Being Blonde

Josh showed me this great Flickr set – Always being up for a bit of experimentation we thought we’d have a crack ourselves – Here are the results kids! Enjoy.

Edinburgh

London

We’ve just launched the all new IRN-BRU brand website. The launch coincides with that of the new “IF” TV commercial, which, not surprisingly, features prominently on the site.

But there’s a lot more to it than that.

There is other advertising based content, housed in two sections named Favourite Ads (ads that did run) and Ads That Never Ran (ads that didn’t - in case that isn’t clear from the title). These sections will be the subject of separate posts.

From a digital strategy point of view the most interesting section is one that we’ve called the Community Centre. The idea behind this is to give a platform to the healthy number of consumer fan clubs and IRN-BRU communities that exist in social media. They are doing a good job of spreading the word about the brand. Now, via the Community Centre, the brand can return the favour by spreading the word about them.

Fan club and brand group administrators can upload details of what they stand for, a link to their site or page and a representative visual. The result is the digital equivalent of a customer ad display in a newsagent window.

We’ve also provided access to a range of visual assets that can be downloaded and used on these sites.

So, rather than jumping in feet first and setting up official brand spaces on the likes of Bebo, Facebook and Myspace, we’re hoping to help grow the membership of unofficial communities. These have more credibility and tend to express their pro-brand views in forthright ways that would make even a brand like IRN-BRU blush.

As well as there being a lot of active IRN-BRU communities out there, there is plenty of IRN-BRU news and chat, not to mention a good smattering of colourful interesting blog posts. Via a Google News feed we’re pulling this news into the site. It’s a good way to introduce dynamic content on a daily basis, and it confirms the impression of IRN-BRU as a talked about, happening brand. The vast majority of comment is positive.

Watch this space for news on results.

This is taken from an interesting blog post from a couple of years ago by one of my favourite authors - Douglas Coupland. He of Generation X, Microserfs and J-Pod fame.

For reasons that are explained in his blog, he spent a dry-mouthed week personally chewing up the pages of a copy of Generation X and using the pulp to create his impression of a wasps’ nest.

The point of bringing it to attention here, aside from the geeky appeal of Microserfs, is to say that there really is no substitute for, and nothing quite as exhilirating as, pure, original, lateral creative thought.

New content on IRN-BRU’s SFL sponsorship site.

A discussion forum with three sections. The first is an open forum wherein the fans can set the agenda. The second features an enigmatic character called The Gaffer. He’s a professional writer with the inside track on the live SFL issues of the day. He’s our official “firestarter” and, by protecting his identity, we’re looking to generate some Top Gear, Stig style mystery around him.

Finally we have a section of match reports. The reports are written by amateur writers who are dedicated home and away fans of SFL clubs. We’re looking to have a reporter for each club so that we can spark some comment and debate based on two alternative views of each game. The forum only went live a couple of days ago and we have high hopes.

Nice, simple, relevant idea from the Leith guys in a putting something back sort of way.

Grolsch is sponsoring Original Comedy on Channel 4.

In support of this, Leith have produced a series of sponsorship idents, shot in Amsterdam and featuring a couple of guys on a grass-roofed barge. Quirky things happen around them as they make their way along the canals - these involve a zebra, a mole, Amazonian indians, a visit from on high by a Japanese businessman, an unusual pizza delivery and some “wild” grass.

We’ve developed a new Grolsch site which is being referred to internally as the “immortal” - part immersive brand experience, part portal. The new site is designed to make the most of the increasing amount of dynamic content that Grolsch/we are generating - much of this obviously arising from the C4 sponsorship.

An example of this dynamic content is the Codebreaker competition. Within the action of each sponsorship film we’ve included a Grolsch-related number. These numbers pertain to facts about the brand, its history, its locations, its products, its packaging and to beer drinking in general. The numbers are “hidden in full view” in that they’re pretty easy to spot if you know to look for them, but you probably won’t notice them if you don’t.

Competition entrants have to identify each of the six numbers between now and the end of March and enter them on the Grolsch site. To successfully break the code they have to enter the sum of all six numbers. Winners get their own centrally located houseboat in Amsterdam for three nights, plus a two day trip to the Grolsch Brewery in Enschede.

Getting this competition off the ground has been a properly integrated effort involving forward planning and great collaboration between Blonde, Coors, Channel 4, Leith and their production company. Hard work but good fun.

I found this photo that I took at the Eden Project in Cornwall last Summer. It’s impressive when a concept and a tone of voice are carried through into every single nook and cranny of executional detail.

It’s old but still good. Watch Dick deliver a compelling and dynamic introduction on Identity 2.0 and how the concept of digital identity is evolving.

With such detailed briefs coming in its hard to keep up!!

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.