New blog launched

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We’ve now moved to a shiny new blog which you can find here.

Come and say hello, and read all the latest news from Collective Towers.

innocent supersmoothie 'mini movies' competition

We were tasked with designing and innocent supersmoothie 'mini movies' YouTube competition page.

As a follow up to the supersmoothie campaign that launched in Jan 2011, the public are invited to make the sequel to the advert. After a round of submissions shortlisted entries are open to a public vote, the winner receives £5000 as well as having their film aired on TV.

The supersmoothie advert (directed by Ben Wheatley) had a low fi handmade feel, with very little post production a lot of the effects were achieved in camera. We wanted to continue this style with the design of the site, so we handcrafted all the design elements by hand, cutting out bits of card and photographing them. Below you can see Collective designers @designer_dan and @jonnyburch busy creating all the design components for the page. All in all we're delighted with the end results and look forward to seeing how the campaign progresses.

Tinseltown and Camera Apps

Four Collectivites, henceforth known as Wednesday Burger Club or WBC, took on the revered 'Tinsel Town' burger joint on St John's Street, Clerkenwell this lunchtime (suspending, or at least distracting the myth, that media types booze every lunch). Its dingy, underground, plastic American Diner vibe is strangely welcoming - perhaps the reason it's a favoured post-Fabric hangout for the wired. Still, in the daytime it was delicious, with attentive staff and delicious burgers, fries and shakes. Standard fayre at a reasonable price and I dare anyone to leave still feeling peckish. Lunch deals are only £5.50 too which is nice.

As an aside, it provided a great opportunity to use 'Pudding Camera', a nifty little iPhone app developed in Korea (so you can't read any of the menus). Has awesome filters/multi-image capability - and it's free too. This shot uses a four sequential shot technique. Great for pre-editing pictures for Instagram et al., but works in its own right too. Tasty all round!

Collective culture corner

Over the weekend, Dan popped in to the Saatchi Gallery to see the 'Newspeak: British Art Now' exhibition. The exhibition showcases the best of a new generation of contemporary British artists, in fact there were so many to display they had to split the show into two.

Highlights from the show were Steve Bishop's taxidermy goat and cement sculpture, being introduced to Maurizio Anzeri's embroidered vintage prints, and Toby Ziegler's geometric oil paintings.

David Brian Smith - Great Expectations - Wow, 2010

Steve Bishop - Christian Dior - J'Adore (Mountain Goat), 2008

Toby Ziegler - Designated for leisure, 2004

Tessa Farmer - Swarm, 2004

The show runs until the 17th April 2011, so you have plenty of time to drop by and check it out. In the meantime, if you want to see more photos from the exhibition, feel free to visit my design blog

Fifth best digital agency in YouGov survey

YouGov has been busy asking leading UK Marketing Directors their thoughts on digital agencies and we’re pleased to announce that Collective has ranked joint fifth in their Top 100 Digital Ad Agencies list.


The full results will be published in Marketing Week this Thursday, but we can reveal that we scored highly in the ‘Value for money’ and ‘Contribution of senior personnel’ categories.

A big thanks to everyone who voted – it’s very rewarding to all of us at Collective to be held in such high regard by our clients and the UK marketing community. And we’ll keep on doing what we do best – only a little bit better if we want to reach that number one spot next year.

See the YouGov survey in full at PitchDigital

Last week three of the Collective designers @designer_dan @mattakempton and @jonnyburch attended Creative Review's first 'Tweetup' event which was held at the London Design Museum.

Everyone attending the event was invited to bring along a piece of personal work which would then get exhibited inside an exhibition space along with their twitter user name. Next up, attendees were given a free bag of assorted Lego bricks and set about building their own architectural mini-installations, which at the end were all added together to create a mini Lego micro-village.

Looking forward to the next one, more pictures of the event can be found here.

We've gone all misty-eyed

It's been all about the nostalgia this week at Collective Towers. Michael kicked it off by requesting the Labyrinth soundtrack on the office Spotify, which led Dan and Holly to engage in a detailed and empassioned discussion of which Collective staff member would make the best Goblin King in an agency-only remake of the film. No satisfactory conclusion was reached, mostly because of the distinct lack of anyone with a blonde mullet in the vicinity.

Then it was time to move on from the elven eighties to the neon nineties. Because as of today, the office has its very own Nintendo 64, complete with the two undisputed Best Games Ever: Goldeneye and Mario Kart.

"Oh no, not Rainbow Road. My eyes!"

The arrival of the console was accompanied by a volley of trash talking, but most of it turned out to be bravado as we struggled to remember how to use the ill-designed three-pronged controller.

All of which left us wondering what the next rose-tinted arrival from the past might be. Snap bracelets? Vanilla Coke? 2Unlimited? We can't wait to find out.

Holly reports on the She Says ‘SCAMP’ conference

On Thursday 1^st July 2010, the boardrooms and creative departments of London’s digital agencies were utterly bereft of females. More so than usual, I mean. Because they were all at ‘SCAMP’, the first conference of She Says – the women-focused creative organisation that aims to provide networking and role models for women in digital.

The theme of the conference was “work in progress”, and the eight speakers were intentionally proportioned 7 women to 1 man, in an attempt to reverse the usual 80/20 male/female speaker ratio at advertising conferences. They talked about work they’re doing now, how it developed from initial ideas, and where they’d like to take things in the future.

The lovely LBI bar - the setting for post-SCAMP networking

A couple of highlights of the day:

Katy Lindemann, Strategist

Katy talked about “happiness hacking” – that is, bringing the joy found in games into the real world – a concept inspired by game designer Jane McGonigal. Katy told us about a game called Chromaroma that makes use of Oyster card data to “make travel magical”. Users can hold the record for the fastest journey between two tube stops, for instance, or accept missions like visiting Cockfosters station within a week to be declared “Cock of the North”. In this way, it has similarities to Foursquare, but it could have another purpose, too.

Katy explained that TfL were willing to share their Oyster data because they believe Chromaroma could help them to change behavior patterns on London transport. For example, could people be persuaded to use transport at off-peak times, or visit lesser-used stations? There’s huge potential. Find out more about Chromaroma here.

Candace Kuss, Hill & Knowlton

Candace talked about the rise of the “pro-am” (professional amateur – bloggers and creators who use the same tools and are as highly-followed as the pros) and the perils of UGC.

The main bit of advice I took from Candace's talk was that:“Humour is the best way to talk in any of these [social online] platforms. If you want to have the communication with people, you’re going to have to liven it up a bit”. Couldn't agree more.

For more about She Says’s regular talks and gatherings (men are allowed, despite what you may have heard), visit their website here.

Honda CR-Z launches with two digital initiatives

We're proud to unveil two exciting pieces of work Collective has created recently for Honda's new sporty hybrid coupé, the CR-Z.

First off is Mode Art, a Facebook app that allows you to turn your profile picture into a unique work of art to match the CR-Z's three driving modes: sporty, econ and normal. We've had great fun here playing with our mugshots - here's how some of them turned out:

The second piece of work is an interactive 3D model of the CR-Z exterior that again highlights its three driving modes. Experience the car in its full 360-degree glory at Honda.co.uk.

BBC Orchestras and Singers portal launches

The BBC has a huge range of talented musicians. And they all have a place on the new BBC Orchestras & Singers portal, designed by Collective.

Our aim was to give all six of the performing groups their own identity, while still ensuring an integrated feel for the site. We also needed to create a bilingual version for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

The BBC Orchestras & Singers site offers users a concert diary to help fans find the next performance (searchable by date, group, genre or series), as well as the latest news, videos and recordings. They can even book tickets and review the concert afterwards.

You can see the final result at http://www.bbc.co.uk/orchestras/.