adbeast news

McCann Worldgroup and T.A.G. Win Best Of Show

Remember when video games were a novelty only played by adolescent boys? Those days are long gone. DIgital gaming is a mainstream activity supported by the top ad firms the world has to offer. Last week the McCann Worldgroup and T.A.G. won Best of Show acclaim at the One Show in New York. According to AdWeek, the Halo ‘Believe’ campaign played a large role in turning Halo 3 from an ‘ordinary’ video game into a monster success story.

AdWeek lists the winners:

The top winners at this year’s show included TBWA Worldwide (2 Gold, 6 Silver, 4 Bronze), BBDO New York, (5 Gold, 2 Silver, 2 Bronze), Saatchi & Saatchi, (4 Gold, 2 Silver, 1 Bronze), Ogilvy & Mather (1 Gold, 2 Silver, 3 Bronze), Leo Burnett (4 Silver, 1 Bronze), McCann Worldwide (4 Gold, 1 Bronze), Crispin Porter + Bogusky (2 Gold, 1 Silver, 1 Bronze), Jung Von Matt (1 Gold, 2 Silver, 1 Bronze) and Wieden + Kennedy (3 Silver, 1 Bronze).

Of course, many of these agencies are adbeast clients, so they know all about the ways new technologies can enhance the creative process. Be on the lookout for adbeast 3.0, coming to a mobile device near you!

Crispin Porter Bugs Us

Remember these ads?

If you do, you’re about ready to retire, if you don’t the Crispin Porter agency is resurrecting the classic Beetle (a.k.a. “bug") for a new ad. Check out http://www.adweek.com for a story on their new campaign.

Resurrecting the iconic 1964 model, this new campaign for the “people’s car” (the Volkswagen Beetle), from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, features the tagline “It’s what the people want.” Very much in line with Crispin’s past work for the carmaker, it’s odd and surprising and will no doubt generate talk.

adbeast Improves Client’s Workflow—Gets Thanks

We are much like any company when it comes to praise—we like when our hard work gets noticed. RPM Productions has been a client for a while now. One of the things about our company that makes us different from the competition is the amount of dedicated support we can provide when clients need it. We are not a company that puts customers into “on hold hell” when they call in. Most of the time during business hours we’re available immediately, and when we’re not we have on-call staff who can solve snags quickly and efficiently.

Here’s what RPM Productions said last week:

Thanks for all your help by the way. RPM has engrained adbeast into our daily regime for client screenings, casting, directors reels and much more it has become an essential tool for our advertising production work.
 
Thanks for such a stellar product!

adbeast Greens St. Patrick’s Day—And Every Day

Happy St. Patrick’s day to all our customers, but for those of you in Chicago, today has a special meaning. Chicago has a long tradition of being green on March 17th. This year, however, is a bit different. Chicago wants to become one of the greenest, environmentally speaking that is, cities anywhere. At adbeast we are all for that.

Did you know that adbeast is really a “Green” solutions company? It’s true. When we launched seven years ago one of our big motivations was to save people time and money spent moving tapes and hard files around by couriers, trucks, and planes. We are proud to say that over those years adbeast has probably saved the environment from thousands of tons of CO2 that otherwise would have gone into the atmosphere.

Take a moment to think about your company’s carbon footprint. Can you be doing more? Give us a call and we can explain how our services not only can make you money, they can help reduce your environmental footprint—and that is a good thing. A pint of Guinness please! (or, Pionta Guinness, le do thoil.)

First ‘boards awards powered by adbeast

Adbeast helps one of the world’s premier award shows celebrate ad industry talent by making it possible for the work of emerging directors to be first entered and then judged online. See the results at this year’s ‘boards award show on April 4th in NYC. We hope to see you there—and don’t forget to cast your vote for the Peoples Choice Award at the adbeast powered:

http://firstboardsawardsvote.adbeast.com/peopleschoice/

adbeast Helps Make Sparks Fly

Sparks Productions in Toronto, Canada is a major player in the market. Their work for international advertisers like KFC, McDonald’s, and Workopolis gets rave reviews. Not surprisingly, the Sparks website is a study in refined beauty—and adbeast products contribute to the site’s success. The turnkey adbeast Studio service is available to Sparks, its clients, and its partners directly through their branded web pages. As anyone in the industry will tell you, having a powerful content and workflow management system integrated into a company’s web presence is a tremendous advantage over doing things the old-fashioned way with couriers and FTP sites.

Here is what Sparks founder Andy Crosbie says about working smart with adbeast:

adbeast’s work ethic is refreshing. Their approach has always been, “not only will we make it work, we’ll make it amazing”, and they do. adbeast is a company worth placing your creative and technical trust in.

You’ll have to admit, nothing is sweeter than the sound of a happy client.

Has Science Built Advertisers A Better Mousetrap?

Our colleagues at Adweek have a story about the collision of advertising with biometrics and neuroscience. You might call it a virtual, private focus group, or just a better way to find out what people really think about your latest ad. The company behind this innovation is San Francisco based EmSense (for emotion sense, get it?).

The EmSense gizmo, developed by a group of MIT grads, combines EEG technology used to measure brain-wave activity and biometric measurements with proprietary algorithms. It produces data that spell out how a consumer is reacting both emotionally and cognitively to marketing messages, and can be used to measure such responses across a variety of ad platforms.

We all know that really smart agencies and advertisers have been using science-based, quantitative methods for decades, but this is something new.

The EmSense device, shaped like a thin, plastic headband, reads brain waves and monitors the breathing, heart rate, blinking and skin temperatures of consumers who preview ads to measure their emotional and cognitive responses.

New technology-based solutions like EmSense (and like adbeast’s Studio) allow advertisers to work more effectively, and get a better return on their ad investments.

Water Propels Goodby

adbeast Studio user Goodby, Silverstein & Partners got some good news this week from PepsiCo. That beverage giant moved responsibility for its Propel enhanced-water brand to the hot San Francisco agency. Adage.com notes that spending on the Propel brand was $70 million in the first nine months of 2007.

adbeast Tames The Award Show

Time was when award shows were simple enough. Get a few people in a room, turn on the VCR, and a few hours later you had the winners.

In a modern, digital world, judging is no longer just an excuse to get together to share a good single malt with friends. Take a look at the latest round of the Marketing Awards, for example. With hundreds of entries over dozens of categories, managing and judging award shows is becoming a lot like real work.

That’s where adbeast comes in. A few years ago we got into the award show support business because we wanted to give something back to the community that sustains us. As fortune would have it, our technology is ideally suited to the process of registering, uploading, managing, and judging creative entries. The result is we’ve been asked to do a lot of them, and last weekend completed the judging phase of the 2008 Marketing Awards.

adbeast takes its job seriously: we want to ensure all the entries are represented well, and fairly. We also want to reduce “judging fatigue” as much as possible. To do that we invented an easy-to-use, handheld, wireless judging system that’s been getting rave reviews. Our tools have knocked hours off the time it takes to enter and then tabulated the jury’s scoring. Instead of managing time consuming paper trails, the adbeast tools provide results in real time—no more staying up all night adding and re-adding hand scrawled scores.

“adbeast’s new process has trimmed hours off the judging time,” says one award show manager. That’s no surprise to our team. After all, the company’s mantra is “Work Smart.”

adbeast is growing

Last week adbeast officially let the world know about the two new additions to its team.  Robert Ouellette (yours truly) is assuming the role of Chief Operating Officer reporting to CEO, Steve Hancock.  Jeff Dammeier joins the company as Director of Business Development.

Who are we?  I’ve Directed the University of Toronto’s Information Technology Design Centre, and been V.P. of Marketing for Research and Education at Immersion Studios. Chairing the Canadian leg of the Siemens International Innovation Task Force, with partners Sony, Novartis, and Renault in 2002, was a high mark, as was directing the Levi-Strauss SilverTab online campaign that won a Revolution Award in 2001 (that campaign helped launch the careers of the Black Eyed Peas—really).

Jeff Dammeier comes to the company from an account management role at Boards Magazine where he helped grow the magazine’s advertiser base significantly. With ad-industry specific sales experience from Cannes to Los Angeles, and a background in commercial production, we expect Jeff to drive adbeast’s international expansion.

By bringing us on adbeast intends to get its money and time saving services to as many users as possible. That shouldn’t be hard: the adbeast Studio “Work Smart” offering is embraced as a best-in-class service by leading advertisers like Anheuser-Busch, major ad agencies including DDB, Ogilvy and Y&R, and hundreds of independent commercial production suppliers across the globe.

We’re excited to be here.