Press Release

London (February 24, 2010) - Today sees the launch of The Co-Creation Hub, www.co-creationhub.com. A collective of organisations, academics and individuals who passionately believe in doing things ‘with’ people rather than ‘at’ people. Their first project is Co-Create London, an independent initiative giving the general public’s most pressing issues, and their solutions, a platform to be heard.

The founding members of The Co-Creation Hub – London are Face, the co-creation planning agency, which has successfully co-created projects for international companies such as Coca-Cola, Nokia, Unilever, and Reckitt Benckiser; Farm, the advertising agency, which has co-created communications for Nestle’s Skinny Cow; Opticomm, the media planning agency; Touch of Mojo, the brand design agency; and thrudigital, the social media development agency. And, they are actively looking for organisations and individuals from different fields that share their way of thinking, to get involved and help develop the co-creation movement.

The Co-Creation Hub – London is the first of a planned number of Hubs across the world, as the principle of co-creativity grows and develops in territories such as Latin America, Asia and the USA.

Andrew Needham, founding partner of Face, as well as group managing partner of Tangible Group London, a core division of Cello Group Plc, is one of the key instigators of The Co-Creation Hub – London. Andrew explains: “In the next decade brands must adapt or die. The Co-Creation Hub – London recognises that social media isn’t simply another channel; it has fundamentally changed the way consumers interact with brands. We need a more collaborative, adaptive and continuous model of marketing – one that is based on the core co-creation principle of doing things with people not at them. We call it Adaptive Brand Planning. It is a model that will ultimately be better placed in helping our clients deal with the advent of social brands”.

The Co-Creation Hub – London is the first place to bring the principles of co-creation to all stages of the marketing process, and is founded on three key tenets:

1. Constant consumer involvement throughout the entire marketing planning and brand communications process – maintaining a continuous dialogue with consumers; harnessing their ideas and opinions to develop better products and communications and adapting to their changing needs and tastes in real-time.
2. A continuous process, with no end points as the communication is constantly building and evolving. A fluid way of working with a tightly knit team of agency specialists, seamlessly pulsing in and out of the process, as and when required.
3. Creating communities and fan-bases, and constantly communicating with them, online and offline.

Needham continues, “By putting the consumer at the heart of the communications process we have removed the old linear process of passing the baton from one agency to another. We work in a continuous loop of insight, co-creation, validation, engagement and real-time measurement. And, with Co-Create London as our first independent social project, we are creating a platform allowing people to be heard by those who can make a difference, using the co-creation principles.”

Co-Create London, the first co-creation project by The Co-Creation Hub – London, is a social initiative giving Londoners the chance to change their city.

The project is designed to crowdsource the problems and ideas of the general public by asking the simple question ‘What Would You Do To Make London a Better Place?’.

The most insightful and tangible ideas from the crowdsourcing phase will be taken forward into a co-creation workshop. The workshop will see Londoners who contributed to the www.cocreatelondon.com website come together with open innovation experts and key London stakeholders to refine the best concepts and convert them into robust solutions.

The top three ideas collected from the co-creation workshop will be put up for voting online and the idea with the most votes will then be presented to London Mayor Boris Johnson.

As an example of how this creative philosophy is applied to design and branding, The Co-Creation Hub logo was developed using the process of co-creation. An identity brief was written and ideas were crowd-sourced from members of the public. The crowd-sourced designs were taken into a co-creation workshop attended by members of the founding agencies together with members of the public, following which, two logos were selected and refined, using the learning from the workshop, by Gary Robinson, Farm’s Creative Director and Ray Armes, Creative CEO of Touch of Mojo.

The final logo is a combination of a crowd-sourced identity, an output from the co-creation workshop, and the skills of an experienced design team.

Owen Lee, Founder and Creative Chairman of Farm and Hub member, comments: “Consumer research has long been considered a wet blanket on creativity, but the answer certainly isn’t to remove them from the process, it’s quite the opposite. The brand building process is now continuous and the consumer is a constant and integral part of it. We no longer launch our view of a brand at a passive audience; it is about building fan bases, allowing them to play with brands, re-shape them and even imbue them with new meaning.”

Ray Armes, Creative CEO of A Touch of Mojo and a Hub member, points out, “Consumers have always been a rich source of insight and creative inspiration; bringing them into the heart of the creative process yields big brand ideas that both agencies and clients can believe in. For once, consumers can become part of a brand’s vision and even help determine the most effective channels of communication.”

Charles Dalton-Moore, Managing Director of thrudigital and Hub member, says, “Today there is a constant consumer dialogue going on around products and services. The challenge for brands is how to join and add value to this conversation using a range of co-creative tools.”

Paul Cox, Managing Director of Opticomm Media and Hub member, adds: “It is increasingly apparent that consumers are hard to define by prescribed statements on a generic survey, and as media owners can make or break brands. By combining traditional tools with sharper adaptive media planning bespoke to our audience, as well as looking at the efficiency of our media usage in real time, we can make immediate changes within a campaign.”

Whether manufacturers, artists, writers, designers or government organisations, The Co-Creation Hub – London is looking to collaborate with people from around the world involved in co-creation, whatever their discipline, to stimulate the co-creation approach.

As part of the launch, an inaugural members’ open evening will be held on Thursday 18^th of March at The Design Council 34 Bow Street, London WC2E 7DL at 6.30pm.

To reserve a place at the evening on a first come first served basis, please register your interest here: ldn.co-creationhub.com.

ASOS.com Launches Twitter Feedback and Reviews Site ASOSreviews.com

Summary

LONDON (November 13, 2009) – ASOS.com, the UK’s leading online fashion store, has launched ASOSreviews.com, an exciting Twitter-powered feedback and reviews micro-site. The site follows ASOS.com’s hugely successful launch of ASOS Life, an online community that facilitates interaction and conversation between the brand and its consumers.

James Hart, eCommerce Director at ASOS.com, said ‘ASOSreviews.com is a great way for us to keep in touch with and be open about the real-time feelings of our customers. Its bright, visual nature gives us nowhere to hide and I’ll be making it not only visible to our customers but to all of our colleagues at ASOS HQ as well. It’s also a great feedback tool and the great thing is that the loop is already closed as our customer care team already monitor and respond to tweets directed at us 24/7. We are excited about the launch of the site and have some interesting plans for its future development.’

ASOSreviews.com aggregates and displays positive and negative tweets about the brand, and encourages users to tweet their opinion about their ASOS.com experience. The site also visualises the overall sentiment of the brand and displays an interesting word cloud overview of what people are saying.

Charles Dalton-Moore, Managing Director of thruSITES, the social media development firm that built the site, said ‘ASOSreviews.com is designed to give a snapshot of customer sentiment on ASOS.com whilst encouraging ASOS.com’s online community to engage with and talk about the brand. We very much admire ASOS.com’s boldness in launching the site and taking the leading social media approach of any fashion retailer. Many other companies out there have yet to wake up to the reality of social media and should take ASOS.com’s example of learning from and engaging with their online community.’

About ASOS.com
Established in June 2000, asos.com is the UK’s largest independent online fashion and beauty retailer. With over 25,000 branded and own label products available, and 1000 new lines added each week, asos.com is rapidly becoming the market leader in the UK online fashion world. Aimed primarily at fashion forward 16-34 year olds, asos.com attracts over 5.6 million unique visitors a month and has 2.7 million registered users.

About thruSITES

thruSITES is a London-based strategic web design and development agency specialising in community sites and social networks, plus social media apps and widgets for a range of networks. thruSITES works with large multinationals and government organisations, directly and via top marketing agencies, as well as smaller clients and web entrepreneurs.

Key Words

asos, asos.com, asos reviews, community, twitter, social media app, thrusites

Links

http://asosreviews.com

http://www.asos.com

http://www.thrusites.com

thrudigital wins itv.com project to build a Twitter application measuring buzz during FA Cup Final http://bit.ly/thrudigital

Summary
LONDON (May 27, 2009) – London based digital agency thrudigital have been appointed by itv.com to build a Twitter application for activity around and during the 2009 FA Cup Final sponsored by E.ON. The match, which this year features Chelsea against Everton, is traditionally one of the highlights of the sporting calendar and is expected to be the source of a large amount of traffic on Twitter.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets). Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them, known as followers.

thrudigital’smain objective is to allow fans to see which of the players is generating the most chatter on Twitter in an entertaining visual format. The players’ names and faces will appear alongside bars which will move up and down to reflect the buzz around players during the game. The tool will be available after the match so that fans can scrub along a timeline to see which players caused a buzz at crucial moments.

thrudigital have built other twitter apps in the past including: The BBC Apprentice predictor, which allows twitter users to vote for the contestant they want to be fired off the television show each week; Birdie Tweet, which aggregates content from the world of golf; and TweetBorisTweet, which allows users to vote for London Mayor Boris Johnson’s new twitter background.

According to clickingandscreaming.com, “With plenty of bloggers liveblogging the final and even more people hanging around on Twitter, this is exactly the sort of thing many will have running in the background.” The FA Cup Final app is expected to give an exciting new insight into the buzz around the game. Dominic Cameron, Managing Director of ITV.com, said: “This experiment is a great way of reflecting the buzz about the game on our site and if it’s a success, will no doubt pave the way for more efforts to engage football fans in new and interesting ways.”

About thrudigital
thrudigital is a London-based strategic web design and development agency specialising in community sites and social networks, plus social media apps and widgets for a range of networks. thrudigital works with large multinationals and government organisations, directly and via top marketing agencies, as well as smaller clients and web entrepreneurs.

Key Words
Thrusites itv itv.com football FA Cup Final Twitter app application

Links
http://itv.com/football
http://www.thrudigital.com
http://www.itv.com