pass the relish

It’s always been one of my favourite movies…

…and last night I got the chance to live it in person at the 2008 Digital Marketing Awards.  The Tell Your Story site that we designed and built for Dentsu Canada was part of an integrated campaign that won a DMA Gold award for Integrated Campaign and Best in Show.  The campaign encouraged users to tell their own story by uploading a series of 12 photos to the site.  Visitors to the site can view and search the stories, vote for the ones they like and even save their favourites so that they can find them easily again later.

On a geekier note, not only is the site slick, but it’s also run by an easy-to-use custom CMS.  The CMS allows Canon to review and approve submissions as well as get a top level view of the entries that includes the most viewed, highest rated, etc.

This was a fun project to do as the whole team was involved and we were able to get our hands dirty on the design, Flash and PHP development.  Tip of the hat to our lead designer on the project John Thai.

Congrats to Michael Gramlow and Dentsu Canada on a campaign well conceived, thought out and executed.

In addition to the kudos for the Canon site, the Test Your Breath site we worked on received an honourable mention.  Not a bad night for Relish’s first appearance at the DMAs.  Looking forward to next year!

by Paul on November 4, 2008

We all know that The New Ketchup is good and just, but oh my, what has become of the old ketchup?

by Joshua on September 17, 2008

You can thank Airbag Industries for the overly-bureaucratic sounding post title.

The talented folks at Airbag have recently launched this little web application (see a video demo) as a way for them to gather the brief but necessary details from a prospective client who’s considering hiring Airbag to work on a project.  I think the execution is pretty flawless — design and layout are top shelf.  No surprise there.

But I wonder about the usefulness or practicality of a tool like this. It kind of reminds me of those “We are now accepting projects in January 2009″ messages you occasionally see on agency sites.  51% of me thinks that they’re complete assclowns for actually putting that on their site and the other 49% of me thinks it’s kind of cool.  Whether the message is accurate or not is anybody’s guess.  But in any case it does add to the agency’s air of boutique-yness… like, they’re so busy you’d be lucky to work with them.  Nothing wrong with trying to maintain that image.

But I digress… back to Airbag’s RFP tool. As a guy who works at an agency I see most clients falling into one of two categories: a) ones who you’ve worked with many times and will just call you up for a quote and b) ones you’ve never met and find you by word-of-mouth or just surfing.  I can’t imagine the former being too impressed at being redirected to a web app rather than talking to you and the latter group would even think to look for a tool like this (unless you dedicated like 75% of your home page to it). And even if they did find it I suspect they wouldn’t be too jazzed at the prospect of filling out a multi-page form the way YOU want them to after they’ve most likely written an RFP or some kind of similar document themselves.  They just want to send a quick email to the company’s general email box with the RFP attached.

I don’t want to be all Captain Buzzkill on this idea.  I think Airbag’s heart is in the right place.  They’re frustrated with the lack of education a lot of clients have when dealing with interactive shops.  They’re not blaming the clients because it’s us as agency folk who need to educate them.  Maybe this whole application is intentionally labourious for clients as a way to educate those that aren’t able to provide the basic info (timeline, scope, budget) and force them to either figure those details out or contact the agency directly and know that their are some “gaps” in the information they’re supplying.

I think most of the folks reading this blog are in the interactive agency business.  What do you think?

by Steve Palmer on September 17, 2008

Life is full of decisions.

Do I get out of bed today?  Shreddies or Cinnamon Toast Crunch?  Do I shave or pretend that I’m going for the rugged look?  Ok, you get the idea… maybe these decisions aren’t too hard, but some can be.  Many choices we make require us to consider a multitude of factors – each with many options.  To top that all off, maybe some of these factors are more important to me then others – some are deal breakers, while a few probably are just ‘nice to have’.  Head starting to spin yet?

This is the problem that MyChoiceBot has set out to solve.  The folks at ChoiceBot have a nifty little algorithm that helps sort out these nasty little problems and unlike a lot of the current web tools out there, it doesn’t filter out options — it just helps me rank and see what sets each one apart.

Ok, you’ve probably guessed… I’m talking about this because we worked on it, but I really do think it’s a cool tool.  I know I will definitely use it the next time I have a hard decision to make.  This was a fun project because we touched a number of different pieces on it — not only did we design and build the Flash widget in conjunction with the talented ChoiceBot backend developers, but we also redid the logo, designed the site and threw in a bit of HTML/CSS for good measure.

Hmm, so what should I make my first ChoiceBot of…

by Paul on August 7, 2008

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  How about a moving picture?  What about one where you can control the action?  That’s gotta be worth a gajillion words.

Recently, Relish was asked by AMD to help them announce a new chip  — dubbed “Cinema 2.0″ — that plans to blur the line between movies and video games.  Imagine combining the immersive and emotional (albeit passive) cinematic experience with the interactivity of video games. What if you were able to peek around the corner to see if the villain’s about to attack our hero?  Or if you don’t like how sunny it is just click a button and it’s now a nighttime scene.

For the announcement of this revolutionary chip, Relish created a visually rich multimedia presentation to complement the speakers’ words and provide a bit of subtle eye candy to remind people that this chip’s graphical capabilities are what’s making “Cinema 2.0″ possible.

by Steve Palmer on July 25, 2008