FOCUS (Families OverComing Under Stress) provides a training program designed to help military families learn practical skills to meet the challenges of deployment as well as create a happier, healthier family life. The Groop is translating this program into an interactive, online experience through FOCUS world. Parents, spouses and children will be able to explore tools, play games and learn from exercises designed by The Groop. The Groop has also recently launched their HQ website, where military families can discover the offerings of this amazing program.

Visit Focusproject.org

This is an amazing video. Must watch.

From Fury.com

If you are an integrated media producer at an ad agency or a marketing executive at a fortune 500 brand then you have already dealt with creating an online video campaign. And whether your goals where to build brand awareness, drive online sales, capture emails or simply to educate your customers the sheer number of options, collaborators and budget constrains likely made the experience challenging.

In our experience the most common challenges are:

1. Figuring out what to do and how to get consensus amongst your many stakeholders

2. Maintaining expectations during the production of your campaign

3. Follow-up after the launching your campaign

We have talked to integrated media producers, marketing executives and countless others and determined that there is no clear agreement on what makes a good online video campaign. The one thing that remains constant is that with the increased complexity and quantity of moving parts you have to take a more strategic approach to solving these three challenges. In our experience we have found that the same tools developed to create successful user experiences for websites apply to creating video. With that in mind we have created 6 rules that you can apply to your online video campaign website.

Here are the six rules:

Rule #1. Have a shared language:

Have everyone agree on who your viewsers are and what is important to them. It allows the teams to ask the question “does this idea or solution work for our viewser”.

We helped Savings.com rally around their viewsers’ needs and created a common language from which to frame our conversation. This can sometimes be dismissed as “fluff” but if used correctly can be an effective way to communicate and produce better results.

Rule # 2. Have clear measurable goals:

Create simple measurable goals. For example: To increase return visitors by 10% in one month.
Instead of having your team focused on a set number of features, “shots” or functions have them ask “what will it take to meet our goal?”

In The Groop school of thought we use the Agile concept of the “Global Business Objective” as one of our tools to help keep the team focused on “the prize” not fighting over some of the minutia.

Rule # 3. Create approach consensus:

Working to define your goals together allows for both creative and technology partners to feel part of the process. The traditional hand-down from strategy or planning to creative to technology simply does not work.

Our experience has been that consensus is best reached when all of the parties involved participate in
the process of defining the goals and the viewsers for the campaign.

Rule # 4. Have flexible execution:

As with most websites it is better to release less features that are awesome versus more features that are mediocre. Quality of experience trumps quantity of options. More importantly even if you plan well things will change and you will have to be comfortable with cutting features to meet your deadlines and budget caps.

We use a project approach that resembles film and animation methods used today by companies such as PIXAR and Dreamworks. Shorter cycles with more with frequent adjustments towards a shared goal.

Rule # 5. Measure often but plan it well:

Measuring often is much easier than knowing what to do with the data. For optimal data analysis make sure that you plan your tests, and conduct A/B or multivariate testing. That is what makes online video campaigns so awesome. It’s like TV but you can fine tune even after “airing” the campaign.

Google Analytics, Omniture, Webtrends and others provide you with the tools and metrics that you need but only if you use them with A. a cleal goal and B. Well planned analysis will you get optimal results.

Rule # 6. Plan to Adjust:

Launching is only half the battle, the real work begins in the small adjustments that you will continue to make on an ongoing basis. Always plan for several releases in the life cycle of an online video campaign. It’s ok if you don’t get it exactly right the first time, you can adjust it.

To the left is the first design of a Savings.com coupon page. To the right you can see the evolution of the design based on the results of multiple rounds of testing.

We would love to hear what you think. What are your experiences? Leave us your comments below.

José Caballer
Chief Visionary, The Groop

For more information about The Groop’s online video capabilities please email us at video@thegroop.net

You can also call us at 213.613.0066

Last nights AIGA event was awesome. Tomato was awesome.
If you missed Michael Horsham, Dylan Kendle, and John Warwicker below are the pictures.
This is just one small example of the Awesomeness that an AIGA membership brings you.

If you are a designer and you are bummed that you missed it. Make sure that you don’t miss the next one.
Become a member and they will hook you up. I just renewed my “lapsed” membership. I was able to do the $79 a quarter version to save on the cashola – as you know times are rough…

Click Here to Become a Member

iPhone Video QA with New Groop Chief Catalyst, CEO from Jose Caballer on Vimeo.

Transcript:

I am Seth Epstein, the Chief Catalyst and CEO of The Groop.

What attracted me to merge Broadtent into The Groop is the fact that The Groop is in a leadership position. It is one of the top interactive, digital agencies in Los Angeles, and it does unbelievable work, has an incredible track record and is a great strategy firm, a great design firm and great at execution.

I think it is important to shoot this interview on a iphone instead of our $10,000 camera sitting over there is because it really represents the future in that content will be created. In the short time that I have already been here, in about a month and a half, we have already tackled a project that is cross plat-formed, kind of a new form of advertising on the web using video so it was an exciting project that we did for Rite Aid with Adperk and it really represents the future of how the web, advertising and television are colliding.

When we merged the companies people would say well what does The Groop do and who are the clients, and basically our clients are Ad Agencies, Television Networks, Fortune 500 companies all the way down to startups who want to grow their business on the web– so everything from platform, all the way to content and really that’s what we do.

Posting by Bruce Nussbaum that talks about Venture Capital Design and how designers are funding new ventures either on their own or with partners.

Read Entire Post

The new downloadable Groopies are up! Check out our Groopie page where you can download various Groopies such as Dorky Groopie, Catalyst Groopie, and Wrangler Groopie. Great for your desk, computer monitor or dash board.

Click the link below, and follow the instructions to build your very own Groopie!

Visit Our Groopie Page

To make sure you get to The Groop bash here is a Google map with parking locations highlighted.

401 S. Main St.
Los Angeles, CA 90013

Click Here to Get Directions

View Larger Map

The “Lawn Chair Panel” will feature:

Benjamin Bratton
Professor of Media Studies at UC San Diego

Todd Mendeloff
VP of Digital Media Marketing and Distribution Walt Disney Studios

Jonathan Lambert
CEO of Workhabit

David Brody
Managing Partner at North Venture Partners and former VP of Marketing for Virgin Music

Panel outline:
Our Topic will be Advertising in the Digital Landscape:
What role does creativity play in the digital landscape?

We will try to answer the following questions:

1. Who drives? The strategist or the creative? Could they be one in the same? How do they collaborate?

2. What is the role of the Digital Agency vs. Traditional Agency. (i.e. The Groop vs. Young & Rubicam) in the current landscape? In the future?

3. How do we as a community (Advertising, Creative, Technology, Business) better listen, communicate, collaborate and learn from each other?

4. How do we make technology more beautiful? More human? How do we bring art to it?

“Our goal is to bring together our friends in advertising, interactive, and broadcast to celebrate the future. It’s easy to get caught up in the economy and the uncertainty of our industries, but the reality is that we are just at the beginning of a very exciting time. So let’s party!”

Seth Epstein, Chief Catalyst

See for yourself in this “stroll through Groop history”.