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…

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.

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.

Nia joins straight from graduating with a BA in Politics from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwhich. Not a ‘green’ grad- she has experience as a fundraiser for the UEA Alumni Association, and previous work experience within PR & Events in Kent.

She brings the New Business & Marketing roll-call to three, and is busy getting stuck into all aspects of agency (and new business) life.

Mobile computing is currently the fastest growing IT market, with mobile information retrieval ranging among the foremost activities of smartphone users. Marketers and global companies are excited at the prospect that it will soon be common place for their users to point their mobile device camera at anything in the real world and create contextual information/visuals.

There were a few major announcements at this year’s event; including the fact that metaio will be releasing a free version of its Mobile SDK to bring latest AR features to a broad developer community. It will also be publishing a tool called ‘junaio Creator’ to allow virtually anybody to create AR content for junaio. This information is of particular interest as it will become increasingly easier for creatives to enrich the user experience and extend the story we take them on.

Thomas Alt, CEO of Metaio, commented:
“We predict AR to become a common feature on every smartphone and tablet. Of course we are pleased that our solutions have emerged as benchmarks for advanced technology and excellence in our industry, used by developers’ worldwide.”

Software from companies such as Metaio and Layar now makes it possible for social networking to become a real world live experience – when at a bar, shopping or at a gig:

Here’s another example of what can be achieved at the moment with augmented reality: Rofo on junaio

A great brand example is Lynx, who extended their campaign to Victoria train station in London, asking passers-by to look up at a giant screen where they saw, not only themselves, but fallen angels alongside them:

Services such as Google Goggles – a visual search tool, which in basic terms helps define what you see in the real world and wants to monetise the process. Once the public gets used to navigating their environment with tools like Goggles, everything we see and share will become searchable data. Combining environments with predictive technology, Google will be able to serve visual experiences that benefit both the consumer and advertiser.

Although consumers have been confronted with advertising messages for decades and the future could see a positive change of more targeted and relevant messages in our environment, I do worry that this real world product placement could also have a negative impact, for example, instead of someone looking for an item in a shop, people will become reliant on using an app to scan a room for it – almost like putting on your glasses to see. If this was the case, would we lose part of our real-world connections and daily communication with others.

Questions to ponder on… Who owns the advertising space in an augmented world and has the rights to the GPS coordinates? At the moment, anyone can create a message and attach it to specific coordinates. What will stop brands’ realities overlapping, and will this be a movement not just for entertainment and advertising purposes, but for how we see the world in the future? Will the divide between virtual and physical realities become blurred?

Other food for thought is whether ads in the virtual world have to match ads in reality. For example, brands could take over competitors’ outdoor press – presenting an alternative virtual world. Although treading on potential dangerous ground, there is nothing currently in place to stop such a thing.

I find this whole area of our industry fascinating. There is so much opportunity for virtual advertising, projection mapping and Kinect. This mix of augmented reality, social data and interactivity is a real game-changer. My only worry is that without structure and processes in place, the market and our everyday environments will become over-saturated and eventually lose value, becoming a lonely virtual world that no one wants to visit anymore. But, let’s make sure this doesn’t happen by working out rights ownership and allowing virtual ads to evolve into content that users can choose to experience on their own terms.

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…