One of the nicest things we get to do at Matmi is work with companies we respect and admire. This one’s even better – it’s one of the UK’s top 100 best loved brands and it’s based in North West England like us.

Vimto, the original health drink, is 100 years old this year and still full of life. We’ve been appointed as their digital agency working alongside another company we respect and admire (Driven) as part of an expert virtual team working on a £5 million re-launch of the Vimto brand.

Although I say it myself, it’s gonna be awesome. The campaign is aimed at teenagers and their mums so we can go to town with the digital brief. There’ll be loads of interactive content, social networking, mobile material and the usual suspects of new design, packaging and TV advertising. There’s a huge amount of buzz around for the Vimto brand anyway – 81 posts in an hour yesterday afternoon without any prompting – which gives us a great springboard to work from. As Vimto’s digital strategists, I think our problem will be knowing where to stop rather than where to start – another really nice thing to do (and I do this for work J).

Watch this space and if you need some extra vim and vigour (like I did with 5 hours sleep and a 6am start this morning), reach for a Vimto. Seriously, that’s where the name comes from and it’s all natural ingredients. Betcha didn’t know that a minute ago J. Enjoy, Jeff.

Matmi is more sunshine than shade, but we can do dark surprisingly well.

Leave the lights on to visit this new album site for the intriguing, challenging, indefinable band Archive. Managed by ieMusic (Robbie Williams, Massive Attack), they are lauded outside the UK and occupy an unnerving space between Pink Floyd and Massive Attack.

With video by Hello Charlie, the visually challenging, brand bursting, experiential result is stunning. But don’t take our word for it; let us know what you think.

www.archiveofficial.com/matmi

Play it here:

Let’s combine the phone company, Orange, with zorbing, slaloms, snowballs and music talent tours! What’s wrong with that? It makes perfect sense to us – and the people at Orange who sponsored this year’s three-stop Caprices New Talent Tour in Switzerland as part of their X-treme music packages.

X-treme Snowball Slalom is an accessible, friendly, fun game with the same feel as the talent tour itself. It’s going to be really interesting because it targets the 2,000 people who visit the 80 band showcase on tour. It’s the smallest group of players we’ve ever been asked to reach, but small is beautiful, and small can get big. see how far you can get.

Play it here

Forget the TV adverts for another mobile phone recycling company, Envirofone is the biggest recycler of mobile phone handsets in the UK. Never mind the cash you can get for an old handset, the best thing for us is that you don’t have to add to the UK’s horrendous landfill problem or leave even more toxic battery waste lying around polluting our green and pleasant land.

In our research, we found that 75% of the UK population owns a mobile phone, but that figure shoots up to 96% in the 15-24 year old bracket. This group are the big handset swappers and its them and their parents who we’re targetting with Battlefones to raise awareness of the cash trade-in value – and the downside of sending handsets to landfill.

The game is only just out and with boxing, battling phone handsets, it can’t be anything but fun! Added to that, we’ve set each round in a typical British scene – down the pub, in an office, on a train and in the kebab shop (well, why not?!). The handsets box each other to win the round and players compete to increase the trade-in value of their battling handset to its max by customising it. Any damage inflicted by your opponent reduces your trade-in price.

The game displays the handset’s new trade-in value – getting the message across that the handset can earn cash. We like good causes and this is our second landfill beating release, so we hope Battlefones will win a few hearts and minds.

This game is geo-locked to the UK but it’s still No.1 on the MemeCounter chart and thanks to a whopping average play time of 17 minutes, we reckon it’ll deliver an extra 10 years worth of Internet broadcast time to ITV during the 10 week run of the TV show. That’s an obscene return on investment! Great example of reaching new & existing customers over the Internet.

So what’s the game all about? Instead of being a viewer of the TV show, you become a contestant on it in this immersive online game. The set, the coloured cash machines, Chris Tarrant, Millie Clode, the countdown, audience reactions and the theme tune are all in there – but most importantly, so are you!

A little technological Matmi magic means that you can upload an image or video clip of yourself into the game which appears on screen as if you were the TV show contestant. If you have a webcam, the game times it so we get a recording of your reaction when you win (or lose!) and that automatically appears in the Leaderboard (if you get a high enough score, that is!).

Although you’re playing for recognition rather than cash (sorry about that), the game runs on a weekly cycle like the TV show. While the show’s on air each Saturday, the Leaderboard locks down to select the highest scoring player to enter the Hall of Fame, so online players get to know their winners at the same time as TV viewers! In fact, it turns out that many of you are watching the show and playing the game at the same time.

Instead of the eight contestants on the TV show to date, 90,000 UK residents have been contestants in the online show. In a nutshell, that’s how online can create a much heavier impact for your business.

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