Boot or Bust Touch Site

The home of our Boot or Bust experience for Lenovo RapidBoot. Its vertical layout was designed for touch so that the user could go flying through the clouds with the swipe of a finger. Just like the hero in our video.  Users were driven to the site via email, banner ads (like the one below), and a vanity URL at the end of the video.

Boot or Bust Behind the Scenes

Here's the proof what we did was fer reals. This ran in cinema and online as an accompaniment to the original Boot or Bust video.

Boot or Bust

This is a video we did for Lenovo to highlight their new RapidBoot technology. What began as a web only video project for North America was quickly transformed into a campaign that spread all around the globe. And it was just awarded a bronze Effie. 

The New New McKinney.com

Over the past month, our new agency site has made some big waves. The development process not only made me rethink how to get interesting work done, but apparently, the site made others rethink the relationship between their mobile and dot-com sites.

Typically, mobile sites are watered-down versions of their dot-com brethren. I pushed my team to create one site that delivered the same experience on mobile touch devices and on computers. The key was to stay focused on the experience we wanted the user to have not the technologies we might use to create it.

We essentially designed for the human finger first and the mouse-click second.The result can be seen at www.mckinney.com.  Try it on your iPhone, Android, iPad and laptop.

So far the site has received loads of positive feedback from the design and development communities. It's also received several awards including CA Webpick of the Day, as well as, Mobile Site of the Day from FWA. It also made the FWA public shortlist. I think there are more to come for the site.

Congrats to the entire 6-person team!

Souvenirs from Advertising Week

While I didn't get to attend the ceremonies (got the nose firmly planted against the grindstone) a handful of projects I was fortunate enough to have had a hand in got some recognition this week.

We picked up two category wins at the 2010 OMMA Awards for a project we did for Qwest Communications called Protect Ur Rep. It was a campaign that focused on Xbox Live gamers. Participants could play for the right to have their Xbox Live avatars cover up our in-game ads.

We also notched a gold at the 2010 MIXX Awards for a social media campaign we did for Travelocity, and both a silver and bronze for an integrated campaign we did for Qwest Business.

The Qwest Business campaign included a LinkedIn forum, an interactive iPad ad and iPhone app all centered around a problem solving competition for IT professionals.

Congrats to all my teammates!

Roadster. Reinvented. Resurrected.

This piece has been a part of my body of work for years now and it still feels fresh. I just never had a way to showcase it very well. It's a vehicle brochure we did for the redesigned Boxster back in 2005. The amount of real estate we were allowed to dedicate to imagery was a bit of a coup considering their typical brochure at the time. These images came from a friend's site. I was the writer and ACD on it while at Carmichael Lynch. Unfortunately, these snaps just give you a flavor for the book and don't showcase my unparalleled command of the English language. I'm kidding. Okay, the writing's decent. Wish you could see it in person. It also included a CD-ROM in the back. I'll post some stuff from that as well.

Holiday Wrap Up

This past holiday season, Qwest asked us to quick come up with a little online thing they could promote in their offline catalog. And we had about 15 minutes to tell them what we would create. Without thinking we blurted out "custom gift tags". Anyone giving a gift generally likes to wrap it. And everyone hates shelling out for gift tags. I'm cheap so I usually cut a piece of scrap wrapping paper, fold it into a mini card, write the "to-from" in it and then tape it to the gift. So we thought other cheapos would appreciate being able to customize and print their own fancy schmancy gift tags for free. The application lets you choose a style, customize it with an uploaded photo, and then download a pdf of your tags set up to print on sticky labels or on plain paper. Once downloaded you can print as many as you like. The response was phenomenal. Where's the branding you ask? It was embedded in a Qwest.com page.