Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

It’s the unavoidable catch 22. Finances are tight so the last thing you want to do is spend more, but people still need to know about your products and services. The secret to surviving any budget crisis is not to stop spending altogether, but to spend smarter. Find new ways to communicate with your audience and your campaign will pay for itself. We’ve pulled together a few tips that will stretch your imagination, not your budget.

Join the digital revolution…

Online advertising is the most accountable medium available. Once you’ve got a great campaign idea, replicate it across the formats that are most relevant to your consumers and use the marketing intelligence it provides to build your brand.

Poke, Blog and Tweet…

Make use of the vast array of social media platforms to get your message across. Create your own Facebook page, start your own tweets on Twitter or run a regular blog to tell people about your brand. It’s a quick and easy way to get free publicity.

Access Twitter Page

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30 seconds in Wales
(17 hours behind the scenes of our Welsh TV commercial)

We all met up in a dark underpass in Cardiff one chilly evening in May. Our star actress, the lovely Ffion, had to walk back and forth for about 5 hours with a scary guy stalking her and we soon attracted a row of onlookers gathering to watch what was going on. We were all very impressed by the girl who turned up at 8pm and stayed all night long watching, she almost felt like one of the crew in the end! I was glad I’d invested in some new gloves earlier that day as it did get rather cold, but our 11pm pizzas kept us going till about 1am before we packed up all our equipment and went back to the hotel.

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“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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Wolf whistles, horn beeps and pub jeers may seem like innocent behaviour to most people, but it all adds up for women on the end of abusive behaviour. If left unchecked, it can fuel the acceptance of other controlling actions towards women such as emotional and even physical abuse.

The Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) wanted to create a powerful regional TV campaign to get people talking about gender discrimination and highlight the problems of going ‘one step too far’. Access have produced 2 x 30’ commercials, a series of outdoor ads and website visuals for www.onesteptoofar.org

The shoot went without a hitch and the campaign is due to air in Wales in June.

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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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

There’s still a lot of confusion between Social Media Marketing and Social Marketing – is it simply a case of terminology or do people really not understand the difference?

As we are increasingly asked to integrate both disciplines into campaigns, we thought it important to try and explain the difference – some clients may be unsure as to which one they need and, in some cases, they can have both!

There is already a vast amount of online space covering the topic, so without wanting to repeat anyone, here goes…

Social Marketing is used by government and other public bodies to communicate to audiences to encourage a change of behaviour for the common social good – i.e. we have worked with the NHS in the North West to engage with and encourage smoking cessation in certain parts of the region using social marketing techniques. These aren’t dark arts or new phenomenon – they are just practical ways of reaching, communicating effectively and changing people’s opinions and habits – and they’ve been around in one guise or another for 30/40 years. For more information the National Social Marketing Centre provides a comprehensive database of case studies.

Social Media Marketing on the other hand is very much the new kid on the block and has only been in existence, as a mass marketing tool, for the past couple of years. Facebook, Twitter, My Space, Linkedin and You Tube are all examples of social media – and that’s the key difference – these are media channels that can be deployed, taking great care, to communicate with discreet audience groups to disseminate information in a viral way. We are currently running a pilot social media campaign with the OFT – promoting their Scams Awareness Month 2010 – to determine what appetite the British public have for dispersing information. News on the results of this pilot will be released next month, see the Scamnesty Facebook page for more details.

Therefore you can use social media to deliver social marketing messages – just as you can any media channel.

Their commonality comes from their social status – as ‘communities’. Social Marketing looks to influence the thinking, attitudes and behaviour of real communities and social media looks to tap into the similarities that ties a community together – albeit a virtual one.

So it’s quite straightforward really. But are you ready for the challenge?

This morning, under the careful choreography of Kirstie, we finally revealed the relationship we have forged with our local secondary school, Stretford High School, and in particular their Year 10 ICT students – under the watchful eye of Chris Grey, their teacher – or ’sir’ to you and me!

Access / Stretford High School Partnership In Action

It’s an idea we dreamed up with our pr gurus Sian and Rachel at Cuban 8, following successfully reaching our 10 year milestone earlier this year – yes Access is 10 years old!

Please see our press release for full details on this initiative.

We fully intend to harness this relationship and do so responsibly over the coming years. We have already seen the extent to which is will be valuable to both organisations – we even used the school recently as a backdrop to a shoot for a client’s press campaign (but we can’t let you see it just yet)! We’ll keep you posted on this collaboration as it develops…