Fortnotes 8

Posted by Roo - 24/03/11 at 10:03:00 pm

[Number eight in a fortnightly series of brain dumps: what I'm working on, wondering and worrying about.]

I spent some time out of the office at a shoot for Cravendale. We were there to help Bertrum Thumbcat (the ringleader of the polydactyl cats in the current Cravendale campaign) make some YouTube videos in which he assesses the capabilities of the recently evolving race of cats with thumbs, putting them to to test for his own satisfaction and to prove a point to humans who might question their abilities. Examples included Can a Thumbcat Blend (which was perhaps the question asked most frequently), Can a Thumbcat play checkers and many more.

Since then, I’ve been working fairly solidly on Honda. Lots going on, some really interesting work coming together. I’m writing strategy stuff and trying to be helpful.

I have been at W+K London for over three months now, which is long enough that various employee benefits kick in including a pension, health & dental, etc. I’m finding it hard to believe that more than a quarter of a year has passed since I joined. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m really enjoying it. It’s hard, chaotic and can be stressful, but people talk about coming to W+K to do the best work of their lives, and I hope that will be true for me too.

I visited the Artfinder team with Dan Hon. They’re a nice bunch and they’re working on some very interesting stuff.

Introducing interesting people to each other remains one of the nicest bits of my new job. Avoiding spreading myself too thin, and making sure that when I get involved with something I’ve got the time to see it through properly, is the hardest. Mainly because I want to say ‘yes’ to absolutely everything.

New starter: Matt Simpson (previously Lead Community Manager at Face). He’ll initially be spending most of his time on Honda and Nestea, but will be getting stuck in to all sorts of other projects too. He was even prepared, on his very first day, to give a presentation to the rest of the Honda Europe team at W+K, researching and preparing examples of community activity around Honda online. As though we’ve just thrown him out of some sort of moving vehicle, he “hit the ground running” and stayed upright very impressively.

In other news, I (still) have a cold. I’ve had it for a couple of months and I’m very bored of it. Spring is springing, it’s lighter in the mornings. I didn’t miss not being at SXSW one bit.

Fortnotes the seventh

Posted by Roo - 11/03/11 at 12:03:00 pm

[Being the seventh in a fortnightly series of brain dumps: what I'm working on, wondering and worrying about.]

The past couple of weeks have largely been about cats with thumbs for me. If you’ve bumped into me and I’ve appeared a bit distracted, it’s probably because I’ve been thinking about polydactyl cats taking over the internet.

It started with a tense weekend. A certain video started to “go viral” on the “interwebs” quite a big way; the whole team were keeping a close eye on the tone of the comments and the inbound links over the weekend. Then, just as that was calming down, the Cravendale ‘cats with thumbs’ TV campaign launched. I think it’s fair to say that people seem to like it. They’re talking about it too. Weekly mentions of Cravendale on Twitter increased 2226% (21st – 27th Feb vs 28th Feb – 6th March), within a week the ad was viewed over a million times on YouTube. It’s now up to 1.6M views and that video has already been shared on Facebook over 211,000 times. Oh yes.

Bertrum Thumbcat, the ringleader of the polydactyl cats (you can see him picking up a rubber ball in the ad) has used his dextrousness to access Facebook and Twitter and is attracting exactly the sort of passionate involvement from a lot of fans, and making even more people laugh. I was going to write some more about the campaign, but ‘What Katie Does’ has described it so well that I’ll just link to that for now.

As you can imagine, I’m really excited to be involved with such a fun project; I get to work with some properly amazing people. I’m heading to Worthing for a couple of days next week to join the team as the next stage of Bertum’s master plan becomes a reality.

Aside from cats with thumbs, I’ve been spending time working on stuff for Honda, a bit of Fairtrade (what with it being Fairtrade Fortnight and everything), some early work for P&G and not nearly enough to be helpful on Nokia. Plus the usual collection of secret projects, recruitment, longer term projects and meeting nice people.

In fact, a bunch of really interesting and nice people started in the past fortnight, including: Kirsten Rutherford and Lisa Jelliffe lovely antipodean creatives whose collaboration with Mentalgassi you might recognise; Romans Dobzanskis is our new senior creative technologist (he’s a semantic web guru and was previously head of creative tech at Saatchi & Saatchi London); Gavin Gordon-Rogers (previously Executive Creative Director at Glue) joins as Andy Cameron’s ‘lieutenant’ as well as being the Interactive Creative Director for Nokia. They’re all lovely and I’m looking forward to working with them all.

Pondering:

New terminology: NPD = new product development. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m partly writing these down so I can track my understanding of the weird industry lexicon, and partly so I have somewhere to look them up when I forget them again. :-)

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