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

Location, location, location…

If you do go down the digital route, make sure your ads are being seen by the right people, in the best location. Online technology allows us to track user’s movements right down to the last click, so use this information to tighten your targeting.

It’s good to share…

See if you can find any complementary companies or organisations that you could team up with to book advertising space and share campaign messages. It could halve your budget and double your profile.

Be a pillar of the community…

Get involved in pro-bono work, write a piece for the local paper or sponsor your local football team. Positive word-of-mouth is one of the simplest ways to raise your profile regionally.

Don’t kill the radio star

Booking a 30 second spot on a local radio channel can be a relatively inexpensive way of reaching a specific audience. Offer to be interviewed on a hot topic and see if you can negotiate down the rate further.

If you don’t schmooze, you lose…

Networking with other local businesses can give you ideas on how to move forward and help you to understand where your weaknesses and strengths are. Setting up collaborations can also strengthen your business offering.

Choose your agency wisely…

A good advertising agency understands that their success is based on yours.

So they’ll go the extra mile to make things happen for you, making sure you choose the most effective channels to make your budget go further.

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.

The alarm went off early and we headed over to a local bar to start filming the next scene. It’s amazing how many people are involved in the production of a TV commercial – with all the actors, extras, crew and clients we were all in all 48 people! A lot of organising, but a lot of fun! In the bar scene we had the challenge of directing the actors and actress when they were speaking Welsh… Although, for some unknown reason, people often think I’m Welsh myself, this is not the case, so my Welsh vocabulary has never been better than it is now after this little trip. It’s just unfortunate that I won’t get much use of lines such as “I wouldn’t mind a piece of that” or “She’d have it”, so I think I’ll have to stick to speaking English for now. Despite the language barriers this shoot went really well, we even managed to get some shots for our advertising campaign despite the tight schedule.

Next up was the van scene and this was the only time we really needed the weather to stay dry. I’m sure you can guess what happened… just before we headed out onto the busy street it started raining – we must have brought the rain with us from Manchester. But by the time all the camera gear was set up it was only drizzling, so we were quite lucky in the end. People thought we were joking when we told them that the bus stop where they were queuing wasn’t actually a real bus stop, but our very own portable one that we had brought with us… I think even the bus drivers looked a bit confused! We were very happy with our casting of loud builders, but it was almost scary how quickly they got into their characters, shouting and leering at our poor Ffion. The wife of our main “builder” was looking suitably impressed watching her husband hanging out of the window eyeing Ffion up… The director, Adam, and myself were hiding in the back of the van, directing the “builders” whilst the van was being pushed by 5 strong guys… you wouldn’t guess that when you watched the ad would you!?

When we arrived to the office location we were greeted by a whole marching band, which we thought was an extremely friendly welcome to Cardiff Bay! Our sleazy boss didn’t disappoint and the shoot went very smoothly indeed. At this point I think Ffion had had enough of all the men following, commenting, shouting, leering and staring at her during the past 24 hours, but she did extraordinary well putting up with it all. It was about 9pm before we set off to go back to Manchester. I amazed myself staying awake in the car chatting to Simon all the way back to Sale, but I can honestly say that I was a little tired as he dropped me off past midnight. Being a gentleman, Simon went to get my bag out of the boot of the car, leaving the engine running. As he was getting back into the car it had locked itself. With the keys still in the ignition and a door that wouldn’t open, it wasn’t the best end to a great few days in Wales, but after a quick taxi journey back home picking up the spare keys, Simon was on his way home again.

The campaign has been live since the 1st of June and we’re all very pleased with how well it’s been received. With comments not only from Wales and England, but also requests from the USA and Germany to air the commercial there, we can only hope that this will result in a follow-up production in Berlin… that would be Sehr Gut, Jawohl! (better start brushing up on my German!)

Have you not seen the ad? Watch it here…

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?

Eventful Escapes with Visit Chester & Cheshire

And as you can see VCC have been busy bees themselves with a media launch taking place at London’s Euston Station. It all went down very well apparently – and the ‘Eventful Escapes’ branding we created for the campaign has received recognition from Virgin Trains who commented how much they liked our artwork.

Roman Centurions at London's Euston Station

Roman Centurions at London's Euston Station

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.

What do we really want?

Having given it some thought, what we really wanted was:

• accurate and reactive to updates through the day
• central and web-based – save paper, remote access, same list for everyone
• very easy to use for all members of the business
• simple permissions to allow people to jump in on jobs and make updates
• email notifications when tasks are updated
• suitable for a range of work types like bugs reports, mini development tasks and large web projects
• we may also like to roll it out to different areas of the business like the Design department
• follow a simple logic of clients have projects, projects have tasks

What’s out there already?

We considered all kinds of existing systems like Basecamp, Lighthouse and activeCollab, amongst others. Our main complaint was that most of the systems were too complex and it too time consuming to create jobs on the system; we desperately wanted to make it quick and easy for everyone, otherwise people wouldn’t use it!

Do it with Drupal?

As a very Drupal-focused agency, we started to look at how we could do this with Drupal; the thinking being that we have the know-how to customise a Drupal solution. So we looked at Open Atrium and a whole bunch of modules you can just download and add to Drupal itself (comparison here). Again, we found these just too complicated or geared too much towards IT or Software technical support tickets. But one module stood at as being very close to what we needed  – Case Tracker.

Case Tracker was good (read ’simple’) but needed some tweaking

In Case Tracker, we had found a very good starting point. It is small collection of Drupal 6.0 modules that handles the Project-Task relationship, permissions, updates comments and email notifications. All we needed to do was tweak the views, add in clients via taxonomy, build a theme and make the log-in system more pleasant. The final product is actually very usable!

Is it working in the business?

We gradually phased in what we refer to as ‘Access Task Manager’ to the business over a few weeks. It’s been up and running for two months and so far the feedback has been very positive. Users have found it very intuitive, very little training has been required. All the  ‘can you just do this’ emails disappeared overnight and turned in to well-formatted requests on Task Manager. Follow-up comments and updates to the task are centrally stored – very handy when a key member of the team is out of the office.

Download Task Manager for yourself

We love ‘Task Manager’ so much that we have added the code for you to download here on our blog – Task Manager – Drupal 6 and Case Tracker made better

Screen shot of the main task list. Download and try Task Manager for yourself

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

View more screengrabs on our Flickr account.

What is Task Manager?

Task Manager is a Drupal 6 installation with various contrib modules already installed and setup ready to be used as a task management or ticketing system. The configuration is particularly weighted towards the requirements of a digital agency but with a little configuration change this could be used in other environments where a user needs to raise tasks/tickets against projects for one or more clients.

Requirements

The system requirements are the same as Drupal – the gist being PHP 5 and MySQL 4+.

This is a dump-down of an existing website (files and a SQL dump) and not an installer. To install the database you will need access to MySQL at command line, phpMyAdmin or something like Sequel Pro or SQLyog to import the database file.

Download

Download Access Task Manager v1.0 (.tgz / 5.5mb) »

Legal: There are all kinds of reasons why Access can’t fully support Task Manager as a product and so you are using this release ‘as is’. We accept no responsibilities for the quality of the software or any other problems you have. Feel free to customise Task Manager as much as you like but be aware that it is a combination of code from the Drupal Project, various contributed modules (especially Case Tracker) and the CKEditor. By downloading you are agreeing to respect the individual licenses of the contained code and not to moan at us if this doesn’t work like you expected.

Installation

Just take a look at installation readme inside the download package.

We hope you can make some use of this code. We’d love to see your comments below!

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?

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…