NewMediaAge ran an article on how automotive brands were quick adopters of digital media for marketing. This year will see an even bigger push by these brands to move digital closer to centre stage. The biggest challenge facing these brands is reaching customer-centricity - the single view of the customer. But reaching this nirvana of online CRM is a massive task. Prospects move across mediums making tracking hard. Most brands have a handful of agencies covering various areas which makes data collaboration hard. Downstream systems and/or processes aren’t setup to feed back; helping to close the loop. And on top of this the manufacturer and dealership separation further complicates things. But complexity is made up of a whole lot of simplicity. Those who are able to deconstruct this problem into its separate parts are those who will succeed. DMReview.com has a good article outlining 7 steps in developing a business case for customer-centricity. While I agree with everything they say in the article, I would like to add a bit more.

Don’t look for the one-stop-shop solution - or investing in the development of a single solution. It will become very expensive to implement and later maintain. It also makes you less agile when trying to keep up with market changes. The difficult thing here is the articulation of the business needs and the technical options. The success lies in the ability to view your data landscape without being lost in its complexity - you should clearly be able to make out the main themes. From this position you can set out affective strategies. The solving of this problem lies more with management than with technology. I have witnessed many situations where technology was seen as the solution but in fact it wasn’t - it was down to management and processes. You need to switch between wearing your management hat and your technical hat.

Often I find it overwhelming when trying to understand what is involved in having an all encompassing solution to manage all customer data - like the times I try comprehend the universe - it can put me into a flat spin. I was once told the only way to eat an elephant was piece by piece. So you will find it not that hard when you deal with the smaller parts, but always have an idea of the bigger picture - because if you don’t, you might end up with a solution the represents the Mir Space Station.

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Jaguar Cars’ website has been rated as the top online destination for the consumer goods manufacturing sector according to a survey by interactive agency Blast Radius.

Independent mystery customers and Blast Radius’s internal panellists rated Jaguar Cars a top performer across all categories, gaining almost perfect scores in awareness, navigation, brand recognition, use of language and product categories.

Global Beach has been the global digital agency for Jaguar Cars for over 10 years and last year worked extensively on the redesign and launch of the updated website.

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Jon Hicks, creator of the Firefox logo and all round web standards type person has started a weekly Podcast with his colleague Jon Oxton called ‘The Rissington Podcast’ (pegged as ‘Like Gardener’s Question Time, but for Geeks’). Both informative and entertaining (at the same time!), they are now up to their third episode and so far so good. Nice little bits of insight and downright silliness make this worth a listen.

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This is something I was originally introduced to a few months back whilst attending Jason Santa Maria’s talk at the @media conference in London. I found it to be an interesting way of working and have used it when developing my own personal site.

‘Grey boxing’ is the process of working up a site visual without getting sidelined by issues of style (imagery, colour palettes etc). It helps you concentrate on the structure and visual hierarchy of the page by using (guess what!?) grey boxes to split up the content. It’s a very useful way of working and acts as a perfect bridge between the stages of wire-framing and fully designed mock-ups.

Anyway, Jason Santa Maria himself does a much better job of explaining the process in his article ‘Grey Box Methodology’ on his personal site (although how anyone can create site designs in Illustrator is beyond me, but hey, whatever you’re used to!) so if you’re interested in finding out more, check it out.

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http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/08/0340229

Found this today.. Some super clever people with far too much time on their hands (and no doubt a whopping budget courtesy of the military) have been studying the sensations and brain activity attributed to feeling “close to God”.

Basically the idea is that their device stimulates the brain to induce the feeling that there’s an unseen ‘presence’ in the room.
Wonder if they could modify it for use in cinemas with horror films.. Now that would be scary!

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Was having a geek moment last night, musing on words and some of their design/use in language…

In particular, the word ‘exsanguinated‘ (drained of blood) - a nice happy thought for the evening, I know.
I suppose it must’ve come from a new US series I’d been watching, Dexter. It has cropped up there, so that hopefully assuages any suspicion of me having murderous tendencies!!

What I was thinking, however, is that people may argue: “Why bother learning that long word when you can just say ‘drained of blood’“.

Well, that’s where laziness kicks in and I draw a parallel to programming; When coding anything, similar tasks will appear in your code and it is good practice to avoid typing the same code again and again and instead use functions, procedures or subroutines to perform the common task. In the same way, in language we have some words that can simply condense several words or even a sentence into a single word. (hence the laziness)

‘Exsanguinated’ is perfect example of this, meaning that either spoken or written, both time and effort can be saved.

I suppose that once you get above the basic nouns and verbs, most words act as a kind of token/placeholder for more verbose definitions..

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Browsing through my feeds at bloglines the other day and found a pretty accurate article commenting on how programmers work. I think most developers should be able to relate to it in some way - the mental juggling act of super classes, members, listeners and intended/existing program flow.

At the very least, I’ll be able to cite it as a caveat for when I “…growl at people who pop their head in the door to say hello.”

Check it out: http://paulgraham.com/head.html

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There is nothing better than getting through something you had no idea about with a sense of achievement and enjoyment far beyond one’s expectations. That is exactly what happened when I was part of the Global Beach team that took part in Jaguar/Land Rover’s Trek Challenge in Wales on the week-end.

A few months back Global Beach were invited to enter a team into Jaguar/Land Rover’s company challenge week-end. When asked to take part I jumped at the opportunity knowing little of what would be expected of me. (At that time I thought I would be spending the day driving around in Jaguars and Land Rovers - hence my enthusiasm.) So on Friday midday we (Dan, Federico, Kristi, Sevil, Rob, and I) jumped into two cars and trekked up to Wales just north of the Brecon Beacons to a town called Rhayader. We arrived within minutes of the registration cut off time. So Team 43 (we didn’t think of coming up with a team name) was registered and we settled in for the night - camping style.

The competition has been running for 22 years and about 400 people take part. This year they invited 7 suppliers, ranging from various business areas. We were the only agency there, and I think one of the only teams from London. And looking at the other team’s camps we were truly the amateurs at this event. So with our city comforts 200 miles south east of us we pitched our tents and realised we have nothing to make food with (we can’t live on our Special K breakfast bars alone). Luckily for us the camp site was adjacent to the town so we found a quaint pub to go have a hearty Welsh dinner and plot our route for the next day. With tummies full and eyes closing we settled into our sleeping bags and off to the land of nod.

With six hours of sleep we wake up at 6 to a foggy, cold (4°C / 39°F) camp site that is buzzing with activity. Teams are kitted up and raring to go. We just stand around trying to make sense of the cold and why we couldn’t sleep the night before. More importantly, how are we going to get through this day without coffee - surprisingly the Starbucks frontier hasn’t made it to Rhayader. So with our backpacks fully laden we drag ourselves out the camp site onto the route which we have plotted. A false sense of hope that we will pass a cafe that will sell coffee soon becomes a distant dream. (I still blame that for the reason why we got lost within the first 10 minutes of the challenge.) After backtracking and walking through thick wet grass we finally arrive at the first check point and the first activity centre. From this point things changed and we pulled together as a team and the day just got better.

For the rest of the day we would hike through some of the most beautiful country side stopping off at points to do various types of activities. The aim of the challenge was to accumulate as many points as possible. This can be done through check points and team activities. Our first challenge was blind-folded driving. A driver in a Land Rover is blind folded while another team mate stands outside and talks the driver through a figure-8 course. Other activities included projectile launch (Dan’s design is patent pending), catepillar walk, wall climbing, abseiling, team-bondage (we weren’t very good at this), pyramid building, high-wire walking, thinking-puzzles (we left Rob to these), ball volleying and a few others. But never mind what the activity was, the impressive thing was how the group dynamic grew and we tackled each activity as one team. You spend your days working closely with peers but you never spend any time like this with them. So these events introduces you to a different side to the people you work with. This is something you won’t get at work, and the way you bond in these types of events is invaluable. People are also challenged. In team spirit Sevil did the wall climbing and abseiling even though she has shoulder problems. Federico overcame his vertigo just so we could get maximum points. We never argued (even thought I got us lost), and we cheered each other on. Our main objective was to enjoy the day, and that is exactly what we did.

Eleven hours and 20 kilometres (12.5 miles) later we arrive back at camp very tired and with minutes left before cut off time. Our expressions are very different from the morning, but the sense of accomplishment is evident. You don’t forget the moment you take off your hiking boots or the feeling after a well deserved shower. That night there was a sponsored dinner and presentation - everyone gets a certificate. So we enjoyed a good meal, a few cold brewskies (aaaaaaahhhhhhh!), and a couple games of pool (which Kristi hustled) before we settle back into our tents. This night there was no problem sleeping - it was warmer and we were finished.

Nine o’clock the next morning we are on the road after a good breakfast and leave Wales in our rear-view mirror. In retrospect the week-end was amazing. Not only was it a great way to see the beautiful Welsh country side, but a great way to challenge yourself physically and mentally, and to get to know better those who you work with daily. I am sure I speak for all of us on the team that we worked brilliantly together and got to know each other more. At this level these events are very successful for team building, and we have all agreed, if invited we are back there next year, and with the same team: Team Fruity Tree!

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Sometimes you climb a mountain and, weary from the effort, you stand up and take a good long look around. You soak up the view and, feeling exhausted but re-invigorated, you stand back and really appreciate your achievement.

I’d like to echo the sentiments above, but I’d just really like a few days to get to know my duvet again – possibly with some pottering around the house, catching up on some lapsed TV series, maybe even deflowering the copy of God Of War II that still remains untouched next to my dusty PS2.
You never know, I may even go outside… drink alcohol… see this summer thing that everyone’s on about…

Bit of a monumental project, this one; the microsite for the new Jaguar XF - no less for the fact that three generations of Global Beach Flashers were involved in the project. Huge pat on the back must go to Martin who, using the ancient and secret power of McRome-Dia, merged with me to form a Super Actionscript Ranger to battle the evil Dead-Line

In fact this project saw the majority of our senior agency staff pull together to bring this beast to life.

And quite a beautiful beast it is:

http://www.jaguarxf.com/

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Scott Rosenberg wrote an interesting article for the Guardian this week. By challenging the cynical blog haters of the world and debating his views on the first blogger he seems to have caused quite a stir. How has blogging evolved, what does it entail and what does this mean for business in the future. Is blogging invasive and nothing but a “universe of Rumours” or something that critics need to stop over reacting about?

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