In the second part of our ‘how to brief’ series, Rob Turner talks about how creatives want to be briefed and how it sets the rules for a good working relationship.   Independent creatives have worked hard to reach the point where they regularly get new business. We’ve gone through the cycle of needing work [...]

As promised, we’re going to be bringing you a series of blogs on ‘how to brief’ from some of the Creatives and Agencies on the Exchange. First up, Rob Remington-Drake, an award-winning creative who has worked  on brands such as Nissan, Air New Zealand, Samsung and BMW talks about ‘briefing the brief’.   What do [...]

There is one overriding maxim when you’re a disruptive company: you have to keep disrupting. If lunch is for wimps, innovation is for the permanently hungry.   So with blur Group, its aim to disrupt the way businesses buy creative services – and the way creatives deliver them, requires us to be ahead of the [...]

Since the Creative Services Exchange first launched its brief app we’ve received nearly 800 different briefs from businesses around the world. Although to some marketing professionals, briefing is as straightforward as turning on a tap, we still get asked countless questions about what should go into a brief. We’ve given some advice in the past [...]

  C&A Brazil took social media to the shop floor with their recent mashup of digital and real time retail.   In an innovative strategy, the clothing chain created a campaign entitled “Facebook Like”, which invited Facebook users to “like” items of clothing. The real time social media activity was then translated to hangers in [...]

How much should a creative project cost? What should I spend on a new website? What’s the average cost for a mobile app? How much should I put in my budget for PR? Can I get a new brand for less than 10K?   Setting a budget for a marketing project  always seems to be [...]

As design and creative industries software giant Adobe release their latest version of Creative Suite, a new era of software purchasing is born.   CS6, the latest version of Creative Suite now moved from Beta this Monday and applications are available either as full priced downloads or as the much anticipated  Creative Cloud™ package.   [...]

You didn’t expect us to do things conventionally did you?   Today, blur Group announced a funding round of $2m as it continues to disrupt the media industry and develop a new business model for buying and selling creative and marketing services.    At this stage, convention would suggest a heady mix of VCs to inject capital [...]

The huge news in social media circles this week is that Facebook, the ever-growing social media giant has acquired Instagram, the visual social platform for a cool $1 billion.   Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the deal in his Facebook timeline last Monday, stating “I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire [...]

It’s always going to be a challenge to produce a glossary for something as fast moving as social media – it seems every day there’s a new network emerging, or new developments in old (where old isn’t very) favourites. So here’s an update to the glossary we first published last year – and wow, what [...]

The first of April, “April Fools” day, was this year as inventive, fun and playful for brands with a cheeky side as ever before.   From Virgin’s hopes to drill to the centre of the earth to “green” champagne and old school NIntendo maps on Google earth, social media and tech played a joker’s apprentice [...]

It’s probably not escaped your attention that there are now over 14,000 creatives and agencies on blur Group‘s Creative Services Exchange. That’s a fairly substantial creative crowd for a CMO to benefit from. But what turns these creatives on? What’s the project that’s guaranteed to gain their attention – and give your marketing a real [...]

Some big news in social media land this week is that micro blogging giant Twitter has acquired Posterous, the short-blogging platform.   Posterous has been in existence for 4 years and has been favoured for ease of blogging;  users could post via email and mobile with images and rich text. The company officially announced the [...]

Today we have a guest post from Joe Linford from Broadband Genie, the consumer advice and social shopping site.   With millions of users worldwide, Twitter is the unbeatable micro-blogging platform that should already be an integral part of your social media marketing strategy. A lot of small businesses and entrepreneurs find it difficult to leverage [...]

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about different models for the advertising industry; how best to move the old agency world to address the increasing demands of digital campaigns; how to ensure that the value of creativity is maintained as crowdsourcing models make businesses look beyond a small core of suppliers.   Meanwhile [...]

On Wednesday 14th March Starbucks stores offered a free latte to anyone going into a branch and introducing themselves.   The move by the market’s biggest coffee chain is to get back to a more personal approach; “Nowadays everything seems a little impersonal. That’s why from now on we’re going to refer to you as [...]

The naming of your company is something people really do worry a lot about when establishing a new brand, and for good reason. Once your name is established it’s really hard to change, you’ve got it for life.   Entrepreneurs often start in the wrong place, they want a name that ‘sounds good’ without considering [...]

Social media platform Pinterest has had a surge of popularity at the start of 2012, now coming to a grinding halt in the wake of a blog post by a lawyer who has deleted all her pin boards.   Kirsten Kowalski is a photograhper and also a lawyer. She decided to look into the minutiae [...]

In the last quarter of 2011, massolution, the research and advisory arm of Crowdsourcing.org, conducted a major research study on patterns and trends in crowdsourcing. blur Group has talked about how it’s seeing increasing size, value and complexity of the projects that are briefed on the Creative Services Exchange, but the research which surveyed 32 [...]

Just as we start talking about the increasing propensity of businesses to think about Crowdsourcing as a solution to bigger issues and not just as an interesting experiment for feedback or ideas, we find ourselves on the end of what can only be described as a record breaker.   Yes, to show that businesses mean [...]

The benefit of social media is that it facilitates two-way communication between your brand and customers/prospects. Interacting with your audience will keep them interested far longer than simply providing links to product/service information. Learning to engage your social network may be a little tricky.   Engagement means different things to different people. As a marketer, [...]

So we just got used to the explosion of moodboard madness that is Pinterest, when Chill gains momentum as the video version of the pinboarding phenomenon. TV is not just TV any more folks…it, like everything else, just got social.   Chill launched in August 2011 and had a re-design update last month. The premise [...]

This weekend the tragedy of singer Whitney Houston’s death was broken on Twitter some 27 minutes prior to a press announcement. The incident has once again raised awareness of how the micro-blogging site has the ability and reach to enable news to spread far quicker than news channels and press due to the unembargoed and [...]

A lot of people still ask me “So what is branding anyway?” I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and readdressed my ideas recently when establishing my own branding agency. I’ve come to the conclusion that brands that work are alive and kicking. If the only thing someone consumes of your brand is [...]

Wunderkit, the latest addition to 6Wunderkinder’s armoury opened its much awaited beta launch during January, used and tested by an army of Wunderlist fans. From February 1st it was extended to the public. So, what is the big idea, and why the fuss? The Berlin-based company formed in 2010 and are the creators of Wunderlist, [...]