“You can’t understand what a business needs until you speak candidly and openly with the people who own, manage and work at it. Rogers communicates with hundreds of businesses every day in various ways, and we are learning from those conversations,” says Geoffrey Booth, a lead contributor to the newly launched Rogers RedBoard Biz Blog.

In August and September 2010, Thornley Fallis & 76design worked with Rogers to design, build and launch a new forum for discussions with small and medium businesses – RedBoard Biz.

Rogers created RedBoard Biz as a place to share proven tools and know-how that businesses can use to be more successful. Posts will contain news about Rogers products and services, and how businesses are using them. RedBoard Biz will also provide ideas and advice on a broad range of topics of interest to businesses.

The Rogers Redboard Biz Blog was developed following the great success of Rogers Redboard, a hub for consumers to discuss news and ideas as well as industry trends. Launched in March 2010, Redboard continues to gain in popularity.

Over the past few years, there have been a lot of high-profile campaigns against drunk driving. Whether it be through outreach in schools or various advertising campaigns in the media, the message has been hammered home: Don’t drink and drive!

With the introduction of so-called “hands-free” laws in a number of provinces, the issue of texting or using your phone while driving has gained significant traction. In fact, there are more similarities between this issue and inebriated driving than one might think. Driving while distracted is like driving after having four beers, and distracted drivers cause 8 in 10 accidents.

Armed with these facts, Thornley Fallis and 76design developed a Greater Toronto Area pilot campaign for Allstate Insurance Company of Canada aimed at sensitizing young drivers to this critical issue.

The campaign, Action Against Distraction, encourages teens to take the pledge against distracted driving and share it with their friends via social networks. Allstate is also giving away an iPad to one lucky pledge-taker.

To support the campaign, we produced a video that asked teens to tell us the craziest driving distraction they’ve ever seen. Some of the responses surprised us, including that of one teen who said his relative eats a bowl of cereal while driving.

Hundreds of teens have already taken the pledge, and you can too

In order to reinvigorate and revitalize downtown Ottawa businesses hit hard by the recession and the bus strike, Thornley Fallis and 76design  conceived, developed and executed the Picture it Downtown campaign for The City of Ottawa, where residents were encouraged to go downtown, snap a photo and share it online.

Point, shoot, share – a simple concept to get Ottawa excited about all it has to offer. The “Picture It Downtown” concept we developed served to visually promote downtown Ottawa as a whole, but also the eight specific areas being promoted:  Byward Market, Downtown Rideau, Sparks Street, Bank Street, The Glebe, Chinatown, Preston Street (Little Italy) and Wellington-West Village.

Residents could participate in the campaign contest to win daily ($50), weekly ($250) and grand ($500 to $1200) prizes by taking pictures of downtown activities and uploading them to the campaign website.

The campaign included a media launch event involving the Mayor, a website with a list of downtown activites, a description, videos and photos of each area, contest rules and regulations, a photo gallery for people to submit and view photos, and YouTube videos, featuring all that’s cool in several neighbourhoods, print, radio, online and transit advertising, weekly news releases and ongoing online outreach using other social media tools including Twitter and Flickr.

Thousands of people participated and competed for prizing provided by local businesses.

The campaign was to remind Ottawans of all the diverse experiences and excitement downtown Ottawa has to offer, and entice them to visit downtown — ultimately spending money while engaging in the various activities highlighted in the eight main areas being promoted.

For the City of Ottawa, running a marketing campaign with a heavy online and interactive component was not only a smart business and communications decision, but its creativity generated a lot of buzz within Ottawa and got people sharing ideas and photos of great things to do and see in the city.

The fall 2009 campaign resulted in over ten thousand unique visits to the campaign website, more than 1300 entries (photos uploaded to the website), significant earned media in targeted outlets, photo and video assets for future use by the City, and a general buzz across the City about the creativity of the campaign, particularly by government.

Picture it downtown would not have been possible without our lead technologist Brett Tackaberry, senior developer Steve Lounsbury, our superb designer Steve St. Pierre, the ad campaign led by Laura Mindorff, the videos by Ryan Knuth, writer and producer LeeEllen Carroll and our SEO expert Shaun Scanlon. Special thanks to our GM Keelan Green, who has a knack for assembling the best teams to deliver outstanding results.

Thank you IABC for the recognition. It’s nice to bask in the spotlight… and great to share successes. As I used to say in my former journalistic career, you’re only as good as your last story. So that means back to work. Right now.

As designers during these rapidly changing times it is more important than ever to exercise flexibility and adaptability in the approach we take to our work. With the competitive nature of our business, the ever evolving vehicles of communication and the state of our recovering economy, our clients have become pretty demanding when it comes to us delivering the goods. If we can’t deliver to their expectations, they know someone else is waiting in the wings, hungry and ready to take over. 

I said it before and I’ll continue to say it “one size does not fit all”. Each client we work for and every individual project we work on has unique objectives and goals and therefore we need to make sure that we take a unique approach to each one and that means being flexible. 

A lot of times it’s smooth sailing. Good ideas flow quickly and client “buy-in” happens without a hitch. However, there are those occasions when things become a little more challenging, when it takes more time and effort than normal to deliver “the goods”. It’s during these times that we ask ourselves “what happened?” The reality is a number of things could have happened and the fact of matter is you still need to deliver. Great designers find a way to adapt on the fly, extending themselves further and further with each new challenge that’s thrown their way. In the end it’s a win-win situation, the client gets delivery of a project and the designer has taken the opportunity to grow and work beyond their past limitations. We are fortunate enough at 76design to have on staff a group of great designers that have shown me the true meaning of adaptability and flexibility. I’d like to take this opportunity to say, “thanks guys!”

Being a designer is not always easy. Deadlines can be tight, projects can be challenging, clients can be really demanding. But being adaptable in the face of challenge makes it easier for everyone involved and that’s a good thing.

To further illustrate my point I leave you with a quote from the late great Bruce Lee, one of the greatest martial artists in history, “Be formless, shapeless like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.” 

I am pleased to announce  the launch of  Thornley Fallis & 76design’s new online presence.

Our new websites, conceptualized, designed and developed by  our team of creative masterminds and technology all-stars, exemplifies our capacity to push the limits of innovation  in the world of social media and digital marketing.

Thornley Fallis & 76design is made up of individuals with fun, smart and professional personalities; personalities that have all contributed to the success of marketing & communications projects. To fully demonstrate  the range of personalities, talent and intelligence our  team has to offer, we’ve done something  a little outside the box.  Something very brave… or maybe something very stupid – we’ll let you know ;-)

We’ve created a live LifeStream for every one of our employees. This is more than just a standard funny profile picture and biography.  It is an aggregate of their work and online profile, intended to paint a picture of who they are, what they do, what they think and what they are interested in.

To explore the diverse and unique characters at Thornley Fallis and jokers at 76design, take a look through our people profiles and find out who you could be working with on your next project.

Not only is our team exceptionally talented (and good-looking), we are experienced & passionate about the work we do.  While adventuring through our People pages, zoom over to the Work & Services sections to see what Thornley Fallis & 76design has to offer.

My colleagues and I hope you enjoy perusing through our new sites.

Oh and one more thing… if you like what you see, don’t hesitate to call us, we’d love to hear from you!

During the post-presentation free-for-all of a recent Third Tuesday Ottawa, I had my mind blown by smart cookie, often shift+control linked and former 76er, John Wiseman. We were talking about A vs B Testing and its slow and steady adoption within the web industry. We talked about the conversion of visitors into buyers via the testing of 2 variations of a site design, the evolution of focus-testing. It was the usual chatter until he drops this nugget on me.

RobotReplay — The Next Generation of Web Analytics

It’s a free web-based application where it tracks and records the mouse gestures of each visitor’s session. Did I mention that it’s FREE? Beyond being pretty damn cool, it allows clients to see for themselves where a visitor clicks first, what doesn’t get any attention at all and everything in between. The service is simple to implement into your site’s code and it records the session in tasty flash video on their servers. This is especially useful for those darn online forms that gets no love. Now you can see why.

Can it replace your current tools for collecting web metrics? No. Think of it as a beauty of a complement to your existing plan (if you have one that is). The dead-sexy kneepads to the thigh-high leg warmers, if you will.

I have yet to test it out on my personal sites/blogs, because evidently you need actual traffic for it to work.

This can help mash out those long battles over the size of buttons, where they’re placed, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn’t address the request by the client to make their logo 75% bigger. You’re still on your own for that one.

steve got the ball rolling with a couple of beauty posts documenting our new project at 76labs
it’s temporarily top secret
but our development process
is inspiring a whole lot of blogworthy thoughts…

it’s no secret that ours is a music project
so i’d like to talk about musicians
and what kind of lousy dough they make
because they make painully little
playing in cafes, bars, clubs, theatres, festivals
50 bucks sometimes
a hundred bucks a lot of the time
and for every quality gig that pays 2 or 3 hundred
another couple that pay nothing at all
which is why one of the main objectives of our new project is to increase the amount of money working musicians make!

and while it’s true that the legends are rich
there are very few of them
compared to the countless fabulous musicians
lifelong musicians
who live poor
and die
more or less penniless

and if you know how the music industry works
you’ll know that even selling a million records
or having a number one hit
is no guarantee of significant financial rewards
because there are so many predators, so many ways to get screwed
that time and again musicians get famous and go broke all at once

and so the project we’re working on is in large measure for them
real musicians who spend their lives making people feel good
we’re building an economic engine
unlike any other
based on an understanding of the real lives of musicians
and their fans
and designed for them and no one else
and when it’s ready to test (soon)
we hope you’ll give it a whirl
and let us know what you think
js

I saw an amazing public awareness campaign yesterday.

I came across it first in the bus on the way to work. One of the few overhead ad-panels I’ve ever really cackled at; a cartoonish illustration of a guy wearing a hardhat and a confused expression, with a bloody length of rebar stuck through his head.

“Win an MP3 player and other cool stuff” was written in big letters, along with “Workplace Safety” and “Join the contest and win!”. Highly incongruous and ironic copy given the image. The people next to me were cackling at it too.

I memorized the url on the ad and checked the website as soon as I got to work. And hey – it’s fantastic. Full of craziness and craftiness, and also lessons about workplace safety. It’s really excellent work and I salute whomever made it.

It turns out – as i was informed by my knowledgeable colleagues – that the client,
the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario has done this sort of thing before, in a freaky tv campaign called Prevent It, which can be seen on YouTube, here and here.

And what struck me is, “Here, at last, is a client that takes risks!” Hallelujah!
Possibly this is because risk is their stock and trade, and because lives are at stake, but they deserve credit anyway, because intelligent and effective risk-taking in advertising is all too rare in Canada, though in other places, like the UK, it is common. (I mean, who can forget this risque classic?)

Very few clients are willing to take risks, for all kinds of reasons, none of them good, and collectively we suffer for it. And individually those organizations that do not take risks suffer too, losing their edge and their energy, and failing to translate their strategic visions into reality.

Of course risk inevitably involves an element of, well, risk. Whereas when you go for the same-old same-old you can be sure that whatever else happens, you won’t fail. At least not by standing out. But from an organizational perspective that’s risky too, because in the end campaigns fail by not standing out. Everyone has seen that kind of familiar failure, mediocrity tacitly approved, simply because it’s less risky to ignore than to critique.

I think part of the problem is that organizations tend to diffuse risk-taking, and when individuals do go out on a limb and advocate a ‘risky’ strategy, they become vulnerable to scapegoating if – for whatever reason – the execution does not match the original vision. Maybe organizations should have designated ‘risk takers’ who are expected to take risks and aren’t so vulnerable to scapegoating.

Another reason organizations fail to take useful risks is that employees often seem to feel they need to shield their bosses from seeing ‘wacky’ ideas. Whereas, in my experience, the higher up the ladder you go the more open decision-makers are to taking risks, and the greater their ability to see the potential benefits of trying something new. So I guess what I’m saying is that organizations that want to succeed by standing out rather than fail by staying in line need to create a culture of risk-taking that reaches from top to bottom and back up again.

Innovation always includes a measure of risk. But creative, intelligent and targeted risk-taking can produce results that really do the job, that really succeed, and that really matter.

Anything else, as Ontario’s Worker Safety Insurance Board evidently knows, is asking for trouble.

It’s an old and tired tale by now – the employee who gets fired/harassed/suspended etc. for blogging.

But this case, involving an NCAA basketball coach being reprimanded for comments he made on his blog about the way his league is run, is of interest to me because it brings up the issue of blogs and sports, which is an intriguing topic.

Of course the most famous sports blogger, possibly the most famous blogger period, and certainly the richest, is Mark Cuban, (http://www.blogmaverick.com/) the billionaire owner of the NBA’s powerhouse Dallas Mavericks. Cuban made his billions (5 of them, if I recall correctly) by selling his audio/video streaming operation (the world’s first) called Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999. Cuban has always ‘gotten’ the web and he has been a tireless advocate for free speech, blogging and other progressive web initiatives ever since. He also posts regularly and answers many comments himself, something few billionaires and no other sports team owners do. (His post on the corporatization of YouTube was a killer: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/12/27/ripping-on-gootube-again2/) So, good for Mark Cuban. His team might even win the title this year, if they can get past the amazing Captain Canada and his Suns. (My money’s on the Suns.)

Another NBA blogpost that really knocked me out was this one, by former Raptor and current Milwaukee Buck, Charlie Villanueva: http://www.cv31.com/myjournal.html. This post was written last year by a 21 year-old NBA rookie who had just scored an amazing 48 points in a game, the most by a rookie since Michael Jordan, I believe. This post on his blog is not some typical ghost-written prefab pap nor is it sports journalism. It’s one young NBA player’s honest outpouring of feelings about an incredible experience he had just had. I loved it. I also found it indicative of the generation gap around blogging because I tried to imagine veteran sports stars sitting down and putting their feelings out there this way and it was inconceivable. (Barry Bonds: “So then I got another shot of ‘the clear’ and stepped to the plate…”)

It also made me think back to Ball Four (1970), the hilarious book by Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton that was the first ‘exposé’ of the life of a professional athlete, with its booze and hookers and juvenile hijinx. Bouton was excoriated by many (tho his book was a bestseller) for breaking a taboo that kept players’ realities shielded from their adoring fans. Of course the journalists were complicit in this, too. These days, things have changed, and the Internet has a lot to do with that. Just take a look at this behind-the-scenes video on YouTube from NBA draft day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QibGO_QKzQE. The average Joe wasn’t privy to this kind of thing in the days of Harold Ballard. (Just imagine what that behind-the-scenes footage would have revealed…Yikes!)

Then there’s the Raptorblog, (http://www.raptorblog.com/) which has been a furious hotbed of Raptor fandom for many years. (If you notice a certain theme, here…yes, I am a huge Raptors fan). Apart from the high level of critical discussion on this board, which sees itself as able to deliver much more informed and knowledgeable writing than do the basketball writers for Toronto’s daily newspapers, it’s interesting to note that the moderator of this blog just took a job at MSN.ca as a senior sports editor. Another example of how blogging is a good career move.

When I think about it, as much as I like the new dynamics that have made sports more transparent, on some level I do long for the good old days too, when sports heroes were heroes to their fans even if they were pricks in real life. I remember when I was a young boy, my dad wrote a fine book called Babe Ruth and the American Dream (Random House, out of print). I went out with him on some of his research trips and got to meet several hall-of-famers who had played with Ruth, including the likes of Frankie Frisch, (The Fordham Flash) and kindly old Harry Hooper (who had been on the 1927 Yankees, widely considered the greatest baseball team ever). It was awe-inspiring. And although my father’s book made no bones about Ruth’s coarseness in person (imagine MeatLoaf with a bat) it also highlighted the incredible respect and love that he engendered among Americans of every race and class. It’s hard to imagine anything like that today – in the era of OJ Simpson and Kobe Bryant, of Terrell Owens and Mark McGwire, of season-long player’s strikes and endless testing of the free agent market. Maybe Gretzky was the closest thing to Ruth we’ve known in a long time. Now if we can just get The Great One to blog…

Surfing blogs recently I came across this interesting yet entirely unsubstantiated fact: 60% of all new Internet content is now user-generated.

I don’t know if this stat is accurate, and probably never will, but it’s a reasonable estimate that reflects the web’s reemergence into a predominantly peer-to-peer publishing medium. I say reemergence because it was touch-and-go there for a while, in the shut-down-Napster, kill-iCraveTV, broadcast convergence mania of some years back, when the global content conglomerates tried to turn the web into a one-to-many medium. As many of us predicted, however, that attempt was doomed. Thanks to MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, LinkedIn, and countless terabytes of user-generated content, the inherently p2p nature of the web is now a mainstream fact. Only the real dinosaurs (like the music industry) still believe in the bad old dream of the top-down web. (Though admittedly there may still be important battles ahead. See my recent article Stopping the Copyright Wars of 2017 for my take on what those battles might be).

What would be really interesting would be to know what percentage of all viewed content is user-generated. If that’s a bit too much to ask we can nonetheless get a clear picture of the world’s surfing habits by surveying global website rankings. Currently, of the world’s 16 most popular online destinations, 10 are English-language websites. They are:

1.Yahoo
2. MSN
3. Google
4. MySpace
5. YouTube
6. Orkut
7. Windows Live
8. Wikipedia
9. eBay
10. Blogger

In other words the top 10 sites are:

1. Search engine
2. Microsoft portal
3. Search engine
4. music-themed community site driven by user-generated content
5. video-themed community site driven by user-generated content
6. dating-themed community site driven by user-generated content
7. search engine
8. encyclopedia-themed site driven by user-generated content
9. auction-themed community site driven by user-generated content
10. blog-themed community site driven by user-generated content

If anyone still has doubts about the power of user-generated content, I think this data speaks for itself.