Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

During the creative phase of any project we spend hours doing interviews with our clients, collecting reference and doing creative explorations that usually result in what I like to refer to as a total mess. Through the ungentle process of elimination, arguing, late-night epiphany and revision what we distil is still a dog’s breakfast of ideas. In the days following we start becoming more attracted to certain elements and as we continue to remove what isn’t working we start to find out what does. It’s an ugly process but by the process of elimination we’ve end up with a cohesive message that will eventually end up on a screen or device somewhere and hopefully in front of the audience for who it was intended.
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Applied Arts, ‘Canada’s Visual Communications Magazine’ published their 2009/2010 Interactive Awards today and Engine Digital once again made the cut!

See what won after the jump.

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Wow! We’re so busy with 2010 that we’re having trouble keeping track of the accolades that are still rolling in from 2009. Which, in all honesty, is just fine with us.

The SWISS WATER® Process, along with Engine Digital, was featured in the December 2009 issue of Direct Marketing Magazine for our “Relax. Enjoy. Awaken.” campaign as being one of the best of the year. Our relationship with the fine folks at Swiss Water started back in 2008, and the campaigns that we’ve launched since then have far exceeded expectation from both a marketing perspective and as a heavy hitter on the awards circuit.

Unfortunately, Direct Marketing is a print only magazine, but you can still download a copy of the issue that features The Swiss Water campaign via PDF with this link.

The theory of value is subjective. In regards to a product or service, value must be useful in satisfying the wants and needs of the consumer, we’ve also seen value generated when something is in limited supply. While this idea holds up in the comparison of two products side by side, it does not induce a desire of want in the customer who is inundated with hundreds of choices for nearly the exact same product or service.

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Over at i [love] marketing, Ana Andjelic makes some valid and interesting points on the comparison of digital and traditional agencies in her post titled Why Digital Agencies Aren’t Ready to Lead. It’s an interesting issue to consider. With integration and convergence now more or less a no-brainer, you really can’t have a campaign span both traditional and non-traditional channels without providing a consistent experience (can you?).

Ana defines digital agencies as “focusing on experimentation”, spinning their wheels trying to out-create competing agencies by making bigger and more complex digital experiences, while traditional shops “thrive on exploitation”, leveraging their bag of marketing tricks. This equates to more of a typical business model – make it once and sell it over and over again. It’s true, digital shops are terrible at this.

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