What an amazing quarter it’s been, finally it feels like things might be moving again, I do hope that it’s the same for you.
This month alone we have tendered for more projects than we did during the past three months! The highlights being an Olympic campaign for Docklands Light Railway, two new shopping centre accounts, two universities, a new pet food distribution concept and an energy advisory body! Yesterday we presented our first campaign to Saga Holidays and when we returned to the office a brief from a Saudi Bank for a complete re-brand pinged in to my inbox! Two years ago we designed a new range of credit cards for a Qatar Bank so looks like the word is spreading!
Anyway back to Christmas and you….
I wanted to take a minute to thank everyone that we have worked with this year (and previously of course) for your ongoing support. We appreciate everything you do for us and nothing is taken for granted so THANK YOU!
As some of you will have already realised I have been taking a much more active role in account direction and this is something that I will continue to do next year ( I finally realised what it is I like doing most!!!). So If we haven’t caught up recently we will very soon.
Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year I hope that together they bring all you wish for!
The following presents some results from the RAR survey completed by our clients. Clients were invited to provide ratings and commentary about the service provided by our agency. The survey has been completed online and the identity of clients completing the survey remains confidential.
“Anthony Allen for his personal support & leadership of the whole team and Andrew Brown for his direct involvement from concept to implementation of ideas.”
“Stephen Delaney always provides New Nordic with excellent communication and service.”
“Anthony Allen, my initial point of contact. After our first meeting I was assured that the project in mind would work and that he had a full understanding of it.”
“We worked closely with Anthony Allen and Peter Wyatt on the strategic planning, brand creation and website. Stephen Delaney the senior designer worked closely with us to ensure our expectations were always met.”
“I successfully completed projects with Steve Riley, Andrew Brown, Mark Farrell and Behrooz Saeed. Their entire team are warm, friendly and most of all reliable.”
If you would like further information about the RAR survey please contact Anthony Allen on 01226 292921 or email aa@allendesigngroup.com
South Yorkshire is now one of the country’s most advanced regions for digital networks, with littlebigone.com’s next generation, super-fast broadband available to households across the area and IPTV and phone lines packages will also be added later on in the year. Multi-award winning agency Allen Design Group and Chocolate PR have been appointed to lead the launch.
The Yorkshire based agencies are collaborating to create a buzz around South Yorkshire’s status as a leading digital region, working with Reading based technology supplier, Isrighthere who are bringing the new service to the county.
The team at Allen Design Group have created the brand, briefed with making the service provider stand out in its marketplace as being big enough to deliver, but small enough to care, as personal service is to be at the heart of their offer. Working alongside the Allen Design Group team is Barnsley based creative illustrator Gary Swift and Leeds agency Chocolate PR. From hereon, the design teams will also be responsible for all marketing collateral and brand communications.
Teresa Robins, Director of Isrighthere said “We’re very excited to be launching in Yorkshire and chose our agencies based on them being leading regional agencies who have a connection with the area. Our choice was also based on their interpretation of our remit, which was both innovative and creative”
The new service will provide a package covering next generation super-fast fibre-optic broadband, phone lines and Internet TV, enabling the people of South Yorkshire to be better connected online. As well as the speed elements, the service of providing TV entirely over the Internet is what will make this new offer unique, currently not being done anywhere else in the country this is a first that South Yorkshire can be proud of.
The work is part of The Digital regions remit and a commitment to improve the technology across the county as South Yorkshire traditionally has suffered from poor Internet connections and digital services.
Isrighthere was founded 10 years ago, providing Internet access,
IP technology and IPTV to the hospitality sector. It is now the largest independent Tripleplay service provider in the UK. They have recently provided services for commercial clients in the region, including The UK’s most pioneering low carbon development Greenhouse in Leeds and Residence 6 in Leeds along with other hotels across the region with the Bridge street chain, but this new launch marks a strong advancement into the consumer market.
Charter Walk Shopping Centre has just launched their new website with help from the team at Allen Design Group. The site is much more interactive and user friendly to the customer, giving up to the minute information about special offers in the shopping centre plus all the latest news and events. Customers can now follow the centre on Facebook and twitter plus they have the chance to register online for a chance to win an Ipad!
The site also has a CMS built in so it can be updated by any member of the team at anytime! If you would like more information about our system why not contact a member of our team to discuss this further.
Check out the website for yourself, www.charterwalk.com
If you would like any further information about the site please contact Andrew Brown on 01226 292921 or email ab@allendesigngroup.com
Google announced a new social networking layer that may compete with Facebook but, at the same time, is utterly different. The Google+ project will do some of the same general things as Facebook, such as sending messages to friends, sharing links, chatting, and sharing pictures, but the big difference is that with Google+, you can choose who you want to share these things with. Unlike with Facebook where posting a link will show up on your profile for all of your 500 “friends” to see, Google+ lets you do things a little differently. Here’s how it works:
Circles
The concept of Circles is a major part of Google+. This is where you choose who you want in your contacts. You can have a family Circle, a BFF Circle, a co-workers Circle, and even an “Epic bros” Circle, as Google shows in the demo video below. One of the hardest things about Facebook becoming so popular is that everyone is on it and everyone is friends with you.
Most of us are friends with a lot of family members and colleagues on Facebook, and we enjoy seeing what they’re up to. However, we don’t always want to share everything with them. Google allows you to choose which people you want in what Circle. You then use those Circles for all of your Google+ activity, which we’ll get into more in depth below.
Sparks
Sparks is a feature that lets you select certain areas, hobbies, or interests that you particularly like. They’re the things you always ramble on and on about when someone brings it up at a party, like that new album by your favorite musician, or a new comic book. Google wants to keep people searching for content on its site, so Sparks helps by delivering a “field of highly contagious content from across the Internet” on any topic.
You can then share it with a particular group of friends who will appreciate the news of a new restaurant opening in your neighborhood, unlike the rest of your 495 friends who live in different neighborhoods and would otherwise be seeing it in your Facebook status.
Hangouts
Hangouts is one of the features I’m not quite sure will catch on, but it’s a cool concept nonetheless. Hangouts aims to bring a group of friends together sporadically by combining casual meetups with live multi-person video. I’m not sure how useful it will be when everyone’s just “hanging out” in different parts of the world, at different time, but the aim is to for people to just stop in when they have the time.
Mobile
In Q1 of this year, 36 percent of phones being sold were Android devices, so mobile is an important area to Google+, and its mobile features are pretty impressive. First, Google+ allows you to add your location to every post so you can share where you are with your Circles. You also have the option of not sharing, so it’s not a huge privacy issue.
The second feature is Instant Upload, which lets you take a photo and instantly upload it to a private album in the cloud. For those of us notorious for snapping photos throughout the day on our phones and then forgetting to upload them by the end of the day, this feature will come in handy. When you get back to your computer, you can simply flip through the photos you uploaded earlier and share them with your Circles.
Huddle
Maybe one of the best features of Google+ is Huddle, which lets you coordinate with friends and family in real-time. It’s especially useful on your phone when you’re trying to plan something out with a group of people. For example, when you’re trying to pick a place to meet, you don’t have to do the whole “I’ll call Jess and Jim and see if that’s okay and call you back” thing. You can just have a flowing conversation with the people you select in your Circle through text messages.
How to get Google+?
Google says Google+ is available today on the Android Market, but you actually have to wait for an invite since it’s still in active development. If want to make sure you are on the list, you can sign up here.
We’re waiting to get ours, and when we do, we’ll let you know how these features work hands-on. We’ll also let you know when Google+ is out of development and ready to go. Google says “it’s coming soon to the App Store”.
The latest in a long line of recent website launches is one for local Barnsley based Natural Cement, a world leader in the supply of natural cement based products.
Through recommendation we were asked to pop in and discuss a possible re-brand which would incorporate re-designs of all on and offline marketing collateral. Shortly after our initial presentation which was based around our Absolute Branding methodology we were commissioned to perform a full re-brand. The deliverables included initial market research, logo design, stationery, folders, product data sheets, email templates and of course their new transactional website.
Briefly looking through their Google Analytics it’s clear that the new website is massively out-performing their old one. Visitor rates are up 42.60%, Pageviews are up 128.02%, Pages/Visit are up 59.90% and the Avg. Time on Site is up 141.60%. Great results all round!
Natural Cement manufacture and distribute products based on a natural cement based binder which has been in use for over 200 years. Their special products are used by all sections of the Railway, Civil Engineering, Water, Utilities and Construction industries throughout the UK & worldwide. The products have proven to be environmentally friendly, chemically resistant, easy to use, and time saving. They are especially useful in wet & cold environments, fast setting with high early strength gain is a standard feature of all products.
On Saturday 13th August over 12,000 music lovers were entertained by some of the countries top pop groups at Towneley Live 2011. Towneley Live is the biggest new music festival of its kind in the north west which was held at Towneley Park in Burnley. Charter Walk Shopping Centre sponsored the event and with our help produced a campaign to help raise awareness in Burnley and gave customers the opportunity to win free tickets by visiting the shopping centre and entering a free ticket draw!
The competition was promoted via banners and posters around the shopping centre plus advertising in the local press. The 2BR radio team presented live from the centre on the two Saturdays before the event to encourage customers to enter the competition plus to announce the lucky winners. Charter Walk retailers also played their part by encouraging customers to enter by giving out entry forms from the individual stores.
The crowd on the day was entertained by household names such as McFly, Scouting for Girls, Diversity, The Saturdays and headlining were N-Dubz. The day proved a great success and many families enjoyed a great day out! The organisers are already talking about running the event next year and there are plans to make it an annual event for Burnley. Plus making it even bigger and better than this year.
Congratulations to all the competition winners and we hope you enjoyed a great day out!
Earlier this month we took the wrappers off a huge upgrade to the editor for email™ – our fantastic email marketing application. This update has been months in the making, and is the sum total of hundreds of bits of feedback from passionate clients. We’re pretty excited about it, but before we dig into all the gory details, here’s a video showing some of the highlights.
For those that have an account with us, the first thing you probably noticed is the new vertical split window. Now that you can have an unlimited number of elements in a repeater, we switched to a vertical split so you can still see most of your email when you’re adding content. We’ve been using this version for a couple of weeks now, and it’s a huge improvement on the old horizontal split. Now you can see most or all of your email as you add content to it.
On top of the new layout, here are some of the exciting bits.
Put anything in a repeater:
By far the biggest request for the editor was more flexible repeaters, and it was the first thing we built into this update. Now you can have a repeater with 6 images, no images, 5 titles, whatever you like. You can also add your own labels for each of these elements so you and your clients know what you’re updating.
What this really means is total design flexibility. We can now throw any template design at the new editor, and it will still be a piece of cake for to add content to.
Design multiple layouts within the same repeater:
This is probably our favourite new feature for the editor. Let’s say you want a repeater where an image is sitting on the right for the first item, but on the left for the second, then back on the right again. Using our new tag (which we explain below), we can specify any combo of different layouts in the same repeater.
What’s more, we can even label each of these different layouts and provide the option of choosing which one to use and when.
Streamlined WYSIWYG editor:
The experience of formatting content was another area we wanted to nail with this update. The first step was simplifying things. We’ve combined all the different ways to add special items to your content into a single “Insert” button. You can add a link, personalization, social sharing buttons plus lots of other goodies all from a clean menu system.
We’ve also provided the ability to tweak the font size for any content. This was a hard one for us. As designers we think most of this should be pre-defined in the template itself, but the requests were overwhelming. To keep a balance we’ve kept the size options within a reasonable range to minimize the chances of client-uglification! We’ve also cleaned up and streamlined the way text is pasted (goodbye annoying popup), especially from places like Microsoft Word.
Add alt text to any images:
Another shortcoming of the old editor meant you couldn’t add alternate text to any images added to the email content. Image blocking in many email clients makes alt text a valuable fallback when an image isn’t loaded and it’s now super easy for clients to add or edit the alt text for any images they insert in their email.
We’re proud to announce the launch of a new website for Cobalt Park – http://www.morecobalt.co.uk. A re-vamp of a pioneering website devised in partnership with Allen Design Group over 5 years ago, it focuses on providing a community of over 10,500 employees with a dedicated travel and support service. It ultimately enhances their day-to-day experience and makes Cobalt Park one of the most attractive locations for employment in the North of England.
A few examples of our recommendations from their digital strategy include;
Cobalt Park is one of the UK’s largest office parks and provides over 2.25M sq ft of premium office space to some of the worlds largest organisations. These include; Balfour Beatty, G4S, Procter & Gamble, HP, Orange and Santander to name a few.
On Friday 24th June Frenchgate Shopping Centre launched its very own ‘Tour Bus’. Designed by the team at Allen Design Group the bus has certainly raised a few eyebrows following its first journey from the Frenchgate Shopping Centre.
The brief was to create an image that would become memorable and instantly recognised as Frenchgate Shopping Centre. Its Just Fantastic! Wow! It’s Great! These were just a few comments from passers by.
“This is a fantastic day for the Frenchgate Shopping Centre and First Transport. To be a part something like this, which has never been done before, is great. We are here for the people of Doncaster and we will strive to work in conjunction with other key businesses to deliver services like this so that the people of Doncaster benefit” comment Amanda Phillips, Centre Manager of the Frenchgate Shopping Centre.
The bus is aimed to target customers from a wider catchment around the region, bringing customers to the centre and as an extra bonus, customers travelling on the bus on the 27th of each month will receive free travel from 10:00am to 3:00pm to the Frenchgate Shopping Centre. That’s not all! Customers will be treated to special goody bags and extra incentives to visit the centre creating a unique travel experience. The bus will also be used to promote some of the local attractions in the town such as Doncaster Racecourse & Yorkshire Wildlife Park. Plus customers have the chance to meet players from Doncaster Rovers.
If you would like to know more about the Tour Bus please contact Andrew Brown on 01226 292921 or email ab@allendesigngroup.com.
