RAAK is proud to announce our latest project. We helped conceive and then built a creative platform (Guided Collective) that we think might just be a major sign post on the road of change creative agencies are hurtling along.

Ever since Unilever’s crowdsourced Peperami campaign, debates have raged (Brand Republic) about the future of crowdsourcing and its potential to encroach on the domain of agencies. On the other side of the pond, people like Bud Cadell have even wondered if the future needs an agency at all (Whatconsumesme).

Guided Collective is a hybrid between a traditional agency and a crowdsourcing platform. It is driven by a collective of top freelance creatives from all kinds of disciplines that use an online collaboration platform to pitch and collaborate on creative briefs.

The platform is invite-only, so we can't show what really is under the hood of Guided. But included in this post are some screengrabs that we made with dummy briefs & content

One of the main arguments for opening up the creative team is the range of skills now required when seeking to speak to consumers. Edward Boches, Chief Creative Officer and Chief Social Media Officer of US agency Mullen recently blogged (EdwardBoches.com):

“You can make ads with a writer and art director. But if you want to
conceive and execute platforms, utility and experiences, you need IA, UX, technology, connection planning and social media working together. This is a significant change for many agencies but one that is absolutely essential. It may come with pain and resistance but what choice to you really have? The post digital days are upon us.”

But crowdsourcing as the panacea is not without its detractors. It is argued that it does not take into account important agency functions, like account management, coordination (in particular with large transmedia campaigns) and long term strategic planning.

A second criticism is that it exploits creatives in a competitive free-for-all environment, where their chances of winning work are slim and the remuneration is paltry.

The Guided platform tries to address exactly these two issues. The platform itself is invite-only and restricted in size. It aims to have the UK’s best creative talent, across a number of disciplines. From copywriters and bloggers, to iPhone developers, social media strategists and directors.

Guided comes with an in-house account management team. Clients are familiar with that kind of dedicated attention and service.

And importantly creatives can earn money three different ways:

1. One is by coming up with a winning concept.
2. Secondly – and this is unique – part of the budget is ring-fenced for collaborating on a winning concept; to make it even better or by giving input that makes the idea go transmedia.
3. Lastly, creatives can win all or part of the actual production of a concept.

Sam Reid, founder of Guided studied research on crowdsourcing when planning the collective:

“When it comes to solving specialist problems, research shows that numbers are not necessarily the solution. They are great for simple yes/no stimuli but become quickly overwhelming for complex tasks. For this it’s better to have a range of different skills within a smaller network.

We have a heterogeneous but small crowd. This is a doubly good, because besides having cross-discipline inputs, creatives who are part of this crowd won’t feel like a number. And happy creatives means good work.”

So what did RAAK do? We helped Sam conceptualise the Guided way of working as well as the Guided platform. RAAK then went and built it.

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The platform consists of two types of functionality. One set of functionality is community orientated, including what must be the sexiest ‘activity feed’ and member profile pages in any social network. But what really makes this platform significant and unique are the collaboration features.

Guided has bespoke functionality geared to make creatives happy, which is too often neglected. When we conducted focus groups, it was clear there was a concern amongst creatives that their peers could steal their ideas. So we included functionality to allow them to make their ideas visible only to members in other specialities than their own. So a director’s idea won’t be seen by other directors, if they so wish, but everybody else will.

Is the Guided platform perfect?

No. But it’s a very good first take on how we might source creative work to engage with customers on behalf of brands in the future. And we’ll be improving it constantly as we go along and discover more about collective and social creativity.

More about how Guided works in this lovely animation.

Media is changing. Organisations and business are looking for Social Media expertise.

We think that public relations companies should – in theory at least – be best placed to serve this need in the short term. But they are not doing so yet. Partly because there is a lack of understanding. Partly because of a lack of practical experience.

And in the longer term companies are best placed to do social media for themselves.

To address this state of affairs RAAK has developed three courses -

:: We have a Social Media course specifically tailored at the PR industry to give public relations professionals the tools to raise awareness and engage on behalf of their clients.

:: There’s a more strategic course for executives that helps them to decide what to about social Social Media with respect to their organisation, but also contains some practical elements for them to raise their profile (Executive visibility) using social media.

:: And there’s a very hands-on course that teaches the ins and outs of how to ‘do’ Social Media on a daily basis inside an organisation.

Find out more on our dedicated Social Media training page.

The rather interesting PR agency Cow PR got in touch to develop an internal info sharing hub for the marketing team of one of their big international clients.
Even though it wasn’t directly part of the brief, we developed the platform in such a way that it could easily incorporate social media elements and be developed into a collaborative platform.

We were asked to develop a website as well as the brand identity for this new business consultancy. While we would normally plug-in some our preferred designers to do the graphic work, this time we used one of the much-talked-about crowdsourcing services.
You can read a full account on how that went in this blogpost.

Wessel wrote a detailed blogpost about the CanEUhearme project that was effectively the start of RAAK.

WHERE is new ethical fashion retailer founded by Lawrence Warren. WHERE needed an online presence and was also toying with the idea of having their own shop. In other words an additional direct route to market, via an ecommerce solution.

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RAAK was very excited to work with an ethical brand like WHERE. The authenticity and ability to cut out middlemen than new media technologies provide made them an ideal choice for addressing WHERE’s business needs.

We built an integrated blog and shop. And we then trained WHERE on how to interact with their potential customers using their blog. AND we also trained WHERE in the use of Twitter to promote their blog, shop and products.

Central to WHERE’s brand identity is the idea that one should be aware of the location the products are produced.

We built that into the WHERE blog. All posts can be categorised with the location of where products were produced.

But princely the blog serves the purpose of talking about the brand and what the company does with prospective customers.

This includes posts about the whole production process, including moodboards, production facilities, but also anything that tickles WHERE’s fancy. In other words the blog gives the WHERE brand a personality.

We continue to work with WHERE to improve their blog and social media strategy and you can follow WHERE on Twitter.

This was the last project at Pixelspew. While we were talking about convergence and the changing world of advertising, TBWA contacted us because they really wanted to work with director/animator/artist/all-round genius Han Hoogerbrugge. Which gave us the chance to get our teeth into a proper tv ad! Oh the irony…

Pros: It was nice to see that everybody was open to creative ideas. TBWA even stimulated Han to apply his usual weirdness. In the past, commercial clients have said that before and then rapidly changed their minds, but these guys were actually disappointed with our  initial thoughts. They were too ‘normal’.
Still, we had to balance the more ambitious requests from the creatives (“can he jump across the bed, then do a somersault”?) with the key message of the spot. We wanted to keep the message clear and not stuff 100 ideas in 20 seconds and not let interesting visuals take the attention away from the core text. We think we did fairly well. And the tone of voice was nicely continued in the web animations, produced by Else.
Kyriad was very happy with it, which is always a good sign.

Trivia: I couldn’t help but crack up when we went to  TBWA’s Paris office and saw all the Cannes Lions awards etc prominently on display. Very old-school.

Cons: It’s still a tv ad and some animated web banners, isn’t it? So it did feel like a lot of time and effort for possibly-not-that-much result.
From an awareness point of view, I’m sure it worked ok. But with Raak, we’d love to talk directly to the client and explore other routes to back up that increased brand awareness with a Twitter campaign or a website or …

The World Economic Forum

I was asked to create a strategy and practical functional specification for WELCOM.

WELCOM was the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) rather brilliant idea to build a social network for their members.

Why was it such a good idea?

It was a good idea because the World Economic Forum is an organisation that is joined by its members (and some pay thousands for the privilege) precisely because they get to hob knob  with the other members, who also happen to be the worlds most powerful people. And, not only to they get to meet, they get to do so in private and on a social level that other international events don’t provide.

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So the basic idea was sound. In theory it should be no problem to build a workable social network. But what should the functionality of this social network look like? Do Bill Gates get to ‘poke’ Tony Blair?

I approached fascinating project by looking at the WEF structure, and interviewing staff and its members.

The key question to my mind was this? Why do a very diverse set of really important people, that are time poor, interact with each other and how might new digital media help this?

I brainstormed the possible needs and goals of WEF members with members and staff and used use cases to create the functional specifications.

Key to the proposals was a personal activity feed a la Facebook, now standard in Social Networks.

Read about WELCOM on Techcrunch.

We’d already been brainstorming with the team at Ben & Jerry on how to get that elusive ‘MTV audience’ interested in a pretty serious message. Then we got the call that they wanted to ‘go viral’. The objective was to raise more awareness about the campaign and get more people to send in their application videos.

Rather than do the usual, dull melting-iceberg approach, we approached it with a bit more rock ‘n roll attitude. B&J immediately realised the potential of a girl smashing up a big 4×4. It worked a treat.

What we learned: At the time, our knowledge of seeding was limited. We recommended to the client to use a major seeding company, but budget restrictions meant that didn’t happen. So if this project would happen right now, we wouldn’t just come up with the concept, but also suggest an overall social media approach to distribute the message more efficiently.

And it served its purpose internally. Through internal show-and-tell conferences, it managed to get other countries interested in the Climate Change College and the UK team at some point planned it to use it as a cinema ad.

Realising the power of content MTV and Motorola created MTV Load, a project that combined MTV’s creative credentials with the then-fairly-new phenomenon of downloading and accessing video through your mobile phones.
We were asked to source, curate, license and commission anything that was funny, beautiful, strange, interesting enough for people to download.
So we scoured the world and ended up with something like 300 films, from Argentina to Sweden, from Canada to Hong Kong.

What we learnt:
- Working for mobile requires a different technical approach: close-up shots, no fast movement, forget about detail. That helped us when we later helped MTV launch.
- It needs a different kind of narrative. Short, direct, more one-dimensional stories. Although we did experiment with not-so-obvious pieces like the ones from Zeitguised. After all, it was an MTV project.
- There’s an enormous amount of people out there with lots of little fun ideas to tell. And even if it was a typical low-budget, high-profile project, people were keen to get involved.