Two significant extra projects awarded by an existing client, and a pitch win. A nice way to end the week.
More detail on the business gains once we’ve agreed with the clients in question what we’re able to say.
This is my washing machine. It takes all the daily laundry that four girls and a wife can throw at it, washes it and then spins it dry at some astronomical speed.
What it doesn’t do is give you loads of options that you neither want nor need. It’s a laundry top-loader not an information over-loader.
Here’s a closer view.
You can choose between hot, cold and warm. And you can choose how much water you want. And that’s it.
Now here’s the old Blonde holding page.
It didn’t really do anything beyond confirming our existence. It certainly didn’t tell you anything about us. All it did was give visitors the option to register. In fact it didn’t even verbalise the invitation to register, merely providing input fields for name and e-mail address. Nonetheless hundreds of people “signed up” without having the faintest idea what they were signing up for. To be honest I don’t think we had the faintest idea what they were signing up for either.
However, now that this site is up and running and doing a good, single-minded job of telling people all about us, we’ll have to think of something.
The old holding page was definitely under-spec’ed in terms of its functionality, but that’s probably better than an over-spec’ed front-loader of a website crammed full of options that no-one wants and which only serve to obscure the ones that they do.
Mike Coulter of Digital Agency came in the other day and we shot the breeze about all sorts of stuff for a couple of hours. It didn’t feel like work at all and it was the kind of blue sky coversation we should find more time for more often.
Mike is a very generous man in terms of sharing his ideas on all things digital. He’s also the driving force behind the Edinburgh digital coffee mornings.
A lot of the work that Mike is doing for his clients can be loosely categorised as “making things happen for them on the web”. That’s a pretty good definition of what working in an agency is all about. The basic function of agents is to make things happen for their clients - be they actors, musicians, writers, footballers or marketers.
Mike talks about various internet “hygiene factors” that all brands should take care of as a matter of course, but seldom do. It can be as simple as making sure that the brand is well represented with appropriate photography on the likes of flickr. It obviously gets more involved and sophisticated than this and he’s providing a valuable service that represents a gap in the market in Scotland.
Hopefully this post will help to make his agent status less secret.
Out of context you could be forgiven for thinking that we employ psychopaths at Blonde. An early morning conversation went something like this…
“What did you do last night?”, “Oh nothing special just went on a mindless killing spree, what about you?”, “held someone up against a wall and physically strangled them to death - it was great fun”, “nice”. It actually reminded me of a conversation I had with my mother a few years ago where she proudly exclaimed that she could “take out a tiger with two shots from her Uzis” - we are a gaming family and Lara in the old days was indeed a revelation.
So Final Fantasy XII arrived (finally) and the Godfather has descended on the Wii and as usual Fraser and I are spending far too much free time in front of a screen.
I have to say that FFXII is a real treat and I’m trying my best not to burn it up in a few weeks as titles like this just don’t come around that often - development time definitely well spent.
With reference to Phil’s post on the Leith blog, I feel I have to add some behind-the-scenes detail into what actually happened that day.
The race and terms were agreed, however what Phil failed to mention in his post was that he started approximately 6mins 37secs before me. I not only had to find my car but I had to walk about a mile to find it. Also in my defence, I drove, at maximum, 29 mph - Phil can you verify you didn’t break the “in town” speed limit heading down hill towards Blonde? - I don’t think so.
Also I managed to make several hands free business calls and continued working while Phil probably gasped and wheezed horribly like an old train trying to make sure he didn’t lose.
It’s fair to say that I was disappointed that Phil was already in the office when I arrived but at least I was relaxed, dry, composed and my hair remained vertical (which for me is a good thing).
Next time Phil let’s do Segway vs Skateboard… choose your weapon Mr Adams.
