Archive for the ‘General posts’ Category

We like to help people out. Wherever possible, we always try to give a helping hand.
Here is a quick update of our recent good deeds!

Simon Landi

Simon set off with his wife, two other intrepid walkers and the dog, completing the 34-mile Sandstone Trail in Cheshire, taking almost 12 hours and raising over £1,100 for The Christie.

Mark Hope

Mark, together with five others from Northern Digitals, embarked on a ‘Manchester to Blackpool’ 62-mile charity bike ride, raising over £1,400 for The Christie. To give himself an extra challenge, Mark rode an additional 38 miles home, making a total of 100 miles!

Kirstie Fisher

Kirstie took part in the 13-mile Shine Manchester night walk for Cancer Research, raising over £200 to bring light to the lives of those affected by cancer.

Helen Holmes

Helen put on her dancing shoes in Singing in the Rain at the Oldham Coliseum, in aid of Francis House Children’s Hospice, raising £2,000. Francis House Children’s Hospice, based in Didsbury, provides care for children and young adults with life threatening conditions.

Access

We’ve created a website “pro bono” for Children Today, a charity that provides grants for vital, life-changing equipment for children and young people with sickness and disability across the UK. The website is due to go live later this month.

At Access, we are proud of our commitment to supporting worthwhile causes and community-based projects. So far this year, Access have contributed to raising over £4,700 for numerous charities and counting!

Ladies and gentlemen,

Did you know that these lovely chaps are blowing into a Vuvuzela?

The Vuvuzela

It’s a large horn-type instrument used to create a cacophony of monotone rumblings during African sporting events. If you’re planning to watch any of the World Cup, chances are you’ll be familiar with the sound it makes in a few days time. Unlike Samba drums which are used sporadically during games in South America, these things are used constantly for the full 90 minutes.

It’s certainly making shockwaves. Massive amounts of pressure have been put on FIFA to ban the instrument, not only because of the annoyance factor but also in light of recent reports which claim it can ‘permanently damage hearing’. FIFA duly responded by giving the Vuvuzela its seal of approval.

Fair play I say. It may be excruciating on the ears (fact) but how wrong would it have been to finally give the World Cup to an African nation, only to tell them not to host it in their true spirit and tradition? Plus, if it drowns out some of the dross we’re forced to listen to from the commentary box, I say ‘hoorah for the Vuvuzela!!’

Experience the sound of a Vuvuzela for yourself…

“One word, one look, one gesture…..To you it’s nothing but it all adds up.”

Access were recently featured in the Manchester Evening News for our latest campaign for the Welsh Assembly Government. This is high profile campaign that tackles sexist behavior and violence against women.

For more information visit the “One step too far” website.

Where does harmless end and abusive begin?

We’re just  in the process of rolling out our summer of events programme for Visit Chester and Cheshire. Mia’s created some lovely looking artwork including press ads, leaflets and city dressing.

Eventful Escapes with Visit Chester & Cheshire

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Over the past 3 years, the Digital team at Access has grown dramatically in number and in work load.  With the steep increase in number and complexity of projects, our Monday morning work-in-progress notes were becoming unworkable. Within hours the sheets were out of date and scribbled on, things were getting forgotten about and there was far too much pinging of emails back and forth. It was becoming evident that we needed a better way of managing tasks within the department.

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I’ve already written about our requirement for a web-based task management system for the digital department. Here you can download our Task Manager code that we ended up using so you can try it out for yourself!

Screen shot of the main task list (currently displaying one open task)

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Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How they Shape Our Lives

I’ve had a book on my desk for some time now, called “Connected (The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How they Shape our Lives)”. It was sent to me by the ‘nice and bespectacled people at Rubber Republic‘. (It conjures up images of them filing away books in a quiet library somewhere). I don’t know if they are bespectacled, but I do think they’re nice – they sent me a free book

Rubber Republic are specialists in viral and social media campaigns, seeding ’stuff’ (content) to influential audiences, getting ideas to spread online: Stuff like this.

The book idea follows the same simple ’seeding’ idea that works so effectively online – send the book to an initial group of people, make them feel special by getting the book first, let them read the book, and (hopefully) get them to pass it on to somebody else, distributing the message and exposure to the original sender. The difference being that with offline the idea is never really going to go ‘viral’ – it’s not possible for somebody to read the book and then send it to multiple friends – so the sharing element is a much slower process. (It’s quite a thick book too).

Send to a friend 'feature' - presumably by hand or post

It has had an effect though, and probably the desired effect. Without even having read the book, I’d already told several colleagues about the nice book idea, been back on the Rubber Republic blog and started following them on Twitter. The offline ’stuff’, in this case the book, has therefore definitely had a ‘return’ and has converted into an opinion that’s gone online (you’re reading it). It’s also had a much longer lasting effect on me than receiving something digital would have – it’s much more personal and intimate than receiving something digitally usually is.

This really does illustrate the power of including Direct as part of the marketing mix, and that offline and online can work really well together as part of integrated marketing campaigns.

So, thanks for the book Rubber Republic, and when’s the next one coming? And if only you’d include a ‘Send To A Friend’ on your Rubber Bullet email I’d probably pass that on too!

Now who wants the book next?

Mark

mark@accessadvertising.co.uk
@markhopetweets

Recently (OK not that recently), I was lucky enough to hear Sienne Veit speak at the How Do Mobile Marketing Conference in Manchester. Sienne is Social and Mobile Commerce Development Manager at Marks and Spencer and had plenty of interesting insights to share about the challenges for brands like M&S working across new online channels, such as mobile. She was a pleasure to listen to and was clearly very passionate about weaving Mobile and Social into everything M&S do.

This isn’t the reason I remember her talk. The thing that really stuck in my mind was her use of frilly knickers. Or rather, her use of a great analogy, illustrating the M&S approach to introducing mobile marketing, and how it relates to the attitudes of their customers.

For the most part the typical M&S customer wants to pick up a plain pack of white briefs. They’re consistent, comfortable, good quality, dependable, great value for money and the design is rarely changed – women know exactly what they’re getting and they’re comfortable with that (I can’t vouch for the knickers but their plain white T-shirts are similar). But, every now and again, they’ll want to try something a bit different. Something that feels a bit special, a bit sexier and a bit more glamorous. Most of the time they just go for what they know, but having something else on offer means that when they are ready to try something new, they’re more likely to try it with the company that is trusted and delivers the basics so well.

So how does this relate to Mobile Marketing? For the most part M&S still relies on a trusted mix of traditional, established media (I consider website, email and display marketing in this mix). Their customers are comfortable with it – it works, but, they’re not afraid to try something new. Take mobile for example. M&S have trialled a number of approaches including SMS alerts (offers, vouchers and loyalty points), 2D barcodes (QR codes), WAP links to mobile web content, Twitter, Facebook and other social sites, and customer feedback services like Fizzback. Channels you wouldn’t instantly associate with M&S’s customer base.

If you think your customers won’t try something new, think again. M&S’s do.

Sienne’s talk was specifically about the use of Mobile and Social Marketing but there are similarities with all online channels. Your brand may well not be a big as M&S, or you may just be starting out online, but your approach should be the same.

• Get the basics right: Make sure you follow best practice, gain trust and have a foundation to build on
• Be useful: Your audience will be more receptive and loyal if they get something from you (advice, an offer, or maybe just an opinion)
• Unify: Have a plan to get your team thinking about online, integrating it into campaigns and making sure the technology can deliver
• Start with the end in mind: Be ambitious, and keep taking steps that are manageable
• Be pants: Offer the good, reliable and consistent, but don’t be afraid to try something new

And finally…

• Test, learn and refine: Make sure you have the right tools and systems in place to analyse your activity – learn from mistakes and build on what works.

But what will it cost to try something new? What will the return be? How can you be sure it will work? The simple answer is, if you don’t try it you won’t know. The beauty with online is that it is extremely measurable – you’ll quickly be able to see what’s working and what’s not – the most important thing is to test and learn.

So what was the last thing you tried out online?

You can read a Q&A with Sienne Veit on the econsultancy.com website.

The Access team are celebrating the announcement that we’ve just won three awards in the 2010 Summit Creative Awards!

Among the thousands of submissions, from 24 countries, our creative work has been recognised among the very best.

The Summit International Awards (SIA) organization is dedicated to furthering excellence in the communications industry. It administers rigorous awards competitions throughout the year with the goal of recognising companies that excel. Throughout its sixteen-year history, the SIA has established itself as one of the premier arbiters of creative and communication excellence. Using both specific and comprehensive evaluative criteria and a blind judging process, its competitions reward only those firms and individuals truly deserving of special recognition.

This year’s international panel of judges included professionals from Ogilvy 2B and Saatchi&Saatchi, amongst others.

So, as you can imagine, we’re all suitably chuffed about it!

Our winning entries are:

Award: Gold
Category: Self-promotion stationery/identity
Client: Access
Work: Access identity

Award: Silver
Category: Self-promotion website
Client: Access
Work: www.accessadvertising.co.uk

Award: Silver
Category: Healthcare/Medicine TV
Work:
Client: Smokefree Northwest

Access Branding: Gold Award Winner

Award winning branding applied to the studio

Award Winning TV Ad: 'My Little Baby' for Smoke Free North West

http://www.youtube.com/user/AccessManchester#p/f/3/dRc1LoJZLuo

Rice-paddy art was started in the Aomori village of Inakadate, 600 miles north of Toyko in 1993 as a local revitalization project, an idea that grew out of meetings of the village committee.

In the first nine years, the village office workers and local farmers grew a design of Mount Iwaki every year.

But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted more attention. In 2005 agreements between landowners allowed the creation of enormous rice paddy art.

A year later, organisers used computers to precisely plot planting of the four differently colored rice varieties that bring the images to life.

The farmers create the murals by planting little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru roman variety to create the coloured patterns between planting and harvesting in September.

The village has now earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry and this year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall.

More than 150,000 vistors come to Inakadate, where just 8,700 people live, every summer to see the extraordinary murals.

The murals in Inakadate cover 15,000 square metres of paddy fields. From ground level, the designs are invisible, and viewers have to climb the mock castle tower of the village office to get a glimpse of the work.