Success in Barcelona

Well, I really hoped that I’d never get into writing about what I did today on this blog and keep it to the big things which show what we do and the milestones we achieve on behalf of clients.

Having said that, we presented the DEWARS strategy today in Barcelona and then used this to facilitate an ideation session to develop some tactical ideas. With Shift Global this went down so well we have managed to invigorate the Barcelona based Ad agency, the Spanish Market and the Miami based Global team.

The ideas are fantastic and I know they will make DEWARS one of the best websites in the spririts industry, if not just one of the best websites!

However I have promised myself that I will never give away competitive advantage for a client here so you will just have to wait until we start to deploy these excellant ideas. You won’t have to wait to long, just a couple of months, for the launch of the next phase.

We are off to Barcelona

We are off to Barcelona to start work on the Strategy for DEWARS for next year. While we are there we also want to discuss with the local Spanish market how to localise the website to suit them.

We have a really cool way of activating the Dewarisms campaign online, which we need to develop the full strategy for and also the implementation plan full of tactics to engage the consumers.

Anyway, more of this over the next couple of months.

Bacardi Limited Website Launched

We have now also launched the first ever corporate website for Bacardi Limited, the parent company of all the Bacardi Companies and Bacardi-Martini Companies throughout the world. Again, our strategy and direction and managing the agency to final delivery of the solution.

Bacardi Limited – www.bacardilimited.com

We did some extensive research of other spirit companies, other privately owned companies and other luxury goods companies to make sure the website we finally delivered was a world-class winner, and we think we have achieved this. I hope you agree it’s a “very premium and professional website reflecting the company and its values” as the official announcement said.

We launched Dewar’s new website

We launched the new DEWARS’s website yesterday. This is a site to support the new Dewarisms Global Campaign for the DEWARS white label whisky. As always User Experience is key so have a look and tell us what you think. You can find the site at www.dewars.com, www.dewarism.com and www.dewarisms.com to make it easy for the consumer to find the information they want quickly and easily.

Just on that point, all spirit websites require a user to confirm they are above the legal drinking age in their country of residence before entering. This has previously caused issues although, because DEWAR’s is a brand with several products and their web presence had a different website for each product. The issue with this was that consumers got feed up entering their date of birth to go from one product site to another, and also tracking of the consumers journey through the sites was a problem.

With this new site we have created an intelligent Legal Drinking Age (LDA) page which accomplishes two things for us. Firstly it’s a gateway to all the products, although this site is only phase 1 you can still link to interim holding sites for DEWARS 12 and holding pages for DEWARS Signature and ABERFELDY. Secondly, it intelligently interprets the domain name a user has come from and displays the LDA page relevant to that user. On successful completion of the age check it then directs the consumer to the exact part of the website they are interested in, rather than forcing them to go through the homepage and clicking to find the content they are interested in.

It was developed by a really cool agency, Shift Global based in Columbus, Ohio who I now consider to be friends, again with the strategy and direction provided by us. If I get a chance I’ll look out some of the e-mails we got from the Brand Team who just love this and the rest of the strategy we are rolling out.

There’s so much cool stuff on the site I don’t want to go on and on, check out the site and the Google Earth videos in there, with which you can track Tommy Dewar’s Ramble Around The Globe.

As I said this is Phase 1, there are some more really cool things coming, which I’ll post when they are launched.

New Bacardi Global Terms and Conditions

As well as consulting on internet strategies and implementing them we also advice on all aspects of the digital world. We therefore raised the issue a few weeks ago that Bacardi’s Terms and Condition and Privacy Policy were out of date and non compliant with new legislation and the new Company’s Act 2006.

It’s much less sexy than websites and other digital stuff, but none the less important so we’ve been working with some very intelligent legal people for a few weeks now to bring the Bacardi portfolio Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy up to date with currently legislation and practices. Our involvement was specifically to advise on how the websites are used, what is required from an operational point of view as well as using our general knowledge of all things digital to advise on Business, Marketing and Technical matters.

These documents cover all Bacardi Portfolio brands; BACARDI, DEWARS, ERISTOFF, CAZADORES, MARTINI, GREY GOOSE and BOMBAY SAPPHIRE as well as locally managed brands.

ERISTOFF vodka

Found out yesterday that the ERISTOFF vodka site, www.eristoff.com is in line for an award after only being launched 2 days.

ERISTOFF vodka Formal Announcement

Well the website was formally launched yesterday, the annoucement wasn’t very good so I haven’t posted it.

We have already had some unbelievable feedback and the potential of an award for the site already!

ERISTOFF Vodka from the Land of Wolf Launched TODAY

We launched ERISTOFF Vodka’s first Global website today, a ‘soft’ launch to make sure the site is okay etc, the formal announcement will be on Monday.

It’s objective at present is to support a new global marketing campaign called “Land of the Wolf”. The idea being that ERISTOFF is from Georgia which got is name from Persians and means “Land of the Wolf”. Anyway the site is excellant, design and developed by my friends at AgencyNet with, of course help from us.

We also came up with a solution which will allow the site to be downloaded while the user interacts with it so that when they click through the site it reduces the amount of loading or waiting time they experience. User Experience is something which we always champion, without it users won’t take the time to view the site or get familiar with a Brand.

Have a look at www.eristoff.com although you have to be over the legal drinking age in your country of residence to enter the site.

There will of course be further updates, the strategy is still being implemented and this is only phase 1.

Subsequent phases are looking to do more to promote the site and drive traffic to it as well as become more engaging to the consumer and allow them to interact more.

Should be fun!

I’ll post the formal announcement when we have issued it.

Recent Website Launches

We’ve also launched in the last few months:

www.dewarisms.com:

This is a very cool hold site while we develop the main website. 

www.dewarisms.com: Select “United States”.

This is the USA version of the holding site, very different to suit a different target audience but still very cool. There’s also some cool stuff on youtube etc, too much to list it all here. Link to YouTube Video.

www.bacardibliveradio.com on MSN Instant Messanger:

This is a fantastically successful campaign to take Bacardi B-live Radio, the worlds first branded radio station available on a mobile phone, onto MSN Instant Messanger.  So far we are 1 month into the campaign and are exceeding all the targets set. 

www.bacardiflavors.com:

This is a 3D environment USA website for the Flavours brand extension to Bacardi.  It’s also one of the first Flash based animated websites, at our insistance which still allows the browser to control the site, via the forward and back button, bookmarking pages and allowing deeplinking into the content which the consumer wishes to view.  It also has a really cool animated drinks mixer.

www.bacardidj.com:

Bacardi DJ 06 is a fantastic award winning online application which allows both advanced and beginners to mix tracks online like to professionals do. There’s a number of testimonials from high profile DJ’s which prove the value this online application truely has along with the numeros awards the site has won. The winner of Bacardi DJ 05 went on to a full recording contract with a record label.

www.bacardi.co.uk:

This again is a great website buiding using a hybrid of HTML and Flash. It’s much more of a portal in style but is very engaging with the consumer and activitly promotes offline activity run in the UK. The site was designed and built by Graphico in the UK with an initial strategy and steer from us. The site has been featured and highly praised by a couple of magazines.

Oopps

Sorry I should have pointed out that some of the websites listed aren’t live yet and that all will be changing to the new websites which we’re currently working on.

Anyway the exciting part is that these website will be relaunched soon.