Over the past few years, there have been a lot of high-profile campaigns against drunk driving. Whether it be through outreach in schools or various advertising campaigns in the media, the message has been hammered home: Don’t drink and drive!

With the introduction of so-called “hands-free” laws in a number of provinces, the issue of texting or using your phone while driving has gained significant traction. In fact, there are more similarities between this issue and inebriated driving than one might think. Driving while distracted is like driving after having four beers, and distracted drivers cause 8 in 10 accidents.

Armed with these facts, Thornley Fallis and 76design developed a Greater Toronto Area pilot campaign for Allstate Insurance Company of Canada aimed at sensitizing young drivers to this critical issue.

The campaign, Action Against Distraction, encourages teens to take the pledge against distracted driving and share it with their friends via social networks. Allstate is also giving away an iPad to one lucky pledge-taker.

To support the campaign, we produced a video that asked teens to tell us the craziest driving distraction they’ve ever seen. Some of the responses surprised us, including that of one teen who said his relative eats a bowl of cereal while driving.

Hundreds of teens have already taken the pledge, and you can too

In order to reinvigorate and revitalize downtown Ottawa businesses hit hard by the recession and the bus strike, Thornley Fallis and 76design  conceived, developed and executed the Picture it Downtown campaign for The City of Ottawa, where residents were encouraged to go downtown, snap a photo and share it online.

Point, shoot, share – a simple concept to get Ottawa excited about all it has to offer. The “Picture It Downtown” concept we developed served to visually promote downtown Ottawa as a whole, but also the eight specific areas being promoted:  Byward Market, Downtown Rideau, Sparks Street, Bank Street, The Glebe, Chinatown, Preston Street (Little Italy) and Wellington-West Village.

Residents could participate in the campaign contest to win daily ($50), weekly ($250) and grand ($500 to $1200) prizes by taking pictures of downtown activities and uploading them to the campaign website.

The campaign included a media launch event involving the Mayor, a website with a list of downtown activites, a description, videos and photos of each area, contest rules and regulations, a photo gallery for people to submit and view photos, and YouTube videos, featuring all that’s cool in several neighbourhoods, print, radio, online and transit advertising, weekly news releases and ongoing online outreach using other social media tools including Twitter and Flickr.

Thousands of people participated and competed for prizing provided by local businesses.

The campaign was to remind Ottawans of all the diverse experiences and excitement downtown Ottawa has to offer, and entice them to visit downtown — ultimately spending money while engaging in the various activities highlighted in the eight main areas being promoted.

For the City of Ottawa, running a marketing campaign with a heavy online and interactive component was not only a smart business and communications decision, but its creativity generated a lot of buzz within Ottawa and got people sharing ideas and photos of great things to do and see in the city.

The fall 2009 campaign resulted in over ten thousand unique visits to the campaign website, more than 1300 entries (photos uploaded to the website), significant earned media in targeted outlets, photo and video assets for future use by the City, and a general buzz across the City about the creativity of the campaign, particularly by government.

Picture it downtown would not have been possible without our lead technologist Brett Tackaberry, senior developer Steve Lounsbury, our superb designer Steve St. Pierre, the ad campaign led by Laura Mindorff, the videos by Ryan Knuth, writer and producer LeeEllen Carroll and our SEO expert Shaun Scanlon. Special thanks to our GM Keelan Green, who has a knack for assembling the best teams to deliver outstanding results.

Thank you IABC for the recognition. It’s nice to bask in the spotlight… and great to share successes. As I used to say in my former journalistic career, you’re only as good as your last story. So that means back to work. Right now.

As designers during these rapidly changing times it is more important than ever to exercise flexibility and adaptability in the approach we take to our work. With the competitive nature of our business, the ever evolving vehicles of communication and the state of our recovering economy, our clients have become pretty demanding when it comes to us delivering the goods. If we can’t deliver to their expectations, they know someone else is waiting in the wings, hungry and ready to take over. 

I said it before and I’ll continue to say it “one size does not fit all”. Each client we work for and every individual project we work on has unique objectives and goals and therefore we need to make sure that we take a unique approach to each one and that means being flexible. 

A lot of times it’s smooth sailing. Good ideas flow quickly and client “buy-in” happens without a hitch. However, there are those occasions when things become a little more challenging, when it takes more time and effort than normal to deliver “the goods”. It’s during these times that we ask ourselves “what happened?” The reality is a number of things could have happened and the fact of matter is you still need to deliver. Great designers find a way to adapt on the fly, extending themselves further and further with each new challenge that’s thrown their way. In the end it’s a win-win situation, the client gets delivery of a project and the designer has taken the opportunity to grow and work beyond their past limitations. We are fortunate enough at 76design to have on staff a group of great designers that have shown me the true meaning of adaptability and flexibility. I’d like to take this opportunity to say, “thanks guys!”

Being a designer is not always easy. Deadlines can be tight, projects can be challenging, clients can be really demanding. But being adaptable in the face of challenge makes it easier for everyone involved and that’s a good thing.

To further illustrate my point I leave you with a quote from the late great Bruce Lee, one of the greatest martial artists in history, “Be formless, shapeless like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.” 

I am pleased to announce  the launch of  Thornley Fallis & 76design’s new online presence.

Our new websites, conceptualized, designed and developed by  our team of creative masterminds and technology all-stars, exemplifies our capacity to push the limits of innovation  in the world of social media and digital marketing.

Thornley Fallis & 76design is made up of individuals with fun, smart and professional personalities; personalities that have all contributed to the success of marketing & communications projects. To fully demonstrate  the range of personalities, talent and intelligence our  team has to offer, we’ve done something  a little outside the box.  Something very brave… or maybe something very stupid – we’ll let you know ;-)

We’ve created a live LifeStream for every one of our employees. This is more than just a standard funny profile picture and biography.  It is an aggregate of their work and online profile, intended to paint a picture of who they are, what they do, what they think and what they are interested in.

To explore the diverse and unique characters at Thornley Fallis and jokers at 76design, take a look through our people profiles and find out who you could be working with on your next project.

Not only is our team exceptionally talented (and good-looking), we are experienced & passionate about the work we do.  While adventuring through our People pages, zoom over to the Work & Services sections to see what Thornley Fallis & 76design has to offer.

My colleagues and I hope you enjoy perusing through our new sites.

Oh and one more thing… if you like what you see, don’t hesitate to call us, we’d love to hear from you!

During the post-presentation free-for-all of a recent Third Tuesday Ottawa, I had my mind blown by smart cookie, often shift+control linked and former 76er, John Wiseman. We were talking about A vs B Testing and its slow and steady adoption within the web industry. We talked about the conversion of visitors into buyers via the testing of 2 variations of a site design, the evolution of focus-testing. It was the usual chatter until he drops this nugget on me.

RobotReplay — The Next Generation of Web Analytics

It’s a free web-based application where it tracks and records the mouse gestures of each visitor’s session. Did I mention that it’s FREE? Beyond being pretty damn cool, it allows clients to see for themselves where a visitor clicks first, what doesn’t get any attention at all and everything in between. The service is simple to implement into your site’s code and it records the session in tasty flash video on their servers. This is especially useful for those darn online forms that gets no love. Now you can see why.

Can it replace your current tools for collecting web metrics? No. Think of it as a beauty of a complement to your existing plan (if you have one that is). The dead-sexy kneepads to the thigh-high leg warmers, if you will.

I have yet to test it out on my personal sites/blogs, because evidently you need actual traffic for it to work.

This can help mash out those long battles over the size of buttons, where they’re placed, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn’t address the request by the client to make their logo 75% bigger. You’re still on your own for that one.

steve got the ball rolling with a couple of beauty posts documenting our new project at 76labs
it’s temporarily top secret
but our development process
is inspiring a whole lot of blogworthy thoughts…

it’s no secret that ours is a music project
so i’d like to talk about musicians
and what kind of lousy dough they make
because they make painully little
playing in cafes, bars, clubs, theatres, festivals
50 bucks sometimes
a hundred bucks a lot of the time
and for every quality gig that pays 2 or 3 hundred
another couple that pay nothing at all
which is why one of the main objectives of our new project is to increase the amount of money working musicians make!

and while it’s true that the legends are rich
there are very few of them
compared to the countless fabulous musicians
lifelong musicians
who live poor
and die
more or less penniless

and if you know how the music industry works
you’ll know that even selling a million records
or having a number one hit
is no guarantee of significant financial rewards
because there are so many predators, so many ways to get screwed
that time and again musicians get famous and go broke all at once

and so the project we’re working on is in large measure for them
real musicians who spend their lives making people feel good
we’re building an economic engine
unlike any other
based on an understanding of the real lives of musicians
and their fans
and designed for them and no one else
and when it’s ready to test (soon)
we hope you’ll give it a whirl
and let us know what you think
js