POWERSHiFTER is 25^th on the list. “They changed the way agencies are measured this year,” said Creative Director and founder JP Holecka. “Instead of the number of employees, they’ve measured gross billings.” POWERSHiFTER currently has just eight employees but earnings approaching seven figures. The agency expanded from five employees in 2011. “We are sustaining 50 per cent year over year growth and already on track to pass our targets this year,” said JP Holecka, who founded the agency in 2001. “We are lean and mean but we can still play with the big guys.”

Take a ride with me.

I went for a ride on one of Vancouver’s more popular commuter subway lines to test this theory for this article, and I have the following examples of the good, the bad, and the just plain ugly.

The first example is for an online learning campaign for a college in the interior of British Columbia. The campaign is for online learning, which I suspect is essential for an educational system that is not located near a major metropolitan area. They understand that their target market is professional, mobile savvy, and looking to advance their career through online learning. The posters are well placed on the trains, although a bit weak in design, and have a triple call to action (CTA) at the bottom to call, go to the web, or snap a QR code. The code itself is unobtrusive but visible and supports the other two CTAs well. When the QR code is snapped, the user is taken to a mobile optimized site designed with clear paths into areas of the site that would be of interest to the potential online student. Viewers can see  tabs entitled “About,” “Programs,” “Courses,” “Testimonials,” and—most importantly—a large button that says “Open Learning” placed an inch away from where the thumb would be on a smart phone. This is a campaign that I suspect is doing well in lead generation and mobile page views. If viewed at the beginning of a commute, then I would guess that the time on site might also be quite long. Commuters are a captive audience thirsty for something to do during the ride through town, so you should give them something good to read. They may even have time to sign up for a course or two before the end of the journey if the site is built correctly. At the very least, there will be significant recall on “Open Learning” for the college.

In the second example, I chose a black mark on our city from last year’s NHL playoff run of the Vancouver Canucks. Long story short, when we lost in the final game, many fans decided to riot and trash the downtown core to bits. As

luck would have it, the event was documented like no riot before through the use of camera-equipped mobile phones; the event was uploaded to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, then turned over to the police for the ongoing (now year-long) investigation. They are actually in phase II of the campaign

that invites every day citizens to go to the VPD website and identify rioters in the uploaded photos. The out of home posters are big, bold, and eye catching with a large QR code in the middle. They are peppered at bus shelters around the city, which is great for those with nothing to do while waiting for the bus. Sounds like a great idea right? Unfortunately, when a user snaps an image, the user is taken to the non-mobile optimized VPD homepage with only a tiny banner on the lower right of the page to direct the user to the campaign site. It’s a shame that all that effort is wasted in the last portion of the campaign.

The third example is probably the worst of the bunch. The idea for the campaign was for the Vancouver Autoshow to sponsor free papers on the subway line and have prominent placement on the front page with a very strongly-worded CTA to go to the website to learn more. When I tried to snap a pic of the QR code with my smart phone, it became apparent that no one tested the size required for the QR readers to be able to clearly focus on the QR code. I tried everything to make my iPhone 4S focus on the QR code, but without a macro lens, I could not. Again, all that money to own the frontpage and to pay for the paper distribution on transit that day with a strong focus on QR and the web was wasted with an untested QR code for the CTA.

Top things to consider for a QR campaign:

1. Plan your campaign from QR code to conversion.
2. Point the QR code to a campaign page, not just the home page.
3. Optimize your site for mobile—if not your entire site, then at least the campaign landing pages.
4. Add analytics to the QR codes to track usage and ROI.
5. Make sure that the QR code is large enough to be processed by smart phone cameras.
6. Test your QR codes; does the path work for you all the way through?

Let me know if you have had a successful campaign in the comments below, and please send any other tips for others doing QR code campaigns.

The directive to our sr. developer was to make it pixel perfect, something he does every time anyway, and make the backend so easy to update that we could task either our parents or an intern to do it. I am happy to announce that he did both. Not only did he nail the visual handed to him by the art director, he also customized the CMS so that 95% of the site could be updated without a single line of code being manually altered. The reason for the direction was two fold, firstly this is what we would deliver to our clients, and secondly so many digital agency sites are poorly cobbled together quickly between client projects and it’s too hard for anyone other than the busy agency developer to update.

We are extremely proud of our new site and know that it better reflects who were are as an agency. Please explore the site and feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.

Please take note of our new address: 310-207 West Hastings Street Vancouver.

Photo:  rommy ghaly

Our team completely re-wired the information architecture into four main sections. 1) Philosophy, 2) Community Investment, 3) Team TELUS Cares, and 4)Funding Application form. Prior to our design, new sections would get “bolted on” in odd locations because the site’s architecture was not designed to capture the community program holistically. With the four new global sections we knew that all current and future content would be able to find a logical home in the site that was not be a force fit.

One of the key problems of the existing site was that there were all of these great programs being funded by TELUS that was not being percolated to the top or home page for users to see….well there was no real home page in the last design to begin with to be honest. The new homepage now has a large current events carousel that showcases big projects and initiatives very clearly and in the well known TELUS brand of large images, short headlines and summary copy. The cool part of the carousel is the hidden funding map that is just behind the large revolving slides. When you click the Funding Map button an interactive Google map is takes center stage on the homepage and a showcase of TELUS community projects from coast to coast is revealed. Users can quickly browse the projects and then click into the bigger story right from the map. Site users no longer have to root through many levels to dig into the funding showcases.

The four sections of the new site are now more logical and will always be able to absorb new content organically. There were two main areas that were not showcasing the way TELUS funds programs. Both the Community Boards and TELUS Ambassadors were not only buried but were just giant dumps of heavy copy that users would have to wade through. Each Community Board and local Ambassadors group were given there own landing and project pages. Now each team could showcase the project with text and images. There was substantial weight added to presence that they had on the site. Both of these groups really are on the front lines when it comes to actively working with either local community funding or in the case of the TELUS Ambassadors working directly as volunteers.

The other main goal for the new site design was to give community groups and charities easier access to TELUS funding for projects. A new prominent global driver was added to the site so that no matter where the site user was they always had a quick way to apply for funding. We also changed the funding pages to be a stepped process so that applicants would have to walk through a gated pre-application area. This was done to reduce the error rate in funding applications. The old site design let applicants jump right to the application form bypassing the funding guidelines resulting in a large number of errors in the application process. The new design looks to reduce this substantially.

The biggest challenge for us with the Community site as the fact that it was not on a content management system and all 400+ pages [ 200+ English and 200+ French] needed to be delivered in flat html….we utilized a Ruby on Rails compiler and some markdown to make the process a little easier, non the less it was quite the Herculaneum effort for the dev team.

This is not a dump and run exercise either for the site. Our team is moving right into phase II and ongoing site updates. We are assisting TELUS in a content program that will help them manage all of the stakeholders to provide timely and important updates to the site, so that it will continue to grow and showcase the latest ways in which TELUS “Gives where it Lives”

Ryan’s roll here will be to produce all digital projects that we are engaged with. He will also continue to develop our professional network of contractors and partners that are hired to execute the work. Ryan will draw on his existing large network of professionals and seek out new ones that will add to the breadth of Powershifter offerings.

More quick facts on Ryan:

• Lives on an island in his quest to shatter the myth that no man is an island.
• Uses almost 6 gigs of tethered data on his iPhone monthly commuting from that island.
• Dad to 3 lovely girls that keep him pretty busy while not at the office.
• Caused quite the stir with the co-invention of luggage stickers for The Cheeky.com
• Gets more done in a day than most do in a week.

We are scheduled for some corporate shots in the coming weeks and will reveal what this mystery super producer looks like when they are done.

Let me break it down:

$772.6

$656.5

17.7%

$576.4

$455.0

26.7%

$533.7

$415.5

28.5%

$517.2

$569.1

-9.1%

$396.4

$271.1

46.2%

$366.8

$340.4

7.8%

$344.1

$390.3

-11.8%

$304.3

$265.3

14.7%

$267.6

$303.6

-11.8%

$264.6

$261.3

1.3%

$4,343.9

$3,928.0

10.6%