Kerb RSS News

MTV - Calum Best

0 Thu Aug 21 10:40:00 BST 2008

To support the MTV show, 'Calum Best - The best is yet to come', we were asked to provide a game which not only was to provide content to the MTV Calum website, but would also be used a strategic tool to direct traffic to the MTV website, from a multitude of our game seeding sites.

The premise of the TV show is for Calum is to go without any sexual contact for 49 days and 50 nights...

The game premise combines video and flash to drop you into Calum's sweaty shoes, as you try to keep your 'mind on the game' whilst an attractive young siren attemps to distract you, forcing you to lose.

If you find the going to tough, and your attention is to easily lost, you have the option of a 'cheat' mode whereby you are sent to the MTV website (thus creating click throughs and traffic) to hunt for the password, before you return to enter it into the game bypassing the interactivity...thus allowing you to sit back and watching the girl get more and more saucy in a fruitless attemp to sway you.

Story of Digital Engagement

1 Tue Jan 29 12:56:00 GMT 2008

Why is Digital Engagement more effective than traditional banner advertising? Here is a short animated story that we created for a presentation in Tokyo 2007 that explains our philosophy in one bite sized chunk.

Best Viral 2006

2 Thu Jan 11 15:55:00 GMT 2007

Our viral game for The School Food Trust was declared Best Viral of 2006 by viral marketing website "Killer Viral".

The game, which was targetted at school children, recorded a record breaking response on both Killer Viral and The Viral Chart when it went live in November - and still tops the Killer Viral weekly chart right now in February.. The Killer Viral "Best Viral of 2006" award ignored the record breaking levels of traffic and was judged by visitors to their site on the basis of quality of execution alone. This is what Killer Viral had to say:

"Kerb's brilliant homage to Sonic the Hedgehog was your favourite by a huge margin. Against seriously tough competition this food-focused game devoured the opposition by taking over half the vote. So hearty congratulations to Kerb who can now wear their crown as KillerViral's Best of 2006"

The game was tracked by KillerViral using their awesome Memecounter package and they even put out a press release which read: "On Guy Fawkes day Kerb lit the blue touch paper on viral as we know it by smashing the all time record for the fastest trafficking viral ever"

And they weren't alone - it was also tracked by Viralchart.com who can be quoted as having said "Out of over 400 campaigns - this is the fastest moving viral that we have ever tracked".

According to our stats - In the 3 months that it has been live it has been played by just under 10 million people. So far - 10 million people have interacted with a message reminding them that junk food makes you fat. Imagine what the media spend on a banner advert ignored by 10 million people might have cost...

Fatboy Slim Party NYE 2007

3 Fri Dec 01 11:43:00 GMT 2006

Mr Cook is no stranger to the studios that house the Kerb HQ. Being that he is the closest thing Brighton has to royalty we were more than happy to offer our animation skills to help decorate the big screen at the his beach party on New Years Day 2007. It was cold and rainy but yet again - Brighton beach was the scene of tens of thousands of people ignoring the risk of hypothermia and broken ankles to happily dance away the hours on pebbles.

Evans Cycles 'Pinnacle bikes'

4 Tue Nov 28 14:49:00 GMT 2006

Evans cycles have just commissioned us to create a fully e-commerce driven site for their range of top quality Pinnacle bikes. Their brand has been designed by the Evans bikes team and are exactly the same high performance bikes that the team use in competitions around the world. The web site allows users to fully customise their bikes to their own personal specifications before buying them online. The site is built using Java Server Pages and the latest CSS technologies.

Ashes game 2006

5 Mon Nov 20 12:06:00 GMT 2006

We have just put live a viral game based around the Ashes, which was commissioned by a top advertising agency. The game takes the piss out of Australian culture (cough) and bigs up our team of cricketing Legends. Now we've built the team up for a fall let's just hope our boys don't let us down under. Like a sizeable amount of our work, it was outsourced to us by a full service agency so we'd rather be discreet and not say which one of the many Ashes games it is. But if you want to try and guess, the fact it looks good and is playable should help you narrow down the options considerably.

Adplayin' partnership

6 Fri Nov 17 07:11:00 GMT 2006

Kerb Japan have announced a partnership with Adplayin' - a company owned by internet advertising specialists CyberAgent. The company’s have agreed to work together in order to offer a new range of interactive advertising opportunities to Japanese brands. In a departure from traditional interruption advertising methods, Kerb and Adplayin’ have a similar philosophy towards online advertising which centres around creating a positive brand experience by allowing users to interact with the brand via sophisticated web games.

Kerb, whose viral game for the Schools Foods Council last week broke records as the fast growing viral ever seen on both “Viralchart.com” and “Killerviral.com”, opened their Japan office last month with a view to emulating their UK success with branded game content. The deal with Adplayin’ positions Kerb as the core supplier of viral games to the large roster of clients serviced by Japanese media buying giants CyberAgent whose billings for the last financial year stand at $227m.

Brighton Web Awards - Best Flash Site

7 Thu Nov 09 10:14:00 GMT 2006

We were honored to be both nominated and then voted winners by the people of Brighton and Hove. Our own Orange site must have stuck out from the crowd enough to ensure that we walked away with a Hard Drive shaped award. Whilst the main framework of the site is in fact HTML (for SEO purposes) however this doesn't hold us back from populating it with some of the best flash games and animation available on the web.

Being respected by our neighbours gives us a warm feeling iike no other. Brighton is bursting at the seams with quality interactive designers and so winning this award is no mean feat. A big thanks goes out to all the people who voted for us.

IMAA Runner up - Bets use of Viral

8 Wed Nov 08 10:18:00 GMT 2006

Oh well. We guess that getting shortlisted for the prestigious IMA awards two years running is pretty good going - hopefully next year it will be 3rd time lucky and we'll actually win the bugger!

We were gutted to have not won outright - but when you are talking cutting edge interactive viral, a piece of video seen by 350,000 people was always going to be a hard one to beat... Our consolation is that the client is happy with the modest 2.4 million unique visitors that played their game, the half a million of them that clicked through to their website and the subsequent 127% increase in monthly aquisitions that we acheived for them for £25k.

Multiplayer Aladdin game for Japan

9 Fri Sep 15 13:08:00 BST 2006

We're very excited to be asked to make a game for Disney Japan, not just for one player, but to be multiplayer when their multiplayer site launches. The game is a fun card style game the will be complimented with out awesome animations and action script trickery.

3 games for Disney Down Under

10 Mon Sep 11 12:39:00 BST 2006

When it rains it pours, in England that is, which is where have just produced a tasty selection of games for Disney Australia. Commissioned from the other side of the world due to our reputation as Flash game specialists we have just completed 3 games for the likes for Lilo and Stitch, Kim Possible, and Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.

Healthy eating viral game for kids

11 Mon Aug 21 13:17:00 BST 2006

It looks like we've turned what seemed to be a tough brief, into something that is already looking like an awesome viral. This job for the Schools Food Trust needed no acquisitions or financial ROI. It simply needed to be played my millions of kids and explain to them, in simple terms, the benefits of eating healthily.

The game is centred around a character who has to tear around collecting healthy food items to protect him from collisions with a variety of evil characters. But that's not all - the user needs to differentiate, at speed, between healthy foods and the junk food. Junk food will have the users character bloating out like a beached whale and running about as fast. The only way to work this off is some good old fashioned exercise in the form of press-ups - but this inconvenience will slow down his overall time...

We were responsible for seeding the game as well as concept and build. As well as our usual inhouse tracking system it is also being tracked by Killer Viral and Viral Chart who are already reporting record breaking levels of traffic.

Kerb Qee

12 Tue Jun 27 08:46:00 BST 2006

We've got bigger toys vinyl toys coming but - in the meantime here's a Kerb flavour Qee for your delectation. Miss Moto Qee based offspring of Ms Minimoto (from our Piston Junkies animation which can be viewed in the animation section). Available from all good specialist toy stores or on ebay if you live in the sticks.

Independence is ours

13 Wed Jun 07 12:16:00 BST 2006

Kerb is now 100% independent having bought back the 25% share in the company held by technology incubator Brainspark. Things have changed immeasurably in the Internet industry since they made their investment 4 years ago and a mutually beneficial agreement has been reached with the new Brainspark management. Everyones a winner ;)

E-learning on Energy or all Key stages

14 Wed May 24 13:56:00 BST 2006

We've done plenty of e-learning stuff for some big names including the BBC. It was still, however, a joy to be chosen as the interactive production company to work alongside a team of UK e-learning specialists on a mammoth job for a big European energy company.

As is the case in with all our jobs, time is limited and expected quality is of a high standard, so we had to step it up a gear over the summer. It has all been for a good cause though, as the material we're producing will teach children all about energy, where it is derived from and most importantly how to save it. It also contains reams of interesting interactive info on renewable energy.

There are multiple learning modules that will ultimately be produced for all 4 key stages, which we'll be adding our own unique brand of animation and intuitive learning exercises.. It's a satisfying feeing to be involved in making the world a better place, but it comes at a price - namely hard work and long hours.

E-learning for BBC Wales

15 Thu May 04 14:44:00 BST 2006

Following the success of the "Story Engine" that we created for the BBC Digital Curriculum, the Welsh division caught wind of our work. They commissioned us to not only to re-create the story engine in a new environment but to create 3 new stories. Our team of inhouse animators launched themselves into a veritable animation frenzy, as our programmers came to terms with developing yet another e-learning application for the Digital Curriculum using their SCORM environment...

World Cup Illustrations

16 Fri Mar 03 15:12:00 GMT 2006

We've been commissioned to create the Illustration and animation for the Mars Bar on-line campaign being put together by a large London based agency. The on-line campaign is part of a larger off-line campaign aimed at involving users that believe England will win the world cup and getting them to prove it by eating more of their chocolate products. Hopefully it will be the sweet taste of victory for our boys this year then!

DesignUK Seminar Tokyo

17 Mon Dec 19 16:28:00 GMT 2005

DesignUK Seminar was put together by the wonderful Trade Partners, the British Embassy and a very nice fellah who ran the location. Kerb's talk followed local ex-pat's Mark Dytham and Steve Lidbury. Anyone whose been to Tokyo will have seen Mark's architecture and, in fact, two of the advertising agencies we visited had offices designed by him. Steve is very prolific and it would be quicker to list what he doesn't do. Our talk centred around branded viral game design and seemed to go down well - although to be fair the Japanese audience aren't reknowned as a hostile crowd.

A big thanks to Youki, our man in Japan, for stepping in again as translator (and helping Jim out of the usual scrapes).

Pecha Kucha Tokyo

18 Mon Dec 12 12:59:00 GMT 2005

Anyone that knows our MD will know that he's the kind of guy that will never use ten words if he can use a hundred. Which makes talking at Pecha Kucha an interesting choice. Pecha Kuchu is a night, held at Mark Dytham's Superdeluxe club, where people in the design industry have to talk about 20 subjects - be it pieces of work or even favourite foods. The catch is that each presenter only gets 20 seconds to talk about each subject. This ensures that no one (not even Jim) can ramble on too long.

Jim plumped for showing off 20 pieces of Kerb's work which ensured that the crowd, who had been getting stuck into the free whisky, had the chance to enjoy some of our more insane pieces. It was probably a contrast compared to the talks by more traditional designers such as Sebastian Conran and Thomas Heatherwick.

Thanks to Uleshka for supplying the images. You can read Ping Magazines account of the evening by clciking the following link.

Gift-o-matic

19 Wed Nov 23 14:39:00 GMT 2005

The Gift-O-Matic website was commissioned by the folk at EMI to present users with direct links to purchasing their own merchandise, and that of other labels. It was done through a website that asked the users to complete a number of questions about their personality and musical tastes.

Through some PHP scripting and nifty image manipulation, they were given a number of products that would suit their tastes and were given a character that was built dependant upon their answers. They could then send this profile to their friends or add it to their blogs, or download the character to their mobile phones free of charge and automatically resized to their handset resolution.