Pod1 Blog

“99% is the research arm of Behance, a company dedicated to organizing the creative world to make ideas happen. As creative professionals, we often focus too much on idea generation and not enough on execution.”

Having the big idea is one thing, but making it happen is another task. The 99 Percent website has an abundance of tips, articles & videos about increasing productivity within creative organisations. I am looking forward to the 2010’s speakers including John Maeda & Stefan Sagmeister.

Michael Donnelly, Coca Cola’s Group Director for Worldwide Interactive Marketing gave the above presentation at the iStrategy 2010 Conference.  Very interesting to see how the uber brands of the world manage social media marketing and well worth the review.

A few key points from Mr. Donnelly that resonate:

• Your consumers own your brand.  Make your social strategy fan-focussed and let them choose how they want to engage with it
• Creating engaging communities builds a sustainable relationship with your consumers
• Fans don’t join online communities to be advertised at or sold to
• Fully integrate media campaigns with common social media functionality for maximum impact
• Optimise social medial tools  you have available to you
• Social Media should always support Brand Objectives
• “Keep it simple and intuitive”

NET-A-PORTER.COM have ventured into the world of white and launched their first online Wedding Boutique this month.  The Boutique sells luxurious, chic bridal and wedding fashion from a number of designers including Lanvin Blanche, Alexander McQueen, Temperley London and more. To promote the online Wedding Boutique, we’ve worked with Net-A-Porter to launch a rich media advertising campaign.

Pod1’s brief was to create the campaign messaging, and design and produce a number of rich media ad formats within an interactive template. The camapign is the first of its kind for Net-A-Porter that uses an exciting new rich media format.  We’ve teamed up with Flashtalking to create dynamic templates containing a share panel that all ad formats will use.  The panel allows the Net-A-Porter audience to interact with the ad in a personal, engaging way.  Gone are the days of traditonal formats, static impressions and boring click-throughs; make way for multichannel sharing, social media engagement and behavioural tracking! Check out the Ad’s in action on the following sites:

http://www.youandyourwedding.co.uk/
http://www.weddingmagazine.co.uk/
http://www.bridesmagazine.co.uk/planning/default.aspx

Published on Netimperative, February 2010:

Extract: “After a burst of innovative activity in e-commerce over the past few years (from single page checkout to shop the catwalk), 2009 saw innovation all but grind to a standstill. While this is to a certain extent understandable due to the torrid time traditional retail has had through the recession it has lead to all e-commerce sites looking pretty much the same… and this isn’t good for the e-tail business. Is this going to continue into 2010 or are there already new ideas that are set to burst onto the retail scene? Fadi Shuman, co-founder of digital agency Pod1, looks at the outlook for e-commerce in 2010.”

Read full comment piece here

We’ve been reading Prologic’s report on technology in fashion, available here, and it contains some very useful insights. Based on responses from companies representing 18% of the UK clothing, footwear and accessories market, it shows some optimism about the coming year. Retailers are switching from cost reduction projects to building their web and home shopping capabilities. A significant number expect to be keeping headcount around where it is today (after cuts last year) and sales, though tough, will improve somewhat.

Of the 80% who had a transactional website, the average annual spend on the website as a percentage of its sales was around 6% (we often hear this number) but a significant number are this year looking to spend more, as they invest in their fastest growing and most profitable source of sales. Interestingly, it looks like multi-channel will be a big area of focus this year: while only 32% can show shoppers their in-store stock through the website, 50% are planning to implement this capability, and 45% want multi-channel store or gift cards.

While we hear this sort of information regularly, it’s great to see it from a survey based on such a large sample, with such authority. And it reinforces our view that it’s going to be a busy year.

Google has just added a whole load of new functionality to its Analytics Tool. Watch the videos below for a demo of the new features and let us know what you think.

Mark Blenkinsop, published in Admap in November 2009:

(click images to enlarge)

This article reports that the iPhone App Store has reached the 2 billion downloads mark, which turns out to be 2 thousand million, not 2 million million as some people in the office thought. (According to this article, though, a Welsh billion is still a million million, which is different from the rest of the UK).

But 50 million iPhones and iPod Touch devices isn’t all that many… There are 4 billion mobile phones in the world, so the iPhone  has less than a 1.25% share of the mobile phone market worldwide.

When we’re talking to clients and partners about potential mobile phone applications, of course we talk iPhone, but we always have to remember the others have 99% of the market.

It’s been a breath of fresh air to see the progress of the content on the Amanda Wakeley blog:

It’s been incredibly difficult trying to get fashion/designer brands to buy into this type of activity, even though in many other sectors it’s a must have. Yes we did the design and build (on the wonderful Wordpress platform) but all the content is coming from them direclty. Investing in this type of engaging content will reap them rewards, especially when the ecommerce element of the site goes live in october.

So team Amanda Wakeley, we salute you.

Amanda Wakeley – Behind The Scenes London Fashion Week Spring Summer 2010 (MED)

Oh, and I forgot to add – IT’S GREAT FOR SEO!