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...

O2, BT, Gillette, Premier Foods, Swarovski, Illuminations, BBC, American Express, Ideal, SCONUL....

2006 has started brilliantly. We’ve produced several new sites projects for clients including BBC, Swarovski Catwalk Report, American Express and Ideal. We've also picked up some work with a number of interesting new clients. As a growing company it’s not that unusual to see our order book grow month on month, but 2006 so far has been unprecedented.

January and February saw us working on a large project for Novartis to introduce an Over-The-Counter drug. We can’t say much about it, but it will be launching in late March.

For SCONUL (the Society of College, National and University Libraries), we are building a new search engine for people researching documents across the network of libraries, called find it!.

We have also picked up some work with BT, a research portal for O2, some online advertising work for Gillette, a series of microsites for Premier Foods and an animated online training tool for PwC.

We’re also redeveloping television production company, Illuminations' main website and have just won the contract to redevelop fashion and jewellery company, Swarovski’s ‘swarovskisparkles’ site.

All this work has come from referrals – the best marketing tool of all is getting people you’ve done work for before to be so happy that they tell everyone they know.

Roll on the summer.