Website Design in London by Dodec

Innovating your brand online

bart — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:07:52 +0000

Old Spice is continuing its experimentation with new approaches and rotating spokesmen with a new campaign breaking on YouTube and Facebook that features Terry Crews’s exploding head.

In the video above, Crews, a former NFL player perhaps best know as Julius, the father on Everybody Hates Chris, declares that Old Spice Body Spray will make you feel so powerful “It will blow your mind right in front of your face.” Then, Crews’s head splits open and his brain flies away, leaving him to spout gibberish. The “Smell is Power” campaign from ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, hits TV on Saturday. Josh Talge, Old Spice brand manager, says the brand wanted to reward fans with an early glimpse of the new ads. The campaign promotes the Red Zone sub-line of body sprays. Talge says Crew was chosen because he epitomizes the idea of power. Though the brand is best known these days for spokesman Isaiah Mustafa from 2010′s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign, it has used various spokesmen of late, including a September ad featuring a sea captain.

This isn’t the first time Crews has starred in an ad. He appeared in a series of Old Spice commercials in 2010, concurrent with the Mustafa campaign.

In a new twist, however, other Procter & Gamble brands will be featured in the ads. In coming weeks, ads for Charmin Freshmates and Bounce Dryer Bar will be interrupted by Crews, who will literally burst through the tableau to make a pitch for Old Spice.

How beneficial it is to your Brand that Facebook and Twitter are real time

bart — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:31:45 +0000

We all know the drill: You’re supposed to listen to your customers in social media, engage them authentically, and act like the human you are, not the company you represent. But I’m here to add that engaging with customers after they start using your product isn’t enough. You simply can’t wait until customers start getting mad and yelling at you online to change your product or strategy. At that point, it’s too late.

Given the ability to reach customers and prospects via social networks, it’s now easier than ever to embrace customers in your product development process. Changing this process may not save you from the inevitable system failures, but it will help you avoid the slip-up phases typically associated with releasing new products or services.

Users rule the world now; therefore, businesses must be more responsive by using agile and lean practices. Here are three simple steps to guarantee the development of desirable products and services.

1. Find Your Earlyvangelists

Today’s smart company asks lots of questions up front. The brand involves its customers in the product development process from the very beginning. Often called the “customer development model,” the premise is described by Steven Blank in The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Blank describes earlyvangelists as “a special breed of customers willing to take a risk on your startup’s products or service because they can actually envision its potential to solve a critical and immediate problem.”

2. Build a Minimum Viable Product

Start with bare bones. Put together a product that has the minimum bells and whistles, focusing on the must-have features only. Let your customers try it out and see what they like. Let them tell you what is missing. Let them tell you what is extraneous. Then build what really satisfies that problem, and stop there.

When you solve a problem for earlyvangelists, you build a supportive customer base that will promote the product to other visionary customers. You may now consider whether this product is desirable for an even larger market.

In the software world, agile and lean software development methodologies leverage fast feedback from customers. Google’s product cycle is a pretty classic example of this customer-focused approach. Gmail Labs was designed to tighten the feedback loop between users and developers, so that it could learn quickly what people liked and disliked. It took out the extra step of having to go to a customer support forum or email a representative, and let users communicate directly with developers. This experiment greatly increased the frequency and quality of feedback, which in turn, allowed Google to rapidly improve Gmail and its suite of apps.

Eric Ries’s book, The Lean Startup goes into these concepts in great detail, explaining how applying a combination of agile customer development methods and lean social media engagement can create a true collection of thinking and acting tools for today’s complex world.

3. Release, Iterate and Repeat

Once you have a desirable initial product, you can begin to test extension and offers into other markets and user segments. Using secrtet tools (that we have), you can now easily track the conversion metrics based on different offers to different segments before you build. This type of market feedback allows you to bring back “validated learnings” to the product team. It lets you co-develop your market in the most capital-efficient and viral way possible.

This is where the value of agile development kicks in. The short growth cycles that adapt to both positive and negative feedback let you steer your product into the segments without wasting precious development cycles.

Surprisingly, many companies aren’t really embracing customer development yet. Maybe because they’re still afraid of what lies beyond company walls. If you have not figured out how to energize or support your customer base in 21st century social networks, then you might be very cautious with customer development.

So knock those walls down and begin truly embracing customers and prospects early in your development process. It’s clear that users rule, but they need you to make projects affordable and scalable first. Otherwise, be prepared for a social media rotten tomato storm.

Top 9 tech millionaires under 30

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:29:51 +0000

Our Ethics

admin — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 11:44:40 +0000

Here at Dodec, we take pride in our strong work ethic. It is the reason we are the number one media agency in Ealing, West London.
Our services are second to none as we always aim to provide each of our clients with a first class and high quality service according to their individual requirements; whilst working within budget and delivering on time.

Our mission is to keep growing into a better, stronger and more innovative media agency. We have a lovely huge open plan office, with a newly built training room which can facilitate upto 1000 hours a week of digital creativity, development and management.

Dan Smith, the Director, has put his heart and soul into Dodec and has founded a multiskilled workforce to deliver the highest quality solutions for your digital and creative needs.

See some of our projects, Home and Cook, Bonus Print and more.