“I love your videos” said a client recently, delivered with a slightly wry Glaswegian lilt. Was she being genuine or just taking the piss? A low-level paranoia has typified mine and Mark’s feelings about the monthly ‘2-minute to camera’ videos that we put out each month as part of Third Thursday.

This week saw the public lambasting of SapientNitro’s own take on just how cool it was to work there, with their “Idea Engineers” video. It lasted a short time on Facebook before the piss-taking became too much and they pulled it down. Publicis’ “I’ve got a feeling”, PHD’s “We are the future” and Agency.com’s “Going to work for Subway” have all come in for a similar amount of ridicule over the years, so there is always that fear that we could be next. 

As you would expect from a busy agency, as the third week of the month approaches there is a bit of a last minute scramble to get articles written, a video recorded and an email produced. Sometimes Third Thursday has even become Third Friday.

The videos themselves are hastily planned, normally along the lines of ‘can we mention x yet?’ – ‘great, you say that bit then’. We don’t rehearse and we rarely start again if one of us messes up: resulting in an output that makes us wonder whether we just end up making idiots of ourselves.

Which all begs the question: is it worth it? 

We thought we would practice what we preach and measure what it costs and whether it can be justified by ROI, and whether there are other intangible benefits to committing to a monthly newsletter. 

So, what does it actually cost us each month to make? Well here is a rough attempt.

We write, normally, four articles: two serious-ish opinion-piece ones, one comedy one and one educational one. All but the ‘grind my gears’ ones take a few hours research, probably another hour to write and they all need to be proof-read by someone else and images found to go along with them. I’d say about 12 hours in writing time. Taking a point somewhere between raw costs of hiring and housing people and opportunity costs (the money we could have made had we been charging people out to clients rather than doing stuff for free), I’d estimate somewhere in the region of £800 to write the newsletter.

The video takes a few minutes to record, but about an hour to encode and edit. The design is probably another couple of hours. Building the email, testing it, messing about with various elements and then broadcasting is another 2-3 hours.

So all in all, we’re probably talking about somewhere in the region of £1,200 per newsletter. And we’ve been doing the full-on video-enriched Third Thursday thing since May 2010. So this month is number 19. Which makes it just slightly shy of £23,000 we’ve invested so far.

The newsletter goes out to just under 1,000 people each month, and we have an average open rate of approx 20%.  So, about 3,800 ‘views’ of our newsletter email, plus the people who actually read the blog posts – about 6,000 (assuming most of them are newsletter recipients too).  

So, all in all it costs us about £4 each time someone reads anything to do with Third Thursday. Would we be better off just buying everyone a sandwich?

ROI measurements
Ultimately, the ROI has to be financial. Unless it’s a vanity thing, at some point it has to deliver value. However, how this is measured isn’t always as immediately straightforward. Here are some of things we consider:

New work
Do we send out a newsletter and then see a load of orders the following week? No (is the simple answer).

But we do definitely win work off the back of Third Thursday, but bear in mind that most of the recipients are existing or former clients. If nothing else, it acts as a prompt to remind people we are here. They may have called us anyway, it’s hard to say, but often it acts as a catalyst.

Punching above our weight?
We’ve always loved the idea of out-teaching our competition. We know we have sector experts here because we only hire people who are passionate about the medium. And we know that bigger agencies are often forced to hire job-a-day software developers who just don’t care. So why not share the love? We actively encourage everyone in the agency to write. We think that their wisdom is of interest to our clients and ultimately shows us being thought-leaders (for want of a less hackneyed phrase).

New ideas
Much of what we talk about involves emerging technologies or practices. We think, if nothing else, we can give our clients a competitive advantage by keeping them abreast of what they need to know. And, hey, if they pick up the phone and ask us if we can help them, too, then that’s all the better.

Our company
We tend to be a bit too fluid to have anything that resembles a mission statement (not that anyone reads them seriously anyway), so writing about what we think seems to be a better way of reflecting who we are. It’s kind of low-key PR.

Personality
We all know people buy people. One value we’ve always espoused is honesty and transparency. It might put a few people off: but that’s a good thing. We only want to hire people who want to share those values and we only want to work with clients who do, too. So, in some ways, we get what we ask for by talking about it.

Hymn sheet harmonisation
Because it’s such a shared, collegiate kind of thing – and because we know we have to do it every month, it means that it’s not left to one person to think about. We don’t have a marketing department responsible for broadcasting the company line on “social media” or “Google” that everyone within the company promptly ignores. It genuinely means that we all have more of a stake in thinking about what we think about things.

Word of mouth
We’ve definitely seen our referrals increase over the last year or so, and many people when they write to us make reference to one or two of the pieces they’ve read on our blog. If we didn’t have this self-imposed monthly deadline, we’d certainly write less and there would be less for prospective clients to base an opinion on.

How was  it for you?
The consensus internally is Third Thursday is worth it. It can always be improved and should always be evolving. But we’ve found a voice that suits us and we think that it can only be a good thing.

It's the Third Thursday of the month. 3-2-1 go!

We are looking for a new developer. Click here to find out more.

Other links referenced...

• Learn Thai iPhone and Android App. "Head and shoulders above the competition..."
• The Tepilo Nokia App launches
• Introducing our new Creative Lead Bjorn Jansen
• We got jobs for Developers and Project Managers

We are ecstatically pleased to be able to announce that we will be developing the lead sales and marketing tool for the restaurant and bar at the top of the world famous 30 St Mary Axe building AKA The Gherkin!

We haven't exactly set an easy stall out for ourselves with our design solution as we intend to develop a truly immersive web experience that will simply rock your world! More details in due course...

Obviously this has required many codegent team trips to the top of the tower, usually around lunch time or at the end of the day... drink o'clock. Long may our on-site "Recces" continue and our client's fantastic hospitality last :)

Watch this space people!

We're pleased to have won some work with the V&A. More details to come, but we're going to be using some funky technology to provide an interactive feature that we haven't seen anyone else do yet. Exciting stuff!

Watch this space....

Fair's fair

Observation/Rant .... but we try very hard to have integrity. If we are wrong, we will admit it and do our best to make it right. If we say we're going to do something, we'll do it.

In our line of work we have to do a lot of speculative work, proposal writing and pitching to give people a feel for just how great we are. This is a considerable cost to any agency and it's something we expect to have to do. In fact, if the truth be known, we love it - it gives us a chance to talk to an audience about ourselves for an hour or two.

But, and here's the rant, the least we expect is some sort of feedback on the rare occasion where we've not been successful. It doesn't have to take a lot of time to put together, but acknowledges the time and effort that has gone into it and allows us to make improvements to the way we present ourselves.

If we had asked a company to spend several hours putting together a proposal for us and had to say thanks but not this time, we would expect to have to tell them why. We'd feel really really bad if we didn't even do that.

Codegent is to design and build the digital elements of Youth Music’s ‘Passport to Music’ initiative. Youth Music has developed its Passport to Music as a major new pledge to the government backed Music Manifesto – a campaign for improvement in music education. Research has shown that children often give up learning instruments when they move from primary to secondary school. ‘Passport to Music’ has been designed to encourage the continuity of children’s learning by giving them a digital record of their learning and allowing them to interact with their peers and mentors.

The new site will feature a video diary using the latest Red5 technology that means children can film themselves using just a webcam that will encode straight to flash. Teachers can review students’ diary entries and comment by leaving their own video entry.

David Hart, Director of Codegent said:
“It was great to be chosen by Youth Music for this very exciting project. We have plans for a lot of clever functionality that will address the problems faced by music educators when their students move from primary to secondary school.”

Trish Thomas, Executive Office at Youth Music added:
“We chose Codegent because of the innovative technical solution they offered and their genuine enthusiasm in responding to the brief. We look forward to a successful relationship with Codegent.”

Youth Music is a UK-wide charity set up in 1999 to provide high quality and diverse music-making opportunities for 0-18 year olds. It targets young people living in areas of social and economic need who might otherwise lack opportunity and predominantly supports activities which are held outside school hours.

Youth Music receives £10m a year National Lottery funding through Arts Council England. It has also levered in more than £13.7m in partnership funding from other sources.

Oooooo its enough to make your eyes water!

Well that is what we are hoping to find out! Codegent have launched a site for Premier Foods to relaunch the Pickled Vegetables range. A UK tour of supermarkets and city centres is currently underway challenging people to try one of the products from the new range and then recording their reactions.

The footage is played live through a plasma screen in the store, and then uploaded to the website a day later.

In addition users can upload or MMS their own pictures to the site to win a prize. Visitors to the site can vote on which of the submitted pictures has the 'Branston Factor'.

The campaign was developed by Sales Promotion agency The Big Kick. The UK tour is being managed by Live Marketing agency Sense and the website streaming is provided by Groovy Gecko.

Branston Factor »

Ooooh exciting new project

We can't say who, but we won a new project last night that we're really excited about. Once contracts have been sorted I'm sure we can press release it. But it's a sweet, sweet win on so many levels.

Firstly, it's in a really interesting market for us, one that we're really passionate about. The guys we'll be working with are great - and its nice to feel that the effort ahead of us will be adding to people's lives. Also it's a great project for Red5 - we are going to be able to show some really great applications of the technology.

(also, the competition was pretty stiff - we know two of the agencies we were up against very well)

So, watch this space.

All aboard!

David takes to the high seas today for the Marketing Forum on the Oriana. A gruelling session of back-to-back meetings followed by further schmoozing in the Crow's Nest bar.

Stuck on a luxury criuser for three days with nothing to do but eat, drink and make friends? It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it.

Nice new win for Codegent

We've just found out that we've won a competitive pitch with the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists (at least we will have done once all the contracts have been signed). We're really happy to have won this for a number of reasons:

• The project is in the area of recruitment where we have loads of experience
• The project itself will be a really interesting one - although we can't really say much more about it yet.
• We were approached to submit a proposal by CSP (always nice when someone has heard of you).
• We reckon the opposition were as keen as we were to win it ;-)

Happy days...