Sideshow

It's time for retro marketing

It's what the customer wants that counts, Follow your gut first, Markets are conversations, Customers don't know what they really want, It's about telling stories, Be your own client, Etc, etc...

If I grabbed 10 books off of my shelf I could find researched theses on each of the concepts listed above and many more.

I find myself wondering if the "new era" of marketing is quickly becoming the cluttered noise that it is hoping to rise above. The latest "Fad" based on a few case studies where a different approach proved successful.

It reminds me of similar cycles in food and fashion:

Carbs are good, carbs are bad, protein only, protein only is bad, etc..

Ties are wide, ties are narrow, no ties, ties are back, etc...

Is marketing evolving or is it merely moving in a fad like cycle in the same way diets and fashions move in and out of style?

Fad Marketing = Fad Diets = Fashion Trends

Advertising is not as dead as some would think, word of mouth is not the singular answer and blogs are not the only way to go forward.

For all the new ideas being presented in order to find the front edge of the envelope, it is worth noting that the timeless wisdom of the likes of Peter Drucker, Napoleon Hill and Nelson Rockefeller remain highly effective. Follow the teachings of any of these authors today and you will still find success.

As companies accelerate to embrace all these "New Marketing" ideas, the classics become more surprising, more novel and more effective.

At some point, everything old is new again. Simple beats complicated. Comfort beats confusion.

"Retro Marketing" is just around the corner.

Ultracet Instead

Ultracet is a prescription medication for pain relief distributed by Ortho McNeil part of Johnson & Johnson group. Ultracet Instead was a nation-wide marketing campaign developed to boost results.

The brief:

In partnership with Dig Business Design, through the Falk Group, we were commissioned to create a light presentation to aid with the training of the sales reps.

The results:

A well executed and engaging award-winning presentation that that would load as it was playing and deliver its key messages effectively by using key phrases and colourful imagery whilst a professional voice-over delivered the spoken content.
In June of 2005 the Ultracet Instead presentation was awarded a Bronze Medal in the 2005 IN-AWE awards held by the Medical Marketing Association in the USA.

Barthco.com

Barthco is a nationally ranked provider of worldwide customs brokerage and international freight forwarding services and of the largest privately-held logistic organizations in the United States.

The Goal

As part of a wider strategic project we were commissioned to redesign the Barthco website and corporate branding.

The Result

The makeover was styled around two main objectives. Modernise the company's image and make the site useful to both employees and customers alike. We redesigned the company's identity and one of the features we developed for the website was a Newsroom that agregates a number of different RSS feeds from various industry sources, as well as internally written news, and allows the site's visitors to subscribe to their choice of feeds.
Compared below are the before and after versions of the Locations page and the Customs Brokerage page respectively.

World Memory Challenge

The Online World Memory Challenge is a website where you can take a number of interesting memory tests to see how good your memory really is. The site records various statistics including score, name, gender, age and country and charts the top in each category.

The brief:

"Buzan is a business that is focused on changing the way the world learns for the better and helping everyone to better understand - and then get more from - their amazing brain"
Buzan Ltd. and the work of Tony Buzan has been shared with millions of people around the planet and had a measurable, material impact on peoples everyday lives; from shopping lists to school homework, to business planning.
We were commissioned by Buzan Ltd in association with Tony Buzan to develop a database driven competition website with series of games that would test and measure peoples ability to memorise. By holding the challenge on line it would becomce the biggest and most comprehensive memory challenge in the world.

The results:

OWMC was built using Flash MX to on the client side and PHP on the server side using the Macromedia Remoting AMF protocol for Remote Procedure Calls. The PHP Remoting package and Flash seamlessly maintain the user session allowing for a smooth single-page application experience as opposed to the constant page refreshes associated with a pure HTML solution. All game logic, timing and scoring takes place on the server to prevent cheating as much as possible and to avoid the risk of someone releasing a "cheat" version of the game to the public allowing for mass cheating. Loading times were kept to a minimum by keeping all imagery assets externally and only preloading the necessary ones on a game-by-game basis.

 

WinOnline

WinOnline is a games website that offers registered users the change to win prizes by playing games of chance.

The brief:

We were commissioned to develop a games site that could offer different prizes from different sponsors. Players would be required to register and then log in to play the different games. The games system would need a back-end to allow the WinOnline admin to change prizes, add images, and alter the odds of winning for the different games as required.

The results:

We created a Flash gaming engine that communicates with the server using the SOAP RPC protocol. Sessions are authenticated on every SOAP request, which allows matching requests coming from Flash with the session database, facilitating the games engine to identify users when they play the flash game. The administration system includes a registration system to manage the users as well as a time and quantity based weighed selection algorithm to allow the admin to alter the win frequency of the different games.