2008 has been a great year for the Engine Group, including Altogether, in terms of amazing work and corresponding awards. There was the Best Use Of Viral Marketing at the IMA Awards, our win at the Marketing Week Effectiveness Awards, the Creative Circle for Best Multimedia Campaign as well as WCRS picking up Marketing Week’s Agency of the Year to name but a few. And so it’s great that we’re ending 2008 in the same vein, with news from the Meribel Ad Festival that we’ve picked up a couple of awards there too.

The Do The Test campaign for TFL won the Marketing Services Cristal in the Charity sector, as well as getting a special mention in the Integrated category, whilst our Brylcreem b:Effortless campaign scooped a Cyber Cristal. What’s really great about nearly all of the awards mentioned is that they were for group efforts, where more than one of Engine’s partner agencies worked together: in particular our work with WCRS has been particularly fruitful.

Whilst 2009 is obviously going to be tough, we’re looking forward to seeing how we can help our clients get the absolute maximum from their marketing budgets by creating clever, integrated campaigns. And in the meantime, we’re looking forward to a very merry Christmas and a peaceful New Year, and would like to wish all of you the same. See you in 2009.

Header image by D3 San Francisco on flickr | No Comments

We’re a generous bunch here at Altogether and we’re always thinking of ways that we can give people something for nothing.

So, this Christmas, with marketing budgets tighter than ever, we’ve created an amazing machine that could save your business thousands. Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pride that I present the Amazing Altogether Digital Strapline Generating Device. You simply enter the name of your brand and, to use the exact words in the operating manual, ‘depress [the] button’ and a solid gold strapline will be generated for your business. I’m sure you’ll agree that the strapline it generated for us earlier, which you can see above, is amazingly prescient.

Consider the Amazing Strapline Generating Device our little gift to you this Christmas. We hope you enjoy it and do feel free to share it with your friends as they might need its help too. | No Comments

 We’re all very chuffed here at Engine Towers today as industry bible Campaign has named TFL as its advertiser of the year.

Whilst it wasn’t the only piece of advertising they released this year, far from it in fact, there’s no doubt that the Do The Test piece created by our friends at WCRS was the shining star out of their ads from 2008. Whilst we’re obviously chuffed for the guys at WCRS we’re also quietly pleased ourselves due to the fact that, as the agency in charge of the online marketing & seeding of the ad (and its follow-up, Whodunnit?) we’d like to think that we can take pride in this award as well as the fact that it was named as one of the top 10 virals of the year as well.

With over 12 million views and counting, appearances on programmes ranging from Good Morning America to BBC London News as well as features in papers such as The Observer and The Daily Telegraph, Do The Test really was a viral monster in 2008. It even has more views on YouTube now than Cadbury’s gorilla ad which is quite an achievement though of course it may simply be that there are lots of people out there who loathe the music of Phil Collins as much as we do.

Image by eecue on flickr | No Comments

I was chatting to some people from the NSPCC the other day when I came up with, what I thought was, a brilliant idea.

“You have this catalogue full of things that people can buy from,” I said, “and you get a cut of the proceeds. But the problem is that a lot of the gifts on offer are not to the taste of a lot of people. Why don’t you just set yourselves up as an Amazon affiliate so that people can buy whatever they want, and you get commission?”

“Oh,” they said, “we’ve already done that.”

And indeed they have, I just hadn’t heard about it. And on the assumption that a lot of other people haven’t heard about it either I thought that it would be a nice thing to encourage anyone reading this to do any of their shopping that they were planning to do on Amazon (or eBay) via the NSPCC Wishes site. I did mine this morning.

It also makes me wonder why every charity in the UK hasn’t set-up something similar, especially when you consider that the school one of our team sends his kids to is doing it. It strikes me as the most obvious thing in the world: let people buy their normal Xmas gifts (or birthday presents or anything else) at the same time as doing a bit for charity.

If you know of any other charities doing anything similar, let us know and we’ll add them to this post.

Image by tallkev on flickr | No Comments

 I can remember shortly after the year 2000 came and went without a hitch a number of people scoffed at the ‘Y2K’ bug, complaining of the pointless stories of doom and woe which proved to be false. The entire thing was a scam they cried, and the vast sums spent on ‘fixing’ the problem were a waste.

The people who said these things were usually technically illiterate and had very little idea whatsoever what they were talking about. The reason there was no catastrophe in the IT world when the clocks ticked over was down to the tens of thousands of people like me, who worked extremely hard investigating, testing, and ultimately fixing the problems that not having enough bits in date fields caused.

When people tell me there was never a problem, I remember Sunday 2nd January 2000 quite clearly. A panic stricken client called me in to their offices - one of their testing contractors had falsified his Y2K test results over the preceding months. The primary system he was testing didn’t work once the clocks changed, and never could have. I can chuckle about it now, but that Sunday was a rather panic filled and fraught time to say the least.

The next looming IT crisis is approaching, but this time things are rather different. Instead of a fixed date which everyone knows, this time a resource is running out and no one knows quite when it will be gone. You may have seen the odd news article or so about the Internet running out of addresses but you can be sure that these stories will increase at a rapid rate over the next couple of years.

The current computer addressing method is called ‘IPv4‘ . In IPv4, 32 bit numbers represent the address (analogous to telephone numbers) of computers and devices connected to the Internet. For example, an address might be “11000000000010011100100000000001″
and this would represent one unique computer or device with a direct connection to the Internet. These addresses are more commonly written for humans in ‘dotted decimal’ notation, e.g. 192.9.200.1.

There are 4.2 billion unique possible addresses available with IPv4. Unfortunately whilst 4.2 billion may have been adequate in the 1980s when IPv4 was standardised, with the incredible take up and expansion of the Internet over the last 20 years we are on course to run out of these addresses in roughly 2011-2012. Running out of addresses will be a big problem. Companies or users who need an address to connect to the Internet will not be able to get a new one. They will all have been given out.

The replacement for IPv4, is called IPv6 (this is what happened to IPv5 for the curious).

IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses, so a single address might be “110000100001100101001000100100010100000010 1010011100100110101001110000101010100111001 1001001001110000100100110011100100100100101″

A number this long gives 340 trillion trillion trillion possible addresses, which should be enough for a little while at least. In context, it’s enough addresses for every human on earth to have a personal network the size of the current Internet. Or for every one of our home appliances to be hooked up.

We’ve had resource exhaustion problems like this before. Phone numbers in London used to start with ‘01′. A phone number would be for example 01-387-5946.
BT realised that the rapid take up of phones in the capital meant they were running out of numbers, and soon would be unable to allocate a new number to someone requesting one. So in 1990 new prefixes were introduced, 071 and 081.

These prefixes were then superseded in 1995 by 0171 and 0181, and even these were again replaced by 020 in April 2000. Each time these were replaced it was relatively easy to adjust - we humans could just alter the numbers we used to call who we wanted. Dialling extra numbers is no problem to us.

But say for the sake of argument, that instead of extra numbers, new phone numbers had letters added as well. Old phone numbers (such as 020-3128-8600) would be incompatible with new phones which had letters such as ‘3AB40-DA6E3-GB2C1′. Old phones would only be able to call old phones. New phones would need new equipment all the way between the handset on the desk, through the various exchanges used to connect and the phone at the other end.

People with the new phone numbers couldn’t be called by those people with old phones. Every piece of telephony equipment would need to be replaced - phones, office telecommunications switches, fax machines, modems, automated alarm systems, mobile phones. Everything.

This is basically what’s going to happen with the changeover from IPv4 to IPv6. Those computers, phones and network devices will all need to be switched over in order to be able to talk to each other. Companies are starting to look at this problem and are beginning to make the change over to IPV6. However, this isn’t helped when major players in the telecoms arena seem to be rather less than forward thinking.

A temporary fix to the problem of IPv4 address depletion is to use Network Address Translation (NAT). Most companies use this to connect their offices - one TCP/IP address is used to connect many individual computers to the net. This is however just a short term fix.

When the last of the IPv4 addresses is allocated, the deployment of new services will become extremely difficult. The Internet won’t suddenly stop. But there will suddenly be a difference between the digital ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ with the potential for ‘black markets’ in IPv4 address sales.

Solutions to the migration are mired in complication and cost. For example, Windows XP, though technically IPv6 capable, is incapable of doing IPv6 DNS resolution rendering it unsuitable for use. Mac OSX automatically uses IPv6 connectivity if it’s available, but is incapable of using DHCPv6. The complications of converting an entire Enterprise of systems, hardware, bespoke software and documentation would incur a significant cost. Unsurprisingly, the move from IPv4 to IPv6 has been sluggish.

Some commentators think we will only ever manage a NAT’d IPv4 solution, and the deployment of IPv6 simply won’t happen. The European Commission is trying to encourage us to change over to IPv6, while in other parts of the world different solutions are being rolled out . Companies are planning ahead, though what they are planning is unclear.

Here at Altogether we’re thinking hard about this problem, what it means to us and what it will mean to our clients. It’s very clear there won’t be a clean switch-over any time soon, so with some forethought and planning, the various problems that will occur when the address pool does run won’t come as a shock or surprise.

And that should mean that January 2nd 2011, or September 3rd 2012, or whatever the actual date is, won’t be quite as manic as that Sunday back in 2000 was.

Telephone image by macinate on flickr | 1 Comment

We like to think we’re a pretty generous bunch here at Altogether and so whenever someone takes the, frankly crazy, decision to leave us, we always try to get them a pretty splendid present. A while back one of our planners, Chungaiz (he of Martine McCutcheon video fame), left us and to send him on his way we bought him a pair of trainers. But seeing as how Chungaiz is an absolute Nike fanatic we didn’t just get him any old daps, but got him some personalised NIKEiD trainers.

This is where you can design your Nike trainers to your own specifications, so that they’re totally unique. Rather than designing Chungaiz’s for him (you can do it all on the website) we thought that it would be more enjoyable for him if we sorted him a session at Nike Town on Oxford Circus (with a little help from our friends at Slice who work on NIKEiD). And when he came in to see us recently he was wearing his new Nike Chungaiz. Only, as you can see in the photo above, they’re actually Nike Altogether: they’re even in our brand colours. Which we thought was rather nice.

Altogether Digital - the company people love so much they put it on their shoes. | No Comments

Although the development team at Altogether pride themselves on being the best groomed members of the company (any anyone who sees us will no-doubt agree), we have decided to make an exception this November, all in the name of charity (or charidy, if you happen to be a radio show host). For this month, and I really hope this month only, we are all growing immense (and most probably laughable) amounts of facial hair as we take part in Movember.

Whilst I am not entirely certain how I got caught up in this, here is a brief explanation of the event from the official website:

“At the start of Movember guys register with a clean shaven face. The Movember participants known as Mo Bros then have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their moustache and along the way raise as much money and awareness about male health issues as possible.

Men lack awareness about the very real health issues they face. There is an attitude that they have to be tough - “a real man” - and are reluctant to see a doctor about an illness or go for regular medical checks.

The aim of Movember is to change this attitude, make men’s health fun by putting the Mo back on the face of English men and in the process raise some serious funds for key male health issues.

Every year about 35,000 men in the U.K. are diagnosed with prostate cancer and about 10,000 men die from of the disease. A British man has a 1 in 11 lifetime risk of developing prostate cancer . It is now the most common cancer diagnosed in men in the U.K. with at least one man dying every hour from the disease.”

So far we have raised a collective £110, with £79.33 having been raised by our handlebar-sporting Mr Anthony Galvin alone. Although this is obviously a respectable total at this early stage, we’d love to get a lot more, so please try and dig deep and donate as much as you can in these credit-crunching times, and help us raise awareness of prostate cancer! Don’t forget the back of the sofa can be an invaluable source of donatable funds.

To keep tabs on how the team is doing, take a look at our awesome Movember microsite (pogonophobes may want to proceed with caution: this site may contain beards). You especially won’t want to miss our esteemed dev team co-leader Mr Hiren Jakison as he dyes his tache blonde in the coming weeks. Note to Hils, stop making silly bets in the pub…. | No Comments

Today’s a big day. Yes, it’s the opening day of the 2nd annual SMX London conference. Oh, and there’s something going on in the US as well apparently. But anyway, back to SMX.

Since leaving Search Engine Strategies, the event he founded, Danny Sullivan has created a series of excellent conferences covering a wide range of topics related to internet marketing, and to date I’ve been lucky enough to speak at the inaugural events in London & Sydney. For some reason they’ve now invited me back to speak again today & tomorrow.

Whilst I don’t imagine for a second that’s enough to get anyone out of bed, let alone down to a conference in Central London, the rest of the line-up certainly deserve a hearing: veteran conference speaker Dixon Jones, the ever excellent Tor Crockatt of Microsoft,  Robin Goad of Hitwise (whose blog you really should be reading if you’re not already), Jon Myers of MediaVest & formerly Latitude, Jane Copland from SEOmoz, Will Critchlow of Distilled, Vanessa Fox (formerly of Google) - and that’s just today.

The event’s being held in The Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden and whilst I’m not sure if there are any tickets left, if you’re in the area and fancy getting up to date with the latest developments in SEO, PPC, social media & much, much more, then you should pop in. And if you can’t make it, why not head to LondonSEO for a bit of post conference networking. You’ll often find that the best way to find out an SEO’s secrets is to get him a bit tipsy.

Header image by michaelmcd on flickr | No Comments

Last week saw the 5th annual Interactive Marketing & Advertising Awards (IMAs) and Altogether Digital, together with our friends at WCRS, were short-listed for two of the most hotly contested categories. Unfortunately we didn’t win in Consumer Products & Services for our Brylcreem campaign (but it had already won a Creative Circle, so that’s ok) but I’m very proud to say that we did win the Best Use of Viral Marketing category for our dothetest campaign for Transport for London.

Obviously we were all very excited about this (indeed I was perhaps a bit too excited as the fact that I nearly took off the sponsor’s nose when I ran on to the stage and started waving the trophy around proves), just as we were very excited when the video recently featured on the popular US TV show Good Morning America. But what’s got us really excited is the fact that today sees the launch of the 2nd stage of our work for TFL.

We’re working with WCRS again who this time have made 4 films which allow you to test how aware you are. The main one, Whodunnit?, can be seen at the top of this post whilst the others are all available over at www.dothetest.co.uk or on the dothetest YouTube channel.We’re hoping that people enjoy these new films as much as they did the original one, and that it helps to spread the message of cycle safety. And in case you’re not one of the ten million viewers the original video had, why not check it out now?

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Unless you’ve been stuck on the moon for the last year or so you’ll undoubtedly be aware that the UK, and it seems the whole world, is heading into a recession. You don’t have to look too far for predictions of woe with even seemingly recession proof companies & industries looking vulnerable. In many cases, such as the world of Me 2.0 start-ups, it does feel like the recession might simply act as a naturalising force, pushing companies to develop valid revenue models and stop relying on VCs handing out funding like sweets on Halloween.

But all is not doom & gloom, or needn’t be according to the Financial Times. It currently has an ad campaign suggesting that the best way to beat a recession is to continue to invest in advertising & marketing. The campaign is backed up by a nice little micro-site which collects independent research & case studies showing that:

In every recession of the past 90 years…the businesses who increase their advertising spend are the ones who survive the tough times and thrive afterwards.

The site also encourages users to post their own thoughts on the opportunities a recession might offer and whilst there was only one at the time of writing this, it’s quite an interesting one:

Whilst there are very obviously economic challenges we all face in a climate such as this, there are also the same number of opportunities. In an economy when everyone is shouting it\’s very hard to be heard - an economy when no one is shouting is a great time to steal a march

Now it’s obvious why the FT would want people to continue to advertise: whilst they have a very healthy revenue model based on sales, they obviously can’t do without advertising revenues either. That said, we tend to think that they have a point. We’ve always banged on about ROI, even in the more ‘fluffy’ fields of viral & social media marketing. And if you can prove an ROI that boosts balance sheets, why on earth wouldn’t you continue to invest?

And when you consider the opportunities still available in the fields of affiliate and paid search marketing, where cost effectiveness is the main selling point, it seems like you’d have to be mad not to keep spending on marketing. But then it often feels like the world must have gone mad for us to even be having to talk about this sort of thing.

Header image by aturkus on flickr | 1 Comment