News from Enable Interactive

One addition...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:49:52 +0000

As part of a monthly series, Kate (our Queen of Campaign Co-ordination) interviews some of the Enable team about the burning questions that concern a thrusting young digital agency.

This month Ben, Robb, Darius, Ben, JP, Ben, Seb, Lauren, Hugh, Amanda, Ben, Claire, Matt, Ben, Nic, Ben, Alex, Kit and Ben answer the question ‘What is one addition you’d make to Enable’.

Next month: Ben on why you should never ask a Planner to give you a simple answer to a simple question…

Pink Pirates

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:40:52 +0000

Last week 20 of Enable’s finest descended on a number of Bristol landmarks dressed as pirates in aid of Breast Cancer Care. Every 11 minutes someone in the UK is told they have breast cancer so in addition to our work on the Pink Fridays campaign we thought we’d behave like idiots and raise some cash for our friends at BCC.

Step 1: Dress up as Pink Pirates
Step 2: Get a big yellow bus to Bristol Zoo
Step 3: Prance around with the flamingos (running with the pink theme)
Step 4: Do the conga all the way from Bristol Zoo to the Bristol Suspension Bridge (very tiring!)
Step 5: A Pink-nic (prawn-cocktail crisps, strawberry cakes, pink doughnuts) by the Bristol Observatory, in the drizzle, dressed as pink pirates, with a view of the suspension bridge.

It was very silly and a great laugh. Best of all we raised over £1000 and we’re still going – if you fancy donating to a great cause visit our justgiving page.

A few accolades

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:29:48 +0000

We’ve had a few nice bits of recognition for our work recently.

Traces of Hope won the One World Media Awards in the New Media category. We’re also shortlisted at the PR Week Awards – fingers crossed.

Breast Cancer Care was NMA’s site of the week.

London Gets Equal was Third Sector’s campaign of the week.

Computer Arts profiled us in Output: Design trends, the hottest illustrators and the best new work from around the world and did a Q&A with Darius. The creative team were prety pleased to see their work alongside The Ronin and Ian Anderson from The Designers Republic.

Overdue news

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:52:09 +0000

Our first news update since February. Rubbish. Anyway…

NEW HOME
We’ve moved (again). Our current home is Spike Island, 80 000 sq. ft. of space devoted to visual arts and media. Spike was formerly an old tea packing factory and has been refurbished into studio and gallery space.

NEW RECRUITS
Hi to Alex 1 (UX), Alex 2 (also UX, will be working for Alex 1, very confusing), Dan and Nick (Client Services), Damon (Creative), Kate (Campaign Management), Claire and Amanda (Production Management), Rick (Technology), Kieran (Strategy), Faye and Lauren (superstar interns).

NEW WORK
uefa
One of the biggest disappointments of last year was losing the redesign of UEFA.com in a last-minute penalty shootout with another agency. So we were over-the-moon when UEFA asked us to do the creative on something very exciting. We’ll tell you more soon.

Lipsy
We are doing some exciting stuff for Lipsy and their parent company Next at the moment.

Drinkaware
We’re working on all of Drinkaware’s consumer campaigns for the next year. Check out The Ultimate Day and Play Your Night Right for the first fruits.

Scope
We’ve just finished working on a scoping exercise (no pun intended) with our friends at Scope to specify requirements for their new website, intranet and CMS.

Back in June we also helped out with some ideas for creating buzz around their great Time To Get Equal campaign. The result was London gets Equal – a race across town on public transport to spell out a giant ‘Equal’, captured on film, live tweets, phone blogs and photos.

Breast Cancer Care live

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:23:59 +0000

Our new site for Breast Cancer Care is now live and hosting one of the largest online cancer communities in the world, with thousands of people affected by cancer supporting each other. It’s pretty amazing.

It also marks the beginning of an era for BCC who are making digital the central plank of their service delivery as an organisation.

UK's Time To Change

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:21:52 +0000

Our latest campaign breaks today – Time to Change is the UK’s biggest ever attempt to tackle stigma around the ‘last social taboo’ mental illness. It’s fronted by Stephen Fry and Ruby Wax – here’s Ruby telling you a bit about her personal story:

We’ve used animation to bring to life the stories of people who’ve suffered from stigma and discrimination – take a look

And here’s the TV ad – it airs tonight during Coronation Street:

Kit and Ben's excellent adventure

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:21:49 +0000

Kit and Ben are off to do the first of their digital brand workshops. Today they’ll be spending time with the digital team at Amnesty.

They’re on a world tour of, well, London mostly, and will be spending the next couple of months talking to people about this sort of thing:

Impact of recession
Changing models of audience/brand relationship
Brand integrity in community and social media
Opportunities and emergent trends
Innovation too high risk?
…and workshopping ideas.

A few windows are still available in their busy schedules so if it sounds interesting and you can offer them a cup of tea and a biscuit, get in touch with Kit.

Speedo top brand for online chatter

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:13:51 +0000

An independent study into ‘global online chatter’ has our friends at Speedo whupping their competitors during the Beijing Olympics with a 128% increase in talk around the brand.

By contrast Nike and Adidas only saw an additional 17% and 18% respectively. We’d like to think Speedo’s digital marketing is working a little harder for them…

While we’re on the subject, why not visit speedo80 and play LZR Trials?

More ARG-speak

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:06:12 +0000

And if you fancy knowing more about Traces Of Hope, here’s a podcast of Darius speaking at The View From Here – New forms of Public Service Broadcast hosted by SW Screen.

Darius’s bit starts about 38 minutes in but there’s also some very interesting stuff from Stuart Cosgrove, Director of Regions at Channel 4 and Marc Goodchild, Head of Interactive and On-Demand for Childrens BBC.

'Traces of Hope' ARG now live

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:15:59 +0000

Traces of Hope – our ARG for the British Red Cross is now live! The game is designed to help create awareness of the issues around the Red Cross Civilians in Conflict campaign and also incorporates brand immersion for Penguin and Reuters.

In the run up to launch there’s been a load of press attention, including these…

…and loads of write-ups on gaming blogs. So it’s no surprise we’ve already had thousands of pre-launch registrants. Very exciting!

And now it’s officially live and we reckon you should head to www.tracesofhope.com and help Joseph find his mum. Good luck!

Speedo Going Swimmingly

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:08:20 +0000

A while back we beat the likes of Glue, AKQA and Agency Republic to win the account for Speedo’s 2008 digital activity.

We’ve been working on a ton of stuff in the run-up to and during the Olympics. Check out Speedo80 where you can see the record-breaking LZR Racer, Olympic athletes on the beach in Sports Heritage swimwear or join the PureSwim community. More coming soon.

Give Coal The Boot

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:06:12 +0000

The burning of non-renewable resources is one of the biggest contributors to global carbon emissions. We’re working with Greenpeace on their new campaign Give Coal the Boot, which includes plenty of mash-up and social media action. Find out more here.

New recruits

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:03:37 +0000

Growing agencies need great people. We’ve got some senior additions to our already pretty incredible team:

Fergus Roche joins as Head of User Experience. Previously at Conchango and LastMinute.com he’s worked on some of the biggest brands in the UK and combines rocket science with outstanding taste in t-shirts.

Amanda Milton is our new Head of Production. Previously Mandy was Production Director across Carlson Marketing’s UK operation and is busy whipping us all into shape.

Natasha McKenzie joins as head of Client Services bringing weapons-grade experience in senior marketing roles at the like of M&C Saatchi and McCann Worldgroup.

Ben Akin-Smith joins as Head of Planning. Ben was one of the founders of e-commerce specialists Add Momentum and brings serious entrepreneurial flair along with great consumer insight.

Lipsy

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:02:06 +0000

Over the next few months, we’ll be working with fashion brand Lipsy on an exciting innovation project. More news soon…

British Red Cross ARG and digital prototyping

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:02:31 +0000

We’re hard at work on another project for British Red Cross – this time we’re creating an ARG (Alternative Reality Game) to run alongside their Civilians in Conflict campaign. We’re teaming up again with Hazel Grian, who worked on HIV: What’s the Story? with us and was script-writer on Bebo’s KateModern.

It’s going to be amazing. Drop us an email if you’d like to register for the game…

If that wasn’t exciting enough we’re also working with BRC’s digital team to concept and prototype their new digital platform.

Digital strategy roundtable

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:00:06 +0000

With the input of the leading charities across the UK, Matt chaired a charity roundtable to explore the future of digital within the industry. Because Enable works with some of the biggest UK charities, the event was well attended by the press who were treated to some seriously thought-provoking debates. Check out some of the coverage below.

Charities look to harness social media

Charities too cautious about digital

New Work

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:58:19 +0000

War Child
We love working with War Child so much that we’re doing it again! This time round we’ve been appointed to develop a social network for kids to tie in with the key stage 4 Citizenship syllabus.

Unison
We’re also happy to announce that Unison, the UK’s largest public services union, have selected Enable to develop and deliver their digital strategy. We’ll be kicking off with an extensive user and business requirements gathering phase before moving on to their website, extranets and intranets.

Time to Change
Some of the UK’s biggest charities are embarking on an integrated campaign to change the way the public perceive mental health issues – Time to Change. The good news is that Enable has been appointed as their digital partner!

Connect2Earth

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:56:18 +0000

Connect2Earth is a fantastic new project from Nokia, WWF and IUCN to combat environmental issues. And now we’ve joined them to raise awareness across a number of social networking sites, including Facebook, Bebo, Orkut and MySpace. We’re looking into a number of exciting applications for the project as well designing web and mobile banners.

Breast Cancer Care

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:55:28 +0000

We’re delighted to say that Breast Cancer Care have chosen Enable to redevelop their website. The new site, due to launch in September, will incorporate a number of groundbreaking features designed to deliver their services online. Revolution magazine are following the development of the site each month so keep an eye out for it.

Revolution ranks Enable as UK's No.1 digital agency

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:52:37 +0000

Amazing news. The readers of Revolution Magazine have voted us the UK’s no. 1 digital agency in their annual survey.

Nearly 400 agencies were ranked by different criteria and we scored a whopping 9.78 out of 10 average. We topped the tables in strategic ability, creativity, new technology, and account management.

A big, big thanks to everyone who voted for us!

HIV: What’s the story?

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:51:25 +0000

In time for World AIDS day, British Red Cross and Enable have launched HIV: What’s the story? on http://www.redcrosshiv.org/, Bebo and Facebook .

The campaign features a ‘nano-soap’ where you can watch the videos of Shabna, Marco and Kirsty, they all know each other and they’re all worried about HIV in different ways. The story starts with Shabna: she’s just had Marco’s baby but he’s had a one night stand with a girl everyone’s saying has HIV. What should she do?

We came up with the initial concept, characters and stories and then worked with our friends Hazel Grian (who writes for KateModern) and Greg Browning (who makes very good films).

War Child Iraq Appeal

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:49:56 +0000

We’re awfully proud of our work with War Child. Our friends there need to raise £1.5m to continue their amazing work in Southern Iraq where they estimate that one child dies every five minutes.

Here are some things you can do to help:

Visit the Iraq Appeal site where you can find out more and become a donor
Text CHILD to 88818 to donate £1.50
Show your support by posting the widget or badge on your blog/profile/site

Futurelab and Microsoft launch Exploratree

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:48:19 +0000

Isn’t it about time web 2.0 and social networking came to the classroom? Check out Exploratree, our new online educational software for Futurelab and Microsoft.

Exploratree is a mix of modules that allow children and teachers to express themselves creatively and a social network where individual pupils, groups and teachers can work together collaboratively on projects.

- UPDATE -
There’s been a great reaction with loads of schools adopting it already and Adobe have made it their site of the day.

Adventures in Second Life with WWF and BBC

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 13:47:33 +0000

‘Conservation Island’ in Second Life is the latest initiative in WWF’s global campaign to get people to live in harmony with nature. We’ve spent the last six months creating a place for Second Life residents to learn about conservation in a fun, engaging and interactive way.

On the island you can befriend a panda, buy ice-cream from ‘Mr Tangee’ the orangutan, play games and watch films in a surreal town powered by a 100 metre high child’s pinwheel. Other areas of the island include further interactions designed to inform and educate on WWF’s key campaign areas.

There’s an ongoing series of events drawing visitors to the island and we recently hosted the BBC’s first ever virtual ‘outside broadcast’. We built the beeb a working virtual studio for the event which was used to interview guests using Second Life’s voice over IP technology.

Visit the island.

Enable & Aardman launch Webbliworld

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 13:44:04 +0000

It’s official. WebbliWorld is now live and already getting a lot of attention. And we say, rightly so. WebbliWorld (and yeah we might be a little biased) is the most exciting and vibrant kids website around, all made a little easier with the brilliant character design and animation from our fab partners at Aardman. Hey, and this is only Phase 1.

Over the next while, WebbliWorld is set to become a full blown entertainment and social network which becomes the destination site for kids around the world. We will be introducing some of the hottest trends from social networking and user-generated content, as well as a few new ones, including innovative models for prospective sponsors. If you’d like to know more about WebbliWorld or sponsorship opportunities then feel free to get in touch.

FT and T-Mobile challenge Enable to 'Mobile Survival'!

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:44:53 +0000

FT and T-Mobile challenge Enable to ‘Mobile Survival’!
July 11th 2007

Matt and Darius have just spent a week travelling all over the country testing out the new ‘Web ’n’ Walk’ kit supplied by our friends at T-Mobile. Their adventure was followed daily in the Financial Times who challenged them to work as normally as possible using only mobile communications.

To find out why Matt has formed a sudden obsession with power sockets and Darius should be kept away from monkeys at all costs, check out the FT article, listen to the podcast or read their blogs: Darius | Matt.

Guardian Angel

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:41:37 +0000

Jemima was interviewed in The Guardian this weekend as part of an article called ‘Pursuits of Happiness’. It’s about businesses who encourage their staff to have a life outside of work, which is one of the things we’re very serious about Enable. In Jemima’s case it’s how she mixes her job at Enable as an Account Exec and her career as soon-to-be-famous rock star with She Tells Lies.

Enable in the Dragons' Den

Mon, 14 May 2007 13:38:11 +0000

We’ve just been told we’ve won the UPS Local Business Awards as judged by Dragons’ Den business guru Theo Paphitis. The awards celebrate businesses who contribute to the local community and needless to say we’re thrilled.

WWF Climate Solutions

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 13:37:15 +0000

WWF International have entrusted us to help support the launch of their ‘Climate Solutions – the WWF Vision for 2050’. This is their strategy for avoiding the worst aspects of global climate change and contains radical solutions that will be presented to, quite literally, some of the world’s most powerful people including heads of state. Our part is pulling the presentation together. It’s a big information design challenge and we’re having to make some very complex data easy on the eye.

Insuring Success

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 13:36:37 +0000

We’re excited to be working with BCWA, who are part of the Simplyhealth Group – a community of healthcare businesses that joined together to help make people feel better, boasting over 70 years of market experience. We’ll be using our digital marketing nous to help them significantly develop their position in the Private Medical Insurance market.

BCWA commissioned us after a hotly-contested three-way pitch against agencies with significant experience in the healthcare market, so we’re particularly pleased to be working with them, along with a range of technology partners like Mediasurface, ATG and Omniture.

10 Rules of SEGOR Marketing

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:34:24 +0000

If you’re a brand who wants to communicate with ethical consumers then you need The 10 Rules of SEGOR Marketing.

Last year we worked with a field of ethical brand ‘superstars’, researching best practice communications for brands with SEGOR (sustainable, ethical, green, organic and responsible) attributes.

Contributors include Mick Bremans of Ecover, Dan Germain of Innocent and Craig Sams of Green & Black’s. As expected, we’ve had lot’s of requests but we’re only going to give it to those who ask nicely! So if you’d like a copy, have a quiet word with Kit.

New HQ

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:33:22 +0000

We’ve finally moved into our awesome new solar-heated pad by the waterfront. 4 Alfred Place was designed by Architect/Artist couple Mike and Sandie Macrae and we first fell in love with the place when it was profiled in the Sunday Times magazine.

The building contains a studio (formerly an art gallery) offices, 2 wetrooms, kitchen, lounge area, creative spaces, meeting rooms – in fact everything a young agency could want. Best of all it was designed and built to have a low environmental footprint by Mike, who’s a specialist in sustainable architecture.

Come and visit us – you can even hang out in the garden and feed the fish!

Shoe appeal

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:21:46 +0000

We’ve just helped Clarks with their first-ever email campaign, in which they’re promoting two great causes.

To raise funds and awareness for leading children’s cancer charity CLIC Sargent, Clarks’ brand team gave themselves 24 hours to write, illustrate and print a unique story book for the under 5s. The result is the tale of Toby the Taxi – for sale online and instore at only £5 – with every penny going to Clic Sargent.

The Blue Peter Shoe Biz Appeal is raising money to set up fun-packed Children’s Corners for some of Malawi’s poorest children. You can support Blue Peter and Unicef by dropping off any old and unwanted shoes at your local Clarks Store.

Light Up Bristol

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:21:45 +0000

During December we worked alongside Bristol’s best and brightest creatives to produce Light Up Bristol, an alternative Christmas lights show. 8 images were specially produced for projection 400ft wide onto Bristol’s Council buildings during the peak shopping period. The work was commissioned by Bristol Media (www.bristolmedia.co.uk), with Darius doing creative direction. The Enable contribution was ‘Xmas Invaders’, a particularly retro response to Christmas!

To see more, visit our Flickr Group or check out our video.

Reaction to the how has been great – the Guardian and Telegraph gave us a write-up and we even made the Daily Mail’s picture of the day.