Wednesday 21 March 2012

say what you see


another recent agency visit was to razorfish to meet william lidstone and dan bonner. they had lots of advice to give and even set us a live brief to work on during the afternoon but almost as importantly to any self-respecting ad student; they had cake! william and dan started by giving us a presentation showing previous campaigns that razorfish have worked on including the dealership without cars, created for audi. i was particularly impressed by the augmented reality calendar, combining with an app, could be kept up to date month by month as new audi models came out.

william explained that razorfish offer 'expertise, experience and scale' and believes that big brands want a larger agency. he talked to us about razorfish's current approach to advertising and marketing as one of the leaders of digital and also where he saw the future of digital. we learnt about omni-channel retail which seamlessly knits together the consumers' experience across many different platforms, big data - using social, behavioural economics to build a service geared around you, multi-screening - based around the idea that certain tv is better experienced with your friends, remotely but collectively commenting, as many people already do on twitter, mCommerce - not only shopping from your phone but combining it with your in-store experience and near field communications (nfc) - the technology in oyster cards, being applied to phones, keys and other portable items.

once we'd had our fill of tech-talk, coffee and cake we split into three teams and worked on a live brief. with only 15 minutes to come up with 5 to 10 ideas based around the factors laid out about the brand we were then scored against brand new thinking:

  • did we capture what the brand stands for?
  • how new was the concept?
  • did we apply the thinking to the components that the client had specified?

it was the first time that we had such a short time frame to work on a proposition and we were all keen to impress (not to mention the incentive of a prize for the winning team) and with the adrenalin pumping (don't judge - we're planners) i was the first up to present my group's ideas. it was nerve-wracking and although our group didn't win it was a great experience and we were provided with helpful feedback.

it was inspiring to see the way razorfish combine ideas with digital technology and was a really motivating and challenging afternoon. a big thanks to william and dan for their time... and cake.

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