Cherryflava

Cherryflava 2011 report card: Our year in review

Posted on 19. Dec, 2011 by Jonathan Cherry.

As well as being the year of The Protester [Time magazine's person of the year] , for us 2011 has been the year of pushing ourselves into uncomfortable new spaces.  We started this year with a mission – to take everything that we’d learnt from producing alternate reality games for our clients over the years, and packaging the unseen, fantasy mechanic for retail and event applications. In essence we’ve transformed ourselves from a marketing company, into a technology company.

This year we’ve focused on just a few key areas of specialisation. We’ve done a significant amount of work in the realm of 3D projection mapping, which on a global scale has seen a significant amount of growth as a brand presentation mechanism. We’ve concentrated our efforts on the production of 3D mapping, which culminated in the production of the Dimension Data’s Annual Sales Conference mapping on a custom built 14 x 5 meter set. We worked with the world-class team from Motif Studios to create a mixture of visual and audio delight that really blew the audience [and client] away. Having seen many of the mapping examples from around the world – we’re pretty confident that ours was right up there with the best of them, which is where we feel the most comfortable.

See our post on The re-engineering of a conference for more on what we created for Dimension Data.

The other area of specialisation that we really got some good traction with this year is RFID. It stands for Radio Frequency Identification and as a technology we’ve been exploring its uses as a means to trigger our branded experiences and integrate those real-world experiences with social media platforms like Facebook. In a very short space of time we’ve developed, prototyped and built some pretty powerful machines that talk directly to actionable applications like Facebook. The result was that we turned the recent Axe Cloud 9 Party into an interactive media space that added to the experience of being at the event and gave the Axe brand some very cool brand exposure on Facebook.

So this year has been a great one in the sense that, once again – we’ve prepared ourselves well for 2012 and our mission to help brands create fantasy experiences for their clients and stakeholders.

A huge thanks has to go to all of our business partners and clients for making 2011 the success that it was. The team from Dimension Data / Internet Solutions, Habari Media, BAT, G2, Steenberg Vineyards, You Know Who, BConfident, Go4Word, CCPP and Motif Studios – thanks for sharing the vision and pushing the boundaries with us.

As is tradition here at Cherryflava – at the end of every year we give ourselves a public grading for how we feel we have performed throughout the year and this time around we will give ourselves a B+ for 2011. We are exploring in a unique, niched arena not only in South Africa but globally, but with our unique background and mixture of talents we’re well set up now to deliver even more in 2012.

Thanks do much for reading and joining in with us this year – have a great holiday.

The blog will be taking a break over the festive season until posting resumes on the 9th of January 2012.