We are lucky to have Eamon Ryan, the Minister for Communications who has championed the roll-out of the eagerly-awaited Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) around the country. This is good news for Ireland and it’s good news for our rapidly growing digital marketing industry, says Keith Lee of Strategem.

In Tokyo, fibre to the home (FTTH) is already delivering over 1000 MegaBite/s to consumers. (ref Forfas Jan 2010). Ireland needs to blast past this now. Our future depends on it. But how fast can we tie together all the fibre assets owned by the state to link the 94 Metropolitan area networks (MANS) and let nanotechnology deliver the rest with the likes of Intune Networks?

The future model of integrated digital advertising agencies will also need to change. In house R&D into new media platforms or applications has got to be part of the new creative agency model too. As more of the value of marketing assets are residing in the digital/technology platforms then integration problems may occur with a digital out source model. Why? If a client is investing over a million in digital marketing assets then they don’t want to find out that they don’t own all the IP or are setting themselves up for integration or migration issues in the future.

If you want to work with an integrated digital creative agency that has an open transparent philosophy to its software development then give Strategem a call.

Some of our more recent digital wins are in part due to having one of the nimblest software developers/engineering team and also this philosophy.

Our Search business and online media business is also growing fast. We have 11 in our creative studio, and another 11 in planning, digital/social media, search and account handling.

World class interactive ideas based on an insight is what we do in a nutshell. We put digital at the heart of your communications strategy. It delivers the best return on your money. Some of our campaigns have had over 285% return on investment. You only measure what you value. We measure everything. Recent integrated digital wins include Cow & Gate, GSK, The Gaiety Theatre, Alpharooms.com, Ireland.com and Ballygowan.ie to name a few.

Below we discuss some of our recent campaigns.

Awards success.

Strategem’s client Cow & Gate were winners of The Best Digital and Best Integrated Campaign Awards at the An Post Direct & Digital Marketing Awards 2009 with “Ireland’s Happiest Babies”. Strategem were also finalists in three categories at the Digital Media Awards 2010 with Ireland’s Happiest Babies and The Gaiety Theatre website.

Strategem’s search for “Ireland’s Happiest Babies” adopted as best practice for integrated digital communications.

The digital interactions were so immense that Strategem made a new 30” TV Commercial with all the Happiest Irish Babies. It is on air now and reinvigorating all the brand measures. The campaign was about recruiting mums and the digital campaign metrics and returns were benchmark breaking. Again if you integrate a great idea across web, search, social media, display and relevant off-line disciplines the returns follow like night after day. We put Happiest Babies into the UK market as well. In fairness we are only as good as our clients who are exceptional.

See more at www.strategem.ie/happiestbabies

Over 10,000 become part of it with Facebook and Ballygowan Strategem recently created a new website arena to house animated, dynamic information relating to the launch of the Ballygowan Pink ‘B part of it’ campaign raising funds for the Marie Keating Foundation. Our part included an open CMS system to dynamically update campaign messaging with relative links to Facebook.

This is where users can engage and ‘B part of it’. We used a fusion of standard social networking tools and bespoke coded features here. McConnell’s expertly created the above the line campaign and WHPR brilliantly managed the PR. On the client side Sian Price in Britvic played a huge role - it was a big team effort that Strategem were happy to be part of. Initial reporting against the campaign indicates benchmark usage figures coupled with more than 10,000 Fan Page members within the first few weeks of launch. The activity was heavily supported in traditional media channels.

See more at www.strategem.ie/ballygowanpink

‘The Apprentice or Master Challenge’ campaign has best in class results.

Appleby, Ireland’s preeminent jewellers, once again took part in TV3’s ‘The Apprentice’. Harnessing the success of the programme, Strategem created an integrated interactive campaign to drive traffic to the Appleby website. We had a publisher first here with a full animated takeover of the TV3.ie home page. We then recruited with datacapture via this ‘The Apprentice or Master Challenge’ competition.

We followed up with an eDM (eMail) conversion campaign successfully driving traffic instore to purchase. With campaign site traffic of circa 30,000 and eDM click through rates 285% above industry standard this work proved to be one of the more successful integrated digital campaigns of 2009.

Ireland.com brand proposition leads the way.

Ireland.com appointed Strategem to help develop their brand creative strategy very recently. It is a great brand and web property with such potential for international scalability. The team from DigitalworX and their digital brands are really gathering momentum.

Revenue approved R&D for Innovation

Strategem iLABS is a first in Ireland when it comes to a creative agency having a software R&D department. It’s as simple as that. ilabs is not part of our everyday strategic digital planning process. At present, we are working on a select number of cutting edge partnership developments with various clients on an agency performance model.

Innovations for 2010 currently include:

• Advanced e-commerce functionalities for product/service purchasing through social networks.
• Constructive and commercial developments using latest integrated Augmented Reality technologies and capabilities.
• Social networking framework development for efficient social media campaign initiation and scaleability.
• 3D television advertising integrated with online platforms for further engagement.

We now have one of the bigger independent interactive in-house software application development teams in the integrated digital and advertising space in Ireland.

Search Strategem.ie to see our blog and some more of our work or call 01 6680755 and ask for Keith Lee or Adam Clarke. Article published in Irish Marketing Joural March 2010 and Sunday Business Post, Sunday 4th April 2010.