After a week of Batman-esque signals being projected onto buildings in Newcastle the mystery has finally been revealed.

No Car Superstar is a new campaign launched across Newcastle and Northumbria Universities with the aim of reducing students’ dependency on cars.

Commissioned by Northumbria Students’ Union, Leeds-based creative marketing agency Magpie worked alongside the Environmental Activities Co-ordinator to develop marketing materials for a fully integrated superhero style campaign.

Gerard Savva, Director at Magpie says “It has been so much fun to work alongside Northumbria Students’ Union developing a new approach for getting this very important message across. The web platform we provided for this project allows students to take an online challenge under their personalised superhero pseudonym. As they progress through the levels their avatar changes from an ‘Average Jo’ to a ‘No Car Superstar’.

Whether students own cars or not, they can all take part in this challenge and along the way they will absorb the health, social, financial and environmental benefits of varied travel methods. The campaign may not take students to infinity and beyond but it will certainly give them plenty of options for traveling around Newcastle without their cars.”

Students can access the online challenges at www.nocarsuperstar.co.uk

After nervously finding the offices above The Faversham pub 10 minutes late, Ged greeted me and I was introduced to the rest of the team, Becky and Alex. Straight away, offered a cup of tea. I panicked and declined, even though my mouth was as dry as Ghandi’s flip-flop and tea would have been perfect.

Whilst talking to the guys I looked around the stylish office with the slick Apple Macs and company objectives written on the wall. I knew this was a cool young, innovative team. The more I chatted about where we could take this weekly placement, I felt more comfortable and confident in myself.

Before I knew it was out the office and on my way home with some research and work to do about Magpie and how they are perceived in the public eye and on the net. I was excited to do work. Oh no, I wanted to do some work. Magpie charmed me in the space of 15 minutes. So I did what anybody doing research does. I Googled Magpie Comms.

My research consisted of new ideas on how to get the company out there in the public eye more, I came up with a few ideas such as having a constant feed of press releases and newsletter-like things sent to the contact list and clients, showing them how the team has progressed and what they are up to, all very positive of course. I thought it would be a good idea for them to promote their other successful projects such as what the flock? Which didn’t seem to get as much media attention as I thought it deserved.

After successfully winning a pitch at a client, drinks were in order after work. Drinks on a Friday night never end up being ‘drinks’. After a couple, we were all getting quite tired so we opted to head home. Alex and I spontaneously decided to go to another pub before going home. Our bromance blossomed from there and I still can’t see Alex in the same way…

Second week, after I got the times wrong again, I cracked on with some press releases. Firstly I did one for the new relationship and project built between Leeds Trinity University College and Magpie. I went on to do one for Doreen Murdin’s, ‘ The Tails of Poppy Wiggins’. A series of books about a dog who teaches kids and parents about little ‘’life lessons’’ from road safety to fostering and adoption, it’s the hard hitting truth, that kids needs to know put in an approachable and fun way.

I can’t wait to get stuck in next week and hopefully have some things to show. Until then…

Felix

Happy Movember from Magpie!

Yes, yes, we know it’s too early to start boasting about tashes. But the kind folk at Ideasbynet have sent us all these cool ‘mo’ mugs that Becky, Alex and Ged have modelled.

The youth of today seem to have everything and nothing all at once.  From technology, music and fashion they certainly seem set up in the way of material things and aesthetics. However beneath the surface they are faced with a looming rise in tuition fees, low employability, an economic crisis and an unattainable housing market – the future doesn’t look bright. So why is it we work with and love this sector so much?

When setting up Magpie, a marketing agency specialising in youth, in particular student marketing, we were faced with many questions from peers, business mentors and entrepreneurs surrounding the longevity and credibility of working within our market.

Some of these comments started to cloud our faith in our specialist area. We were unsure just how much to shout about our student offering even though this had been our background and focus for many years before setting up. We don’t only work within the education sector and have many commercial clients, would shouting about our youth marketing experience put off potential private sector clients?

On reflection, we decided to hold onto the fact that we truly believe in the value of students, what they can bring to communities, economies, health, science and the world around us.

We thrive on the design work, campaigns and innovative marketing solutions we have been able to implement within Universities. We have achieved great results and engagement from the audiences we work with. From Aberdeen to Bristol, we work up and down the country in a sector that shows passion, solidarity, potential and a sense of community.

Our mission is to become the first choice in student and youth marketing, and with that in mind we take it upon ourselves to remind those around us of the importance of students and the value they bring.

Starting locally within Leeds, a thriving student city and our main place of work. The University of Leeds and its students have a great impact on the city around them. The University is the third largest employer in Leeds, contributes around £1.23bn per year to the local economy with the student spend contributing a further £211million a year through rent and living costs. Over the years many health and science advancements have come out of the University from X ray machines, to work on cancer research. The students themselves are proactive in running social enterprises within the local community, environmental programs and arts and culture events.

However it is not just an economical impact that student communities have on our everyday lives. The students of today have the potential to be the leaders and innovators of tomorrow and to back up this statement, below are some globally recognised success stories that we have students and student communities to thank for.

Facebook

With over 600million users worldwide, Facebook was worked on and launched by Mark Zuckerberg whilst at University. There is no doubt this social networking site with a multi billion pound value, plays a huge part in most of our lives.

Whilst Zuckerberg is clearly a genius and may not have needed to be at University to develop Facebook, the success of how Facebook was launched owes a lot to student communities. Launched from one University to another, before Facebook became mainstream, its launch strategy involved spreading virally via the student market. Launching products or messages within this market is effective because of how contained the market is allowing marketing to be targeted and direct. Whilst being a community means the dissemination and placement of messages proves successful as most students within a community use the same facilities, services and locations.

Google

Sergey Brin and Larry Page both Stanford University students worked on the Stanford Digital Library project. This provided them with the inspiration and insight to start compiling research and plans that eventually resulted in a massive media conglomerate and most loved search engine known as Google.

The original site even used the URL google.stanford.edu until its Google.com URL was purchased in 1997.

Just two years after they drew up their research papers, a server they had running from a garage had indexed some 60 million web pages.

Now an internet giant, Google offers maps, design tools, email hosting and have become involved in mobile technology.

It is with thanks to a University Library project and the intelligence of two PHD students that we now have a reliable streamlined search engine that we all know and love.

FedEx

In 1965, Yale University undergraduate student Frederick W. Smith wrote a term paper on how a delivery service could take advantage of emerging technologies and the inner workings of the Federal Reserve System to ship packages overnight. This paper inspired the company and some years later in 1971 Federal Express emerged following two tours of duty in the Vietnam War.

By 1973 Federal Express boasted 14 airplanes delivering packages between 25 American cities.

Today, FedEx ships overnight packages worldwide and is considered one of the worlds 400 best companies achieving $39bn worth of sales in 2007.

It’s amazing what a University student can achieve off the back of his or her term paper.

Other successes to come from university students include Dell, Microsoft and Venus to name but a few.

To us, students’ are so much more than teenagers on the brink of adulthood and living beyond their means. They are exciting, passionate, involved members of the community and let’s not forget, the majority of them are on a journey with lessons and experiences to learn for themselves, therefore we can forgive them for wanting to have a little bit of fun along the way.

It’s been the buzz-word of the marketing world for a few years now, a bit like ‘flash-mob’ was before that. You can just imagine advertising creatives saying “yes, let’s do some crowdsourcing, that’s cool at the moment”. T-Mobile will no doubt be jumping on the bandwagon soon. But what does crowdsourcing actually mean?

“Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to an undefined large group of people.” That’s what Jeff Howe wrote in WIRED magazine in 2006 when he coined the term. He also tells us that it must involve an “open call”.

It’s not a new idea though, and there are plenty of example of crowdsourcing that we’re all familiar with. In 1857, The Oxford English Dictionary put out a call asking members of the public to help them index every word in the English language. This was perhaps one of the earliest examples.

When Wikipedia launched in 2001, the public were asked to supply the content, and now there are nearly 20 million articles in 280-odd languages.

Galaxy Zoo is an online tool that allows anyone to categorise galaxies in photographs taken by the HUBBLE  space station. This is another positive example of crowdsourcing as it allows users to feel part of a bigger picture.

Let’s take it further, could we say that on X-Factor, the judging is crowdsourced?

The creative industries also use the c-word, this often means harvesting YouTube for creative ideas. However, last year a triangular crisp manufacturer ran a competition and filled their super-bowl advertising slot with a commercial created by… you guessed it, an average Joe.

When used in interesting and innovative ways, I think crowdsourcing can be useful, engaging and empowering.

There is an element of this phenomenon that slightly worries me however. Websites such as 99designs and logo tournament ask ‘designers’ to compete against one-another in competitions set by clients. The problems I have with this practice are as follows. First of all, anyone can submit designs meaning that there is no guarantee of quality. Secondly, the outcome relies entirely on the taste of the client, who may not have the experience and insight of a professional designer. A successful design process is one in which a dialogue is created between designer and client, something that is missing from 99designs. Furthermore, because only the winner is paid, the majority of designers work for free. Overall, it doesn’t really value the service that designers provide.

The power of communities can’t be under-estimated, and the internet has made it easier than ever before to bring people together. I’m looking forward to seeing how crowdsourcing is used, in hopefully positive and fair ways, in the future.

Alex