Emakina Blog

Very interesting post on Seth Godin’s blog who sets a distinction between two categories of workers : the workaholics and the passionates.

A workaholic lives on fear. It’s fear that drives him to show up all the time. The best defense, apparently, is a good attendance record.

A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear.

And it’s exactly what our mindset at Emakina: creating exciting jobs that keep us working much longer than the usual “from nine to five”. Just because we like what we do. Designing cool websites. Taking up technological challenges. Brainstorming on the great idea that will make our next campaign successful. Like Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) once said : “Have fun, work hard.”

A funny ad for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions that could be an Emakina ad if we could afford such a shooting budget ;-) Please post your comments directly on the (Wordpress powered) Bring The Love Back blog…

A few months ago, we participated to a study from Ernst & Young on how the rise of digital media is impacting the advertising industry in Belgium and what advertisers expect from agencies to help them find a way in this new landscape. Download the document in French or in Dutch.

Interesting quote from Bruno Gernay, associate and media leader at E & Y : “According to our study, the emergence of new media will not be followed by a similar growth of the ad budgets. The pie size will remain the same but the slicing will change.” Ready for the battle ;-) ?

We created a nice viral game to celebrate the first year of the “state of happiness” campaign by Center Parcs. Your challenge is to blow out a candle with your mouse… or with your own breath if you plug a microphone in your computer. Check out and play:

- Blaas de kaar uit
- Soufflez la bougie
- Pusten die Kerze aus

We just launched the new website of P&V. New design, new content management system (emagiC CMS.Net) and new information architecture that better highlights the services offered by this insurance company.

P&V celebrates today its 100th anniversary. To mark this milestone, we’ve imagined a top topical overlayer that ran this Wednesday on Skynet.be and MSN.be, the main portals on the Belgian market.

VW EscapeTV #6 is available now for download. On front cover: the latest Brussels Motorshow, the NFS Carbon game, street art and the making of Blood Diamond. Check out also VW Escape Race, a virtual race game using the possibilities offered by Google Maps. a virtual race game. Invite your friends by e-mail to join your team and to get fuel for 25km. Your car will ride that distance when your team mates manage to attract other people. Ready to trigger the snowball effect?

This morning, we participated to an IAB Breakfast about RSS and the possibilities this new format offers to marketeers. For this special occasion, we recorded a podcast you can listen with the player below. The speakers are (in order of vocal appearance) Laure-Emmanuelle Nonnenmacher (Proximus), ourselves, Clo Willaerts (Belgacom Skynet), Jeremy Collin (AdLink) and Hilde Boeykens (SOS Kinderdorpen). Ladies and gentlemen, here’s the very first audio podcast in IAB Belgium’s history ;-).

Download here the pdf of our presentation. We suppose the other slides from our colleagues will be available on IAB Belgium website soon.

UPDATE: Clo’s presentation is now available on Robin Wauter’s blog.

After Wrangler, Total or Jean-Paul Gaultier, we’re happy to welcome a new international client with Center Parcs. And “happy” is indeed the right keyword here to talk about this display ad campaign promoting the “first minute deals” (the earlier you book your holiday, the less you pay) in three European countries (Belgium, Holland and Germany). Check out the first IMUs below.

I’m with Josiane for one year. She’s cute, smart, fun, cultured, patient, elegant. In one word, she’s perfect. I admire her so much that I created a website fully devoted to my worship: www.ilovejosiane.be. Every day during the last 12 months, I’ve taken a picture published on my mobile blog. With all this material, I even assembled this short film - Josiane in 365 pictures, day after day, month after month, season after season.

Just tell me in the comments what you think about my new girlfriend.

Emakina wishes you all the best for 2007. May this new year bring you joy, happiness and prosperity. Looking for a funny and distinctive way of saying “happy new year”? Try our VidCards module to send a video message to your friends, relatives and colleagues.

The nice guys at Extenseo, our partner in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), have unveiled last week their deontological chart to promote best practices in SEO and fight spamdexing, i.e “illegal” techniques (irrelevant content, cloaking, link farms…) that artificially boost your ranking on Google & co. Download the chart here. Also to be read: Michael Vandenhooft’s (General Manager Extenseo) interview on DataNews.

When he’s not at the office, our web architect Laurent Goffin runs Blog-Appetit, a “gastro-aggregator” on cooking blogs. He just released a new version of his baby. The result is an amazing mix between Digg and Del.icio.us that lets you tag your favorite recipes and add them to your personal bookmarks. Check out the other new functionalities here and find your next menu among the 650 blogs and 15.000 recipes gathered.

By the way, a recent study conducted by Technorati and Edelman rated Blog-Appetit as the 22nd most influential blog in the French-speaking blogosphere. Congrats and good luck for the future, Laurent!

This Saturday, my chief-at-home granted me the permission to join an informal chat with Shel Israel (co-author of the best selling book “Naked Conversations”), VC Rick Segal (both are currently making a European tour that Shel Israel relates on his blog) and people from other Belgian interactive agencies. Very interesting talk about the communication value of blogging, Second Life, the use of blogs in large corporations… Sadly enough, I coud not stay until the end (I had already planned to attend Bénabar’s concert later on the same day) but my colleague Evert-Jan De Kort from Duval Guillaume E recorded the whole session with a camera. Let’s hope he will put this material online. Special thanks to Kris Hoet and Geert Desaeger from MSN Belgium for this invitation.

Shel Israel (left) with Geert Desaeger.

For those who followed my presentation today at TechnoFutur TIC, here are the links illustrating my minitrip to Carcassonne (and the power of user-generated content).

- The pictures on my Flickr account

- The Ryanair video on YouTube

- The bookmarks on Del.icio.us

- The house of hospitality I selected…

- …and its ranking on Google

For the VW EscapeTV case, please check out this post.

UPDATE : the slides of this presentation are now available on the TechnoFutur TIC website.

Emakina Academy 5 is open now for registration ! During this fifth session, our WebTrends experts will explain how web analytics can significantly improve your website ROI and better profile your target group. In the second part, our partner Extenseo will show the power of Search Engine Optimization and Keyword Buying to attract qualified audience through Google & friends. If you’re not interested in knowing your consumer, don’t come.

If you attended our third Emakina Academy, you know that we want to be your brand guardian in the Web 2.0 universe by disseminating its content through the multiple 2.0 stamped platforms. EscapeTV perfectly reflects the way we apply this approach to our projects. Have a look at these examples :

- The EscapeTV page on MySpace

- Show opening on YouTube and Google Video

- Video bootleg on Brice’s blog

- Pictures on Flickr

- The casting announced on Scoopeo

The word of mouth around EscapeTV also provides a good illustration of how fast the blogosphere can help promote your product or your service. Here, the buzz started with a story of Canal Z / Kanaal Z (check out the FR or NL version on YouTube) about our recent IPO. The last few seconds on EscapeTV intrigued a blogger who searched for this project on the Net and found out the EscapeTV website where, by chance, we launched the first issue only a few hours before. His post resuted in an impressive blog storm (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here…) that was a huge traffic driver for EscapeTV. Today, it’s all about viral…