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Busy Little Bees

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on May 20, 2010. Filed under Blog, Enjoying life, Future gazing, production, work. Tagged , , , , . No comments.

Well – it’s been nearly 5 months of WEIR+WONG and we’ve barely had time to take a breather! We’ve been doing some great work for these great clients (and some clients we can’t mention!) and having a lot of fun on the way.  Onwards…

BetfairLBiThe MillWeapon7TBWA London

The Chalkbot

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on April 16, 2010. Filed under Blog, Review, production. Tagged , , , , , , . No comments.

It's about youI seemed to miss this the first time around but have just found Nike Chalkbot whilst perusing the 2010 Webby Awards nominees. This is a great example of how a thought or sentiment can be captured digitally and then turned into something that is real. The campaign, centering around Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong charity, allows people to send a message via sms, twitter, online banners or at the WearYellow.com website. That message is then delivered to the Nike Chalkbot – a state of the art pneumatic robot that is towed around the Tour de France stages, printing out each message in turn on the tarmac. Also – people who uploaded message get delivered a geo-tagged image with their message on it. So you didn’t have to go to the Tour de France or watch every minute of it on TV to see it.

Chalkbot

In a way it’s the same idea that you see if you go and do a charity fun-run (marathons are too much for my knackered legs). Runners write mesages on their T-Shirts for the people they are running for, the people who have been affected by an illness and sadly, quite often the people who have died from that illness. This I think is a really nice, sensitive, clever and worthwhile way of getting more people to see those messages, getting them to see just how many people’s lives are affected by cancer.

Full marks to the production team must be awarded because this idea is quite obviously one of those ‘extra’ ideas that always get presented with the usual straightforward creative stuff (“I know – lets build a robot”). It could so easily not have been made. To build all the message interfaces , build a robot, connect it up to a server, ship it to France, organise permissions to grafiti the roads, maintain the robot etc etc is a massive job, fraught with technical and physical difficulty. Hats off to the creatives who came up with it and I bow down to the producers who built it! A great effort. You’ve got my vote!

Wrangler Bluebell

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on March 29, 2010. Filed under Blog, Review, production. Tagged , , , , . No comments.

Wrangler Bluebell

Interesting take on a catalogue site. I’ve never wanted to be able to throw the models around like they were toy wrestlers but if I did I would do it here.

Fanning the flames

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on March 10, 2010. Filed under Blog, Future gazing, Review, production. Tagged , , , , , , . No comments.

Imagine a one stop shop where you could create your own interactive campaign’s regardless of whether you are an ad agency, large corporation or even small business. It would be able to create sweepstakes, contests, give-aways, incentive-based surveys, publish them on your website and seed them to multiple social networks at the same time. They would be able to skin the campaign in any way you wished. You need not be a complete geek to create the campaign. You can easily monitor stats and there is a scaleable pricing model.

Imagine no more. Wildfire is here. It’s creating a lot of buzz and is indeed a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at the SXSW event.

Wildfire Process

A truly innovative idea that capitalizes on emerging technologies and turns it into something extremely useful. Competitions, campaigns and promotions tend to be seen by many agencies as ‘dirty work’ as it involves many third parties (coupon providers, mail drops, Social network’ tech teams and API’s, hosting providers)  and logistical challenges. It seems that Wildfire are taking the donkey work out of this process for us all and joining a lot of the dots. Good luck to them and we’ll certainly keep them in mind for our client’s promotions in the future.

Crowdsourced social community-building experiment

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on February 8, 2010. Filed under Review, work. Tagged , . No comments.

Community building social experimentPepsi’s new community builder, refresheverything, marks a change in the control that big brands are giving to consumers in the way their marketing budgets are spent. Pepsi are not only crowdsourcing ideas to back in the social communities in the US, but they’re crowdsourcing the selection process as well. I love the fact that this is such a simple yet untried mechanism that will allow the cream of ideas to float to the top with relative ease. I’m sure there’s still a huge amount of administration, but no longer is a panel of the great the good expected to decide who is worthy. Makes perfect sense. Although obviously we may see the Jon and Edward effect with some inappropriate  initiatives, but that’s the world that brands live in as X-Factor will attest. It still made great train-crash TV. Anyway, I digress.

This is a huge campaign that has digital very much at its heart, and the fact that Pepsi have parted company with TBWA, allegedly because of their lack of digital and social media nous – particularly in their execution – is a real warning to agencyland about the need to integrate all of their activities, especially digital, and quickly.

I’m still stunned when I see ads from big brands that don’t have at least a URL for those who want to find out more about the brand and what they’re doing for their consumers. Hopefully this campaign will join the chorus of wake-up calls to those spending their bucks on marketing to challenge their strategy teams to how their campaigns can have more of a bite, and drive more than just awareness, and actually lead to some tangible action and interaction when it comes to creating the actual execution.