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

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!

Mark, our creative director and one of the founding partner’s here at We Love, has been invited to participate in this months .NET Magazine’s Design Off.

Each Month .Net invite some the badest, madest, bestest and just plain ugly(est) – (now, where does Mark fit in to that lot?) – to see if they can make the grade by designing to a fictitious brief set by .NET mag. This month its re-thinking and re-designing a theatre site…

Mark is no stranger to .Net Magazine, he picked up a .NET Site of the Month for his Creative Direction on Canon’s EOS 400D digital extravaganza while working for MediaCatalyst in Amsterdam.

Good job he’s still a very much a hands on / can do guy… keep your eyes wide open to see if Mark has still got the mojo. (Oh and Mark, the deadline… it may be in a month, but you have 1 week … you are going on holiday!!! LoL. No sleep for the wicked)

Good news this week. We Love has been formally accepted onto the BBC roster of approved agencies. An exciting time for us…

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

Following a link from our October newsletter, we’ve highlighted some of the best (in our opinion) digital howlers. Ideas, that when given the room and money needed to grow, can lead to some very interesting and entertaining outcomes… from marketeers that should know better…


01 – Second Life… No Life…

2007 brought us the uncontrollable excitement of Second Life’s commercialisation … What crap. Build a virtual storefront and everyone will love you. I hope, come the recession, that the marketeers who suggested such rubbish are the first to be shot at dawn.

A second ‘rate’ idea that cost not only dollars, but a loss of face for the marketing industry as a whole by jumping on this rubbishy bandwagon, making it more difficult to say ‘hey, this is what you should be doing’ with the corporate dollar when the ROI of $100,000 to $5mill spend for a poxy 1000 visits, is and will forever be shameful… woohoo…

I bet the likes of Nike, Nissan, Reebok, Starwoods, et al are kicking themselves and wishing that they invested in some good old fashioned engagement which would show a better return of say 1000%

Overhyped rubbish… yes it was.

02 – Meaningless links

These days we all know that to rank well with the Search Engines you need plenty of Inbound Links – what people tend to forget is that any old link just won’t cut the mustard.

Organic links from relevant, quality pages are what you’re after, following basic rules such as:

i) make sure they’re from pages at least 1 point higher in Page Rank and have content relevant to your site (and if you get the opportunity ask for the inbound links to be from your top keywords, not from words such as ‘click here’)

ii) the pages should have less than 100 total outbound links (inc. internal navigation)

iii) and feature no more than 16 sponsored links or 2 Google Adword boxes.

Anything else will turn you into an online pariah – so don’t leave irrelevant comments on blogs leading back to your monetised homepage and don’t carpet bomb the internet with your link. Let inbound traffic build organically – encourage 2-way communication with other people and become part of the online community as a whole.

(And if you have do have a link page on your site, make sure you don’t call it this – Google does not like these words and if it finds them it’ll negatively impact on your ranking)


03 – Sony’s… All I want for Christmas is a PSP

And the title of worst viral campaign goes to the agency that created the Sony PSP Christmas campaign… After they set up a fake website pretending to be PSP “fanboy’s” and produced a video with a cringe-inducing rap, followed by fake comments praising their campaign. The original posting included “we started clowning with sum not-so-subtle hints to j’s parents that a PSP would be teh perfect gift”. Now I don’t know about you, but I think I just threw up a bit in my mouth… Never ever underestimate your target market’s intelligence . . . NEVER fake a viral!


04 – Cut price websites… Bargain!

When someone offers to design and build you a website for £400 all in, it must be a bargain…
Oh, but it appears to look like all the other site’s out there… AND YOU SEEM SURPRISED! There are far too many people offering templated websites, that neither fulfill the clients needs or offer you any sort of advantage over your competitors.

Now I understand that clients often have to work within a budget, but there’s really no benefit to using these cowboy’s because people will NEVER be able to find your website unless you GIVE them the URL… So they have no SEO properties what so ever.

Not only that, but these sites only ever use one template, have no thought behind target market, tone of voice or market positioning – they’re badly built, badly managed and they provide no positive comeback whatsoever – so our advice is you may as well go and burn your money instead…


05 – Always check your mailing list…

Earlier this year Virgin Trains accidentally hit the send button before checking their mailing list, inviting thousands of customers to a luxury golf weekend… After which they quickly sent another email apologising, as the offer was only meant for a selected few!

They then gave the thousands of ‘happy to have won’ customers the chance to enter another competition to win back one of three available spaces on the luxury weekend that they had already just won… Confusing or simply embarrassing… Well that will teach you to check your mailing list next time…

We had a good meeting with A2 Dominion last week regarding their sales plans for the next few months and where to focus our attention and flex our creative muscle. As we always bang on: We Love isn’t media specific. We apply ourselves to solutions that support our client objectives. Be it digital, print, motion, exhibition, etc, (see the website)… we are there to ensure consistency of creative, streamlined project planning and management… basically make sure everything rocks and goes tickity boo. Which it always does

So for A2 Dominion we are starting with an immediate need of some brochure material to support a new development in Oxford followed by:

1. Supporting upcoming A2 Dominion developments in Oxford (online / offline)

2. Creating an online strategy which will support their overall activities and be cost effective whilst blowing them away with design

3. Viral / guerrilla ideas to support the marketing communications on a brand and development level.

Exciting. Much looking forward to it. Keep your eyes peeled.

A ridiculously talented designer, a pixel perfect master who just loves the digital domain. You have amazing design sensitivities and can put them into practice through extensive software knowledge.

Someone who is mature enough to understand a brief, can take direction as well as contribute and show initiative. Minimum of 3 Years with a degree or equivalent in graphics.

Open to learn and grow. Become someone within this industry of ours. Big personality without an ego… but with an all in attitude.

CV’s and Folio site to:

work@welove72.com