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We’re looking for a Senior Web Developer

Turning visuals into websites, concepts into virals, visits into likes, tweets into retweets. If you’re a career-hungry developer with a passion for doing things better than everyone else and would like to join a team of young level-headed mind-blowing creatives working from an uber-cool office with the freedom to do what you want – then we want to hear from you!

The Role – Here are some of the things we need you to do:

• Produce, modify or maintain HTML based campaigns
• Produce, modify or maintain WordPress sites
• Produce, modify or maintain eCommerce sites
• Work with the team to meet clients timescales and needs

You – Here are some of the things we are looking for:

• Self-directed, motivated, and driven performer
• Ability to communicate technical issues/concepts clearly and effectively
• Demonstrated experience solving problems quickly, inventively, and resourcefully
• Experience and knowledge of OO design principles
• Experienced (2+ years) PHP, HTML & MYSQL
• Experienced (1+ years) with WordPress
• Familiarity with Javascript, XML, Apache and Linux.
• Familiarity with AJAX/DHTML, and browser-specific issues preferred.
• Familiarity with HTML 5.

The Opportunity – Jump on the WGN:

BRND WGN is a place where think tanks, design prima donnas, tech geeks meet and deliver amazing results. We have a fierce commitment to creating the most innovative and effective solutions to meet our clients’ marketing objectives and strive to get things done right first time.

Interested? email: jumpon@brndwgn.com

* THIS IS NOT A WEB DESIGNER VACANCY. THOSE WISHING TO DESIGN NEED NOT APPLY.

Reasons to believe

There is hope with a coke.

This inspiring video produced by Santo gives us reason to believe – go on share the love and share a Coke.

BRND WGN’s Wallpaper featured on AdWeek’s Talent Gallery

Inspiring our team everyday - BRND WGN's office Wallpaper featured on AdWeek's Talent Gallery

Top Industry Design & Branding Website AdWeek have featured one of our latest internal projects on their exclusive AdWeek Talent Gallery.

In an email sent to us this morning at 7.00 am, The Adweek Talent Gallery Curation Team said

“Hello BRND WGN,

We just wanted to notify you that one of your projects was just featured on the Adweek Talent Gallery. Our editorial team features a small number of projects every day.

With hundreds of options, we only pick a few that promote new thinking.

Congrats, and great to have you involved in the Adweek Talent Gallery.

The Adweek Talent Gallery Curation Team”

To say we were elated was an understatement. The project in question is our very own office wallpaper.

Let’s face it, we spend more time at work than anywhere else so when it came to decorating our agency we wanted to make sure this was a place which we look forward to going to – even on a Monday morning! The idea – illustrated wall art, inspired by our own team members and the things that make us BRND WGN.

Hand illustrated by our own senior designer Karl Attard, our office feature walls are clad in a custom drawn wall-paper representing some of our key likes, dislikes or just funny stuff. Everyone who comes over falls in love and asks us where we bought the stuff! Clearly AdWeek loved this too.

Amnesty is 50. Watch the video!

Fifty years ago one man’s outrage at the imprisonment of two students for raising a toast to freedom inspired a global movement. Since then Amnesty International have successfully campaigned for the release of thousands of people, imprisoned just for voicing their opinions; given hope to tens of thousands of women and men facing intimidation, violence, or even death &  made a difference to countless lives.

Congratulations to Amnesty International – celebrating 50 years of uniting against injustice.

Watch this satirical video then join the movement at http://amnesty.org/en/50

Full Time PHP/WordPress Developer (Closed)

BRND WGN is looking for a full time PHP/WordPress Developer to join our growing team.

The Role — here are some of the things we need you to do:

• Produce, modify or maintain HTML based campaigns
• Produce, modify or maintain WordPress sites
• Produce, modify or maintain eCommerce sites
• Work with the team to meet clients timescales and needs

You — here are some of the things we are looking for:

• Self-directed, motivated, and driven performer
• Ability to communicate technical issues/concepts clearly and effectively
• Demonstrated experience solving problems quickly, inventively, and resourcefully
• Experienced (1+ years) PHP, HTML & MYSQL
• Experience and knowledge of OO design principles
• Familiarity with WordPress
• Familiarity with Javascript, XML, Apache and Linux.
• Familiarity with AJAX/DHTML, and browser-specific issues preferred.

The Opportunity — jump on the WGN:

BRND WGN is an innovative branding agency that brings together experienced & creative thinkers to implement marketing, advertising, PR and design projects in a unique and profitable way. We have a fierce commitment to creating the most innovative and effective solutions to meet our clients’ marketing objectives and vision and we strive on getting things done right first.

Interested?

This position has now closed.

Go social in the square with McDonald’s

Watch this video to see how the fast food giant managed to connect with revelers in this Swedish square and turn a 30 second game into a coupon winning session.

Will Facebook hit 700 million users?

According to news released yesterday (30.05.11) by Socialbakers.com, facebook seems to be on the verge of hitting a new User record up to 700 million users – could this be true?

Facebook’s official statistics page claims that there are over 500 million users on Facebook, quite a leap away from Socialbakers’ news feed but the chances of the news being real are quite high.

According to Socialbakers the country which contributed most to this rise is Brazil with more than 1,9 million new users (that’s a whopping 11.37% increase) joining facebook over the last month. Following closely behind in terms of top user growth are Indonesia, Philippines, Mexico & Argentina however in terms of percentage growth, Egypt seems to be the next runner up with an increase of 11.14% increase.

I’m sure the statistics are putting a smile on Mr Mark Zuckerberg‘s face.

Check back soon for more Social Media news and the rise and rise of facebook.

The Source of Creativity: by John Cleese

Where do ideas come from? How does one become creative?

These are the questions that have haunted all ‘presumed’ or even ‘assumed’ creatives over time.

Is creativity a talent, an acquired skill or a process.

Very well respected comedian John Cleese shares his take on ‘The Source of Creativity’ at the Creativity Worldforum in Belgium way back in 2008.

Surely we could learn at thing or two.

Spread the knowledge.

Why Facebook Photo Tags Are The New (And Possibly More Powerful) Likes

The social network’s small new feature could have a big impact.

Originally BY E.B. BOYD (Fast Company) Thu May 12, 2011

Yesterday Facebook rolled out a seemingly minor enhancement to their Photos feature. For a while now, users have been able to tag friends in their photos and have that tag link to the friends’ profile pages. Now, however, users can do the same with company pages (referred to in the Facebook lexicon as “Pages”).

So, for example, if you take a picture of yourself with your favorite musician, and that musician has a Page, you can tag the musician in your photo and link it to the musician’s Page. Or, for example, if you’re wearing a cute pair of jeans from your favorite designer, you can tag them, and the tag will link back to the designer’s Page.
On the surface, this might not seem like a big deal. So you can tag a brand. So what?

Well, a lot.
Think for a moment about how powerful Likes are. Likes are currently the way that users express their support for a particular brand. They click on the Like button on that brand’s Page (or musician’s Page, or publication’s, or politician’s, or anyone else who has a Page) and declare that to the brand–and the world at large–that they think that brand (or musician, etc…) is worth taking notice of.

Which has been why there’s been such a focus in the past year on getting as many Likes as possible. They’re supposed to be a good thing. The more Likes you have, the better you’re doing in the marketplace, no?

Well, not exactly. Social media experts have begun to look askance at the Like system. It’s so easy for someone to “Like” something. What does it really signify? If you “Like” a kind of soda, for example, does that actually mean that you’re buying the item? Or just that you like the idea of the item? How do you really know how engaged with the product any particular Liker actually is?

Now think about tags in photos. If you’ve tagged a photo in which you’re wearing that cute pair of jeans, you don’t simply like the idea of the designer. You’ve actually gone out and put down some of your hard-earned cash for their duds. Photo tags, then, become a much stronger signal of engagement.

The downstream implications are many–and important.
First, it will give brands a whole new set of raw material to work with to promote themselves. According to Facebook, any tagged photo that a user designates as visible to “Everyone” will appear on the brand’s Page. (On the other hand, in accordance with the company’s privacy rules, photos that a user designates as for “Friends Only” will only appear to the user’s network, tags or no tags.)

So now, a brand won’t only have a bunch of Likes to work with. They’ll have real photos of real people engaging with their brands. It’s not clear what Facebook will permit brands to do with those photos, but given that the social network is currently enabling brands to surface users’ Likes to friends in ads, it’s possible that it will also allow brands to similarly leverage tagged photos to–as Facebook would put it–help users discover brands they might be interested in, based on their friends’ interests.
But think of another way Likes are currently used. Today, advertisers can choose to display ads to users based on many factors–such as gender, age, or geographic location. But they can also choose to display ads to users based on specific Pages they’ve Liked. Last fall, for example, we wrote about how a former Philadelphia Eagles football player who was running for Congress in New Jersey was able to make strategic fundraising appeals on Facebook by specifying that some ads only appear in front of users who had Liked the Page for the Eagles’ stadium.

Now imagine how advertisers could use the tagged photo signal. Let’s say you’re that same politician and you need to gather some volunteers to run a phone bank this weekend. What if you could target your ads to appear only in front of users who had posted a photo to Facebook in which they had tagged the politician’s Page–because they’d been to one of his rallies, for example, or had a shot of themselves waving one of his re-election signs. Imagine how much more effective an ad asking for volunteers would be if you could target those specific Facebook users–people who are clearly already highly engaged with the politician–rather than simply anyone who had Liked the Eagles stadium, or even the politician himself.

Similarly, take the new Deals service Facebook unveiled two weeks ago. If you’re a restaurant trying to drum up new business, and you decided to issue a coupon that gave diners a fourth entree free for every three at full price, wouldn’t you prefer to make that offer to a user who had tagged a photo of themselves eating at your restaurant, rather than any old person in your general geography? The user with the photo would be more likely to be already highly engaged with your business, and so if they brought three new friends with them, isn’t it more likely that at least one or two of them might turn into regulars, rather than the random person just looking for a deal?

We don’t know whether Facebook plans to allow any of these use cases. (They might not even have thought that far down the line yet.) But given the directions the social network has taken in the past, and its mission to enable people to share and connect with the people and things they care about, it wouldn’t be suprising if they headed in this direction, or one like it. All of which is to say that, if Likes were meaningful indicators of how connected a person felt with a particular brand, tagged photos are going to be that much more powerful.

Doubtlessly, some companies will initially regard tagged photos the way many view Likes today: as points to be amassed in volume. Some might even go so far as to try to offer rewards of some kind for tagged photos. (Though a Facebook spokeswoman tells Fast Company that the company will discourage this.)

The smart brands, however, will be the ones that encourage photo-tagging to happen organically–from fans who are already highly, and genuinely, committed–and then figure how to leverage those photos in ways that resonate with the fans’ networks–on Facebook and beyond.

Final note: Facebook says it’s currently limiting the rollout of the new feature to Pages from the Brand/Company and People categories. Later, it says, it will expand the feature to other Page categories.

E.B. Boyd is FastCompany.com’s Silicon Valley reporter

The makings of great brands.

BRND WGN‘s views on the making of great brands and their worth in 2010.

What makes a good brand tick the senses and convert the masses?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmBh4NnesNc&feature=channel_video_title]

(source interbrand.)