Rise to – The Enterprise Challenge (January through to the 18^th March 2012)

We have a superb history of mentoring, supporting, and developing talent at Bright Blue Day. We give some of our time, we support initiatives and we genuinely play our part in bringing on the next generation of talent.

The ‘Rise To’ challenge is no exception. We mentor 6 graduate students from Bournemouth University – from Marketing, PR and Interactive Media. Their challenge is to develop a campaign and to then get ‘thanks’ from people, like you dear reader. The number of ‘Thanks’ is how their success will be measured.

So, please visit this site, it will take you one minute, and have a look at their campaign, and importantly please leave your thanks. Its anonymous if you want it to be.

http://www.thankstofirefighters.co.uk/

Thank you genuinely for your support, it means a lot to them.

Jonathan and the Bright Blue Day team.

@ BrightBlueDay

There is lots more information on the Rise To Challenge if you follow the link below;

http://www.thanksto.com/

Our February newsletter featuring our latest Facebook app It's a Stick Up.

http://bbd.createsend1.com/t/ViewEmail/y/5D61DBAAF58CED90

Enjoy!

At BBD we have a tradition that goes back many years. On the last Friday of every month, and increasingly other Fridays as well, we hold a ‘Soup Kitchen’ session in the boardroom. It is a forum where anyone can present anything they like on anything they like, of for that matter anything they don’t! This Friday Ollie presented the following, ok so you don’t get his commentary, but enjoy the work. Any comments or thoughts, then share them with us @brightblueday

Ads Last Week (and beyond!) 

by Ollie Flippence (follow me at @oflippence for more weekly inspiration)

Some inspiring campaigns and visual inspiration from last week (and beyond)!

Charity 

The first gallery is comprised of ad campaigns from charitable organisations/ foundations.

Links are as follows:

1: WWF - Hand Drawn

2: ALCC - Mozambique Super Awareness Campaign

 

Social/ tech

This second gallery includes strategic campaigns that reach into the digital realm and utilise social media and new technologies. 

Links are as follows:

1: Mini - Fan the Flame

2: BMW - Interactive Projection

 

Concept

This gallery has ads that are solely concept based and executed to a high standard. 

Links are as follows:

1: Adidas - Run faster. Play faster. Get the jersey faster.

2: Tropicana - Brighter Mornings

3: Lego - Tell a story

4: Google Maps - Explore your world

Inspiration

This final gallery includes some inspirational content discovered last week.

Links are as follows:

1: Years - Modified record player

2: Earth - Time lapse from the ISS

 

Additional links (time-lapse videos)

The additional links listed below are for time lapse/ stop motion and super slow mo videos that bring a new perspective to everyday life.

A stop motion history of the world

Deadline - Post-it stop motion

TimeScapes

Traffic has never been this beautiful

PROTEIGON

Phantom Cocktails

Visualizing Photons in Motion at a Trillion Frames Per Second

Time is Nothing - Around The World Time Lapse

ISS Passes Over Stormy Africa (w/Milky Way)

Yosemite HD

 

 

‘Its a Wrap’ winner

Yep, its all over. The Bright Blue Day Christmas Game competition is now closed. We had hundreds and hundreds of plays, and a fair bunch got them all correct. For those of you interested the answers were;

Rubiks cube
Lego
Gameboy
Spacehopper
Etch-a-sketch
Barbie
Simon
Speak and spell
Transformer
He man
Tamagotchi
My little pony

Our postman drew the winning name out of the hat on Monday 9^th of January 2012, and it was Andrew More. He gets himself a box of retro games including Hungry Hippos, Buckaroo and Kerplunk to name a few. Well done Andrew.

Virgin and British Heart Foundation

And while you are reading this discussions around Bright Blue Day are that we are loving this, the new Virgin Money advertising campaign and of course the British Heat Foundations January campaign. 2 really great starts to the new year...

...and we would not be doing our job correctly if we did not remind you of our hugely successful campaign from a few years back...

http://www.brightblueday.co.uk/work/childhood-obesity

here’s to a great New Year, from all of us at Bright Blue Day

@brightblueday

www.Brightblueday.co.uk

What makes Christmas... Christmas?

That's right. PRESENTS!

For a chance to win some great nostalgic games,

guess which ones are inside the 12 wrapped presents.

If you get stuck, you can skip to the next

but you must get them all correct for a chance to win!

Tweet us @brightblueday for tips!

Play the game here;

www.brightblueday.co.uk

Good luck and Merry Christmas!

Enjoy!

http://bbd.cmail2.com/t/ViewEmail/y/D4D1D6499856BD0A/923B9557ACC4B72B6D5E5F9A...

 

We are proud to anounce that the new UKSP website has won the top prize at the Caterer and Hotelkeeper Web Awards. It impressed judges with its interactive elements and “attractive design with a lot of calls to action that encourage users to explore the site further”.

We were tasked with the full remit from concept through to development, content creation and population. We began with full stakeholder workshops and collated recent audience research to get a full and common understanding of the objectives and audience needs. From here we designed to vision through site maps, wireframes and visuals. Full content requirements and maps were produced at this stage. Development of the CMS and functionality ensued, with rich content creation and bespoke technology features created in parallel. The integration of this into fully functioning prototypes for testing was followed by full deployment.

We delivered the complete site experience, content and CMS platform. This was supported with the bespoke development of tools, such as the interactive career map and a background widget that pulls in jobs from partner sites. We also developed a number of launch materials including an introduction video for the parlaimentary launch.

Affiliated to the skills council for hospitality, leisure, travel and tourism (HLTT), UKSP’s remit is to promote the sector as a positive and viable career choice. They charged us with bringing the options to life in a compelling way to the youth audience.

Over 250 employers and near on 200 training providers are now profiles in UKSP, offering thousands of jobs and courses. Traffic has increased by 20% and proportion of organic search doubled. The new career map is used by numerous schools and colleges.

 

 

 

 

Weeks of hard work and preparation paid off when over 200 friends, family, clients and colleagues – past and present – joined us to celebrate our landmark anniversary at the Bright Blue Day 50th Year Exhibition in our offices on Poole Quay.

The entire Bright Blue Day team pulled together to create displays, arrange tours, organise presentations and even bake cakes, before we welcomed our first guests.

Canapés were served and specially produced champagne flowed (for the adults, anyway) as guests enjoyed an exclusive viewing of our most prolific work. Members of the team took visitors on guided tours of our offices, taking in Creative, Planning and Digital teams, to demonstrate how a brief makes its way through our various departments. With many of our proudest moments hanging from the ceilings and flickering on computer screens, our guests were offered a personal insight into what has made Bright Blue Day one of the best integrated agencies in the UK. Our Client Services and Finance teams were also on hand to show visitors what happens at the core of our business.

Queues formed outside the boardroom, where Executive Chairman Jonathan Clark introduced a retrospective look at Bright Blue Day’s many highlights from the last half a century, showing how much the agency – and popular culture – has changed since his father David set up the company in 1961. Items from the company archive, including the first job book starting with ‘Job 00061’, plus original Walt Disney and Mr Men illustrations, were on display.

Meanwhile, in the room that normally serves as the Directors’ office, clients, local marketing students and some (well behaved) pets jostled for a space on the sofa to check their proofreading skills with our pre-prepared test sheet. They soon realised spotting typos and spelling mistakes wasn’t as easy as they first thought! There was a prize for the guest who matched the most copy slogans to the right brand (again, not as easy as it sounds), and one lucky person walked away with a jar of chocolate eggs after winning our ‘Guess how many?’ contest laid on by the company’s bean counters (also known as the Finance department).

Our movie theatre, complete with working popcorn machine, showcased some of our best interactive work and films, and a new addition to the office – ‘Inspiration Alley’ ­– allowed visitors to see where some of our best ideas come from.

The event proved a fitting finale to our anniversary celebrations, allowing everyone to look back at what we’ve achieved in the past, and look forward to the magnificent opportunities that lie in the future.

Here’s to the next 50 years!

 

So Christmas is nearly upon us again – that time of year when you dust off those Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation games and get Granny doing the javelin in the living room after the Queen’s Speech. No doubt we will all have some great fun in the process. I’m a big gamer so for me it’s a change from shooting zombies, shouting at the TV and being killed by a 10 year old online!

I have a serious passion for games, more importantly Kinect games and the tech behind what has now become a widespread hacking trend. For me, this is a great time to be around this development.

So, you are probably thinking what is a Kinect hack? Well, here is a little background before we get into the detail.

The technology behind Kinect was invented in 2005 by Zeev Zalevsky, Alexander Shpunt, Aviad Maizels and Javier Garcia.

Kinect itself was first announced on June 1, 2009, under the code name "Project Natal". Following in Microsoft's (yes I am a Mac not a PC) tradition of using cities as code names, "Project Natal" was named after the Brazilian city of Natal as a tribute to the country by Brazilian-born Microsoft director Alex Kipman, who incubated the project. The name Natal was also chosen because the word natal means "of or relating to birth", reflecting Microsoft's view of the project as "the birth of the next generation of home entertainment”.

Kinect was launched in North America on November 4, 2010, and in Europe on November 10, 2010. I was very fortunate to get one of the USB devices not too long after the launch when they hit the UK.

After selling a total of 8 million units in its first 60 days, the Kinect holds the Guinness World Record of being the "fastest selling consumer electronics device". 10 million units of the Kinect sensor have been shipped as of March 2011.

The device itself allows for hands-free control of games or applications, made possible by using an infrared projector and camera and a special microchip to track the movement of objects and individuals in three dimensions. This 3D scanner system called Light Coding employs a variant of image-based 3D reconstruction. The system also has voice recognition built in, like SIRI on the new iPhone 4s. And there’s much speculation that the next version will have lip recognition which could mean a whole new opportunity for developers.

OK so enough of the history lesson...

The term ‘Kinect hack’ has been adopted by developers worldwide. It doesn't actually mean they are hacking the device. Put simply, Microsoft offered the open- source drivers to them but it sounds cool so let’s stick with it. Essentially, an open-source driver for PCs has been made available that opens the USB connection, allowing developers to develop upon the framework.

I know it’s a bit nerdy but one thing that excites me most is the opportunity developers and UI designers now have when it comes to user interface designs. I remember watching the Minority Report, back in 2002, where Tom Cruise wore those famous special gloves to interact with a heads-up menu. Blimey, 2002 wasn’t that long ago and we were all thinking... ‘Yeah that’s going to happen’. Well, the truth of the matter is that it is happening, and developers worldwide are creating some fascinating work. Microsoft continues to embrace this by offering $20,000 along with development space to ten startup companies, in hopes of turning out some incredible Kinect applications. At the end of the three month programme, each group will have the opportunity to present their creations to a group of investors. So in essence a heavily technical product that has a huge amount of tech inside has opened up the doors for some creative thinking.

Developers and designers are creating rich audio and visual experiences for the user. Suddenly, our spectrum of interface ideas becomes more engaging and the content opportunities are endless, especially in public spaces. Users are intuitively embracing this new tech. I recently took a trip to Cadbury World and I was amazed that this technology was being used. One of my biggest insights was watching someone the age of my grandfather jumping on a game projection to unwrap sweets. Intuitive and playful to say the least. I could go on but one thing I would say to finish is what a great time it is to be part of this progression. The opportunities are endless for sectors like retail and most importantly education and learning.

Here are some of my favourite examples of Kinect hacks. One of the things that fascinate me is this next level of opportunity advertisers and marketers have to develop engaging content that is truly indulgent for the user.

Interactive Puppet Prototype

!

Virtual Dressing Room

      

Interfaces could be on any surface