Filed under: Events, Hot List Clients, News, Our team, Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth | Tags: AW2010, blogger outreach, burberry, Design, fashion collections, Fashion Week, Jaeger, Jasper Conran, london, MAN event, social media, supreme, topman, Vivienne Westwood, Yahoo!
The Topman trouser shoot did not go to plan.
We’ve been working with Topman on their social media and developed their profiles from a standing start to thriving communities providing rich consumer insight and sales. One of our recent projects for London Fashion Week was identified by Yahoo! as the most viewed and searched show during the period. This is a great example of how involving the community demonstrates real value, providing more impact and exposure than competitors. Independent pat on the backs from brands like Yahoo! are always welcome but we also have our own way of tracking results – just ask about our social rating tool.
The press release is below but we think it is a powerful testament to our social work when our male only campaign trumped unisex campaigns by other brands.
***TOPMAN REIGNS SUPREME ON LONDON FASHION WEEK’S CATWALK***
Men’s Growing Passion for Fashion Revealed By Yahoo! Search
Friday 26th February 2010. As the curtain falls on London Fashion Week, Yahoo! Search has been looking at who reigned fashion supreme as King or Queen of this season’s catwalk.
The Yahoo! Search data over the last week revealed the Topman Design collection made the greatest impact and buzz. Proving that consumers still have a passion for high street fashion the show generated the highest search reaction and greatest keyword spike of the entire London Fashion Week.
Usually incorporated into the successful MAN event, this year’s AW2010 showcase is the first time Topman Design stepped out on its own.
Following on the smartly polished heels of Topman’s premium collection, the ever popular Vivienne Westwood and Burberry collections ranked in runner-up positions.
Top 5 London Fashion Week Collections by Popularity
1 Topman Design
2 Vivienne Westwood
3 Burberry
4 Jaeger
5 Jasper Conran
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Design, Environment, Events, Hot List Clients, Our team | Tags: event, event. launch, evoke, fashion, in mobile, london, london fashion week, party, philip green, retail, store, topman, topshop
topman ad in lights
Topman store launch for London Fashion Week went really well last night – well done to all involved. Some of the Neoco team went down and quaffed quite a lot of Moet by all accounts 
They also hooked up with other agency peeps from Evoke and In Mobile before trying out the digital keycard booth to get some great freebies and Topman discount. A big thanks to all at Topman for working with us on this so far (and everything to come)
You can keep up to date with the store re-launch and beyond using these channels:
Twitter
http://twitter.com/topmanUK
YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/user/TopmanBlog
Facebook
http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Topman/99634526926?ref=ts
Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/topmanuk/
Twitpic
http://twitpic.com/photos/TopmanUK
Check out some more photos and video from the night:
topman stairwell
hot like fire baby! it's scorch london
Everybody say HALLO to the new Scorch website! We’ve involved Scorch in some projects for our clients before and we think they are pretty darn fab – so we were rightly pleased when they asked us to look at their website. Our understanding is they are rightly pleased with the website and have already had positive feedback. So go check it out, check them out, and share some digital lurve.
blazing hot website for scorch
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Cool & Online, Events, Hot List Clients | Tags: alternative, blog, Bowie, cool event, digital agency, jazz, london, Meltdown, music, sold out, Southbank Centre, Spotify, tickets, Twitter, we loved Massive Attack last year
Meltdown headliner
Tickets now on sale for the AWESOME Meltdown event.
This has been an absolute stormer over recent years with previous guest directors including Massive Attack, David Bowie, Morrissey and more. this year, free jazz legend and icon of the avant-garde Ornette Coleman will take over Southbank Centre’s riverside venues and spaces as the 16th director of Meltdown. Reflecting the restless, unfettered spirit of this year’s director, Meltdown in 2009 will provide a platform for avantrockers, jazz and world music artists alike – giving free reign to reinvention, improvisation and the collaborative concerts Meltdown is renowned for.
As the Southbank Centre digital agency it was our task to put together all the comms for this year’s event including the dynamic website that draws on several social feeds, including Twitter, Blog and a Spotify playlist.
Meltdown homepage
There has been a great response from the community – the Twitter feed already has nearly 700 followers and newsletter subscriptions are high. So don’t sit here reading any more – go and check it out and why not treat yourself to some tickets too!
Filed under: Industry news, Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth | Tags: Alex Bainbridge, BA, community, Cravendale, Facebook, hosting, london, Make The Tea, maps, Metrotwin, New Media Age, New York, NMA, social networks, trave;l, Trip Advisor, trip pods, Virgin, Virgin Active, virgin atlantic, Vtravelled
As reported in January’s New Media Age, Virgin Atlantic are preparing for the soft launch of their new travel portal “Vtravelled”. According to the article, the community site will aim to recruit 2 million founding members between the soft launch date (end of Feb) and the rollout in June – an ambitious target.
The site moves Virgin into territory already covered by their main long-haul airline rival – BA. “Metrotwin” is based around the idea of “use[ing] what you know about one city to explore the other one.” So Borough Market in London is twinned with Union Square Greenmarket in New York. It’s an interesting idea, complimented by the excellent look and feel of the site and interesting content – a point well observed by Alex Bainbridge in his blog.
Virgin’s community site takes a different approach. According to the NMA article, the site will focus on:
• providing an “inspirational” site that will help “spark ideas for new trips”
• image and map content
• hosting “personal travel content” in the form of “trip pods” that allow users to share their travel plans, photos, notes and chat
Ultimately, Virgin want customers to “think of the site when making a travel decision”.
As Alex points out in his blog, with this approach, much of the content appears to be focussed on an individual’s travel plans. This differs from sites such as TripAdvisor and Metrotwin where much of the content is focussed on a place and therefore often of interest to other users.
There is also a crossover of functionality with the large social-network players (Facebook, MySpace etc.). Can Vtravelled persuade users to leave Facebook and other social networks to post photos and chat to their friends?
I believe that the success of the site will come down to the implementation. If the look and feel and feature-set are attractive enough to the target audience (users who wish to share travel plans or plan trips), then users may embrace these tools and make the jump.
Arguably Virgin have the clout to make this happen. Other recent Virgin advertising activities (agreeably not in “digital) seem to have been a success. I joined Virgin Active after the “lose the bits you hate” tube poster campaign and the more recent Virgin Atlantic TV ads are extremely impressive.
Whether Virgin can meet their ambitious targets remains to be seen. I for one am looking forward to following the success of the site, not least because of what it will say about consumers appetite for niche social-network communities. From my experience implementing social networks for our clients I do believe that niche networks are the future. I think users are willing to sign up to sites that they identify with, me included. Recently I’ve signed up for the BA website and a Cravendale branded ‘make the tea‘ site! But at Neoco we know that, however grand the scope of a new social network, it’s expert implementation that will keep members engaged over time.
Filed under: Events, Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth | Tags: applications, beer, cat burton, Dan Lester, event, Facebook Developers Garage, huddle, iPlatform, LinkedIn, london, mark baker, moshi monsters, MySpace, MySQL, Open Social, pizza, Santosh, social networking, sun microsystems, Twitblogs, victoria mcevedy
facebook developer garage london logo
Another event we will be attending, the FDG. A monthly staple of ours to chat to like minded folk about developing on Facebook. Again, we will feedback to clients anything interesting that comes out of this. This month doors open at 6 – which gives us more time for Pizza, Beer and that essential banter!
Join us this month as:
* Andy from Huddle talking about their experience on the LinkedIn platform, and how this compares to Facebook
*Victoria McEvedy – lets us know the legal stuff with ‘The law and social networking: third party applications’
*Cat Burton from Moshi Monsters join us to talk about their experience with Facebook applications
*We hear the latest on the MySpace platform from Chris Thorpe
*Mark Baker fro Sun / MySQL tells us about meeting Facebook’s scalability challenges, and scaling MySQL apps.
*Dan Lester, CTO of The iPlatform enlightens us on the framework for launching applications on multiple social networks
*Santosh from TwitBlogs talking about their experience building an Open Social container
Plus the regulars – Iskandar’s back with the Latest from the Platform and all the top advice, networking and free beer at Sun Microsystems.
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Events | Tags: advertising, Alastair douglas, Andrew Sibley, B2B, council, Covent Garden, Digital, event, forum, Guy Philipson, Hanne Tuomisto, hopefully they've got nice food, IAB, joe harrison, london, online, Richard Bush, UK
IAB banner
Another event that you can catch the Neoco team at – or ask us for a report from is the IAB B2B forum: B2B marketing can be hugely different to consumer facing campaigns, particularly when using online advertising, but it can also be incredibly powerful when used correctly.
This essential IAB afternoon forum will give you everything you need to use internet advertising correctly to attract, convert and retain customers in the B2B sector. Whether you are entirely new to internet advertising, or are simply looking to refine your skills, this event will equip you with actions to take back to your teams, improve your business systems and ultimately increase your return on investment in 2009 and beyond.
The IAB has been providing educational material and thought leadership in the B2B sector for many years through its B2B Council. Consisting of the industry’s leading experts, the Council has put together an agenda that is packed with case studies, helpful tips and facts. It will cover most forms of internet advertising from a strategic perspective, including search, email, display and video marketing.
At the event, the B2B Council will also be launching their latest publication with every delegate receiving a free hard copy.
AGENDA
12.45 – 1.15pm
Arrival and lunch
1.15pm – 1.30pm
Chairman’s welcome and B2B Market Overview
Joel Harrison Editor for B2B Marketing
1.30 – 2.00pm
ATTRACT – Innovative online thought leadership
Hanne Tuomisto-Inch – Banner Corporation
Andrew Sibley – Head of Brand & Advertising – Cisco Systems
Cisco’s European head of brand and advertising, Andrew Sibley, will shed light into Cisco’s worldwide experiences and strategies in branding and marketing to business and IT decision-makers in the digital space. Cisco, one of the IT industry’s leading innovators, is a good example of a company that is at the forefront of innovation in digital marketing. Online is key to all Cisco’s communications from enhancing brand experience to launching new products.
BREAK
2.20 – 2.50pm
CONVERT – Delivering business intelligence through digital acquisition 2 x breakaway sessions: long and short closing cycles
Edward Weatherall – Concep
Matt Cooksley – Global eMarketing Manager – Cushman & Wakefield LLP
Long closing cycles: Cushman & Wakefield is the world’s largest privately held real estate services firm with 221 offices in 58 countries and more than 15,000 employees. The firm offers a complete range of services to various clients, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Based around the long cycle, if you choose to attend this session you will learn how to convert clients for larger purchases that require a longer period of consideration.
Alastair Douglas – Simply Business
Short closing cycles: If you run campaigns within quick closing cycle sectors, this session will be perfect for tips to improve upon your campaigns from an expert in this field. Simply Business is the UK’s most popular business insurance and finance portal, using many internet advertising tools including search to deliver undeniably good results.
2.50 – 3.20pm
RETAIN – The role of Internet marketing in Retention
Richard Bush – MD – BaseOneGroup
Retention is key, we all know that, but what role can the internet play in developing and retaining our most valuable customers. In this interactive session we’ll be investigating the retention potential of a whole range of web based techniques from search to virtual seminars.
3.20 – 3.40pm
FUTURE – 2009: an IAB insight
Guy Phillipson – CEO – IAB UK
3.40 – 4.00pm
Q & A
Filed under: Cool & Online | Tags: convert, filter, Flash, gif, jpeg, london, neoco, png, raster, svg, text art, textorizer
Neoco Sketch
I recently stumbed upon a site that does one simple job – it takes an image and then produces a representation of this image by simply writing words on a page. My explanation is clearly rubbish, so here’s what it does, straight from the horses mouth:
Textorizer takes a raster image in a format such as png, jpeg or gif, detects edges using a Sobel convolution filter and replaces them with supplied lines of text.
You can click here to see my “textorized” version of one of LB’s Neoco sketches.
The output of this process is an SVG XML file – where SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics (click here for more details from Wikipedia). In terms of the usefulness of this process, I will say what I said to eveyone in the office – usefulness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I think it’s useful. Kind of!
Filed under: Events, Industry news, New Technology | Tags: applications, Covent Garden, Digital, Ebay, Events, expo, Facebook, gadget, gizmo, Internet, london, made up facts of 90%, marketing, October, small, web, Web 2.0, why do Americans spell behaviour without a U?, widget, WidgetWebExpo
whilst looking at the iphone screen, the WWExpo designer had a great idea for a logo...
Hooray! Widget Web Expo is coming to town (London)! The future of the web is widgets – in fact, the present of the web is widgets too. Long time associate and thoroughly nice bloke Ivan Pope (Mr Widget) is chairing the WidgetWebExpo 6-7th October, in Covent Garden, London. It should be a great event and you should really make it one of the things for you to do in October. I’ll be down with some of the team and maybe a few clients, so let me know if you want to come along – it will definitely be a chance to put you ahead of your competitors.
Wondering what a Widget is? The simplest explanation is 90% of the elements that make up your Facebook profile are widgets. It’s a loose term for little applications or interfaces which let you stream video, bid on ebay, upload docs – pretty much do anything you can already do on the web! The other great thing about widgets is the way users can incorporate them to their own environments or behaviour. This presents great opportunities to communicate brand messages and experiences in a way that engages the audience.
