles is useful but I don’t think it’s a
“delightful experience that rewards people” as Andy Hertzfeld, Google+ designer explained to Fast Company’s John Pavlus. He went on to say that ‘categorisation can easily become tedious, and fun animations help add a twinkle in the eye, some whimsy to the process.” Hmm. I’m not so sure.

The feature ‘Sparks’ brings content to you automatically based on your interests. Each topic you like will get its own “Spark” page and provide links to related articles, videos, photos, etc. Although it has had some negative reviews, if it provided quality, relevant content, this is something I would be interested in.

One issue that I have seen surface, is that if you have a business and social Gmail account. You have to log out of one to use Google+ on the other. And the same goes for if you have an Apps account, you can’t be logged onto the two at the same time, even though that may be inconvenient to a user.

I also find the concept of online ‘Huddles’ and ‘Hangouts’ between friends hard. Setting up video chats to play charades seems a little sad. It might be great for a quick chat but why not actually meet up and have some face-to-face interaction?

It isn’t all bad though Google+ is hot on the heels of Facebook over its many privacy issues. Google+ offers a huge array of privacy settings. Ultimately, respecting users’ privacy and giving every feature its own privacy implications.

With previous efforts such as Google Wave and Google Buzz behind them, Google+ has tried to tackle the four problems in social networking that they think others lack in. By creating a safe environment with solid privacy settings, taking time out of sharing, integrating video chatting and creating easy to set up social circles. Is this enough to make people switch though? When services such as Facebook and Twitter are viewed as part of normal day-to-day behaviour. Rather than ‘just’ a social platform, they are part of people’s lives.

It would be great to see some of these social platforms collaborating – maybe one day we could check Facebook updates through Google, use search fields on Facebook or  integrate the Google+ button or Google Maps into Twitter. In my opinion I don’t think Google+ has conquered it just yet. I think that the initial excitement and buzz will soon come to a standstill, leaving Google+ to be embarrassingly swept under the carpet, and plans to be dominators of the digital world put back into action… But, we’ll wait and see what happens!

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)