Rollercoaster marketing

Barclays Rollercoaster Marketing

We love the follow up to Barclays waterslide ad which first showed on 24th January during ‘Dancing On Ice’. Love it or hate it (and we think it’s got a lot of love judging by the fact that it has its very own facebook fan page), just imagine the conversations that Ad agency BBH must have had pitching for the original waterslide idea.

Barclay’s:  So what’s the idea then?

BBH: Well, it’s like this – we want to put a ordinary looking man in grotty swimming trunks on a waterslide and, he waterslides to work

[Shuffle of papers - cough]

Barclay’s: Well thank you so much, we’ll mull it over

BBH: Oh and by the way, it’ll cost A LOT of money

Barclay’s:  A lot of money……right.  Bye then!

Of course it doesn’t work exactly like this.  There needs to be a layer of communication between the client and the creative department which is where account managers come in.  The account managers explain systems, processes and ideas to the client along with keeping an eye on costs and communicating any problems between the two along the way.

The fact that amazing Ads like this get to go ahead is due in part to the persuasion of great account managers (just you try selling a giant gorrila playing the drums with a Phil Collins soundtrack to a stuffy boardroom).

Duncans blog -Training day

Since we’ve managed to get over the launch of www.finditinsandwell.co.uk, we’ve found that things have changed quite a bit around the office. The work load is still there of course with 11 new clients coming in this week alone but somehow we feel that thngs aren’t quite as pressured now. One of the reasons for this is the fact that although we have these new clients, we are dedicating time to each member of staff now for pure training purposes, whether it’s surfing the net for inspiration, tricks and tips, attending a more structured course or putting on our own in house training sessions, we’ve decided that, save for an imminent deadline, training is now top priority.

I kicked off the in house sessions with a training session all about…. how to give training sessions, using the structures that I learnt from my career in the Royal Navy I taught everyonen the principles and structures they should be applying to their in house lessons and now we can see the results coming through the ranks with the more senior designers, programmers and client side staff able to pass on their knowledge to everyone else. The result hasn’t beeen a drop in production from the people attending the sessions but a massive increase in productivity and motivation. The teachers feel valued as their skills are recognised and shared and the students can now do things better and faster.

It is too easy to put training onto the bottom of the list of priorities when it comes to workload but by giving everyone a seperate training plan and work schedule, we have overcome this trap tha we fell into with our last large design project. Now instead of having and relying on just one person to perform a task, we can rely on several, it just makes good sense all round really. As for my own personal training. I like to take an hour out of each day to look at the different seo blogs and sites to see what’s new. Internet world is on in London in May which hopefully I can find time to attend the whole show or if not then definately one day, in fact, I want everyone in the office to spend at least a day there as you can’t beat talking to other people in the industry to give yourself a lift, it’s definately not the most sociable activity, sitting behind a computer all day and it will be good to see who else is out there and share some ideas. Also the Miami search engine strategies conference 2007 is looming on the horizon so I’m in the process of sorting out if and who gets to go there (always a lot of competition) which is a good thing really as it shows how keen the staff at www.iceblue.co.uk are to learn as much as possible about search engine optimisation and search engine marketing (or then again they could just be wanting to go to Miami (I know I’ll be taking my surfboard if I let myself go!)