Friday 31 October 2008

Wear it Pink

In the Pink

Kenta and Sean cleverly combine wearing pink for breast cancer awareness AND sporting a terrifying costume for Hallow'een. Nice one boys, you look...

Wednesday 29 October 2008

Bung Beer!


Thank you to Media Week, Campaign, Revolution, NMA and Marketing Week for allowing us to pop in and say hello yesterday. Hopefully the strawberry beer and cream doughnuts were a welcome treat for a Tuesday afternoon.

Amazingly, only two bottles of beer went 'missing' prior to the drop off and thanks to some very close guarding, the doughnuts remained in their boxes. Boy did they smell good though.

Friday 17 October 2008

Pass the Jazz - Homepage takeover

Honda Jazz

Honda Jazz

As part of the 'Pass the Jazz' campaign, we've just launched a Honda Jazz homepage takeover that highlights Jazz drivers and why they love their little cars.

35-year-old Lynnette Smith, who was selected from a long list of 230 entries, stars on the Honda.co.uk homepage with a video showcasing her Jazz story, quotes about why her car is such an important part of her life, and photography of her beloved Jazz.

This is the first time that Honda has turned over its site to its customers, reinforcing the concept of brand advocacy that is central to the ‘Pass the Jazz’ campaign. However, user-generated content and customer opinion has been central to the Jazz website for some time, with Honda believing firmly in allowing customers to air their views on their cars in an honest and transparent way.

Visitors are encouraged to continue to ‘Pass the Jazz’ by sending a message to a friend from one of the stories pages, or by downloading a branded Facebook application which links back to the website.

Well done to everyone who worked on the site! We've already got a mix of stories from the charming to the inspiring to the funny.

Honda Jazz

Friday 10 October 2008

Not one, but two!



You could accuse us of seeing double after this manic week of pitch preparation, but you have to believe us when we say we're up for TWO awards at the BIMAs.



We’re up for honours in the category of ‘B2C Content and Design’ for our learndirect 'Nothing can Stop You' campaign and the ‘Integrated Campaign Content & Design’ category (with Wieden + Kennedy) for Honda's 'Problem Playground'. It’s great for everyone who has worked so hard on these campaigns and it'd be wicked if we scored a double when the awards are presented at the Bloomsbury Club on 27 November. Now where's the champagne?

Ant update

Our little ant friends have indeed been busy, making themselves at home and digging away:

Ants progress

Katie's ants have made the most progess, surely due in part to the motivational poster bearing down on them.

Ants progress

Petter's men, fuelled by fruit and cereal treats, seem to have built a dual carriageway the length of their colony and have a rather cute Bug's Life wallpaper to gaze at.

More photos on the Flickr.

Thursday 9 October 2008

Collective Go Karting

Karting

Team Collective took to the track yesterday for a day of inter-agency go-karting. It was a gorgeous sunny day and the competitive spirit was out in full. After a tough 90-minute endurance race which saw spins, crashes and drama galore, it was the designers' team 'Make My Logo Bigger' who did us proud, scooping third place. Management team 'Irresponsibly Collective' narrowly missed out on the podium with a 4th-place spot, and the 'Young Team' kids scored 15th place despite inexperience (come on, we're barely out of our toy pedal-cars).

Karting

Well done all round. Back with a vengeance next year...

Wednesday 8 October 2008

Friday night emails will never be the same!


Today Google announcesa potential saviour from those drunken moments of madness after a night of beers, spirits and other stimulants. Active during prime hours of risk (Friday and Saturday evenings), Google mail will present you with a series of simple mathematical tests that you need to (correctly) answer before the email is sent. Added to this challenge, these simple sums have to be completed within a time limit!

Jon Perlow, a Gmail engineer who created the software, announced the new product on Google's Gmail blog, explaining that he himself had sent some unfortunate late-night emails.

He said: "Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late-night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together."

"Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we're launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.

"Hopefully Mail Goggles will prevent many of you out there from sending messages you wish you hadn't. Like that late-night memo -- I mean mission statement -- to the entire firm."

Gmail users can set Mail Goggles to activate at any time they feel they might need protection.

So sit back, relax, have an extra pint, with the knowledge that now, your letter telling the boss where to stick his job or that email to the ex telling them they should really stop being the idiot and get a life are risks you dont have to worry about any more.....

Thursday 2 October 2008

Collective in the News!

Learndirect highlights success stories in campaign

Learndirect, an e-learning specialist, has appointed digital advertising agency Collective to create an ad campaign to highlight career success stories and encourage optimism during the tough economic climate.

Collective won the digital project following a competitive pitched against Learndirect's other roster agencies Glue and Grand Union.

>Click here to read the full article on marketing week.co.uk

Wednesday 1 October 2008

Flash for the iPhone

Paul Betlem, the Senior Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems, has announced that Adobe is developing a Flash Player for the iPhone.

This is great news for anyone wanting to deliver brand experiences on mobile phones – it’s just a shame we still don’t know when it will happen. The powerful combination of the iPhone interface with the rich interactivity of Flash is something agencies, marketers and consumers will find hard to resist. Interestingly, we can also envisage a potential cost saving for clients as pre-existing Flash content is repurposed for mobile.

At present, it looks like there is only talk about the Flash plug-in on the Safari web browser. As such, Flash widgets per se are not really on the card yet. Native iPhone widgets/applications in Flash are still a good while away, but we wait with anticipation for the opportunity to use this new technology.