2011 was a huge year for Odopod. The biggest news of all was our merger with Nurun, the largest independent digital agency in the world. Together, Odopod and Nurun have an impressive combination of reach, depth, and talent that will enable us to do even more innovative work for our clients around the world. For more on the merger, read Tim Barber's article, Odopod and Nurun: Our Next Big Move.

Last year, we launched some of our most exciting work to date. Among the highlights, we redefined luxury online for IWC, establishing direct relationships with its fans. We helped EA revolutionize the way people buy, play and share games with Origin. With Tesla Motors, we created a series of interactive kiosks for their innovative new retail strategy. We also continued producing great work for Sony Electronics, Google, Plum Organics, and more.

Of course, we had some fun too. On Hack Days, we shut down our office and prototyped our own ideas. With the FWATV, we experimented with live video and Processing to give people a fun look inside our office. We shared some inside details about the culture of Odopod, we played a bit of dodgeball, and we won Advertising Age's Small Agency of the Year, West - what a year!

All in all, we couldn't be more proud of the people we've hired (and we're hiring more), the things we've done, and the projects we've launched (including the ones we can't share) during this amazing year.

Here's a round up of this year's work:

International Watch Company (IWC) :: Origin from EA :: EA.com :: Sony PIIQ
Ford Sync :: Plum Organics Quest for Yum! :: Tesla Retail Kiosks
Sony Tablet S :: Google for Veterans :: Plum Organics Contest :: Sony Personal 3D Viewer

Hack Days at Odopod is an incredible time of year. For 48 hours, we shut down the office, turn inward and focus on our own ideas. It’s a chance for us to build the kind of things that our clients don't ask for every day and just invent.

It starts off with an open call for ideas. Eight are picked and small teams are formed to produce the projects over two days. Everybody takes part - designers, developers, producers and strategists - all racing toward the same intense deadline, with a heightened sense of focus, creative energy and collaboration.

The culmination of Hack Days is a series of prototypes and proofs-of-concept.

Here are the results...

Continue Reading »

Big thanks to our friends at Adobe for calling on Tim to chat about HTML, Flash and our work at Odopod. This video was featured during Adobe MAX October 1-5, 2011. Check it out.

Ten years ago we created a new agency. The idea was pretty simple. We wanted to marry the culture and practices of Silicon Valley startups with those of creative agencies.

Our first assignments and clients were incredibly diverse — from designing software for startups to creating digital campaigns for big brands.

Back then, this made Odopod an anomaly.

It took about nine years longer than we expected but the landscape has changed around us. Now clients seek us out for our unique combination of expertise with software design and brand thinking. Increasingly, they see it as essential for everything from product innovation to marketing.

As a result, we're enjoying the best years in the company's history and producing our best work ever.

Now it's time for us to make our next big move.

For the next ten years, we want to charge ourselves with a new ambition. We want to raise the bar even higher — for the work we do and for the clients we engage.

And we're not doing it alone.

Today, we're officially announcing that Odopod is merging with Nurun, the largest independent digital agency in the world.

This merger gives us the platform we've been looking for — one that enables us to do even more innovative work and to deliver that work anywhere in the world.

Nurun's outstanding technology pedigree will help us innovate across even more platforms. Their international presence and leadership will help us expand into new markets alongside our clients.

Together, Odopod and Nurun have an impressive combination of reach, depth and talent.

We're genuinely excited about the next ten years and are looking forward to starting this new chapter with the Odopod team as well as all of our clients, partners and friends.

The Small Agency of the Year Awards was held in Denver last night to honor and celebrate the work of small and mid-sized agencies around the world. Presented by AdAge and Creativity, the annual event is designed for agencies to gather and discuss the unique challenges faced by today’s market.

Founder and Creative Director Tim Barber was present at the conference to accept the honor of Small Agency of the Year, West Region in which Odopod was co-named with Zambezi, an agency in Venice, California.

AdAge quotes, "[Odopod's] 55-person shop's clients include Sony, Electronic Arts, Tesla Motors, Google and IWC. While Odopod does traditional advertising and branding, what caught the judges' eyes were the retail experiences it created for Tesla, the Trends Dashboard and website it created for Google, and the EA Download Manager, which did for EA Sports' PC games what iTunes did for Apple."

We're extremely thrilled to be recognized for our work in both communications, UI innovation and product work. This combination allows us to step out of the box and innovate for our clients at a fundamental business level.

Odopod was also recently recognized as one of the “Top 25 West Coast Agencies to Watch” by iMedia - a group that closely monitors and recognizes the agencies that move, shape and lead digital. Odopod was named as a key agency that has advanced interactive marketing through big ideas, brilliant creative, cutting-edge technology and pursuit of excellence in the digital space.

Thank you to everyone who continues to celebrate our work. With so many big things happening here, we couldn't be more proud and thankful to be recognized for all that we're doing.

We learned a lesson pretty early on as we tried to figure out what to do with our live stream on FWATV: if you want to make something cool, give it to the nerds.

Since we've given our development team the camera and the freedom to do with it whatever they wished, we've gotten nothing but exceptionally cool experiments in live video by hooking up Processing and Kinect applications to our feed.

We've applied various "filters" that react to movement in our studio space. To name a few, we've had a filter that makes the scene look like a giant, moving painting, a filter that applies tiny bursts of pink bubbles that appear when anyone moves, and a Kinect application enabling odopodders to draw via hand tracking.

Check out the gallery of filters we've used so far and tune in each Thursday from 2-3pm PST on FWATV as we continue to experiment with live video using Processing, Kinect, and whatever else we can dream up.

We're extremely pleased to announce our ongoing digital agency of record relationship with Plum Organics, maker of delicious, premium and organic foods for babies and toddlers. Odopod has been working with Plum to design and launch a digital strategy that brings its personality to life in fresh and engaging ways to capture the hearts of the Modern Mom. With an appetite for innovation, we've been working with their team on the 2011 campaign which recently kicked off with the Babies for Yum! caption contest on Facebook.

For the contest, Odopod conceived and designed a custom application that allows participants to create, vote and share out entries to their social graph, encouraging deep engagement and viral spread. In just the first three weeks of an eight-week program, Plum has already garnered tremendous results including a huge increase in their fan base with over 37,000 fans to date.

We can't wait to see how the campaign grows as we continue to craft new initiatives through 2011. Visit Plum Organics on Facebook »

We're extremely proud to announce the launch of the newly redesigned ea.com. The new site is minimal, clean and focused, allowing EA's huge library of game content to truly shine.

Each game has a customizable and scalable page template within the unified EA platform. These templates accommodate a wide variety of content needs specific to each title, allowing game pages to feel unique to the game's core attributes. All the must know info on game titles have a home on these pages and includes as many stories, videos, pics, trailers and news items as each game has to offer.

We are thrilled to have worked with the talented people at EA on the new site and look forward to continuing our work together on all things EA.

Check it out and let us know what you think »

Last year at this time, I wrote a post entitled If you want a Job at Odopod, go to RIT.

A year later, I’m just back from my third trip to the Rochester Institute of Technology for Creativity: Careers in Motion and everything I wrote in that post still stands.

I was attending and speaking at the event. It’s a forum for students in RIT’s new media program to meet prospective employers and get feedback on their portfolios. Although it’s not billed as such, for almost everyone attending it’s a recruiting event.

The reality is that it’s a feeding frenzy.

From my perspective, it’s fascinating. Imagine a gymnasium full of representatives from the best new media companies in the world, as well as some big ad agencies and PR firms — all sitting at identical folding tables, all feverish to recruit RIT’s latest group of new media graduates. Many of these companies were making offers on the spot. Some even arrived a day early to meet with, and try to scoop the top students.

That’s because RIT is producing the best new media talent in the world.

As I described in last year’s post, the students graduate with a focus either on design or development. The program is designed to have them work both independently as well as in teams, very much as they will when they come to Odopod.

As a result, almost all the students are remarkably well rounded — many of them with abilities in both design and development. I can also tell you from past hires that the rigor and intensity of the program teaches them the value of hard work and independent initiative.

They emerge from RIT with the skills to do exceptionally well in a challenging and fast-paced company like Odopod.

My only lament is that there aren’t more of them graduating, either from RIT or other schools in the US. We need more RIT graduates and more schools producing graduates of their caliber.

Thanks to a recent AdAge survey on the origins of the more unique agency names, we're finally revealing the untold story of how we came to be called, Odopod.

"When we started Odopod we wanted to create a company with the ideas and resources to execute big and the metabolism and culture to behave small," said Founder and Creative Director Tim Barber. So when it came to naming the company we combined two pieces that got at this big/small idea.

And Pod [because] at the same time we liked that we were a compact team that grew ideas, like a pod -- the compact, protective enclosure of a seed. For the record, Steve Jobs stole our thunder a year later when the iPod launched."

So there you have it.