Go-Style.co.uk

Posted in portfolio) on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 by admin

This project for Lend Lease is a fashion community built around the Golden Square shopping centre in Warrington. It features an array of original articles and features, backed up with interactive applications including the ‘Style Builder’, which allows users to build outfits from the complete ranges of all the different fashion retailers in the centre. Using a combination of email, Twitter, and offline registration campaigns, the site quickly attracted over a thousand registered users from its target community of 16-34 year old women.

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Clarence Dock Secret Garden Microsite

Posted in portfolio) on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 by admin

To support a summer-long programme of events at Leeds’ canal-side Clarence Dock shopping centre and residences, And Digital was commissioned to produce a microsite. Featuring the full events programme and information, plus a Twitter feed and a Flickr photo gallery, the site enabled visitors to the events to share their thoughts and images with the world.

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Social Media: Digital PR vs Digital Marketing

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 by admin

Incredibly, 40 years since the inception of the internet, the digital marketing goldrush continues. Today (still) everyone wants a slice of the social media pie, which is leading to some interesting conflicts and collaborations between marketing agencies.

PR agencies are laying claim to social media as being naturally their space. On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense: social media is an ideal way of conducting ‘public relations’ since it provides a powerful medium for conducting conversations between a brand and its audience.

But most PR agencies are not in the business of public relations. They are in the business of media relations.
This is an entirely different – though no less valuable – skill set, focused on building up influence with a small group of professional advocates/advisers within a given sector – usually journalists and analysts. Creating stories for this small group of people with the aim of having them share those stories with their audiences is very different to managing a large audience directly.

The skills required for a more direct approach to the audience/prospect have much more in common with the skills of advertising or direct marketing. Sure the message has to be made appropriate to the medium, but it is hard to argue that PR agencies are better placed to handle this challenge than their marketing agency counterparts.

More important is the skill to manage the reaction and interaction with the audience, and shape that interaction to drive specific outcomes. This is where a sales-focused marketing agency really has the edge.
An effective social media strategy requires a combination of talents, creative, practical and operational, and with the space still evolving, no-one yet has the definitive answer. But as a general rule I would propose this:

If you are looking for help to manage your brand’s interaction with key influencers in social media channels , you probably want to talk to a PR agency. If you want to leverage social media channels to talk to your audience directly with clear outcomes in mind, talk to a digital marketing agency (ideally, us).

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If You’ve Got It – Launch It!

Posted in blog ( company news) on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 by admin

Going Out In Style: And Digital at the Launch of go-style.co.uk

Here at And Digital we’re celebrating the successful launch of go-style.co.uk. This stylish online fashion magazine was commissioned to promote the retailers of Golden Square Shopping Mall, Warrington.

The main feature of the site is the Style Builder, allowing users to create outfits online from the collections of all the different fashion stores at Golden Square. With the ability to mix and match from different lines, we expect the site to fast become a one stop shop for fashion lovers – especially once they get hooked on the editorial content: fresh articles on current fashion trends, photos of Warrington’s most stylish and constant promotions.

The aim is to build a real community of fashion lovers that grows organically through social media. Social media remains a hot topic but there are many disaster stories. With go-style.co.uk we placed an emphasis on interaction at the earliest design stage. The social media aspects are not merely add-ons but an integrated part of the strategy. Through these campaigns, we are able to begin conversations with users directly and develop campaigns that are responsive to their requirements. While this may not be a quick-fix route to success, it lays the foundations for a lengthy and mutually fulfilling relationship.

The launch party for the site is a great example of the benefits to this level of interaction. We ran an extensive on and offline campaign for the event and invited stylish ladies of Warrington to get dolled up and celebrate with us. The result was a great success – lots of users signed up, the retailers bought-in and there was a real spike in site traffic.

Most of all though, a good time was had by all.

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Social Media: Not ‘How’ but ‘Why’?

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Monday, September 21st, 2009 by admin

Lots of organisations are coming to believe that they ought to be engaging with social media in some way. The clamour around Facebook, YouTube and Twitter has led bosses and staff alike to believe they need a presence on these popular channels, and others.

I’m all for this new-found enthusiasm, but it is raising some problems. Because social media channels are fairly straightforward to set up (by design), many groups are leaping in with both feet, starting up pages here and feeds there before they’ve asked the crucial question. Because the answer to ‘how do we do this’ is so simple, many groups are failing to first ask ‘why should we do it?’

Without answering this question, it is impossible to set objectives. Without objectives it is impossible to decide on an approach, or to measure the success of that approach.

We believe there are three fundamental reasons why you might consider social media from a campaign perspective.

• Reach: Create content that is ripe for sharing and you will increase your reach beyond the prospects you know about to their friends and family that you don’t. Incentivise prospects to share content by ensuring that it adds value to their day through entertainment or education.

• Reinforcement: As any good PR will tell you, your message has a lot more impact when it comes from an independent source. There’s all sorts of stats out there about this, but suffice to say I trust recommendations more than I trust adverts. If you can achieve ‘Reach’ the chances are that your message will also be reinforced.

• Reaction: Social media tools are by definition about two-way communication. Anything you share can usually be responded to or commented on. If you want to know what your audience thinks of you, or of your partners and competitors, you should at least be listening to social media channels.

Before you set out on a social media journey, decide which of these outcomes you are seeking to achieve. Put some metrics against them, and then design your strategy and your content appropriately.

If you’re stuck, you can always give us a call.

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‘Trans-Media’: Controlling cross-platform campaigns

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Monday, July 20th, 2009 by admin

One of our colleagues/competitors Paul Fabretti over at Amaze coined a term recently: ‘trans-media’. I chastised him for creating yet another buzzword in an industry stuffed to the gunnels with them, then quickly conceded that I would be trying to use it as soon as possible.

By ‘trans-media’, my understanding is that Paul meant a digital campaign that operated across multiple platforms (it could arguably also be called ‘cross-platform’). This is increasingly the nature of digital campaigns: information might be launched into the cloud via email, twitter or YouTube and customers or prospects might respond via a microsite, forum, or MSN. For both outbound and inbound communications, the options are growing constantly, and each individual will have their own preferred ways of receiving and sending information.

This presents digital marketers with a number of challenges, both strategic and technical.

• How do you choose the best channel for outbound communications?
• Do you try to steer people down specific response channels?
• How do you maintain a consistent view of a prospect across the different platforms?

The fact that the first two questions are becoming so pressing explains the number of adverts for ‘digital strategists’ in the marketing press. Every agency is desperately trying to recruit people who know the answers to these questions and other ones like them. They are questions that can be answered in part empirically by looking at user profiles and numbers. But they can be answered much more quickly and completely by someone with the right intuition and experience. Someone who lives constantly with digital media and has a grip on its evolving etiquette. Paul is one of those people and, I’d like to think, so am I.

The last question is the more technical. At the moment you can buy an off the shelf solution (such as neolane) but this is built for enterprises, with (I imagine) all the integration challenges and cost that implies. It is also not what I would call ’social media native’ – it wasn’t built with the current web environment in mind.

You could assemble an array of off the shelf tools and manage them manually. But this is enormously time consuming and lacks scalability. Not attractive. Our ethos for And Digital has been refined and refined to a single phrase: “Join the conversation.” We want our clients to be able to engage with customers across a range of platforms in a seamless fashion. To do that we can’t afford to have a solution that is manual and clunky.

So we have to find another answer. We’re keeping the details under our collective hat for now, but when the time is right we will reveal what we’re calling Project CANDDi. Parts of it are already in the field…

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Is it about time we dropped ‘digital’?

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Monday, July 20th, 2009 by admin

That’s the question in the latest issue of Campaign. Our answer? No.

We chose to be called And Digital because we think there will a role for a true digital agency for the foreseeable future. The problem is not in the word ‘digital’ but in the historical definition of what a ‘digital agency’ does. Unfortunately the term has been co-opted by a wide range of companies: web designers, search experts and PPC campaigners amongst others.
For us, a true digital agency provides clients with a complete view of the marketing technologies at their disposal, and advises them on the best way to use them. In addition to the classic marketing skills of creativity and empathy with the prospect, that requires maintaining a position at least fairly close to the cutting edge of technology.
For this reason we think there remains a need for true digital agencies. The adoption curve for digital marketing approaches is long and shallow; most agencies, let alone clients, will always be a long way from the state of the art.

As long as technology keeps evolving, there will always be a need for digital agencies to keep their clients – and their integrated agency colleagues – up to date.

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When is a blog not a blog?

Posted in Jack's musings ( blog) on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 by admin

There was a time when blogs were the breeding ground for techies, Trekkies and Hogwarts fans exclusively. There were trainspotters excitedly announcing they had spotted the new Virgin rolling stock at Macclesfield, geeky fanboys talking about the continuity errors in Star Wars and all manner of crazy David Icke wannabes selling their crazy theories to those who would listen.

Nowadays, the blogging landscape is somewhat different.

Being an A List celebrity is no longer determined by the takings of your most recent summer blockbuster – it increasingly seems to depend on how often you blog and how interesting your cyber musings are.

Likewise, blogs are playing an increasingly important role within the business world and companies are flocking to blogging in their thousands. Our very own new And Digital site which you are currently reading is entirely based around a blog. Why put up a page of stale, lifeless text which is probably amended once a blue moon when you can have an interactive blog full of depth, resonance and varying points of interest to your clients? A blog allows companies to more effectively communicate with their customer base and more importantly, personalises their offering allowing their customers to get much closer to the people driving the company.

We recently completed a new site for a local print management company called Print Image Network. They initially discussed the idea of an “Ask us a question’ section whereby users could fill out a form containing their question and submit it to the MD to answer via email. Instead, we suggested they did it as a blog. So the same mechanism would be used to capture the question but the answer would be posted along with the question on the blog. This way, all users of the site could view all relevant questions and see the answers. They could also comment on answers and posts and in theory, initiate a a conversation with anyone else using the blog including Print Image who could both monitor and moderate all of the postings. This seemed a much more proactive and modern solution and allowed a conversation to be more than a two way exchange. This suggestion has been very well received and we are in the process of putting together their branded blog.
I will feature the finished article complete with real time postings in a future article.

So in conclusion, if you are looking for a cost effective and innovative way to reach out to your customers, then a blog is a fantastic starting place. Why not comment on this blog entry if you would like to discuss blogs with me in more detail?

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Creative account managers and strategic creatives???

Posted in Jack's musings ( blog) on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 by admin

Over at And Digital we bring a fresh new perspective to digital marketing (that’s what we call web design and the bigger picture of marketing your new website and company profile in the digital arena).

Let me explain how it normally happens at a run of the mill integrated marketing agency who claim to ’specialise’ in and ‘embrace’ digital media.

You’ll get contacted in first instance by the young dynamic sales person. He’ll bamboozle you with repeated rounds of buzzword bingo, tell you he ‘loves’ your current site but can help you improve it and then offer to sell you the moon on a stick as he is being judged on converted phone calls and the subsequent sales meetings rather than the actual delivery of the behemoth he’s just promised you.

Then you’ll meet your account management team. This will normally consist of a senior account manager and a junior trainee. The account manager (if a dyed-in-the-wool digital head) will undoubtedly be a failed and therefore opinionated creative, and the junior will be lost in a sea of technology they claimed they understood at their job interview. They will share a few in jokes in front of you to establish their youth, creativeness and general urbane coolness before listening to your job brief. Except they won’t be listening. They will be listening to what they want to hear through the ears of the senior account manager. As a failed creative deep down they will feel that they have never had the chance to truly shine and show off their creative chops…until now. The brief they’ll be taking back to the creative team may as well be written in Swahili for all the sense it will actually make. Neither person has a real eye for creative solutions or really understands how to apply a creative solution to a staid and unrealised brief.

Then come the creative team. Exceptionally talented and brimming with creative ideas – the only problem is that their solutions are always the same. ‘Let’s make it cool and contemporary…like the Nike or Diesel site.’ This is fine if you are Nike or Diesel. If you happen to manufacture the little widgets that sit in the bottom of cans of lager then a cool site that reaches out to the disenchanted youth of today is probably not the solution you are looking for. They don’t care though…strategy is just one of the big words that ’suits’ use and they don’t give a fig for how practical and applicable their creative baby is.

So the creative team took their ill-informed brief from the account management team and turned it into a completely ineffectual creative solution to an entirely different problem. The account management team in turn took their brief from the client without really listening to what they were looking for and the sales team booked the whole job by downsizing the costs to the client whilst upsizing them to their boss in a effort to earn some extra commission.

At And Digital we are made up differently.

We have creative account managers who can help clients visualise their goals from a creative point of view and can open up client penned briefs to really harness the power of modern digital marketing mediums.

We also have strategic creatives who can understand the business needs behind a creative brief and can tailor an exciting and visually appealing solution to the needs and goals of a digital campaign.

As I said earlier, creative account managers and strategic creatives.

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What is a digital agency?

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Monday, June 8th, 2009 by admin

A year ago I wrote this piece for Manchester Digital’s newsletter. It caused a bit of a kerfuffle, for reasons that will become clear as you read it:

“Who advises your clients on strategy? It probably isn’t you.

Ad buyers wield the biggest budgets and the most power. A relationship with a long-standing PR company carries weight. Digital agencies come a long way down the list of influencers.

This is wrong.

The greatest influence should be wielded by those with the greatest insight and the most to offer. Digital agencies offer the greatest ROI. Only we can measure the success of on and offline campaigns. We have the clearest instincts about how to target anyone under 35.

Yet we have failed to grasp the reins of power. While we have worried about acronyms and aesthetics, traditional marketeers, adept at wielding influence, have been eating our lunch (and certainly drinking our drinks).

It’s time for change. We need to recognise our ability to shape not just campaigns but our clients’ whole sales and marketing function. Too often the digital industry is dismissed as artists, freaks and geeks. We should be recognised as the new emperors.”

One year on, has anything changed? I like to think so. I’ve had conversations with clients in the last six months that have ranged higher up their internal management structure than before. I’ve seen clients clawing back offline budget to support innovative (and measurable) online campaigns.

The combination of changed economic climate and the continuing march of digital is driving digital agencies to the forefront. The question is, are all agencies equipped to advise at this level?

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