As part of its commitment to helping brands of all shapes and sizes understand What’s Next, global marketing and technology agency LBi (www.lbi.com) is launching Reach Out, in association with Lithium Technologies (www.lithium.com). The free half-day event aims to help UK charities understand how to best harness digital channels to drive donations.

At Reach Out, LBi, Lithium and other major players in the digital sector will help charities and not-for-profit organisations understand more about digital marketing, whilst offering practical tips and advice on how to use the latest technologies to generate income.

The event, which will take place at LBi’s Brick Lane offices (UK – London) on the afternoon of Thursday March 7th, will feature presentations from LBi and its industry partners Lithium, Google, Oracle and Facebook on topics including creativity, mobile, social business design, customer experience, PPC and analytics.

Attendees to the event will also have the opportunity to ask questions and share their digital dilemmas with the panel of experts in a dedicated Q&A Clinic. This will be followed by drinks and networking.

Speakers at the event will include:

The session will be hosted by Gareth Jones, Global Brand and Marketing Director at LBi and Tom Burrell, Global CRM Director at LBi.

Charities who are interested in attending the event should contact reachout@lbi.com.

Tom Burrell – Global CRM Director at LBi, said: “We work with major commercial brands like Virgin Atlantic Airways, Lloyds TSB and E.ON to deliver transformational digital strategies, so it’s great to share some of our expertise with charities and not-for-profit organisations. The digital space is a natural place for charities to engage with prospective donors and campaigners, and hopefully Reach Out will offer some easily-actionable, practical ways for them to generate ongoing donations from digital marketing.”

Prelini Udayan-Chiechi – Director, EMEA Marketing at Lithium Technologies, said: “Lithium’s social solutions help the world’s most iconic brands build vibrant online communities to deliver social media ROI and operational benefits. We are delighted to be partnering with LBi on Reach Out to enable charities to reap the benefits of identifying and building a passionate online community of their greatest advocates.”

New York, 28th January 2013: Global marketing and technology agency LBi has appointed Paolo Yuvienco as its Global Chief Technology Officer, with responsibility for developing and leading a unified technology strategy in key international territories.

The newly created role will see Yuvienco work alongside LBi’s global heads of Strategy, Creative, User Experience and Media to implement a group-wide strategy bringing together LBi’s creative innovation, technical expertise and IP toolset to deliver ground-breaking engagements for global clients including Cola-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and Sony Mobile.

Yuvienco joined LBi in 2004 and was appointed as Director of Technology three and a half years ago. He brings 16 years of technical implementation, architecture and strategic planning experience to the Global Chief Technology Officer role, having held senior positions at AT&T Labs, as well as being instrumental in a string of telecoms-focused start-ups.

Yuvienco will be based in LBi’s New York office and will report to Global Chief Executive Luke Taylor, who said: “We are particularly excited by the opportunity to converge bought, owned and earned media thinking and integrate creative innovation, new tools and IP into a better blended mix. I’m delighted that Paolo will be at the forefront of this evolution as we look to target more ambitious client engagements around the world.”

Paolo Yuvienco, Global Chief Technology Officer at LBi, added: “While technology has always been part of the DNA at LBi, this is the first time that it will be led from a global perspective. Being appointed Global Chief Technology Officer is fantastic opportunity for me to further develop the unique fusion of technology and creativity which differentiates LBi from its competitive set and ensures we are building business value for our clients.”

Click on the video to see all kinds of work for all kinds of clients – everything from soft drinks and smartphones to swimming and skincare.

But the most exciting thing? This is just a sample of what we get up to …

Dries Germonprez is joining LBi Belgium as Head of Technology Solutions.
Dries is an experienced senior digital project manager with previous technical experiences at Cronos, Panoptic, LBi and Unic.
We are glad to see Dries coming back to LBi where he will lead the technology team and provide management expertise to the vast team of developers and integrators.

Brieuc Barthélémy will join LBi as Associate Team Lead for our RAD team (Rapid Application Development), that focuses on .PHP, mobile, social and digital integration developments. Brieuc worked previously as Team Lead Developer of the Digital studio at Havas WW. He has acquired strong digital experience in other positions including his own start-up business and at Wanabe agency.

Benoit Gevaert and Peter Waegemans are also joining our Technology department. Benoit is a highly skilled developer with past experience at a.o. Roularta, Securex, Agency.com, VAB. Peter has previously been in charge of developing front-end solutions at VRT and Delta Lloyd, a.o.

Regrettably, Arnaud Geyskens has decided to take on a new challenge and will leave LBi after 12 years as CTO and Head of Technology.
Arnaud has been a pillar supporting LBi ‘s development as a leading digital agency since 2000. The management team truly wants to thank him for his fruitful and loyal commitment to making LBi a recognized market leader. We wish him all the best in his future career move.

Dutch
De NMBS treedt naar buiten zonder Flash en in Sitecore

French
La SNCB se dévoile sans Flash et en Sitecore

London: Global marketing and technology agency LBi has created a special unicorn-themed film to celebrate being named Agency of the Year by Marketing magazine last week.

The short film, which was directed by Ninian Doff through Pulse Films, was shot outside LBi’s Brick Lane offices. It features two urban youths discussing a new bicycle. One youth is boasting about the bike’s features, when suddenly their friend appears with an entirely different mode of transport – a unicorn. Suddenly the bike doesn’t look quite so cool.

The unicorn is symbolic of LBi’s never-ending quest for digital mastery and ability to transform businesses of all shapes and sizes. It’s not the first time the mythical creature has been spotted on Brick Lane. It also appeared in a film with LBi’s Chief Creative Officer Chris Clarke last year.

LBi fought off strong competition from other leading digital agencies, including AKQA, Jam, Glue Isobar and R/GA London, to take the coveted title of Marketing’s Digital Agency of the Year.

The agency was singled out by the judges for its focus on digital transformation and ability to push boundaries for clients, as well as its strong culture and outstanding creative work.

Simon Gill, Executive Creative Director at LBi said: “As 2012 draws to a close, it gives us great pleasure to go out with a rainbow coloured bang. We unlock the power of the unicorn to deliver the ‘real magic’ needed for successful digital transformation. So it seemed natural we gave it a starring role and a chance to extol a few of its legendary virtues, in celebrating our Digital Agency of the Year triumph.

On a personal note, I’d like to say that I’m very fortunate to work with such a bunch of talented creators and technical wizards, who collectively harness the power of the horn each and every day. Keep on dreaming.”

Since Ethan Marcotte published his book early 2011 in the “A book apart” series, many web designers and developers have been changing their mindset about “how” to design for digital interfaces.

In our daily lives we are overwhelmed with a range of devices of different sizes and, more important, screen resolutions. “The Internet” is no longer only accessible from our PC, and many changes and evolutions can still be expected.

What is Responsive web design?

Briefly explained, responsive design could be defined as:
“a technique that aims to automatically display a certain application’s interface in the best possible way, in order to give its visitors an optimal and recurring experience through different devices.”
The technique is based on some basic principles that:

The video below shows a great example of how the “experience” of a single user can be continued over different devices and within different surroundings. It also adds a new aspect to the responsive concept, which is “time”: video

Strategic approach

The explanations above imply minimal strategic insight and research is necessary to define “what” is this optimal experience and “which context” is surrounding the application’s target group.

Responsive web design is much more than some “front-end tech magic” where content blocks are moved and shuffled in order to fit into a smartphone’s screen. We regret that, still, some responsive development practices are treated in such a narrow minded way. A good practice requires a thorough content strategy which takes time, at least if you want to provide long term qualitative work towards your clients…

Responsive or device specific layouts?

Of course, not every mobile web project is suited to be developed in a responsive way and, unfortunately, there is no “single answer” to “when to apply responsive web design, and when not”.
Having a responsive layout will not simply guarantee a good mobile user experience for your website or application.

We believe responsive web design should be a standard approach for all websites where the main purpose is to consume information. Corporate websites, news websites, … should not question this technique anymore, but go for it.

However, if your website or application provides complex interactions and information structures, it is not always possible to provide these functionalities in an accessible way on mobile devices. Sometimes, they simply don’t fit into a small screen. After all, you want to make your visitors’ lives easier, and not irritate them.

Recent cases

At LBi, we are working on some challenging responsive projects, and are happy to see that other Belgian based web agencies also applying this new approach properly.

Some recent successful cases and examples:

LBi.com
Mashable.com
aneventapart.com
Rockwerchter.be

London, 11 December 2012: Global marketing and technology agency LBi was announced as Marketing magazine’s Digital Agency of the Year.

LBi fought off strong competition from other leading digital agencies, including AKQA, Jam, Glue Isobar and R/GA London, to take the coveted title.

The agency was singled out by the judges for its focus on digital transformation and ability to push boundaries for clients, as well as its strong culture and outstanding creative work.

In 2012, the agency pitched for and won a number of leading brands in a variety of vertical sectors. New clients this year included Asda, Cunard, Dyson, Honda, The Guardian, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Invesco Perpetual. These new partnerships contributed more that £7m to LBi’s growing revenue in 2012. The agency also generated over £21m in growth from existing clients including Barclays, Skype and Virgin Atlantic Airways.

Standout campaigns of 2012 include ‘The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator’ for Microsoft Internet Explorer, ‘Choose Interesting’ for Grolsch, and ‘Xperia Studio’ for Sony Xperia.

Anil Pillai, UK Chief Executive at LBi said: “What we’ve set out to do at LBi is to create a place like no other, so it’s particularly gratifying that Marketing has recognised the special culture we have. I’d like to thank all of my LBi colleagues for their contribution to this amazing accolade, and for helping to make LBi such a remarkable and unique place to work.”

In total no less than 5 new projects were launched during this very month November 2012. LBi is pursuing its ambitious path with its usual dynamism and its prominent place in our digital market and launched:

Besides the traditional elements from the web industry (implementation of a new CMS, usability, content architecture, design,…), these projects also show a global approach which LBi applies in all of its digital projects: integration with CRM and social media, a special attention given to front- and back-end elements, user training and strategic guidance to maximize conversion optimization and project follow up.

London: Global marketing and technology agency LBi has acquired Sceneric, a leading ecommerce consultancy and systems integrator.

The deal adds Sceneric’s best-in-class ecommerce platforms to LBi’s blended service offering providing clients with fully integrated digital, social and ecommerce solutions.

Based in the UK and Hong Kong, and operating globally, Sceneric specialises in implementing enterprise level, multi-channel ecommerce solutions. It provides both strategic consultancy and technical integration services including automated inventory control and fulfillment, and PCI compliant credit card integration for clients that include Legal & General, B&Q, Nisbets, Moneysupermarket, Molton Brown and Stanley Gibbons.

The acquisition provides LBi with the opportunity to cross-sell its broad range of complimentary services to the Sceneric client base, while allowing Sceneric to leverage its own growth across the LBi footprint.

Ewen Sturgeon, EMEA Chief Executive of LBi, said: “Sceneric has an unparalleled reputation for delivering best-in-class ecommerce solutions that build business value for clients. This deal significantly boosts LBi’s ecommerce credentials and strengthens our strategic service offering allowing us to better power customer journeys from acquisition through to conversion and retention.”

George Brandie, Chief Executive of Sceneric, said: “The LBi deal was a natural fit for Sceneric due to our complementary customer base and we look forward to utilising itsbest-in-class digital media services to help clients achieve leadership positions in their markets. Partnering with LBi will enable Sceneric to continue providing cutting edge consultancy and integration skills to a range of international blue chip brands while benefitting from the additional expertise available within LBi. We are excited about the opportunities ahead as we become a one stop e-commerce provider offering everything from multi-signal search to hosting and managed services.”