Emakina’s case “Test-Achats / Test Aankoop” won a bronze medal at the MIXX 2011 awards. The campaign for the leading Belgian consumer association was one of the 18 finalists in the category ‘Direct Response and Lead Generation’. Out of a total of 63 participants,  winning the bronze award is a fine recognition of the creative [...]

Axelle Red vient de sortir son tout nouvel album “Un coeur comme le mien”. A cette occasion, Emakina a mis en ligne son nouveau site internet qui arbore un  design vintage et chaleureux, à l’image de l’album. Emakina a également mis en place une “bandpage” sur sa Page Fan Facebook. Avec cette nouvelle page Fan, l’artiste peut personnaliser le design, télécharger et partager des morceaux, des clips, des photos ainsi que les dates de sa tournée. Emakina s’est  occupé de la partie digitale de l’artiste mais a également retravaillé le back catalogue d’Axelle Red, pour la sortie de ses précédents albums en format digipack. Vous pouvez voir notre travail dans tous les bons magasins de musique … y compris iTunes.

Design is Dead proudly presents its new Creative Director: Bart Lommelen. Bart Lommelen started working for Design is Dead in 2005, even before he graduated with high honours from Sint-Lukas in Graphic and Advertising Design. In 2008 he became Art Director at Antwerp’s finest agency. Now, he will be our new ingenious guru behind the scenes and on the set, guiding the creative process of our projects from concept and rough cut though pre- and post-production to the red carpet and the premiere. “The example I’ve set myself for the task ahead is Quentin Tarantino. As a director, he is incredibly creative, quirky, and 100% dedicated to doing things his own way–without this stopping him from reaching a wide audience. That is what I want for Design is Dead: To ensure we stay a cutting-edge, rebellious online agency with its own creative look and feel and its own singular identity, all the while attracting clients from all sectors and walks of life.”

On 14 February, Valentine’s day, digital native agency Emakina and communication agency Troy are proud to announce their marriage. A marriage out of love and the birth of the future agency model. This alliance is the result of Emakina’s commitment to reinforce the creativity that is at the heart of their offer in strategic, marketing and technical services. The alliance between Emakina and Troy will enrich the Emakina/Agency team and the existing brand activation services of the agency. Since its foundation, Emakina has combined creativity, technologies and business. These last years, Emakina has invested more in digital tools (Search Marketing, Direct Marketing, Mobile Development, etc.). With the integration of Emakina/Agency, and the integration of Troy, Emakina invests in its creative and conceptual talents. It will offer a unique service on the Belgian market: the creative world will meet the digital world of tools and strategy… to live happily ever after. The Beauty and the Geek The traditional duo ‘creative director / client services director’ no longer matches the evolution of the market and the real needs of our clients. We are convinced that the best partner of a creative director is a digital native, an expert in digital strategy who knows everything about the latest trends, innovation and best practices in the market, who can offer creation the tools it needs to adapt and continuously optimize the message. Towards a new type of creative dynamics: creactivity Before, a creative developed a concept, followed the development and everything stopped once the campaign kicked off. The only thing he still had to do was to wait for the results of the post-test. Now, with the arrival of creactivity, the launch of the campaign is but the beginning of the creative work. Thanks to the union, the analyst will daily feed back on the results of the campaign in order to allow the creative to boost the performance by making the necessary changes. No creative ideas, business ideas The alliance between Emakina and Troy will also allow us to focus our creative energy on ideas that go beyond the communication strategy. Today, advertisers need campaigns but also and foremost, they need creative partners who can propose business ideas by developing tools and programmes in the long term. Ideas that give the marketing strategy a boost and that lead it to sales successes. No Living Apart Together In order to allow this new dynamic to come to life, the entire Troy team will move to the Emakina offices as of March. This includes Didier De Jaeger (the president of Troy, who becomes Executive Partner at Emakina), David Grunewald (the General Manager of Troy becomes responsible for Emakina/Agency), Xavier Bouillon (Creative Director at Emakina), Antoine Wellens (Creative Director at Emakina), and the entire Troy Agency team. And yes… you can share the moment, and add to joy of the newly weds by leaving them a message…

This was 2010 for You ! Happy 2011 from Emakina.

Cream is a new online service for media and marketing professionals that indexes and analyses best practice examples of brand communications from around the world. Each week the staff selects the “crème de la crème” of marketing innovation. Great news, this week, the editor of Cream chose Emakina’s work on Schweppes rebranding, and it’s activation campaign “Schweppesonality”, as  Campaign of the Week. Here is the blog post.

The Schweppes brand is working on a global rebranding, together with Emakina/Agency. Emakina/Agency has now launched the Schweppesonality: an unparalleled activation campaign based on an immersive viral film that uses social media as a booster. This launch campaign is all about the fans of the brand, charismatic, unexpected and inspiring personalities. In other words: true Schweppesonalities. The interactive video, which is connected to their Facebook account, invites them to take part in a unique immersive experience: to live as a star during an exclusive photo shoot and to shine on the cover of a well-known magazine. Now, you can discover the exclusive making-of of this unusual campaign.

End 2009, Emakina is asked to revitalise the Schweppes brand. Within the perspective of this global rebranding campaign, the ‘digital native agency’ chose to install viral marketing mechanisms in order to support the activation campaign. The launching campaign honours the fans of the brand, surprising personalities, enthusiastic and self-assured. In one word: Schweppesonalities. An interactive video, linked to their Facebook account, invites them to become part of a unique experience: step into the shoes of a real star during an exclusive photo shoot and make the cover a famous glossy. The experience starts at the headquarters of the ‘Schweppesonality magazine’, where the visitor is shown the way by the editor in chief herself. By using the most innovative integration techniques, the visitor immediately dives into the adventure and is guided along the different steps in the creation of the magazine’s next edition. At the end, the visitor gets a hold of the new edition… with his photo on the cover and featuring a giant billboard campaign throughout New York! The next step is a big European contest where the visitor can post his personalized cover on Facebook and Twitter. The Schweppesonality that collects the most ‘likes’ wins an iPad or a cocktail mixing kits. The campaign is launched in 12 European countries and is to be experienced on http://schweppeseuro.com/schweppesonality.

groupeReflect and Design is Dead‘s project ‘MONA’ or Museum Of Neverending Art was launched in the good company of its “making of” video, as requested by Microsoft. Instead of a dry technical tutorial on how MONA demonstrates Internet Explorer 9′s functionalities, we opted for a fun and narrative sequence demonstrating the concept behind MONA. An approach which Microsoft applauded. Buckle up for some Hillbilly-fun and the story of MONA’s birth!

This year, Emakina transformed it’s DMF stand into a real movie set : stage sets, makeup, traveling, lights, basically all the Hollywood glamor with professional directors, cameramen, editors, motion designers and sound engineers working all together to create live “The seas are rising – Squeetchy Bad”. Check the behind the scenes pictures on out Facebook Page.

And it happened … They hit the world where it would hurt the most ! Chaos ensued, the world became a different place, everything was about survival, flashmobs became ancient history, one single thing was in the mind of human kind : “Error 404″ … they had destroyed the Internet !

They are the cutest creatures in our oceans. They make our live so much more beautiful. Even tho man has polluted their ecosystems … Little did we know what would happen …

This video, created by Emakina.EU, is inspired by the Innovation Union, a major European Initiative. Innovation Union is about being daring and creative; it’s about developing great ideas into results which help create more jobs, improve people’s lives and build greener and better societies.

A sphere triggers a series of unexpected situations… To be continued… (made by Emakina.EU)

Wednesday, Microsoft launched its beta version of Internet Explorer 9, the new enriched version of its navigator, with groupeReflect and Design is Dead, who won the pitch involving some of the most creative agencies in the world and by this entered Microsoft’s « Beauty of the web » hall of fame. . The MONA project (Museum of NeverEnding Art) is a virtual collaborative museum to which every surfer will be able to bring his own artistic contribution. This canvas, which is white at the beginning, will evolve over time and will be filled with new pictures, new designs or new texts. They can be either uploaded or they can be made in the web navigator itself. This will be a great international collaborative work of art, that is destined to live forever after… In order to meet the MONA challenge – one of the technical difficulties is managing the contribution of thousands of surfers -, a team of 8 persons, working in Paris and Antwerp, worked for a period of four months. On top of the technical challenge, they had to face a tight deadline: the entire production of the campaign needed to be done in just a few months. This international campaign is the fruit of the first close collaboration between the Antwerp agency Design is Dead and its Parisian homologue groupeReflect. The two Emakina agencies share a passion for creative and technical excellence. Since September, Design is Dead has also become the official creative partner of the Parisian branch. A selection of Design is Dead designers will now regularly visit France to support the digital team of groupeReflect, under the supervision of Creative Director Hendrik Everaerts.

Emakina has made the communication campaign for the next MIXX Awards 2010. It is a humorous campaign based on Internet scams. The campaign consists of the visuals of 3 personalities of the Belgian web. Each character has special make-up and is disguised in order to bribe the jury, using Internet scam techniques that must help them to win the precious trophy. You may recognize some of their techniques, such as scam 419 (the so-called Nigerian scam), the Russian girl who wants to become your partner or the hoax of the little sick girl who needs your help. An original concept to remind us that only the quality of the campaigns will succeed in seducing the jury.

This year, BiFi is launching its new packaging in Belgium and the Netherlands for its entire range of products. The crazy BiFi character will also be presented to the Dutch market for the very first time. To mark the occasion, Emakina has developed a mini-site featuring all the varieties of BiFi. Although the original BiFi is well-known, the cooky world of BiFi has many other specialities as well! In BiFi City, visitors can discover every product thanks to an amusing character, evolving in an environment full of fun and adventure.

Ji Lee, a Creative Director at Google, and the brain behind Google Creative Lab, was the highly anticipated keynote speaker on the opening day of Design At Work’s 3-day trade show in Kortrijk (www.designatwork.be). He started his hour-long talk with some neat examples of personal work (he has worked on some major ad campaigns in his hometown of New York), like creating smart business cards or launching a new museum using the building’s silhouette.

After this light intro, he moved on to more Google-related work. But it wasn’t a coincidence he mixed some of his personal projects in between, as his keynote was titled “Personal + Professional = Awesome”, which was also one of his main messages: that personal and professional projects can, and should, complement each other. Again no coincidence that Google itself is known for its “20% rule”, but others do similar things, he noted, like 3M, or designer Stefan Sagmeister, who takes a sabbatical every 7 years. Indeed, some of Google’s greatest products started as personal projects of Google-employees (most famously probably Gmail), but Mr. Lee stressed that Google’s corporate culture allows creative ideas to come from anywhere and are given an equal chance, like “Google Search Stories”, which was an idea of an intern at Google. For Google, however, the problem is not so much coming up with new ideas for awesome products, but getting them known. Like Chrome; the browser. In fact, in the “What is a browser?” video, Ji Lee is behind the camera.

What’s interesting about the video (next to the conclusion that less than 8% know what a browser is), is that it went viral, and others started to make their own, local interviews. This is the key: let people talk for you (instead of yelling at them, via traditional mass media). One of Lee’s jobs is to make this happen, by inspiring and stimulating people to take the initiative and be creative with Google’s brand and freely available APIs. Goollery, again one of Lee’s independent projects, archives an impressive list of “creative, fun and innovative Google-related projects from people around the world.” Some awesome examples are Favorite places, Browser ball and Layar, but there are many more worth mentioning. Unfortunately Ji Lee’s time also ran out after an hour. The end was pretty lame, however, when Vincent Van Quickenborne (Minister of “economy and simplification”, as moderator Nina de Man put it) and none other than Imke Dielen (so called “blog phenomenon”) were invited on stage and allowed to ask Mr. Lee a few questions. To see more highly creative work from Ji Lee himself, check his personal portfolio at Pleaseenjoy.com. Koen Claes for Emakina/Think

Everyone envoys a nice wine. The Delhaize Wine Exhibition, which has just started, is a nice opportunity to get some excellent wine on fantastic conditions. For this occasion, Emakina, just launched a really fun online game: Delhaize Wine Game. You can win up to 3 cases of outstanding wine until October 3. It is a huge success, in 3 days, more than 9000 games have been played. Emakina also created the complete bannering campaign (2 concepts, 12 sizes, 3 languages) that are currently displayed on Skynet | Jack, Femmes d’Aujourd’hui, Libelle, Marmiton, Brusselslife, Messenger, etc.

Aujourd’hui, la vraie performance d’une marque ne se calcule plus en temps d’exposition, en nombre de pages vues, ou en nombre de clics. Elle se mesure dans l’attention générée chez le consommateur. Ce concept d’Attention Marketing, groupeReflect l’a bien compris, et vient de partager ses idées sous la forme d’un livre blanc dédié à la juste valeur des marques, à la notoriété, à l’interactivité, l’engagement et la co-innovation. Nous ne serions que trop vous conseiller de lire ce document dont le but est d’ouvrir le débat le plus possible. Emparez vous du thème et echangez votre propre point de vue.