Our work for Climate South East is almost complete , we’ll be featuring an indepth case study on the branding and information architecture workshop that enabled us to take on the re-brand and website build…

So Google have changed their approach to adwords – so that now you can actually bid on trademarked names, previously an out-of-bounds option for advertisers….

From Brand Republic:

“LONDON – Google has announced that it will allow keyword bidding on all terms typed into its search engine, in a controversial move that will draw criticism from agencies and advertisers….The move means that a user who types a trademarked brand name into the Google search engine, alongside its associated service, will now see ads in the search results from rival brands in addition to those for the brand they were searching for. For example, this would affect a Google user who enters a carmaker’s brand name alongside the word ‘car’.”

So I’ve spent the last xx years building up my brand name and brand recognition and then a competitor can come along , outbid me for “my” company name (not a key phrase or word related to my business but my actual business name) and they will then appear in the paid search results. So maybe not pure evil but more than just a little bit dastardly.

It seems a very greedy approach from Google, and a bit of a knee-jerk reaction reaction to their declining adwords profits. Surely this will make unnecessary visual noise on search results. If I’m after a new Toyota (which i’m definitely not) and a search yields a bunch of results for Honda, Citroen etc. etc. then thats not really going to be very useful (and in fact i’d probably think their algorithms are all off).

Doesn’t this almost hark back to the days of filling up a page with keywords such as “porn and XXX” in order to drive traffic to a webpage offering anything but…

This new version of our site (version: God knows how many !) was the result of reading an article in Wired Magazine on why free is the future of business(Wired), it began as a brief experiment to see just how far WordPress has come since we first used it last year for building Danny Crates (800m gold medal winning paralympians) website (dannycrates.co.uk).

Could it handle a portfolio style website with powerful CMS functionality , including Ajax , various UGC plug capabilities, accessibility, usability and most importantly ease of use and speed of updates for us ?

So armed with the latest copy of WordPress, a custom theme and some of the plugins we thought we’d like to use for the site (including FLV player, tagging etc.) we set to work building this site.

Our old site was built in Coldfusion which although fast and easy for developers to use, its spread isn’t as wide as php so we’d had the idea for a while to re-build it in php. The problem was that we put a lot of work into our coldfusion CMS two years ago. Sure, we could have built upon it, but why re-invent the wheel when theres a whole plethora of CMS solutions out there and the perception of Coldfusion (well by us anyway) is that it really does seem to be a dying language.

Having used a whole gamut of CMS’s over the years from open source to commercial to custom build it was simply a matter of sorting out our priorities on what we felt was the most important factor for the new site build….And this we felt was quite simply the content – the work we produce for our clients.

We’d already developed a great concept for a re-build using Flash but we felt at this stage the development time and costs would be pretty prohibitive (we’d be looking at 2 -3 months development), when what we really wanted to do was highlight some of our larger projects in the form of indepth case studies and to re-work the existing content for some of our more important projects and cull some of our older projects.

We also wanted to make the site more ” sticky” , encouraging visitors to feedback on projects, build our blog into the core site (which might encourage us to actually use it more) and have all our videos as Flash instead of Quicktime.

Taking these factors into consideration and looking at all of the available options, WordPress more than managed to fit the bill. And at its open source price it didn’t hit us in the wallet either.

So here it is the final product. Let us know what you think, post some comments. And if you want to know the development time from idea , to research to making this site live , it was less than 5 days ! (although the content is still far from finished) !

So thats it , our experiment in Open Source is complete and its suddenly turned our business model on its head….We’ve got some more hacking of the code to get it to do a few more things but so far we’re more than happy with the results…

So the new Cadburys truck ad (the follow up to the Gorilla) is out ! So now we know why the new terminal at Heathrow is having problems losing baggage – its all spread out over the runway due to racing baggage trucks.

But what does this have to do with chocolate and how do you emotionally engage with a bunch of inanimate baggage trucks ? Sure the production values are high and look stunning, but instead of a bar of chocolate at the end you could put up a dishwasher / toilet roll / inkjet printer. Wheres the connection ?

From Marketing Week :

“Cadbury says that the new ad is designed to “put a smile on viewers faces”…

It leaves me going “Huh ? ” And I really don’t care about the “little van” , does it even win – I can’t really tell.

One of the main issues when they developed the movie cars was how do you make inanimate objects have some kind of appeal and emotional reactions to the viewers. Considered probably the least successful of the Pixar movies (cars movie) they realised early on that they needed to “humanise” the cars and personally I think they did a pretty good job , but I think this fact is really lacking in the Cadburys spot.

Their timing with Heathrow Terminal 5′s problems however is impeccable – maybe more than a co-incidence and a pseudo – guerilla marketing campaign ? Maybe Cadburys should be offering chocolate in compensation to all those travellers (maybe they already are !)

Helvetica the Movie…is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.

This is a great movie and a must for any designers.