Happily, we played a part in its creation – our User Experience design team developed the visual design, interactions and user flows.

Telefonica came to us with the concept (and no shortage of ambition). They understood that smartphone users were increasingly using OTT (over the top) communication apps like Skype, Viber and Whatsapp instead of native operator services. Rather than make a defensive move, they’d decided to do something admirably progressive, and try and beat them at their own game, by making an OTT app that offered a better experience.

They also had a really aggressive timeframe of 100 days to design, build and launch the app – with a fraction of that for us to complete a full UCD [User Centred Design] piece; research, concepting, design, testing, iteration, and production.

The team at Telefonica (led by the brilliant @benjkeys) had already thought hard about the timeline concept and feature set. We began by researching best (and sometimes worst) practice for iOS apps in the same spaces as the various features, pulling together both a picture of what worked and didn’t, but also the competitive landscape for the product.

The next phase was concepting. This took a lot of paper, and a lot of post-it notes. It always does.

We thought long and hard about each feature, based on our understanding of the audience and our research findings. Through a series of workshops, and close collaboration with the team from Telefonica, we refined the feature set and then we tested it with users. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t, so we iterated until we felt it was right, and then we tested again. With the concept validated we began work on the look and feel.

Meanwhile, in Madrid, the app was gaining a lot of attention at Telefonica HQ. The move into this territory is a bold one for a telco whose primary business is selling minutes and texts to mobile users. It was thrilling to hear the collaborative team’s approach to the product was making waves.

Much effort went to making the interface a cut above the majority of iOS apps. Polished, slick, detailed – those were adjectives we chased. We also worked hard on making the little interaction touches just right. These subtleties can make or break the feeling of an app’s quality. We delivered a thorough interaction guide for the team in Madrid, and we tested numerous alpha and beta releases via Testflight.

Barely a day after the iPhone assets were delivered, we began work on the Android version. A whole different kettle of fish, taking us right back to basics. Look out for the Android app soon. And don’t expect it to stop there.

Telefonica – with a hand from Albion – have taken a confident, meaningful step into uncharted telco territory. On the day after its launch, Tu Me was the number one free app in Spain, and ahead of some big players (Viber, Whatsapp, and even Facebook) in the UK.

The app has garnered some positive attention on launch: see BBC News, The FT, The Next Web, The Verge and The Kernel for starters.

Download the app and see for yourself.

Congratulations giffgaff! Here’s to the next 100,000!

We didn’t create it because SXSW was coming up and we wanted something to show. Nor because building an app is a good bit of PR for a digitally-minded ad agency. Nope. We built an app because we were trying to get something done, but there didn’t seem to be ‘an app for that’.

It’s @samwander here, and this is the story of the need I spotted and how, with the help of some friends at Albion, we’re making it.

Countless times someone would tell me about a book I just had to read, or a film that I’d just love. But by the time I was next searching Amazon or Netflix, my mind would go blank. So I did the obvious modern thing: used digital storage to prop up my lack of mental storage. I got into the habit of saving simple text notes on my iPhone. Solved. Except I’d be looking for the note about the documentary on fast food that was supposed to be mind-blowing, but instead find a recipe for a smash burger I’d clipped off the interwebs.

What I needed was somewhere just for these kind of recommendations. An app that, like many of my favourites (e.g. Instapaper, Simplenote, Instagram, Clear), was really good at doing just one thing (see: Unix Philosophy).

I asked around and two things became apparent – firstly that there wasn’t an existing decent app that would do this across movies, books and music (which is what I cared about). Secondly, that almost everybody seemed to already have their own ‘workaround’ for saving recommendations – from saving them in to-do apps, to emailing titles to themselves. This behaviour was commonplace.

As I thought more about it, I realised there was something beyond the simple utility I required – I wanted to see my friends’ lists. I trusted their taste, and they (sometimes) trusted mine. Give this thing a social element and it would become really interesting. But – crucially – it didn’t need this component to be useful, and therefore sidestepped the ‘network effect’ where network value is required to augment inherent value (i.e that social app you don’t use because it’s nothing but tumbleweeds).

So we had a premise: solve the simple problem of keeping recommendations in one logical place. We had something of a hook: make the lists social. We had a working title: Queues (as in a playlist queue, not waiting at the bank).

Excitable brainstorming ensued, thanks to the awesome Trello service. Suddenly we had more features than we needed, monetisation ideas, technologies to investigate. We stripped it back to minimum viable product – the least number of features we felt we needed to validate the idea in practice.

We also made two key decisions very early on. First, we would design for mobile first as this better suited the context of use we’d identified (conversations over lunch, in the pub etc). Second, as much as we wanted a proper native app for our iPhones, the minimum version could simply be a mobile-optimised website – a web app. This would be quicker and cheaper to build, available more broadly (beyond the iOS platform), and wouldn’t depend on Apple’s approval process.

Andy Beaumont started knocking together a prototype with the jQuery mobile framework. In next to no time we had something we could fiddle with on our phones. We started using it. Instantly we came across situations where it was useful. “I’ll stick that in my queue” became common parlance.

With the idea validated, we began iterating versions. Instead of planning every little detail upfront, we began introducing basic features and seeing how it felt to use. Only very recently did we begin considering how the thing might look, and how we might brand it. The plan was to share with friends and family and gather feedback over a few weeks, and then use that to steer V1 proper (this might be described as V0.5 – the native app would be the real first version). But with a couple of us attending SXSW, it seemed a good idea to spread it a bit wider than friends and family. We like to share, and in keeping with the minimum viable product philosophy we want to gather feedback from early adopters.

So… if you’d like to help test the prototype Queues app, head over to queuesapp.com (ideally on an iPhone). You’ll need a Twitter account to use this early version, and we suggest you save the app to your home screen a) for a more ‘app-like’ experience and b) so the next time someone tells you about the best book they’ve read in years…. you can easily stick it in your queue.

Hopefully people will like this enough for us to progress to building the native app. Let us know what you think at feedback@queuesapp.com and on Twitter at @queuesapp

You’d expect the story of how we came to make an Eminem-style rap video starring 80’s ventriloquist superstars Keith Harris and Orville to involve maverick creative directors, rampant egos, overblown budgets and lots of chemical assistance.

Surprisingly though, it’s actually the result of a very practical, objective and efficient process. Borrowing a little from Agile software development, we worked in a way that was iterative, allowing for testing of ideas live with consumers, and driven by hard business metrics.

giffgaff is a mobile network ‘run by you’. They strip out a lot of the costs of traditional players, for example big call centres, by motivating their community to provide those services – and they pass this saving onto customers with much lower prices. We’ve been working with them since 2009, helping them with everything from business strategy to UX to managing their Facebook conversation.

Over that time, we’ve been evolving a way of developing brand communications that suits their ethos – and, we believe, that of any modern, social brand.

The traditional development process for brand creative (as opposed to performance marketing) can be pretty introspective and expensive. An idea can gestate for months, shaped by subjective feedback from agency and client, and research which, no matter how rigorous, is always guesswork. After all of this expensive swirl, the Big Idea is launched with a Big Bang. When it works it can be spectacular, but too often it doesn’t, and the campaign is met with indifference and shifting blame.

A modern creative development process for brand creative aims to be the opposite – open and efficient. It involves getting a Minimum Viable Idea out there as quickly as possible, to understand how it actually performs in a live environment. It involves setting targets at each stage, against relevant and measurable performance indicators and, only if it exceeds those objectives, iterating the idea in response to feedback, and seeing just how far it can go.

You’d expect a process like this to lead to formulaic, bland work. So how did we use it to create a film described as “nuts” by C-Net?

Well, the process begins by following the advice of friend-of-Albion Mark Earls, and “lighting lots of fires”. Instead of developing three ideas for a creative presentation to a senior client, instead we test tens of ideas, constantly, on giffgaff’s Facebook Page.

The brief from giffgaff we were tackling was this:

giffgaff is a SIM-only mobile network. You need to have an unlocked handset to use it. But most people aren’t sure about unlocking – what it is, how to do it, if it’s legal. So let’s help people out. But do it ‘in a giffgaff way’. giffgaff is a challenger brand; It’s home for people pissed-off with Big Mobile’s restrictive practices. Oh, and giffgaff is a modern business with ethics, so how can we do an interesting CSR-y thing?

Some of the ‘small fires’ we lit went nowhere, they got no real reaction. Some were popular on Facebook (with the more mainstream end of giffgaff’s users) but not on their forum (with their superuser community), or vice versa. Some were popular with both, and so got developed further. Notably:

The giffgaff Illegal Theatre: Based on the insight that lots of people think that unlocking a phone is illegal (it’s not), we created the first synched dual YouTube player, where our ‘boxhead’ brand character explained that unlocking a phone isn’t illegal, but showed some funny examples of stuff that is. Some people really liked it, but it didn’t go viral.

Unlockopedia: Based on the insight that there is no single authoritative source of information on phone unlocking. Previously a Google search would yield tons of grubby-feeling sites, many of which ripped you off. giffgaff built Unlockopedia, which is community powered, peer reviewed, and fills that void. The site is SEO crack, but won’t make the brand famous.

But then Teddy had an idea. Being locked in to a restrictive mobile contract is (a bit) like being a battery hen locked into a cage. So what if we freed a battery hen for every person who unlocked a phone to join giffgaff?

Everybody thought the idea was a bit silly, and too hard to do, so it would have been rejected in a conventional reductive creative development process. But it made it as one of our ‘100 fires’. So we tested it first as a blog post:

The community of super users loved the idea. So we tried it out on the Facebook page:

giffgaff’s Likers liked the idea too, so we thought we better make it real. We found a charity, Wood Green, who could actual free and rehome battery hens. Tom (our client) went to meet them, struck a deal, and blogged about it.

We created a campaign identity, to make it feel more real:

The idea was still getting wild kudos on the forum and Likes on The Facebook (242% over target in fact), and so we decided to take it to the next level with a sterner test. We replaced a set of our hardworking, uber-optimised acquisition banners with ones using the chicken proposition:

These were equally successful, achieving orders 134% over target, and activations 120% over target. Boom. So this emboldened us to roll out the big guns.

* Some people have pointed out the curiosity of using conversion metrics to assess a brand campaign. So I just wanted to add 2 things: giffgaff’s acquisition marketing campaign does have a brand effect, and we take the same care with the attitude and tone on banners as we do on online film; Who can afford to do pure brand marketing anymore? Certainly not a modern, efficient organisation like giffgaff. Everything we do is ‘brand response’ – that is, we expect everything we do to generate acquisitions, and measure for that. 

We wanted to create a piece of sharable content – something that would dramatise the ‘unlock a phone, unlock a chicken’ proposition, but also demonstrate giffgaff’s personality. We wracked our brains for a famous chicken we could use, but the nearest we got was… Orville. Yes, we know she’s a duck. It was then obvious we should update their 80’s smash ‘I wish I could fly’ with a modern hymn to freedom…

OK, we know the whole ‘customer development’ story goes a bit wibbly here. But I guess that’s the moral of the story. This agile approach isn’t a substitute for creative judgement and bravery. It’s a substitute for shit research that kills brave ideas.

Anyhow, The CONtract feat. K-Orvile is doing rather well. It got 100,000 views in a week, and clocked up 200,000 views in just over 2 weeks – all with no paid media, only blogger outreach. The Sun, the Guardian and the FT reported it because of how it was growing online.

In fact we nearly ‘did a Hoover’, freeing more chickens than Wood Green could rehome. Luckily they’ve found a way, so everybody’s happy.

What’s next? Well, let’s see what our YouTube commenters (94% positive) are asking for:

Watch this space.

The new space is home to some Albionites (as we’ve now outgrown our original office) and also Albion Cell, our digital data marketing agency. However, with the few remaining desks, we’ve done something interesting……

We love working with startups at Albion. We love their energy, we love their ideas, we love the way they work. For this reason, we’ve always worked with startups, and currently we’re working with some fantastic ones, like Just Giving and Road Hero. (To name a few!)

So we decided to go further, and invite some startups to share our new space. They’re always hungry for a good-value and cool space to work, and also for company – it can be lonely otherwise when you’re just a couple of people. So we’ve moved them in, to join the Albion family.

The businesses we currently have in A-Space are:

• Brainient – online video retargeting business, of which Jason is a non-exec.
• Jetsetter – the UK office of the flash-sales business from Gilt Groupe.
• Spark PR – the PR agency to lots of Silicon Valley startups, and long term friends of Albion.

We’re open to a variety of different relationships with A Space startups, from straight-up renting of desks, to client, to investor, and all points in between.

We’ve got room for a few more, so get in touch if you’re a startup in need of a desk in a cool space….But hurry as we’ve already had lots of interest.

Hackney Work Week is a programme that has been developed by the good people at Inspire for primary schools and aims to develop children’s awareness of the world of work and increase their understanding of a variety of occupations.

Strangely daunting going back to school, but it’s like no school I ever remember, great buildings, inspiring environment and great teachers – although Alice the programme coordinator had far too much of my old English teacher about her (a look that can kill at 10 yards – either that or I was quickly regressing). From our own merry band of scallywags was Glyn and Nick – we fitted straight in as one’s just like the teachers and the other’s still a kid (I’ll let you guess who’s who) – and of course yours truly. Our assignment, to do a branding workshop about logos and slogans in order to help the pupils in Year 5 and Year 6 (9-11yrs old) create one for their greetings card business and an invention project.

Like all good creatives there was a distinct air of disobedience, ruthlessly insisting that their creative integrity could not possibly be compromised or altered in any way – sounds like they’re ready to work here already. Joking aside it was a really worthwhile experience and not only did I feel the kids were engaged with what we do – Channel 5 and Epson adverts getting a round of applause no less – but Nick, Glyn and I all came away feeling we had learnt a little too. We work on Hackney’s doorstep and it should be our responsibility to give a little back to the area we live, work, and play in – if we don’t do it who will? Our plan is to get all 30 pupils into the agency in the next month or so and have more of our team helping to (volunteers please make yourselves known) tutor the next generation. It’s a really great day and it’s not every day Nick Darken gets corrected by a 9-year old girl – it was worth it to see that alone.

The ANNA‘s are a relatively new award, put together by those lovely people at the Newspaper Marketing Agency. Our campaign, ‘Forget Everything You Know About Flying‘ for Air New Zealand picked up the award for ‘Best Digital Campaign’.

A huge thanks to the Albionites (you know who you are) who worked so hard on this project and an even bigger thanks to our client, Air New Zealand for being so great to work with.

Well done everyone!

Seven years ago the leisure trust GLL helped to organise tens of thousands of signatures to ‘Back the Bid’. Since that moment they have been working hard to be the organisation to operate the Olympic Park after the London 2012 Games have finished. Last week it was officially announced that they have won the contract to run two Olympic venues: Aquatics Centre and the Multi-Use Arena.

GLL signed a 10 year contract with the Olympic Park Legacy Company after beating the private providers Serco and Parkwood Leisure.

GLL is a charitable social enterprise, so will be reinvesting the profits to provide training, jobs and top quality leisure facilities at affordable prices and will help and improve communities through the services they offer. With this great Olympic task GLL will contribute to ensuring that we have a meaningful and sustainable Legacy into London for years to come. Can’t say fairer than that!

Here at the good ship Albion, we are chuffed to bits for everyone at GLL and would like to take this opportunity to congratulate them with this amazing news and wish them all the best of luck!

All week OK Go have been popping up around Brazil playing pop up shows for Cuervo whilst those of us not actually in Brazil have been putting ourselves in classic OK Go videos using #shotcast.

So what’s #shotcast? It’s a sweet piece of tech that we developed that allows fans to insert their ‘social selves’ into one of the band’s music videos. Using their Facebook or Twitter profiles, fans can then place th profile picture into a special live performance which will be created dynamically from the images and broadcast at CuervoCold.com. It’s a simple as tweeting a hashtag (#shotcast) or signing in to Facebook Connect.

Actually we’ve got a quick video of Damian from OK Go explaining how it works – and since he worked with Google on their Chrome project he gets these kind of things.

So today at 4pm (LA) 6pm (NY) 9pm (Brazil) and 11pm (UK) fans will be able to have their avatar create a unique online video experience.

Twick or Tweat developed in partnership with Kluge, uses pins on top of Google maps to show good and bad trick or treat zones in real time. The data gathered will be used by Albion Cell, Albion’s data division, to help brands understand how they can maximize missed opportunities.

Tim Bateman, Creative Director at Albion West Coast said “As newcomers to Los Angeles, we’ve noticed communities can seem pretty spread out and a little daunting to navigate. Technology can bring communities closer, making neighbors out of neighbourhoods, and towns out of urban anonymity.”

The more flags the app collects, the more of a tool it becomes. For time-starved parents, this app can help them create the best Halloween experience for their kids by going to the right places – this year and next year.

Arturo Perez, founder of Kluge, said “We’ve loved building this app because of its minimalistic approach. It’s so very simple, yet there is such richness in all of the data that it can gather. It’s precisely what gets us excited about the current social landscape.”

Happy Twick or Tweating!