Please give her as big a welcome as we do.

It’s been a busy Winter for Do Tank Studios so far, with lots of very exciting projects in production that we will be able to unveil in 2010.

We’ve been very busy looking at mobile strategies and application development recently, with a few iPhone & iPod Touch applications having recently gone live on the App Store, so here’s a quick roundup.

Pilot is a fun application that turns your iPhone into your very own motion responsive WWII fighter plane for taking out annoying friends, colleagues and pets. Good childish fun.

Lifelines is an iPhone “soundboard” app that lets you play inspirational and seminal speeches from key figures in history. It also connects with Wikipedia, providing background information on each person, their lives and their impact on the world. It has been our pleasure to work with the incredibly talented Alex Mayhew on this project.

Bird Song FM came out of the Do Tank R&D Lab as a collaboration between Adam Hoyle & Julian Baker and builds on previous collaboration that paid tribute to the recordings of Bird Song that played out as a test transmission on early DAB stations. Now available for the iPhone to provide a perfect space to eacape and relax into, even when on the go. To ensure that the soundtrack is always unique we’ve developed a special generative audio sequencer which remixes the individual bird sounds in exciting and unexpected ways.

PhotoFit is a fun app that allows you to take pictures of your friends and colleagues and mix them together with hilarious outcomes. You can then save the images to your library or email them to other iPhone users.

Download the app from here or check out the support site here

We’ve had some really nice feedback about the interactive on Twitter, and also Chris Wilkinson at the Guardian has written a really nice review of it.

Until now, the BBC has not had detailed site-wide guidelines for Flash driven projects but with increasing adoption and integration of the Flash platform, Do Tank were commissioned to redefine how the BBC manage their Flash deliverable from independents and 3rd party vendors. We will examine how the TPMs, the producers for the various streams of flash integration, designers and Flash Developers manage the existing flash built deliverables. Do Tank Studios will report, examine, determine and feedback improved methods of Flash Integration for future Flash built projects.

“We’re looking at the death of the ‘TV-comes-first’ model, definitely,”
Lee Daley, chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi UK, 2005

And yet TV is still the dominant entertainment medium is western society. Almost all households in Europe and US have access to terrestrial (and soon to be digital) TV. It’s cheap and it’s available everywhere while broadband Is still only available to around 12% of Europe and only in built-up areas of the US.

According to figures from BBC, TV consumption is actually up on previous years and, in other polls, TV is stated as the resource “most likely to be missed”, way above internet access. So it can’t be a lack of interest in video entertainment that’s causing the demise.

A decent digital TV set is considerably less than the price of the cheapest laptop and consumers are still buying and watching TV with around 40% of UK households owning more than one TV set. So it can’t be any barriers to entry or a lack of demand that’s seeing the decline in TV advertising.

Affordable PVRs like SkyPlus and FreeView+ still have low market penetration but they give viewers the ability to skip the ads; the worst possible scenario for ad agencies. Coupled with consumers’ increasing awareness of how to “play” marketing and the high benchmarks set by Experiential Marketing where businesses provide, you know, a good service and experience to their customers.

We Love TV

But the single biggest impact on TV (and newspaper) advertising has been the internet and the various forms of digital marketing. Traditional ad agencies (Ogilvy / WPP are not alone here) just don’t get digital. In a recent conversation with another top ten agency, the creative director confidently revealed to me that “you can do some great stuff with banner ads” and thought that an integrated approach to digital meant a microsite to go with the banners. Their recent stab at social media marketing constituted a MySpace page which nobody ever updated so the message board rapidly declined into a directory of porn site. Nice one fellas, good bit of brand management on that one.

Digital, when handled correctly, enables a more accountable, more measurable and, in many ways, more focused campaign strategy. While it’s reach, in terms of numbers, falls far below that of TV (and will remain so for many years to come) the quality of the viewers and their willingness to engage, rather than passively observe, is still to be adequately evaluated. The quality of engagement through digital channels, the communities and the ability to action consumer feedback in minutes just aren’t available in the un-hearing, one-way model of broadcast advertising.

But let’s not write-off TV advertising yet. It’s a lack of understanding, imagination and vision that are killing it, not the format itself. Concurrent viewing, where the viewing audience is surfing the web while watching, switching attention between TV and Internet is on the rise. It’s also growing rapidly with more web-enabled Mobile devices and affordable data packages, concurrent viewing will increase more rapidly in the next 2 years… Assuming agencies bother to make sites that work on mobile.

And in Two years, do you what will happen then? We do. And we’ve been working with a consortium of broadcasters including the BBC to prototype and develop the next generation TV, and it’s web-enabled. Project “Canvas”

Do you see where I’m going here? Is it obvious yet? TV may not lead the field any more but it is still a powerful influencer in an integrated campaign strategy. And pretty soon, with the right people in charge, it could be more powerful than ever.

A campaign that uses the best of broadcast & online, that integrates the two and that allows two-way feedback on both platforms, will provide a much more powerful, measurable and effective result.

This year is slightly different, as The Sancho Plan are the only group to have been invited to produce content for the brand new museum, which opens early in 2009, so it’s a real honour.

Adam is on his way out there today to spend a few days calibrating and configuring the system, so we’ll update this post when he returns with some pictures and more information.

7-11pm Weds 13th November
The Fleapit, 49 Columbia Road, London E2 7RG