I’m not renowned for leaping to embrace new technology, if anything I’m known for dragging my heels. However, call me a good old-fashioned girl, but when technology is fun and exciting, I do want to shout about it. Now, I’m not going to profess that I know a lot about it but Augmented Reality (AR) is really grabbing my interest. Where 3D has seriously disappointed me, AR is floating my boat!

Augmented Reality (put as simply as I can) is combining amazing interactive 3D experiences with reality in real time. It’s bringing graphics alive and into our lives. When using Augmented Reality our senses are enhanced, so what we hear, see, feel and smell will be stimulated to the point we’ll be asking ourselves ‘am I experiencing something real or is this a computer generated encounter’! Sure, we’ll know which one it is but reality is starting to blur at the edges.

It’s a scientific minefield to get into the ins and outs of how it works. But as I understand it, it allows for information to be stored on a chip or a barcode that when viewed through a device (such as a mobile phone for now) will literally project a 3D experience in front of you – remember Princess Leia in Start Wars projected from R2D2? or think of Tom Cruise in Minority Report where someone’s iris will be read and specific adverts are shown just for him.

The future is about to get Augmented. One development suggested, is based on you wearing a small device that takes in data of our surroundings, gathers data from the net and projects the information onto any surface in front of you or even on you. So for example you’re buying a new car, you go to the garage, look at a SAAB 93, with AR you will be able to call up all the information you need about that car onto the bonnet of that car! Games companies will release games where characters can perform actions in your living room, even from your hands.

What really excites me about AR is that I think it will become the way forward for marketing and advertising, maybe not in the near future (although some companies are starting to use it in magazine advertising) but definitely in our lifetime. It’s a fun exciting way to promote your product or brand and the possibilities are phenomenal. Here’s an example of how it’s already entering the market.

‘But you’ve done work for large corporates?’
‘What the? You do work for us and we’re not small!’
‘You only work with one man bands now?’
‘We’re a charity not an enterprise, where do we fit in?’
‘So what on earth is an SME?!’

We’re expecting a reaction to our alignment in the market. We had a big enough discussion ourselves about which way we were heading, so we can’t expect others not to question us.

After nearly 12 years in business we decided to look at what we do best. We realised that most marketing and creative companies rarely practice what they preach; taking a look at our contemporaries we discovered that they never hang their hats on what they really do. Sure, they were creative. Yup they came up with solutions. They were all very friendly (well most of them). But hardly any of them said who their actual target market were; who specifically they were aiming at.

We fell into that trap too – concerned that we would turn potential clients off using us if we dared to state who we were aiming at. We found ourselves in an ocean of ‘marketing specialists’.

But seriously, how can we pretend that we offer everything to everyone? We can’t. At different times and in different departments we can help many clients of all sizes, but the chances of CocaCola ringing us up and asking us to direct their next advertising campaign is slim.

Instead we looked at what we do, what we have done, and how we can best help our clients. And that’s when we realised: we work best with SMEs – more MEs than SEs but we never rule it out – we know how to create exciting campaigns and work that helps organisations to punch above their weight.

We add value when we’re an extension to our client’s team. We’re a full time resource that allows clients to call on us when they need to, and who can help support a small marketing team or a marketing manager without adding extra salaries.

We’re not alienating the big corporates, you only have to see the work that we’ve delivered for adidas – but, to a larger client, we’ll be a small cog in the corporate wheel; we’ll make a difference, but it will more than likely be on a project-by-project basis. With SMEs we can get to the heart of their objectives and help with delivering strong communications that can be the catalyst to deliver results.

Our experience with some of the most exciting teams and businesses allow us to think big, be creative but deliver to a budget. And who better to do that with than the world SMEs who can benefit from a different perspective? They bring their specialisms, we bring ours.

Still not sure? Have a look at our SME Marketing specialists – FAQ

‘Hang on, you’ve done work for large corporates and big names, they’re not SMEs?’

Yep, and we’re really proud of it. We’re not excluding the big corporates; you only have to see the work that we’ve delivered for adidas, we’ve loved it. But, to a larger client, we’ll be a small cog in the corporate wheel; we’ll make a difference, but it is more likely to be on a project-by-project basis. With SMEs we can get to the heart of their objectives and help with delivering strong communications that can be the catalyst to deliver results.

We’ll continue to do this where we feel we can add creative and ROI value, but large corporates are not where we’re aiming our marketing focus right now.

‘What the? You do work for us and we’re not small!’

We know that not all of our clients are small and we’re definitely not aiming at only small companies (see the next point). But we ultimately deliver more value to our clients, can be more creative (and so therefore go home with happy feelings), when we’re a part of a company’s success. When we’re involved in long-term planning. The companies we’re aiming at won’t all be small, but they will have a small marketing team that could benefit from having partners who can deliver creative solutions that get results. We’re always keen to chat ideas over a cup of tea, getting to know you is what works best for both of us.

‘You only work with one-man-bands now?’

No. Definitely not. In fact, it’s rare that we ever work with one man bands – although we don’t rule it out. Our remit is working with companies that are dedicated to seriously making a mark in their industry or region. We don’t limit anything by size, but we do only work with businesses that have a minimum yearly spend, and are serious about developing and moving forward.

‘We’re a charity/Government agency not an enterprise, where do we fit in?’

Just like any enterprise if you have a marketing team that are committed to making a mark in your industry or area and you could benefit from a creative team that can support, develop and initiate creative ideas with strong ROI then we’re still the guys for you. We’ve had years of experience with working for Not-For-Profits on both campaign awareness, new member drives and change campaigns.

‘So what on earth is an SME?!’

In a nutshell: a Small, Medium Enterprise.
In our mind it’s these gutsy companies that are the backbone to our economy’s future. They are trailblazers, challengers and entrepreneurs. They’re small enough to stay nimble, flexible enough to change to suit markets and yet innovative enough to take on the aging behemoths.
SMEs – we salute you.

‘So what makes you specialists?’

We’ve spent years working with SMEs in one form or another; either as small companies or larger companies with small marketing teams. Throughout the years we’ve challenged the status quo. We don’t believe that because you’re smaller you can’t be innovative.

We challenge the standard approach to standard briefs; why do you need a brochure if 80% of your market is online? Why should you have a regular pop-up exhibition stand when you can have one that delivers 100 exhibition stands in 1?

We’re used to working with tight budgets. If we were artists we’d hang our work in a gallery. It’s not good enough to pay a designer to make something look pretty. As a creative agency we have to deliver results and we have to do that on time and within budget. We’ve got years of experience in delivering results, we’d love to share our successes with you, why not drop us a line?

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Ok, so those that know me will vouch for the fact that I’m not one for convention – work, rest and play I’m mostly outside of that infamous box. However, what I’m about to say about may shock even those of you that know me well – especially since I’ve spent most of my working life being passionate about all things ‘design’:

So, the topic is colour, the sentiment is ‘get over it!’

Directing Resources

I recently had a conversation with a large format printer (she prints in large format, she’s not a format printer that’s large – just to clarify!). She recounted the story of a well-known national building society whose marketing team are so particular about their brand colours, that every single material (leaflets/stationery/banners/website/emarketing/TV adverts) has to match perfectly in terms of colour – now this may seem, on the face of it, not an unreasonable ask but, when you consider the amount of different substrates and the different print processes that they commission, it really is a hugely difficult thing to achieve. Take a look at the colour matching article that features in our ‘really useful stuff’ and explains, in more detail, the difficulty in achieving an absolute colour match across different media.

Friends

My rant is really about the art of being realistic and managing expectations – it’s about having a degree of tolerance. It’s also about knowing your suppliers and trusting them. This particular building society really was not in the habit of winning friends with the amount of work that was rejected due to slight colour variation.

At wow! we like making friends; friends scratch each other’s backs and enjoy making each other happy – they go out of their way to ensure that they do a good job. Our suppliers are our friends – we’re able to talk to them when we have a particularly difficult finish that we’d like to achieve, and they help us to meet, and often exceed, our clients’ expectations – it’s often a bit of human ‘tinkering’ and years of experience that works – not a computer programme.

Forethought

Nevertheless, we understand the print process ourselves, we know all about the variation that occurs across litho print, digital print, large format print, as well as the differences between inks that are printed and colours that you seen on screen. We also know that, as long as your brand and palette of colours has been well thought-through in the beginning, you’ll not have to worry too much about slight variations in colour in order to give your customers or clients the right, professional impression. Certain colours should be avoided and your brand should be instantly recognisable; graphically and typographically. If your brand relies on fantastic colour representation then choose colours that translate well across all media.

Back to the building society: their marketing budget isn’t well spent at all – much time, money, blood, sweat and tears are spent making sure that colour is exactly, perfectly matched across all media. That means less of each of the above resources for the message – surely that’s the most important aspect of each action that the building society takes? Not wishing to be flippant (colour is extremely important), but there are very few people would compare a poster to a TV ad; a letterhead to a flyer and say ‘ooh, I’m sure that red (or blue, or green)’s 1% lighter than before’! Humans notice style, layout, overall colour and general messages more than they notice a very slight colour variation – heck, when we read, we don’t even see individual letters – we read words as ‘shapes’.

Tolerance

So, rant over – a little bit of forethought, a great brand identity, a solid relationship with your design team and printers that will scratch your back and you’ll not need endless reprints or reworks. ‘Tolerance’ is a great word (a virtue that should be applied to all aspects of our lives!) – and one that should be applied in this instance – with a certain amount of tolerance, you will be truly represented.

Budgets are not secrets, but clients are often reticent to share them with agencies. Here’s five reasons you should:

1. It saves time.
   There’s nothing more disheartening than coming up with ass-kicking ideas that are going to set the world alight only to be told – that they are way above the budget. We’ve wasted your time, we’ve wasted our time and the project stalls. Rarely can a campaign that’s been tailored to one price be done as successfully for less. Creative ideas and campaigns are worked out to suit your budget, going back and redoing the creative and cutting the budget by half will simply end up as a bodge job. 

2. You get the best results.
   Just as an architect will build a house to suit a budget so creative agencies build a campaign based on the budget. Your architect won’t waste money on things that can’t be included, (gold taps), but he will optimise the solution to get the maximum impact for the budget – saving you money where he can and thinking of ways to save costs but delivering the best solution. We work on getting the biggest bang for your buck – making impact within the budget. Looking at cost savings on production or distribution.  Understanding the budget constraints will result in a well-honed campaign or project being delivered that will deliver the optimum results.
3. You build trust.
   Being up front and honest about costs and budgets allows for the relationship between agency and client to be completely transparent. If an agency has had to undercut their prices to win work at the fear of getting the budget wrong, you can bet that they will be looking for ways in which to claw back the costs that will actually occur. They’ll charge for minor amends and alterations, mark-up imagery or print more than usual. leaving you cheesed off that the budget was never kept. The circle of distrust goes around again. If a fair and honest budget is set out at the beginning the agency can decide if they wish to work on a project and everyone starts on a level playing field.Once you have that trust installed the relationship can start to build and both of you can benefit. You can even consider talking about results-based remuneration – where the level of pay is based on a sliding scale linked to the results. This can only happen once you have trust on both sides (after all an agency will want to see proof of sales/returns as a result of their work).
4. You keep control.
   The fear that by giving away the budget you are letting go of the tight reigns is untrue. You still have control. You can still put in a couple of failsafes to ensure you keep control.

• If you’re dealing with a new agency and you’re unsure of their ability to keep to set budgets, drop the actual amount that you have to play with to cover unexpected costs.
• If you’re dealing with someone you know and trust then believe in them and give them the honest budget (you’ll be surprised what can be done with an extra 10%). Ask their advice about what can delivered and talk about your long-term plans so that the project falls in line.
• Suggest a flat rate fee – explain that the budgets are preset and that there cannot be any overspend. As long as the brief is clear and the project does not veer from the outlining scope then an agency will be receptive to this.

5. They are not your enemy.
Poor results and return on your investment are your enemy. Working with designers you trust and who know your business will get you better results (see point 2) but also will work towards your long term objectives. It should even be a little fun along the way!

Related posts: The Dangers of revealing your marketing budget