Big Hello Design

Big Hello is 2.

October 30th, 2008

That’s right, Big Hello is 2 today! What started while Chad and Suzanne carved pumpkins in ‘06 has now grown to a nice little company producing great work for great businesses all across the UK. We’ve been privileged to work with some wonderful people over the last two years - chin chin!

AMV talks digital

September 26th, 2008

Congratulations to everyone who made it into nma’s annual Top 100 Interactive Agencies guide this week. I love the idea of digital specialists, but want to discuss why we at AMV think it’s time to blow apart the myth of what a traditional ad agency thinks about digital.

Let’s start by being very clear on two things: first, advertising is constantly evolving; second, ad agencies are all about tapping into consumer behaviour. In the 1930s, BBDO broke ground with creative programming of radio ads. In the 1950s TV ads were new and hard to understand, but someone cracked it and we all know where we’ve ended up. Ad agencies respond to new technologies, sometimes driving consumer take-up, sometimes following the consumer.

Digital is ubiquitous and has truly infiltrated life in so many ways. Thus, it’s very normal for ad agencies now to have a real role in driving digital forward in the lives of our brands and their consumers. The perception that we sit here in an ivory tower merely looking to put a TV ad online via YouTube is just not accurate. We understand consumers and so have permission, and indeed the commercial need, to build digital elements into strategies and creative work.

So what about the practicalities of getting into a world where people have been nurtured on a diet of TV, radio and print, all wrapped up by the wonderful invention of the retained account? It’s true to say that adding digital into a place like AMV is no small task, so from a structural point of view the first rule about AMV Digital is that there is no AMV Digital. We’re more of an insurgence than a department, with digital specialists dropped into the disciplines that make up AMV. This way we can have an osmotic effect on the whole company and be open for business right from the start, avoiding being in one corner and ignored.

We’re now at a point where the agency understands that digital isn’t free, might not be the quickest turnaround and that we have to take time to cut through the 90% that’s crap to find that Really Brilliant Thing.

And here is where I see a major difference in what an ad agency or a digital specialist can deliver for any brand. Creativity is the thing we live or die by. We can take time to get to the perfect solution and more often than not would rather not do something at all if we didn’t feel it was right for the client. This is what, if anything, digital agencies can learn from ad agencies. Some are doing this already, I’m sure, but if more borrowed this tried and tested route it might help us achieve our common goal of getting digital first on the agenda of every client.

Charlie Cannell, Director of digital services, AMV BBDO

(Taken from http://www.mad.co.uk)

Charlie makes a good point. To sum up the above - just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, something many agencies forget. Really great work comes from a simple, pure, human truth or insight, this is not AMV’s sole domain but the responsibility of us all.

Go Badges Go!

September 5th, 2008

What’s the most important thing when promoting an agency? We say badges! They are made with bright day-glo and Pantone papers. Drop us a ‘hello’ for your free set! Wahoo!

Remove broken music in iTunes

August 21st, 2008

Do you ever get annoyed that your music in your iTunes library has an old broken link? Well this little AppleScript will search your iTunes library and delete any of the alias’ that don’t have a music file attached to it. Simple.

Simply download, unzip, double click to open in AppleScript and click “Run”

Create a local web testing server on your mac

August 20th, 2008

Have you ever wanted to create a local testing server on your mac that supports PHP and MySQL? It’s now very simple using the application MAMP. (Mac/Apache/MySQL/PHP)

1) Download MAMP from their website to your Mac.

Download the 127mb DMG from here. You’ll notice there’s two options MAMP Free and MAMP Pro. Drag the MAMP Free application to your Applications folder. Now it’s installed, you can un-mount the disk image.

2) Startup MAMP from your Application folder

When you startup MAMP a window in your browser is automatically opened. This gives you all the information you need (should you want it) to access MAMP databases UNIX, and phpMyAdmin. You’ll notice the browser web address is http://localhost:8888/MAMP/

3) The MAMP application & preferences

This window shows you what’s running on your mac. Apache and PHP should have green lights by now. There are some important options in the preferences tab. 

First off, uncheck “Check for MAMP Pro” and also “Stop servers when quitting MAMP” if you want to test your sites when MAMP is closed. 

Secondly, you have the option to set the Apache and MySQL ports of to either the local value of your mac or if you are running other testing servers on your mac leave at MAMP default of 8888 and 8889. I chose to set mine to the mac default of 80 and 3306.

Finally, you can change the location of your sites folder rather than the default location of the application folder. Close preferences and MAMP will reconfigure itself. The browser address required for your sites is now simply http://localhost/

4) Widget installation

One more useful note is the inclusion of the OSX widget located in the applications folder. Double click to install. Now you can effortlessly open the start page as well as easily start and stop the local servers.

Web design dashboard

July 30th, 2008

AgencyTool is super new resource for anyone designing, developing and marketing websites.

Poached beers

July 18th, 2008

An innovative way to recruit from our friends at Conchango. Hijack an oppositions beer fridge and give people something to think about over the weekend. (Incidentally, this was not me.)