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Go Find It with the new Ka

Hugo King — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:00:59 +0000

The latest microsite I’ve been working on is for the new Ford Ka. This is another huge campaign targeting younger (prospective) small car buyers across all the usual channels; TV, print, email, mobile and (most importantly) web and social media.

The campaign is all about discovery – it’s called Go Find It – and the online activity reflects that. There are two sections to the microsite; product – exploring content to do with the Ka – and campaign – discovering cool and interesting things to see and do. Both sections are presented as a map you can explore, with Google Map style functionality; the product section is an imaginary town whereas the campaign section is a map of Europe.

In the product section you can explore the car and it’s features as well as find other cool content like wallpapers, there’s also lots of gems to find – can you see the lightsaber battle or Big Daddy? But it’s the campaign section where it really gets exciting.

The Find It portal

The campaign site lets users explore what’s cool and happening in their area, from street art to music, marked by ‘pins’ on the map. As well as finding content users can contribute it too. The site is powered by the Socialight platform – a location based content network – and in partnership with Multimap. There’s also functionality to search, bookmark and share all of this content too!

The site is active in 22 European countries although the user content is only available in 6. It was also extremely complicated to localise and deploy, there were 3 phases with various permutations across the different local sites.

Have a look at the site and explore (hey, you may even like the new Ka).

Fiesta Fiesta

Hugo King — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:15:15 +0000

UPDATE: The full site has now been decommissioned (the part with the mashup content) but the barebones concept of the site is still there.

So here’s what I’ve been working on.

This is just part of a huge Europe-wide marketing campaign for the new Ford Fiesta. The campaign is the culmination of about 3 years of work at the heart of which is digital and this site is the hub for everything. There’s masses of media out there; billboard, poster, TV, e-mail, WAP, SMS, viral, social out-reach (blogs, Twitter, Flickr)…and web.

The idea behind the site is that it pulls together everything you love – it’s all about ‘mashing up’ content and creating something unique. It is designed to appeal to the 17-29 demographic and is all based around ‘Now’, making the user feel unique and cool! So it’s all definitely about the experience.

The Fiesta portal

The ‘Create’ section of the site streams content from 3rd partie sites – Flickr, CondeNet, GQStyle, Last.fm, Blink box – and creates a Fiesta from the content. You can then mark the bits you like (and don’t like) and your Fiesta will be automatically customised for you using the categories and tags on the content. You can also create you own mashup (video of your Fiesta content) and rate other user’s mashups – all of which appear in a gallery. You can also add your own content to the Flickr group and have the chance of it being pulled into the site (it’s moderated first). It’s totally immersive and interactive – engaging users and making them feel special!

I think it’s an absolutely fantastic site and a great concept! I hope you enjoy it, and please hit up all the links and feel free to repost.

Here’s the links:

Ruby XML translator

Hugo King — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:00:03 +0000

I’ve been doing work experience at AMV over the last month. One of the things that I’ve been working on is a workflow for video assets – managing assets (and information about them) in the file system and between various databases. We set up some ‘chron jobs’ to trigger scripts that interrogate the assets and output XML, these were used along with folder actions watching for new files. This managed the flow of data between the various databases, aggregating it into a ‘master copy’ of information about the asset.

I wrote a set of Ruby scripts to take several XML files, concatenate them and reformat them for input to another database. I had several problems to overcome including; checking for the existence of files and directories and sorting the data by nested properties.

I believe the script is still in use.

The script file