Collective did Latitude

We're back from Latitude in (just about) one piece... A great time was had by all.

We packed up from work at lunchtime on Friday and after a fortifying chip butty, hopped onto the coach.



Several hours of drinking (us) and getting lost (driver) later, we arrived on site.



We lugged all our booty to our luxury camp site, which turned out to be pretty plush indeed - replete with air beds, ready-constructed tents and toilets with soap and toilet roll!



After getting settled in we wandered over the arena, marvelled at the pink sheep, and caught a cool headline set from Franz Ferdinand.



Saturday brought hangovers for some, which was quelled by morning bacon butties and the big Collective BBQ. A fantastic spread of kebabs, burgers, hot dogs and other chargrilled goodness presided over by Team Australasia, Omar and Greg.



A magical headline set by Sigur Ros topped off the day's festivities, and the party continued in the Disco Shed into the night.



Sunday brought even more severe hangovers, but they were soothed by a lovely midday set from Joanna Newsom. We then caught the set from our own in-house rockstar Danny's band Ex-Lovers.



It was at this point, bruised and bedraggled and ready for a bath and bed, that we found out that our coach company had managed to go bust over the weekend. Cue several £300 cabs all the way back to London..



Thank you to the directors and everyone else for making it a brilliant weekend!
Many more photos on our Flickr page.

Brand Wars: The battle for the Best Brand

Today, it was announced that Microsoft has finally been ousted from the top spot for the UK's top consumer brand by Google.

In the survey, run by the Centre for Brand Analysis, across an audience of 2,200 consumers, the search engine moves up two places, knocking Microsoft from the top spot and Mercedes into 3rd place, adding to the momentum already gained by Google, in an earlier research piece where they were named 'Strongest Brand' in the Superbrands survey (2008).

The BBC was the highest ranked UK brand (4th), BA (5th), Royal Doulton (6th).

One of the interesting trends from this latest research was that none of the UK's supermarkets made it into the top 100. Tesco dropped from 230th to 301st, Sainbury's fell to 232nd and Asda dropped 253 places.

Disparity also reigned amongst the more premium food brands with M&S in at 17th place and Waitrose down at 179th!

Snickers - Mr T Get Some Nuts widget

Here's the Snickers - Mr T Get Some Nuts widget that Collective created for Snickers and AMV. The widget uses Clearspring technology - so it can be added to social networks like Facebook and Bebo with just a couple of clicks. The game in the widget is by Skive. Mr T's back on our screens in a new Snickers ad.

Latitude Countdown

2 days til Latitude! We're all getting giddily excited and planning our viewing schedule with military precision. And happily it looks like it's going to be a scorcher so we can leave the wellies behind.* Expect a full festival diary and photos aplenty on our return.

*We may may be deluding ourselves here. Nevertheless we have tons of booze and a fancy marquee so should all be good.

Problem Playground featured in Web Designer magazine

Web Designer magazine had a nice feature on Honda's Problem Playground website - "It's got style and charm in abundance, while demonstrating good commercial use of design experimentation."

Hondamentalism challenge widget flashback

We're getting into our widgets at the moment. Here's one we did earlier for the Hondamentalism campaign, way, way back in 2007. We looked at the way Youtube were distributing videos virally, and thought, why not do the same for our Honda microsite content?

Since then we've created a few more widgets, and started using clever technology from the Clearspring guys that lets users add widgets to any of their social networks with just one click. Watch this space for more widget news coming soon.

For more games like this one, visit http://www.honda.co.uk/hondamentalism/challenge?campaignid=CM059600W01E&advertiserid=site&bannerid=montegi

Honda Accord site of the week in NMA, and featured in Computer Arts

The Honda Accord site has been getting some press coverage - it was site of the week in NMA recently.

Plus it was featured in Computer Arts magazine - we'll upload that one soon too.

Shifting from anecdotal to factual..Google research on organic vs PPC!

Today, Google revealed its first piece of major research on the value to a brand of balancing search results real-estate between Organic and PPC.

For some years now, I've listened to the sales banter from those organisations that make their business from both natural and paid-for search, convincing me that balancing can only be a good thing. Anecdotal stories about seeing a brand on both left and right hand areas of the screen and eyetracker visualisations showing me where my eyes apparently go still had the fundamental flaw that this is the obvious explanation from someone who made money out of selling me both services! These latest findings start (in some way) to shift from the anecdotal to the data-factual.

Run across their European sites, the research showed that coming top of organic listings raised purchase consideration of a brand by 4% and exposure to a listing in the top paid position (with no organic listing on the page) increased purchase consideration by 20%. Combining both a high-ranking natural listing and paid for, raised purchase consideration by 22% and, according to this first batch of research, this trend is seen across most verticals and all markets.

The cynic in me still has lots of questions, however, it's a great start and one backed by numbers not the sales targets...I wait with baited breath!

Harry Potter Teaser Site

Our teaser site for the new Harry Potter video game, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has just gone live. Check it out at http://harrypotter.ea.com, and stay tuned for the full interactive site later in the year...

Google gets Flashy

Google announced on their official blog that they will finally be able to index flash sites.

This is great news for companies looking to get a little more search engine coverage from their Rich Media websites, and hey, it's only taken them 12 years!

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html