Quick-Thinking win Best Limited Budget Campaign at B2B Marketing Awards

Posted by Gareth on Nov 24, 2011 in advertising, agency life, awards, B2B Marketing, communications, design, direct mail, events, web | 0 comments

A runner-up in 2010 for “Best Integrated Campaign”, Quick-Thinking has this year scooped the gold for the 2011 B2B Marketing Awards Best Limited Budget Campaign for our Zoopla.co.uk “We Love Estate Agents” campaign.

Quick-Thinking were finalists in two categories (Best Creative and Best Limited Budget) for three different campaigns; our Simpson Carpenter “Bloodhounds” campaign, Experian Hitwise “Five a day” and eventual winner Zoopla.co.uk “We Love Estate Agents”.

Attended by as many Quick-Thinkers as could make it, the wine was poured, the (very good) food was served and the tension mounted as we waited for our categories to be announced, with laughs along the way courtesy of Jack Whitehall.

Our brief for the campaign was to deliver 200 leads per month for our client, while retaining current agents and communicating Zoopla’s core values of empathy with estate agents, property developers and letting agents. They needed it quickly and economically. Working with Zoopla, Quick-Thinking took a universal and simple truth: ‘Everybody hates estate agents’ and turned it on its head. The juxtaposition became simple: Zoopla – We love estate agents. The campaign was delivered with cost efficiency in mind, but delivered an 87% uplift in leads immediately, directly attributable to the advertising, direct mail, property shows and e-mail campaign and more than doubled the client’s projected results in the first month alone.

We were all very proud to receive the accolade and top last year’s outing at the prestigious industry awards. The dodgems were pretty fun too.

At Quick-Thinking we like to do just that. Think quickly. And intelligently. Oh, and creatively. And hopefully come up with more award-winning campaigns for our clients.

Team “Quick as a ‘Tache” near the end of their moustache-growing Movember

Posted by Gareth on Nov 24, 2011 in agency life | 0 comments

Quick-Thinking is all about doing good things for other people, so it was a natural fit for some of the men of the office to get involved in Movember – the new name for the month of November when men around the world grow a moustache to raise money for research into prostate and testicular cancer.

It’s been a veritable feast of follicular-aimed joviality, not least at those perhaps slightly less-able to grow facial hair than others, but with a determined sense of team purpose. So far, the team has raised over £700 and counting. So please, enjoy the hilarity of badly-grown Mos and if inspired please do donate to the team at http://mobro.co/quickasatache

If we reach £1,000 in donations I’m sure we can come up with some funny and likely painful ways to remove all the hair in December!

Quick-Thinking taking part in mo-growing Movember

Posted by Gareth on Nov 1, 2011 in agency life | 0 comments

Five members of Quick-Thinking will be casting their self-respect aside for the whole of November as they take part in Movember: the charity that promotes health and well-being for men and raises money for research into prostate and testicular cancer.

All for a good cause, the normally clean-shaven quintet will be looking to grow all sorts of weird and wonderful mo-styles in a bid to raise money for the team: named “Quick as a ‘Tache” (see what we did there?)

For any and all donations please donate to the team at  http://mobro.co/quickasatache

From left to right: Gareth Jordan, Kris Chay (12), Tim Chamberlain, Andy Hunt, Will Chaplin

Fattoria La Vialla: Passion for Print!

Posted by Kris on Oct 27, 2011 in design, direct mail | 0 comments

Since my last entry, I’ve been showered with Fattoria La Vialla brochures and catalogues. Not least a beautifully presented taster bottle of olive oil, which is, the best I’ve ever tasted. I’m blown away by the passion and effort that they commit to each and every person on their mailing list. When was the last time you received an individually numbered brochure?

Having worked with quality stocks over the past few years, and more recently with our clients at Arjo Wiggins Creative Papers, I’m always pleasantly surprised at the level of investment La Vialla puts toward the paper and print to ensure the depth of colour and saturation (not to mention that lovely fresh-off-the-press smell we all know and love!).

Recently, the Autumn/Winter catalogue and the Christmas brochure arrived (I have Book no. 14). With an embossed cover and a sketch detailing animals, produce and the farm all in a festive setting, the Christmas 2011 catalogue is a treat in itself. The inside doesn’t disappoint with full page, beautifully framed photographs. But this time, something is different.

“Opening up these catalogues, you are bound to think: but what happened here?”

Fattoria La Vialla are experimenting with a change of their handwritten style to an ‘easier to read’ font which I have to say works. I’m deeply impressed at how they have taken comments and suggestions on board, and made a fundamental change to suit their customers. Yet, it’s still very much part of their home-grown brand.

If you are not on the mailing list of Fattoria La Vialla, I strongly suggest you get on it. If you’re in our industry, you’ll be relieved to see that high production values in print still exist. And if you do order the odd jar of olive oil or pasta sauce, you’ll see that they put as much heart and soul into their products as their gorgeous catalogues. It really is something I look forward to every time it comes through the letterbox.

The Apple Ecosystem and the Evolution of Everything Else

Posted by Ben on Oct 6, 2011 in communications, technology | 0 comments

I bought a bag of Cadbury’s ‘Crunchy Rocks’ the other day. Crispy little morsels of delight, I’m happy to report. Not so happy, however, when I realised I had consumed the entire pack in an afternoon, and that I had given in to a repackage of what was essentially more of the same stuff, spreading the consequences over a series of more palatable, bite-sized chunks of guilt. In hindsight, I’m not sure that the £2 premium was entirely justified.

A recent conundrum that was oddly familiar, was when I had to justify an iPad. When one has to justify over £700 of hardware that’s the same price of a fully-fledged laptop, that’s a hard pill to swallow however much you sugarcoat it. And yet, it has sold by the millions, year on year. That’s no accidental success.

I’m one of the lucky few with a work excuse to have one, having been increasingly involved in app development for clients. Had the choice been left to me I’d have spent all my time researching them till the fad passed me by.

Around 5 years ago, there was a similar buzz around the future of mobile. It was billed to “become the primary means for accessing services such as personal banking, online purchasing, mobile entertainment, and multiplayer online games” [MIT/Nokia]. This was a time when Nokia was at the top of their game with the 3G, GPS, WiFi, web-browsing (ooh!) N95. Remember, this was a time when people were still calling smartphones “PDAs”, built-in cameras broke the 3.0 megapixel barrier, GPS and Wi-Fi integration became the norm, and networks saw faster downloads with early 3G. Labour lost the general election, and a whale swam up the Thames River. No one would have guessed that Google would acquire a major mobile company, or start it’s own social network for that matter. Even the bods at MIT wouldn’t have entertained the thought.

Since then, we’ve seen dozens of interesting developments as other manufacturers join the gold rush, notably Samsung, Motorola, Panasonic and Blackberry. But, fabulous as they may seem, each one is struggling to stake their claim in the market. Sadly, every clutch-sized, business-focused, entertainment-biased creation has yet to offer enough of a difference in the tablet experience. Take the 7-inchers for example, which are often criticised for not offering enough of an improvement over smartphones. And with Google/Android’s ‘Honeycomb’ Tablet OS hitting the shelves, there is an increasing number of manufacturers getting on board. But this isn’t the car industry in the 1920s, when everyone had yet to settle on three pedals and a steering wheel. The giants, Apple and Android, have a format that works for everyone; the consumer, the developers, and the their bottom lines.

While both are looking to monetise after sales through App and content downloads, Apple is sticking with its proprietary hardware, and Android’s biggest route to market seems to be more about giving control to their community, creating something that can run on just about everything.

So OS aside, how have Apple captured so many markets? Clearly, not because they got there first. If you live the the Apple ecosystem, they make sure everything works consistently, predictably, and reliably. Underneath this seemingly superficial sweet outer, there’s an increasingly tantalising network of support, retail, content, supply chain and products that give you everything you could possibly want inside it. It to supports the needs of both developers and their customers, resulting in a device that grows with the its users on an individual basis. And that’s why they’ve so confidently marketed it as something that can do a thousand more things than its box would ever profess it would do.

This is the time to get your piece of the action. With an emerging culture that expects companies to have tablet/mobile apps, brands are under pressure to deliver a mobile experience. However, there are a few important things you need to know before you get your brand ‘app’ developed:

• Consumer pester power is on the up, as they’ve come to expect that brands are listening to their needs. Skype for example, were under increasing pressure to invest in tablet software, to the point that comments on their previous App Store release were getting downright rude.

• Unlike the web, people are more ready to be charged a small fee for content, however, it must add value to the experience, whether it’s just for the convenience or exclusive content, even when you can’t charge more than 59p for it.

• No Average Joe knows that a good, well-thought-out and intuitive idea can’t be executed beautifully for much less than £15k, let alone investing in version updates and listening to consumer feedback. And Apple’s 30% take on the sale of the app, and anything sold within it.

So, you see, in today’s economic climate, even the savviest sceptics are happy to make micropurchases. If it’s something you’re thinking about for your brand or product, get in touch – I’d be more than happy to talk through both the pros and cons of going mobile.

Crowd-source or crowd-control?

Posted by Gareth on Sep 22, 2011 in communications, in our opinion..., internet, technology, web | 0 comments

Recent developments in the technological and social / political spheres got me to thinking ““ can we compare Apple’s App Store and Android’s Market to our societal problems? I.e. Appstore being more prescriptive, restrictive and frustrating for developers and sometimes for users ““ ‘nannying’ developers and ensuring all content that appears has been fully vetted by them, whereas Android is much more ‘open source’ and allows anyone to write an app, upload to the market and take their chances.

Both approaches have their own benefits but then also create their own issues. Restrictions breed resentment and ultimately people try and defy the ‘rules’. However it’s often seen as the ‘safe’ option for people (could this be compared to the New Labour centralised gov’t?), whereas Android provides a much freer and easier platform for those with entrepreneurial tendencies to create something and make it a success through popular approval ratings, BUT leaves users open to unscrupulous characters looking to exploit that freedom and make money / get what they want through duplicitous means no matter what the consequences to others (reflected in our Conservative gov’t ‘Big Society’ theory and the subsequent ‘riots’ by people believing they should be able to take what they want, when they want to).

The theory behind ‘open-source’ and ‘big society’ is sound in my opinion – who would ever criticise the right to opportunity for those of us wanting to succeed within our own moral values and legal systems? But unfortunately, when we’re bred to think we have a right to take what we want, when we want, no matter the consequences, then moral values break down, people feel no moral compunction to think of others and the consequences of their actions on them. Without those, the legal ‘systems’ designed as deterrents and to punish immoral behaviour in an open society imposed by our technological giants and governments are apparently meaningless. So which is the right way to go about things? We’ve seen that both have their strengths and weaknesses but given the choice, I would much prefer to make my own choices, take my own risks and hopefully remain savvy enough to avoid the pitfalls.

Conqueror’s Blank Sheet Project: One Young World Zurich 2011

Posted by Kris on Sep 8, 2011 in communications, design, events | 0 comments

Last month saw the second annual One Young World summit held in Zurich, an even that sees young people from all around the world come together to discuss global issues and some of their ideas and projects for change.

Arjowiggins Creative Papers’ brand Conqueror sponsored the event with their Blank Sheet Project. Being a communications tool, Conqueror provided delegates at the event with personalised Conqueror business cards, notebooks printed on Conqueror and a giant 8m x 3m wall coated in one large Blank Sheet of Conqueror Iridescent Gold Dust 250g which would capture the thoughts and ideas of the delegates.

Quick-Thinking were responsible for sourcing all of these assets and ensuring that the wall was capable of withstanding 3 days of constant attention!

The wall took its place at the entrance to the Kongresshaus in Zurich and from the moment the first pen touched the Iridescent paper the Quick-Thinking team were inundated with requests for marker pens! The days were long but a great to see so many young people with unwavering determination to make a better world for us all.
The real fun started when people started to draw their flags only to find we didn’t have a yellow”¦ One quick (hot and sticky) run to the shop sorted that and we soon had a lovely colourful canvass filled with hundreds of great quotes, muses, ideas and drawings.

The event was a huge success with events confirmed for 2012 and 2013 in Johannesburg and Pittsburgh respectively and the delegates took every chance to put their ideas, projects and calls to action on such a strong communication tool The Blank Sheet Project Wall. Conqueror’s concept of bringing change through a Blank Sheet of Paper really captured the spirit of the One Young World event.

Click here to see highlights of the event and to find out more about Conqueror’s involvement.