Agency’s Interactive Work for The Weather Channel Recognized

Atlanta, GA (5/30/08) - The SuperGroup, a trendsetting web-communications agency, has won an impressive FOUR Communicator Awards, a highly-respected international honor in creative communications excellence. Over 9,000 entries were received from companies and agencies of all sizes, making the Communicator Awards one of the largest programs of its kind.

The SuperGroup won for its Snowjoke (www.snowjoke.com) campaign, an interactive, fun, and high-energy experience designed to promote The Weather Channel’s television programming and its vast ski resort info found on www.weather.com. Snowjoke won top honors in the following interactive categories:

• Best Website - Television
• Best Online Advertising & Marketing - Viral Marketing 
• Best Online Video - Viral
• Best Branded Content - Viral

“We wanted to design a fun, educational viral campaign with a winter theme that encouraged people to interact and better familiarize themselves with all that The Weather Channel has to offer,” explained Chris Wallace, one of The SuperGroup’s founders. “Within one month of launching Snowjoke, we had 40,000 unique views. People enjoyed creating their own online character, and visitors to Snowjoke saw that The Weather Channel was much more than a destination to review a ten-day extended forecast. Viewers were introduced to the network’s programming as well as its skiing and snowboarding information. Our client like our work as did the judges of the Communicator Awards. We’re humbled by our peers awarding The SuperGroup four separate honors for one single campaign. That shows the depth, functionality and innovation of Snowjoke.”

For the winning campaign, The SuperGroup invited people to custom create a skiing or snowboarding character and then build an online video at Snowjoke.com, which they could share with others, insert on a blog or put up on a social networking page. Photos were inserted to show a likeness of a person, and there were a slew of accessories to add to the character such as clothing, music, and skiing equipment.

The campaign was launched in December, 2007, and on top of the 40,000 unique views within the first month, 70,000 initial videos were also created. To date, over 130,000 visitors have stopped by this viral destination. The popular buzz for Snowjoke was the result of an electronic viral marketing effort.

About The SuperGroup (www.thesupergroup.com) - The SuperGroup is a web-branding experience in adventure and exploration. Founded in 2002, TSG has quickly become a recognized leader in the creative industry, and one of Atlanta’s hottest design firms. An interdisciplinary creative agency specializing in interactive new media development, graphic design, and creative consulting, the agency’s work has been seen by tens of millions of people. Clients include The Weather Channel, AOL / Time Warner, Amp Energy Drink, Krystal Hamburgers, and Johnson & Johnson.

About the Communicator Awards www.communicator-awards.com - For fourteen years, the Communicator Awards has honored the best creative work in the communications fields. The Awards are overseen and sanctioned by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from acclaimed media, communications, advertising, creative and marketing firms.

Awards Artwork - http://www.communicatorawards.com/winners/publicity_tools/

 

   

As Apple made the announcement of the iPhone SDK, I’ve been following closely what the folks over at the Surfin Safari blog have been up to.  Apple and Mozilla alike have been making great strides in pushing web standards forward in the past few years, but Apple especially, with the open source Webkit project (better known to most people as the Safari browser), have been pushing ahead by proposing new properties to the W3C for the developing CSS3 spec. Among the new proposed properties include really fun things such as drop shadows, gradients, rounded corners for borders, and even better, animation properties. What this means for developers and designers alike is that web designs can be created with a little more CSS but a lot less unnecessary  XHTML, and even fewer images. The result being a better structured web that’s both more accessible to users and search engines alike, as well as faster page loads, and less of a reliance on plugins.

If you’ve ever tried to make a footer that always hangs out at the bottom of a page, or needed to extend a page all the way to the bottom even if the content doesn’t fill up the browser window, you need to check this out.

The SuperGroup is proud to announce the launch of the newly redesigned website for Mayfield Dairy!

The real life version of this online version of Pass The Pigs is one of the greatest ways to kill a little time with a pal. SuperJames found this after I taught him to play the real game. Click Here to Play

A couple weeks ago while a few of us were in France at the Webdesign International Festival, I had the chance to see Michael Chaize of Adobe speak about their upcoming product currently code-named Thermo. While it seems to exist to primarily push the development of AIR applications, it’s definitely an exciting addition to the ever-growing toolset for developing web applications. Thermo aims to be the step in between design and development of Flex applications that will allow a designer or developer to build out the framework of a Flex application by simply importing a Photoshop or Illustrator file and clicking around instructing the software that “this is a text area”, “this is a scroll bar”, etc. The program is then smart enough to create the assets and some basic code and save it out as a Flex application ready to be hooked up and made functional. Can’t wait to see more as this develops! 

As creative professionals, we sometimes get stuck in a rut and feel like we’ve run out of good ideas. Luckily, there’s now a widget to help get those creative juices flowing from your mindgrapes. A digital version of Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies,” a new way of thinking about your creative dilemma is just a click away. Thanks Brian!

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