News and blog

Earlier this week, our friendly search giant released Google Instant to the world. This huge change to Google’s search engine delivers dynamic real-time search results as you type with no clicking required! (Collective “WOW!”). Google actually calls it “search before you type” because Google Instant predicts what you’re about to type and delivers search results based on those predictions. With predictive search and instant results, you can often get the answer you want much faster.

Are these changes going to affect the way we look at SEO? Only time will tell.

I’m personally very impressed with the changes and in order to demonstrate my enthusiasm, I’ve already submitted the new feature to rigorous scientific testing. As a result of which, I can now reveal the alphabet according to Google.co.uk…

“Awesome!” people say, confirming with every utterance that it has become today’s superlative of choice. Though as a statement, it is, in my opinion, somewhat subjective: one man’s awesome is another man’s average.

The following is an abridged version of an important and lengthy Friday afternoon debate in 2006. Real names have been removed to protect the individuals concerned.

Number 23 in a neverending series: Jailbreak

Nestlé went live last week with their latest campaign for the nation’s favourite mint-with-a-hole, the venerable Polo.

Philip K. Dick was right all along…

The growth of email marketing continues unabated with the latest Email Census recording that email marketing spend has risen from 14% to 17% of total digital marketing spend in the UK. It has now therefore really arrived as a core marketing tactic for many companies and it is essential to maximise its effectiveness and return on investment.

Gently, now…

Adolescent males of yesteryear will fondly recall the formative influence of Cadbury’s flake advertising upon our hormonal selves. Right up there with the Damart thermals catalogue and a scantily clad Debbie McGee. If you know what I mean.

I sit in front of the computer, fingers frozen, throat tightening, stomach tensed. I stare at the screen, the cursor flashing: it demands words from me, but I haven’t got anything to give.

Swifter, higher, stronger… richer

 There was some controversy during the recent FIFA World Cup in South Africa relating to the promotional activities of brands which were not officially sanctioned partners of the tournament, and their alleged, “unauthorised” attempts to capitalise on that sporting jamboree.

My god, it’s full of stars… 

I wasn’t sure what to title our latest blog, so why did I plump for the above? Well we all know how Carlsberg’s famous strapline goes, and as we at Madhouse hosted our first free best practice seminar earlier this month, it was a phrase that I couldn’t help bringing to mind.

It’s hardly contentious to state that Pablo Picasso was probably the greatest artist of the twentieth century: his life and career have been explored in forensic detail ever since his death in 1973. However, Tate Liverpool’s ‘Picasso: Peace and Freedom’ show is currently offering art lovers a great opportunity to investigate one of the less celebrated aspects of Brand Picasso: namely, his thirty-plus years as a card-carrying member of the French Communist Party. Typically, Picasso is characterised as something of a playboy, an incorrigible individualist, but this exhibition argues that this reading ignores his commitment to a number of progressive causes, not least his work on behalf of the many World Peace Congresses that occurred in Europe throughout the nineteen-fifties.

Another Science Fiction: Advertising the space race 1957-1962

Megan Prelinger (Blast Books, 2010)

There’s no need to provide a book review, you can check out the NY Times’ own piece here:

At Madhouse, we get lots of requests to source various branded items for clients and sports teams – particularly clothing. Recently, we have created some striking and very popular ‘street style’ hoodies for kids’ sports team.

See what happens when you don’t do your research!

The testimonial. Number twelve in every good marketeer’s go-to book of tricks. And when you’re communicating those all-important endorsements through the medium of radio it can mean only one thing: hit the streets kids, it’s voxpop time.

Once upon a time, we named ourselves Madhouse. The ‘mad’ bit stood for ‘marketing’, ‘advertising’, ‘design’. And that was more or less enough to sum up what we did.

Now though, it would maybe be more difficult to summarise the business in such a snappy way. We’re still Madhouse of course; that’s our name. But as an integrated marketing agency, our services extend into all kinds of areas that we perhaps didn’t imagine back in the nineties.

Madhouse might be based in land-locked Manchester, but recently we’ve been immersed in a world of foam-crested breakers, sun-bleached hair and the salty tang of the ocean. Not that we’ve moved the studio to Bondi. It’s just that we’ve been creating a new surf-based website for the soft drink specialists Calypso.

In just a few short years, social media has transformed the marketing landscape. As an integrated agency, Madhouse has worked hard to understand the implications so that we can give our clients the benefit of our knowledge; for many, it is already an essential element in the marketing mix. On the other hand, the use of social media is sometimes presented as a miraculous cure for all ills – something that just needs to be mentioned in order for it to work its magic.

When it comes to looking after ourselves here at Madhouse, we reckon we scrub up fairly well when we need to. Certainly, the clouds of cologne that billow round the office before any agency night out would suggest that we all take at least a little pride in our appearance. So perhaps that’s why we’ve managed such a great job on four prestigious personal care websites for Lornamead?

Delivering effective campaigns for any product or service is a source of great pleasure here at Madhouse. After all, it’s what we’re good at. However, when that product is one that can transform the experience of people with serious medical conditions – well, that gives us an extra glow of satisfaction.

I did something completely different this morning: I flew in a hot air balloon! It was a birthday present from my good lady wife, and what a fantastic experience it was.

Sixteen of us (yes, sixteen!) clambered into the basket at 6am in the middle of a remote Cheshire field on a glorious sunny morning and we quickly soared to 2,000 feet.

Your name here?

A random thought on the movie business occurred to me recently, prompted by Russell Crowe’s mini-tantrum during a Radio 4 interview, in which it was suggested that the Aussie bruiser might have lapsed into an Irish lilt during his starring role in “Robin Hood” – Hollywood’s latest blockbuster recycling initiative.

Here is “Jabulani” – the official, FIFA-sanctioned ball for the World Cup:

According to the magnificent promotional blather, Jabulani is…

No. 135 in an ongoing series… Birds Ice Magic

Transparency. Never a bad thing in my book. Take the relationship between agency and client: the work that we produce is driven by the client’s brief. If the client isn’t clear and concise in their statement of requirements/goals, then it is reflected in the end result. Things can be….confused.

Search engine optimisation – which convention dictates we must abbreviate to SEO – can be a bit of a minefield really. There are lots of different agencies out there, and a lot of different selling points which a provider can use to try and ‘hook’ a potential client.

However, ultimately, SEO is all about understanding your target audience – and how to reach them at their most receptive. That’s certainly how we approach campaigns at Madhouse, and it’s a strategy that our clients seem to like. But if we’re talking about REALLY effective use of SEO then, for my money, there can only be one winner.

I recently attended SAScon in Manchester – that’s the Search, Analytics and Social Media Conference – and while I was there, I listened to an interesting presentation by Bruce Daisley from YouTube.

Although it was supposed to be a fairly neutral look at the future of video on the internet, Bruce did a fairly slick sales job about YouTube and the expanding list of advertising opportunities on that site.

The RAF touches down in Albert Square

The Dutch 300m relay team were pleased with their success…

On Sunday, Manchester hosted its annual Great Run. The 10 kilometre road race is entered by about 40,000 people, and takes runners around the streets of Manchester, out to Old Trafford, past the Imperial War Museum in Salford, and back to town again.

Madhouse is named for the disciplines of marketing, advertising and design – our core business (together these days with digital, of course).

We were nevertheless quite tickled to find the following on Wikipedia the other day:

Architectural competitions can be exciting affairs, particularly when they’re accompanied by exhibitions that actively invite public comment and participation. They feature proposals for imagined futures, and the magic lies in the possibility that the potential buildings might become real – and we, as viewers, get the chance to have our say. Dinky little wooden models take on giant dimensions in our minds; slick CGI renders act as templates to be laid over reality; video presentations and expensively bound brochures tempt us into casting our vote in what can seem like an architectural ‘X Factor’ showdown.

Communication is moving fast. No, not fast; it’s moving at break-neck speed, and it’s never been easier to access information and, in particular, to pass comment to a mass market. Businesses and organisations are still getting to grips with much social media, but while the ‘understanding, trying and refining’ phase rolls on, it’s important to remember that Tweeting as part of the marketing mix must be carefully thought out.

With the well documented demise of traditional media such as TV, press and outdoor, and the increasing emphasis on social/online media plus the famous success of Barrack Obama’s social media campaign in the US Presidential election, surely it was on the cards for the UK to follow suit and for us to expect a seismic shift in marketing activity via the web for the 2010 general election.

They say the simple ideas are often the best, and surely there is no better example than Pacman.

First released on May 22^nd 1980 in Japan, it became an icon of the decade’s culture. There were spin off games, a TV show and merchandise galore, all driven by the game’s popularity. The fact that the original Pacman is still enjoyed by gamers today is testament to Namco’s basic format.

I recently blogged about the ways in which people ‘read’ a web page, and on the same theme, I’m now following up with a related post.

Here is a heat map of users interacting with the Firefox menu bar.

We as marketeers are only too aware of the clamour of proliferated media today, and indeed we’d like to think of ourselves as proficient exponents of these instruments.

As valuable as these tools are to us and our clients, it’s nice to know also that there are mavericks standing out from the crowd and using mass marketing techniques to amplify the voices of the otherwise unheard.

Just a quick one, but I saw this quintessentially Mancunian road sign on the journey into work and it cheered me up on an otherwise grey and miserable morning. I had to take a shot of it in ‘Isolation’ as I strolled past. Let’s hope the roadworks won’t tear us apart.

I’ve compiled a list of links to new and emerging technologies that are worth following. Some of them take the core of other products and add functionality, while some have spotted a new niche in the market. Most importantly, it seems that a few of them have been developed with Web 3.0 in mind…

Mobile

Most apps have been offering subscribers information based on their specific location but Loopt blends the love of social networking with location-based services. It detects mobile friends in your vicinity and lets you know where they are with the option of making contact.

Organisations are poised and ready, eyeing each other warily, stripping off Lycra and limbering up as they proceed to their blocks… only, no-one has told them what race this is.

The New York Times reports on the shuffling for position of marketers as they wait for the much anticipated iPad – not so they can watch Okay Go’s latest madcap video, but for the love of the almighty mean green. (Money, that is).

Whether you’ve been on the iPhone band wagon for a while or you’ve just given in and got yourself one, here are a few apps that you need to get hold of – just in case you haven’t already! And if you haven’t got an iPhone, just see what you’re missing out on!

Here’s a pic of a stretch of the incredibly important Bridgewater canal in the middle of the city of Manchester, taken recently at lunchtime en route to The Sevenoak pub up in Chinatown for a smooth pint of Black Sheep.

The Bridgewater turbo-powered the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century that transformed the world (sorry about that folks – Manchester, so much to answer for…), but it holds a more recent significance for all you advertising heads in the room.

Sponsored walks, sponsored swims, sponsored sitting in baths of baked beans. However, you choose to raise cash for charity, the chances are the internet has changed the way you do it.

My two young lads did a three mile walk recently for Sport Relief – with mum and dad in hot pursuit of course. And it seemed that the most effective way of getting the tenners rolling in was for us parents to whack up a status on our Facebook profiles appealing for cash via the Sport Relief website.

So, after a two-year foray into the world of social networking, AOL has decided to bid farewell to Bebo. You remember Bebo, right? All the kids are doing it. Well, they were. At the time of purchase (Bebo was a snip at $850m) it was widely considered to be the prime challenger to Facebook on the web 2.0 horizon. Its predominantly youthful demographic supposedly the perfect springboard for all sorts of lucrative brand activity.

Online though, it’s evolve or die – and the sad fact is that Bebo has lagged waaaaay behind.

As Tiger Woods teed off at the US Masters yesterday, Nike launched their latest ad to feature not only the newly-controversial golfing superstar, but, a little spookily, the voice of his dead father, too.

Instead of running a mile from one of their hottest promotional properties when the going got tough (as many a sponsor would; think Kate Moss, Kerry Katona, Peaches Geldof… the list goes on), the global sports and fashion brand has adopted a rather different approach: go for it with all guns blazing. While the likes of Pepsi, and Procter & Gamble’s Gillette brand hit the panic button, pumping out dated, re-cut, re-hashed and Tiger-less ads to fill the void, Nike has taken its own advice: Just do it – boldly standing by their man and slapping the swoosh front-and-centre.

So is this ad, and the strategy behind it, tasteless golfsploitation or marketing genius? So far, opinion is divided. A Yahoo poll is showing 63% (of some 166,000-ish respondents) saying they love it, while a separate vote on celebrity site TMZ finds 77% of 90,000-odd readers calling it marketing bullsh*t.

I thought this might make for a pretty interesting post. In my daily search of the world wide web for all things geeky, I recently came across a study carried out by Eyetrack III.  In the hope of trying to answer some difficult questions regarding best practice in web design, they mapped the eye movements of a bunch of people looking at a variety of websites, and have revealed some pretty interesting stuff about how we look at the web. So… is there a template that the user will intuitively understand, knowing where to click without really thinking about it and without being bogged down spending time learning how to interact with it?

The results were pretty interesting (to me anyway) and not always what you’d expect.

Or “what I did last night” – a.k.a. the Madhouse staff outing to Bellevue dog track.

You’ll be pleased to see, dear reader, that we’ve avoided a tired, obvious “going to the dogs” pun in the above headline. Consummate pro’s here, you know. Anyway, last evening the Madhouse team got gussied up and hit the races; some gambling novices, some hardened tote-heads, a wonderfully surreal time was had by all (see what we did there?).

Actually, it was brilliant. Bellevue is a fab slice of old school Manc fun, nestled over in the east of our fair city between Longsight and Openshaw. A packed house for a Thursday night, young and old, a hearty spot of grub and a well-priced pint, plus a dozen exciting races and betting service at your table – what could be better?!

It’s always satisfying to win a new account as a result of a keenly contested pitch, and having recently discovered that our work for K3’s SYSPRO ERP system has been successful, it’s no wonder that there have been a few big grins around the Madhouse studio in the last few weeks.

Briefly…

For those of us sat firmly in the PC camp, writing the creative brief is our chance to put the spreadsheets and project plans aside for a while and flex our creative muscles at those Macs. There is no better feeling than sitting down to brief the creative team knowing that the simple piece of paper you hold in your hand will result in fantastic (you hope!) creative work. Starting the creative brief feels like opening the front page on that new exercise book – it’s a clean sheet of paper that has the potential to either depress the creative team beyond belief or inspire them and remind them why they love their job.

I say reluctant but, if I’m honest, contributing to the Madhouse blog is an ideal way for me to spend the commute to work. I just hope that you find the content as interesting as I did to write.

If you go back to August 2006, as MySpace attracted its 100 millionth member, I would’ve staked my house on the site becoming the internet’s primary destination. Meanwhile, approximately seven million people were using the much smaller, Harvard dorm born, Facebook.

In the two years that followed, Facebook caught, and subsequently eclipsed, MySpace. By January of this year, Facebook had become a tool for over half of the United States – its 350 million active users encompassing a whopping 54% of US citizens. It also leapfrogged Yahoo as the second most visited site in the States, trailing only to the perennial leader – Google.

At Madhouse, we’re proud of our track record of helping clients achieve great things with their integrated marketing campaigns, and new arrival Stuart Lunn is going to help us spread the word even further. As Business Development Manager, Stuart will be building our relationships with existing clients, helping them get even more out of their marketing budgets, as well as extending a friendly hand to those with whom we haven’t yet worked.

Stuart arrives at Madhouse from the Media Initiatives Group, bringing a wealth of sales and planning experience, particularly in the digital field. His skills will add even greater depth to our line-up of talented individuals, and we’re looking forward to forging plenty of new connections thanks to Stuart’s distinctive brand of business know-how.

Almost every business has a website these days, but not every business site really performs as well as it should. If your site doesn’t appear in the search engine results for the search terms that are most relevant to your business, then it could be that you are being missed by the people who most need to find you. But at Madhouse, we aim to give you a helping hand – for free!

Madhouse has been creating effective integrated marketing campaigns for over eleven years now. It’s little wonder then that we have developed a systematic six-part method for the planning, creation and execution of campaigns – a method that places the emphasis firmly on creating measurable results for our clients.

When we begin working with a new client, we set out to form a genuine two-way relationship; that way we can start to really understand the business, the market and the client’s place in it. We launch each of these new relationships with a planning session at which Madhouse team members get together with client representatives to look in depth at the product, the target audience and the ways in which it differs from the competition.

Over at Tate Liverpool, the latest show to take over the fourth floor galleries is called ‘Afro modern: journeys through the black Atlantic‘: it’s an exploration of the cross-pollination that took place between artists in Africa, America and Europe during the twentieth century.

Conventional art history tells us about the influence that African art had on the Cubists, but this exhibition offers the chance to consider how far this appreciation went beyond merely taking delight in the ‘primitive’ or the ‘exotic’, and whether it amounted to a genuine two-way conversation between cultures. We’re aware of the extent to which Picasso (for instance) appropriated African forms, but less well known are the ways in which European modernism influenced black artists in Africa and the States.

Whether we’re revelling in some unexpected sunshine or – more likely – having a grumble about the rain, we can’t escape the fact that the seasons of the year are always with us. And at Madhouse, it’s a subject we’re always thinking about on behalf of one our most long-standing clients.

As an integrated marketing agency, we are well used to creating effective websites on behalf of our clients, but we thought it was about time we dispensed some tender loving care on our own internet offering.

So for the past few months we’ve been beavering away behind the scenes to create a leaner, meaner Madhouse web presence, and having transformed it from top to bottom, it’s now up and running for the whole world to see.

One of the great things about the Madhouse studio is its location in the heart of Manchester. As well as the advantages of being connected to the city’s vibrant creative sector – not to mention the fantastic shopping and wonderful nearby sandwich shops! – it also means there’s a wealth of interesting galleries on our doorstep. And one that always delivers a satisfying lunch-time visit is the Cube Gallery just round the corner on Portland Street.

It has to start somewhere, so here goes: the Madhouse blog emerges blinking into the daylight, gets a resounding ‘thwack!’ on the rear end, and begins bawling for all it’s worth.

Consider this post to be the first squawk from our virgin voice-box.