Life After Snapchat – Live brief with R/GA (2014)

Introduction

Our final year students got to work on an exclusive brief with R/GA, the world’s most awards winning digital agency. R/GA are considered one of the top four digital agencies in the world according to industry newspaper Advertising Age and you might know them for the invention of ‘Nike Plus’, which is one of a number of innovative digital products and campaigns that they have created. You can imagine how excited and honoured our students were to work with their creative directors on a brief written just for Northumbria called ‘Life After Snapchat’.

The Challenge

Create an innovative smartphone-focused product and/or service for a telecommunications brand to help capture the hearts and minds of the young generation.

The Brand

XYZ is a fictitious regional youth-oriented mobile operator with 5 million active customers. It needs to reposition itself in the market with a fresh proposition that builds on and goes beyond traditional loyalty tactics (e.g. loyalty points, free movie tickets, access to events, store discounts). It needs a stronger alignment with the youth culture and a platform for a meaningful ongoing engagement with the brand.

Working with R/GA

R/GA sent two of the top creative directors, George Prest and Ilia Uvarov with their Experience Design Director Stuart Tayler from their London office to brief the students and talk about the kind of work that R/GA create. This was then followed up with regular contact through email and presentations over Skype until the students (working in pairs) had created prototypes of their final concepts 8 weeks later.

The Results

Many strong ideas were presented to R/GA, who were delighted with the final results of working with our students. Here are two concepts that were visualized using video presentations:

Reso 

‘Reso’ by Caroline Innes and Simon Walsh is an App that allows users to solve almost any difficult decision users might have to make throughout their day. ‘A problem shared is a halved’ is a saying that we have all heard and is something that Reso strives to make a reality. Regardless of any issue, users are able to share their problem – along with the deciding options instantly to their friends.

To see more work by Caroline and Simon you can visit their websites:

Simon: http://www.sdwalsh.co.uk

Caroline: http://carolineinnes.co.uk

Evolve

‘Evolve’ by Emma Nicol and Sindhur Hegde ‘Evolve’ is an app designed to encourage teenagers to be more active. After talking to the target audience they found out that young teenagers mostly used ‘gaming apps’ and rarely used Fitness apps, health and weight gain is a becoming a great concern as the increase of technology has made the average person less activate. At an age where the target audience do not go to the gym they wanted to create an app that would encourage young people to be more active.

To see more of Emma’s work visit: http://emmanicol.co.uk