Recently, Casper Hübertz and I were interviewed for Agency Future.
The project was born when Aaron Bateman – English-born copywriter living and working in Copenhagen – won a travel grant to document emerging business ideas and models in the global advertising industry.
We were asked to tell the story about Spoiled Milk, what agency we wanted to create, how we work differently from other agencies – and how we see ourselves evolving.
Have a read here.
With a master in geography and glaciology, our new Strategic Intern has highly interesting skills in analysing, managing and presenting data linked to locations. Previously, Attila Frey worked in various companies during semester breaks – primarily in the project management field.
Being one out of six siblings, Attila learned values such as respect, sharing and reliance early on. Further, he grew up with two cultures – Hungarian and Swiss – which lead him to be more open-minded, curious, understanding and also made him a more patient person. Patient in the sense that he accepts how everything doesn’t work similarly everywhere. Attila seeks his balance in hiking, travelling, cycling, snowboarding, etc. In short, a friend of the nature.
His motivation for working in the Spoiled Milk team for the rest of the year is his enthusiasm for the new ways of communicating and interacting offered online. Besides, Attila wants to learn to work with the new generation of project management tools, which have become an integrated part of Spoiled Milk’s internal as well as external communication.
During his internship, Attila hopes he will be able to build a website that allows small and medium-sized enterprises to effectively manage their energy consumption and thereby become “greener”, i.e. offsetting CO2 or getting a label for exemplary energy management.
Attila’s dreams for the future? To find a very simple and effective way to make people care more about the environment. And he adds: “Well, and maybe win the lottery!”
This week, our new Creative Intern, Nicklas Hemmingsen, kicked off his two-months stay in the Copenhagen office.
Like our previous intern here, Nicklas is attending the design school KEA (Copenhagen School of Design & Technology) – aiming to become a rounded master of digital aesthetics. His desired platforms fit well with our services: web campaigns, interface design, iPhone/iPad applications, etc.
With a background as a semi-pro badminton player during high-scool, Nicklas knows all about balance, accuracy and speed. All traits that are likely to come in handy as a designer in this business.
We’re thrilled to have him with us and look forward to sharing bits of his work right here on the blog.
Le Cool sends out hundreds of thousands of e-mails. Weekly. No wonder we were thrilled when they asked us to modernise their entire web application in order to accomodate their growing popularity.
CHALLENGE
Le Cool is a weekly magazine featuring a selection of cultural events and leisure activities for the following cities: Barcelona, Budapest, Dublin, Istanbul, Lisboa, London, Madrid and Moscow.
Their ambition is to filter out the best exhibitions, movies, concerts & DJs plus a sought selection of extraordinary bars and restaurants. The magazine is distributed every Thursday around noon via e-mail.
When Spoiled Milk was approached, Le Cool already had an existing functioning application serving hundreds of thousands of users weekly.
The request was to replace this system with a more efficient version scoring high on user friendliness. More specifically, the frontend of the application should be improved and the website should receive a new interactive interface.
SOLUTION
The new underlying system is built from our in-house developed Casein CMS, which as a new feature secures that content is published and updated before a newsletter goes out.
Stability and reliability of the web application have been vastly improved and the system has become much more flexible and scalable for the future of Le Cool. Here, an important decision was to externalise the crucial and sensitive process of sending out hundreds of thousands of emails on a weekly basis to an external service.
The ability to dive into statistics about the newsletter usage has been highly improved. Similarly, the options of placing advertisement beats the previous version with the new connection to SMART AdServer, which does the job of organising, monitoring and customising advertising in the Le Cool application.
LeCool is about to roll out the new application to their different ciities, so for now you can only check out the Dublin version of Le Cool.
Both Copenhagen and Zurich are on the look-out for supertalents with an interest in digital projects, a desire to learn and an ability to get things done.
Working with our talented team in all stages of digital projects, including: Research and analysis, idea conception, general project management, communication with clients and mainly the supervision of projects in production. We will enable you to work on tasks that challenge your background and require your focused dedication.
We are interested in hearing from people with all kinds of backgrounds. However, we have a few preferences:
You will be working in either our Copenhagen or Zurich office. Our working day is flexible and we are open to either part-time or full-time internships.
Applications concerning both Copenhagen and Zurich will be read with interest.
In 2007, we were developing an in-house Ruby on Rails CMS, first named Data Carton. Casein was the codename we used for the framework built with it and since then we’ve been using this for building CMS solutions for many of our clients. It has been re-designed, reworked and undergone many iterations, but we’re now finally at the stage where we would like to share it with interested developers.
We put the codebase on GitHub a few months ago, but because of client projects and other distractions (e.g. Blueprint), we didn’t find time to announce it. So here it is in all of its glory: the Casein framework available as open-source.
Get more information and download at: www.caseincms.com
In the last couple of months, we have internally developed a simple web-based resource planning tool that enhances transparency, promotes involvement and improves team performance. This is our first announcement concerning Blueprint.
All service-oriented organisations find themselves with the question: “How do we manage our resources in an optimal way?”. This question is tightly connected to technology, although we still hear stories about resources drawn up on chalkboards.
Early on, our small team did not call for fully dedicated resource planning, as everyone knew which projects were active and what other team members were focusing on. But as we grew to two offices and a distributed project organisation, we formed a spreadsheet in Google Docs with our employees vertically and the dates horizontally. Just like so many other companies oversee their resources.
The problem about resource planning in spreadsheets is however the randomness, with which projects are named, resources are listed, dates are entered, access is granted, etc. Something as delicate as a company’s work resources has to be secure, reliable and organised.
Also, spreadsheets are just not sexy. They don’t come with extra features. They don’t allow for integrated conversation. They don’t show you only what’s relevant to you. They are difficult to share with people outside of the company core, because access is either for “view all” or “no access”.
Blueprint is built to solve our own resource planning pain – and already does.
The tool is centred around the calendar, into which you can enter bookings for certain resources on selected projects. All with an easily comprehensible user interface that separates projects into different custom colors.
Resources can also be invited to the system as users to view what they and other team members are booked on for the next weeks. Administrators of the system can choose to limit the view of a specific resource (typically external) to only “view own calendar”, if required.
As an interesting add-on, we have made it possible to synchronise directly with Basecamp (a project management system) projects and milestones. Other synchronisation options may be added later.
And that’s in short what Blueprint is about. We have a list of features to add and a list of more abstract ideas, but the prime of Blueprint will always stay to the promise of ‘Resource planning made easy’.
Today, we’re rolling out the product to a number of selected beta test companies and expect to have the full public launch ready by August 2010.
Until then, we urge you to visit blueprintlog.com and sign up for updates regarding launch. You can also follow Blueprint on Twitter.
(this job ad is also placed in our jobs section)
Develop advanced frontend Flash solutions for an international set of clients. The projects will differ from large campaigns to modules or containers intended for CMS-supported web applications. This is currently a project-based position with the possibility of full-time employment in the future.
This is initially a project-based position, so location is unimportant. However, you may choose to work on-site in either our Copenhagen or Zurich offices, if desired.
Please send your application, CV and example projects to Frederik Cordes (frederik@spoiledmilk.dk). If you have any questions about this position, then please contact Frederik on +45 29 63 99 63.
Last week, the new Creative Intern, Michael Jensen, started in Spoiled Milk’s Copenhagen office.
Michael is currently studying at KEA (Copenhagen School of Design & Technology) as a multimediadesigner (old-school term for webdesigner). He already has the mandatory Spoiled Milk beard and despite being Danish, he finds the weather especially cruel in Copenhagen this winter.
Michael will be working with us until end of April and will engage primarily in the creative side of both our external and internal work. We’re indeed looking forward to working with him for this period.
100 new Facebook fans every day. Stress is a popular Swiss rapper. Surely. But he also received premium Spoiled Milk support.
A while ago, Spoiled Milk released the Stress website (showcase) for the Swiss rapper originally named Andres Andrekson.
During the first months of the website, the general readership was low, the number of Facebook fans only grew by a small margin and stayed in the early thousands. To change the course and enhance the interaction, Spoiled Milk sat down with Stress and agreed to focus intensively on 1) Content and 2) Integration.
The first part, content, was up to Stress himself. He was going to invest himself more into the medium, open his voice more intimately to the thousands of potential fans and thereby secure their experience of authenticity.
The second part, integration, was our responsibility. We set up a Facebook module next to his blog, which pulls in his latest Facebook updates and shows an excerpt of his fans. We also enabled automatic feeds, so Stress can focus on producing content for the blog, which then automatically feeds both Facebook and Twitter. Smaller notifications can still be fed directly to the social media services.
And the result of the renewed direction? Today, Stress has more than 34,000 Facebook fans, growing by 100 new fans every day and usually overseeing 300 interactions on the page every week. The website viewings have risen considerably. The YouTube channel we set up has streamed 2,25 million views.
We’re pleased, Stress is thriving and his fans are happy.
