We’ve developed Cravendale’s latest on-pack giveaway, EPIC Straws. They’re perfect for sipping, slurping, and making all the Cravendale disappear! To support the loyalty scheme, we’ve launched a content-driven social campaign that runs until December. Check out how you can take part in all the fun and become a milk magician too at epicstraws.co.uk.
It’s not every day an account we’re working on gets voted one of the top 100 social brands in the country. Actually, make that one of the top 20 social brands in the country. Oh, and make that two accounts we’re working on…
Yup, according to top social agency Headstream – who published their second annual roundup of the UK’s most socially effective brands this morning – both Lurpak and Cravendale have exploded into the top 20, beating off such giants as Ford, Marmite, Google and last year’s no.1, Dell.
What’s more, this represents two out of only five FMCG brands in the top 25 results, with no other dairy brands even breaking the top 100! Needless to say, we’re very proud.
The Social Brands 100 list was drawn from an initial crowdsourced pool of 300 nominated brands, with the final results calculated using a combined ‘data score’ from social media monitoring firm Brandwatch and a ‘panel score’ from a panel of top industry judges. This panel included Twitter’s UK head of sales Bruce Daisley, and judged each brand in a number of key areas such as their success in creating a credible community and their prioritizing of fans’ needs over the brand’s own.
A huge thank you goes out to all our staff working across these two accounts and everyone else who helps make Outside Line one of the top social agencies out there.
Next year we’re aiming even higher, with even more of our brands in the top spots. Make sure you come and join us…
Another launch day in the office, with our new iPhone app “Slurp” up on the App Store, just in time to use on your new iPhone 3GS! We’ve almost had around 100,000 people download our previous App for Cravendale, the Pocket Pirate, and are hoping this will follow in it’s success.
We’re pretty chuffed with this, it’s a lot of fun, and the perfect way to while away a bus journey. Try and top Edd’s high score of 14 if you can!
Oh and if you haven’t got an iPhone you can still play the game online at the Milk Matters site.
Winning awards for websites isn’t easy. The competition is huge, the stakes are high, and what might be internet heaven for one person is holy hell for another. But we’ve won them in spades for our Milk Matters site, created last year for Cravendale. We recently added 2 FAB awards to our many commendations the site, one for the Best Website and the second for Most Creative Digital Work. And we thought this would be a great chance to discuss some of the design decisions that went on behind the scenes which we feel made the site chime with so many people.
So a bit of background – Arla gave us the task of a re-designing their site we made for them in 2008, and one of the key objectives was to deliver their key 2009 brand messages, such as “Milk is great for strong, healthy teeth”.
So we decided to create a new animated character for the site that would be able to deliver these messages whilst the user browses. This character would have to be easy to draw and animate, giving us flexibility for animations and updates over the course of the year.
The initial interface designs were focused purely on the bottle, and the way our character could interact with the milk bottle while displaying key messages. Looking back you can see how the different initiatives had taken a back seat in our original designs, they weren’t very flexible and didn’t allow room for loads of content and promotions being added to the site throughout the year.
We wanted to move away from typical images in boxes you see so often in web design so we experimented with different ways of navigating around the site. The stage area became larger and scattered more objects around which represented current and future initiatives. These navigational blocks became more individual with each adopting their own unique look. We made our character smaller so that he could interact with the bottle as part of the site. At this point we liked the look of the 3D boxes sitting in the site.
Here we have a slightly more developed version of the homepage, the 2D character is amongst the 3D blocks and large typography in the background denotes the current site section. The navigational blocks are coming to life with more colour and their own distinct look and feel. One problem we came across was we felt the 2D character and 3D objects did not work well together on screen at the same time. The decision had to be made between a 3D or 2D world. The 3D route would allow us to create some really nice objects, but restricted the interactivity our character could have with the site. A 2D world would let us implement a flash physics engine in the site, therefore allowing the user to pick up any block, object or even the character and throw them around the stage.
The decision between 2D and 3D had been made, and 2D won! The navigational blocks were changed to be completely flat, with the graphics on each more colourful and distinctive. They are now all on one plane, allowing our character to run around the site with greater freedom.
At the finishing line, we had a problem with the blocks potentially covering the Cravendale bottle so we moved it to the front giving it prominence on every page. Everything has been brought closer together and the site looks cleaner and more minimal than ever.
So there you have it – from an initial “boring” design into an award-winning site with an integrated physics engine. And at this stage we had fun sticking a few Easter Eggs in there too – for instance, our office telephone number (0207 841 3970) is one of the only numbers that will make the mobile phone ring. There are loads of other hidden gems in the site still waiting to be found – why not head over there now and have a play?
Well it’s been a long time coming, but the new Cravendale site finally went live last night.
A mixture of animation and interactivity, the site has been one of our hardest technical flash builds in recent months. See for yourself by visiting the link or read on for more technical stuff.
The original idea for the site was to create a 2d ‘Cravendale World’ with which the user could interact. After much investigation it was decided to build the site for Flash Player 9 upwards and to use the box2dflash physics engine (a port of the box2d c++ library).
As one of the first sites we could find fully utilising this engine, the flash build started very much in the dark in terms of what could be achieved. However what we have produced (and what we plan to add in the future), hopefully demonstrates a little of what can be produced with this great physics library.
If you love nothing more than a perfectly made cuppa, and hate it when someone kindly makes you one but it’s not quite right, then Cravendale and Make The Tea.com have the answer… ‘Love Your Mug’.
Simply fill in your drink preferences, choose a design and hand over a few pennies. Before you know it your mug will be sitting on your desk!
Your cuppa will never be made incorrectly again! Enjoy…
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