EuroRSCG – Digital developer 2008-2010
Summary
I won the agency's digital work back from the competitors and built an iPhone site and interactive product tools for GN/Jabra.
Description
With over 300 offices in 75 countries, Euro RSCG was a top-five agency worldwide. But in Denmark, they lived a quiet life close to Vibenshus Runddel. As a network agency, they had several clients through their French parent company, including Citroën, Vichy and L’Oréal. These were supplemented by a solid portfolio of local brands – GN/Jabra, TV3, Vattenfall and Longo Vital among them.
Euro RSCG was strong on the creative discipline and delivered thorough work in classic media: ads, billboards, outdoor. But as the market moved, both clients and partners increasingly asked for digital formats and more flexible, technology-driven solutions.
The leap was bigger than it sounded. An ad is finished when it goes to print; a website has only just begun. It has to work in browsers that read the same code differently, it has to be fixed and extended after launch, and it reports numbers back on whether it actually works – numbers a billboard campaign was never measured on. With nobody in-house to translate between the creative brief and what could realistically be built, the digital parts of the work went to competitors, even when Euro RSCG had won the rest.
I had already been helping the agency with smaller digital jobs on an ongoing basis. But as the need grew and the work became both more frequent and more complex, I saw a clear opening to strengthen my own pipeline and position. So I left my shared office and took a desk of my own as an in-house freelancer at Euro RSCG. It put me next to both the creatives and the account managers, which meant getting into the work while it could still be shaped – rather than being handed a finished idea that then had to be forced into a technical reality.
My tasks
I was the agency’s digital voice – outwards towards the clients, and inwards whenever a creative brief needed a verdict on whether it could actually be built. The day-to-day production was online adaptations of what the agency already made: flash banners, online magazines in Flash, eCards and HTML mails. The agency’s own website sat with me as well.
Jabra
GN/Jabra was the client I spent the most time on. I built a standalone iPhone site – this predates responsive design, so the mobile version was a separate codebase with its own content.
Then came SoundLab and ComputeSpectrum, two interactive tools built in Flash. A headset sells on sound, but sound is hard to sell in print, and a specification in hertz means nothing to the person about to buy. The tools let the user hear the difference and see it as a curve at the same time – the product’s quality demonstrated rather than described.
On top of that came HTML mails and banner series in several language versions. I collected the recurring elements into a reusable toolbox with an accompanying design manual, keeping the visual language consistent across markets and cutting production time.
Gallery
