What are we working on?

I never fail to be surprised at the sheer diversity of projects we work on in any one month. Offering the full creative services spectrum means our talented team never know what could be coming in next. This month it all seems to have been digital. We have been doing a lot of video editing work for a museum website, finishing building a Flash website for an agency, providing project management consultancy on a social networking site build, building some data capture functionality for a charity, and pitching for a new website project. It’s funny – some month’s it’s all print work, but at the moment the focus has been online. As well as this variety of projects, we have also been working hard on our Big Stories campaign, which is starting to reap rewards. The offer seems to be being very well received by our target charities, and we’ve had some nice compliments about the microsite and DM pack. Hopefully we can convert this into some new clients and make some new Lavish friends in the coming months.

Persuasion

I’m reading a good book at the moment. ‘Persuasion – The art of influencing people’.

There are some interesting facts around the importance of body language and non-verbal communication. In the 1960’s, Dr Albert Mehrabian conducted a research study that concluded that the impact of a message could be classified as 55% visual, 38% vocal and 7% verbal. Meaning that our body language and tone of voice are infinitely more important than our actual words, in day-to-day communication.

It is interesting in this day and age, when so many of our relationships, friendships and business communications are conducted over text, email, IM, Facebook, Twitter etc how much we are losing in the message, by not focussing on the delivery. If 93% of the impact of our message is based on what you see and how it sounds, our listeners are only actually focussing 7% on what we are actually saying.

So even with all the technology available to us today, it shows that a bit of good-old fashioned ‘face-time’ can’t be beaten.


Persuasion is by James Borg and published by Pearson.

Who would win in a fight?

So, as a bit of light relief we have started a regular debate with our favourite bar staff at St John.

The 'Who Would Win in a Fight' debate started like this:

Who would win in a fight between a duck-sized horse against one hundred horse-sized ducks?'

We got a variety of answers - but the common consensus was that the duck-sized horse would win. Reasons given included 'enormous webbed feet that would squash the horses' - right through to 'ducks are evil'.

This week's animal-based fight conundrum is:

'Who would win in a fight between one human-sized ant against one hundred ant-sized humans?"

Early indications are in favour of the ant-sized humans... based mostly on the concept of conscious thought and our ability to invent weapons of mass-animal destruction.

Although Madge is valiantly fighting the corner of the human-sized ant - but only on the basis that he/she/it could run faster than the time it would take the hundred ant-sized humans to invent anything...

Your comments / thoughts / ramblings are welcome...

Challenging Times

As we approach the middle of 2008, the challenges facing charities and not-for-profit organisations continue to grow. The global credit crunch is adding even further to the problems of fundraising in a society where donation fatigue is a common problem and disposable income is at a 15 year low. For all charities and not-for-profit organisations, maximising marketing budgets during these times is top priority. This still needs to be married up with producing inspiring, creative work and marketing campaigns that deliver fundraising results, be it acquisition of new donors or retention of existing ones. We have recently put together a marketing campagin aimed at this issue. At Lavish we have many years of experience of delivering cost effective, budget-driven creative projects to audiences in both the corporate and charitable sectors. Our charity clients include: Crisis, Public Concern at Work and The Carbon Disclosure Project. Our 'Big Stories' campaign was launched last week with a DM piece and supporting microsite, and initial responses have been very encouraging. We are following up with calls and currently arranging appointments. We are approaching 75 hand-picked charities in the London and surrounding areas, and are looking forward to talking to them more about how we might be able to help. Take a look at our microsite: www.bigstories.co.uk

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Apple today previewed Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the next major version of their operating system. Rather that rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation.

Snow Leopard is optimised for multi-core processors, taps into the vast computing power of graphic processing units (GPUs), enables breakthrough amounts of RAM and features a new, modern media platform with QuickTime X. Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 and is scheduled to ship in about a year.

Read more at: Digital Arts

For more information see Apple

Tea

Like most offices around the country, who makes the tea, and when, is a hot topic in our studio!

More anal than most we have even created a tea style guide, which gives pantone references for all of our tea choices and is stuck on the wall! No-one can say we don't take our tea making (or colour management) seriously!

I came across this innovative way to take the pain out of the tea rota:

Make The Tea