THRiVE Live at Berczy Park

What better way to celebrate ING DIRECT’s new chequing account THRiVE than with a synchronized swimming number. But not just any swimming, fountain swimming.

Berczy Park, 12:43 : a troop of dancers clad in orange bathing suits decorated with a THRiVE arrow and Your185.ca emerged from a dark van. Music started up, the girls took their place and the dance number kicked off. It was wild. The girls danced their heart out in the park’s fountain. A mix of synchronized swimming moves paired with jazz and modern dance lured the crowd closer. Kids were clapping. People were snapping photos. I personally couldn’t help but cheer. And as if the dance number wasn’t enough, the dancers handed out baggies of money – your bank fees. A crowd favourite no doubt.

And then it was done. The music came to an end as the dancers posed on the edge of the spraying fountain. The crowd cheered and applauded, Voila, our stunt was a huge success. The perfect way to end a day packed with amazing events. Big thanks to the dancers, crew and of course, ING DIRECT.

Stay tuned for videos of the Fountain Dance.

Operation THRiVE

A mere four weeks ago Operation THRiVE was set into action. Dashboard, GWP, Maverick and Response Innovations – ING DIRECT’s four media partners broke away to make magic. Today all the hard work paid off (in more ways than one).

When ING DIRECT announced to us that they were launching THRiVE Chequing we knew it had to be BIG. This online, no-fee daily chequing account that will allow Canadians to deposit, withdraw or transfer money for free, while earning interest is ING DIRECT’s biggest announcement since they came to Canada.

To make noise and get Canadians excited we devised a national campaign that spanned all media. And it all started with $185 – the average amount Canadians pay in bank fees (or did).

The campaign kicked off weeks ago with a very obscure website – your185.ca. We wanted to demonstrate what your annual fees look like. On this site, pages filled with 185 images (cupcakes, pigeons, sparkling diamonds) cycled through. After every fifth pattern came a simple message, “August 18. Take back your 185.” Designed to create buzz and build SEO, the site got people talking and wondering out loud on Facebook and Twitter.

Which takes us to today, August 18…

The day began with radio remotes broadcasting from ING DIRECT cafés in Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal. Listeners were driven to the cafés for a chance to “Win Big on the Spot”. Participants stood on large orange circles and were randomly chosen for prizes of up to $185.

Then, using street team videos, we captured Canadians passionate reactions to the outrageous fees they pay annually. Just to stir the pot!

Meanwhile, ING DIRECT Savers received an exclusive email from Peter Aceto, ING DIRECT’s CEO. In a sneak peak video, Peter shared the exciting news with Savers first.

Also, commuters in Toronto and Montreal came head-to-head with their annual bank fees. Giant pedestrian billboards covered in loonies, toonies, quarters, nickels and dimes hid an important message. As passersby pulled off the coins, the big news was revealed, “Stop being nickel and dimed. Meet THRiVE.”

At 12:00 Peter Aceto took to the podium at the Toronto Eaton Center to make the news public.

All roads led to Your185.ca. The hub for all of the day’s activities. You can see the money wall in action and watch Peter Aceto’s press conference live. A Twitter feed pulls in all of the online chatter, while the Flickr feed streams in images from the events. And most importantly you can learn about THRiVE and register for the preview.

What a great day! A huge success for our friends at ING DIRECT. But wait, the fun’s not over…

Know Your Audience

Creating an engaging user experience isn’t about 3D flash and kinetics. Although those elements help wow your audience, they don’t really ensure any level of engagement. Take our website for example, those of you who have been following us may have seen our old website. At the time it was pretty nifty piece of flash. We wowed users with slick movements and lightning bolts, yes lightning bolts! As time passed the website just wasn’t performing the way we wanted it to. Alas the site was so 2005 and we needed to “live in the now” as our good friend Garth Algar would say.

As technologies change the all flash website still has its purpose but for us and our users it just wasn’t the case. We wanted to provide our users with quick access points to our creative portfolio and contact information. Creating great user experiences means giving the user what they want and need. Sure making things spin, pop, and fly around the screen may get us excited but is it what the audience is looking for? Users are looking for specific information and they want it fast. Mobile browsing and usage growth is testament to this. Content on demand whenever and wherever.

Today’s  users are also expecting some form of social engagement on websites. Facebook open graph, tweet meme, and social bookmarking are all norms, and almost every client wants them. The key is how you integrate them, simply adding these elements to any all content on your site isn’t the right approach. Of course Facebook would love for all of your sites content to be social elements. One may even venture to say they are on a mission to kill the website and bring everything onto Facebook.

Whatever platform or technology you employ be sure you know your audience. Build your digital property based on what your user is using and not what you think is cool. Know their platform of choice, browser usage, and connection speeds. This may mean creating multiple versions for mobile, and browser delivery but by having a handle on these key pieces of information it will help you deliver engaging content to your users on their terms.

Collaboration and Teamwork

It’s always encouraged across the various departments at Dashboard to understand each other’s skill sets and department requirements to improve our services for our clients. To this end, our team take courses together, attend lunch and learns, and sometimes just hang out at each other’s stations to absorb. The synergies created by this methodology have allowed seamless execution of projects, better insights into problem solving and a basic fundamental respect for how hard each other works.

As you can see just this morning one of our account co-ordinators sat in with the programmers to get a better understanding of some of the languages they’re currently employing on our active projects.

Err…Nevermind…they were all just playing  Starcraft again…