Barry M did a sync deal to use one of Stooshe’s tracks in their latest ad campaign. At the time the ads started airing on TV we also released a lyric video for ‘Things That Make You Go Mmm’ on YouTube.

To promote the campaign, Alex Burford came up with the idea of building a widget that easily allows people to tweet about things that make them go mmm.

I built a widget based on Kate Brighouse’s design. It’s fairly simple and uses jQuery to generate a link to Twitter’s sharer url and post the user’s comments.

I used a neat jQuery popup plugin to open the tweet window in a popup, rather than a new tab or window.

I then built pages on the band’s website and a Facebook tab to display the widget alongside the lyric video and a collection of the latest tweets directed at Stooshe with the hashtag #mmm.

The widget was a huge success, generating a flurry of Twitter activity around the song.

Elro’s first single, ‘Bad News’, features Rob Harvey and Mike Skinner as well as being the first release on The Beats in 5 years. So we expected a lot of interest from new fans. To try and engage them even further and covert them into Elro fans we created a ‘Like to Listen’ tab on Facebook. The page uses a Soundcloud secret player to stream Mike’s German Car Park Remix of the single.

During the week we released All the Young’s debut album I put together a YouTube preview of the entire album.

Kate Brighouse laid all the lyrics out on individual slides and I matched those to the songs in iMovie before uploading to YouTube.

Adding annotations took ages because the video required 41 different hotspots linking to the start of each track. The end result is really slick and worked well as a quick album sampler.

I’ve been building a lot of Tumblr themes lately. The interface makes it really easy for artists to use and the syncing options help to ensure a socially connected experience.

Coinciding with the release of his first single on The Beats, I launched a new website for Elro, powered by Tumblr.

I based the theme on a bold, black and white design by Kate Brighouse. The sidebar includes an mpu promoting the single, a jQuery sign-up form, tour dates by BandsInTown and a twitter feed based on the work by Janet Wagner.

Elro took to the blog brilliantly, syncing it with his Instagram account and encouraging all his fans to follow him on Tumblr.

One of the latest groups signed to Warner Bros UK is the very talented Amore. They’re a four piece classical crossover group that intend to make Opera more accessible and less stuffy.

To launch the group’s online presence, I set them up with a Tumblr-powered blog. Kate Brighouse designed the layout and I got to work building the custom theme.

David, Monica, Victoria and Peter were eager to get blogging and posting photos. So I set them all up with Instagram and the Tumblr app and they were ready to start sharing their adventures.

To further promote Smiler’s free mix tape, we released a sampler on YouTube. By using YouTube annotations the viewer can jump between clips of every song on ‘All I Know’.

Kate Brighouse designed a still image with all the track names on it. Yoni Lappin then synced up the stills with the audio. When a song is playing the title has three lines next to it, so I suggested alternating between a still without the lines every few seconds to animate the video slightly.

Once the final video was ready I added all the annotations and internal links in YouTube. The result is an elegantly simple interactive sampler of the mix tape, giving Smiler additional coverage on YouTube.

All the Young’s online promo person, Alex Fordham, secured an exclusive pre-release stream for their debut album on NME.com.

To make the most of the promo opportunity I built a custom player widget powered by a Soundcloud secret set. I used Lee Martin’s Premiere app as a base (the same way I did for Smiler) and made a number of modifications to make it suit our needs perfectly.

I removed various elements to keep the app in a tight space and make it easily embeddable. I also opened it up so the packshot is always to the left of the playlist.

I added a pause button which proved to be a fairly extensive task. The pause button needed to detect the current song, pause it and then disappear while making the play button reappear. I had to reconfigure the play button so that it continued the paused song rather than restarting the entire playlist.

I made a number of style changes including a background image that displays a loading message while the player loads all the tracks from Soundcloud.

Finally I added some retailer logos linking directly to the pre-order pages for the album on Play.com, HMV, Amazon and iTunes.

The widget got great exposure on NME.com, generating a significant number of Soundcloud plays and album pre-orders.

Not only could fans watch the show from the comfort of their own homes, they could make a night of it in London. We hired The Big Chill House, just a few doors down from Scala where we set-up a projector and plasma screen for fans to watch the live stream together.

Managing all the technical aspects of this project was a huge endeavour. I hired Metropolis Studios to handle the filming and streaming of the show, while I worked on getting the website and Big Chill screening ready.

To expand the shows reach even further I commissioned Powster to build a Twitter crowd like the one we used for Biffy Clyro. Fans could join in the virtual crowd by tweeting #liannelive. Kate Brighouse designed the page and Powster put all the elements together.

We wanted the concert to be accessible on mobile devices so the page detected what device the viewer was using and displayed the ideal player: a standard Flash player for desktop browsers or an HTML5 one for mobile playback. Our international team secured placements on a number of high profile websites like rollingstone.de. I created a responsive page to hold the Flash and HTML5 players. I then generated a range of different sized embed codes so that the online editors could easily host the live stream on their own sites.

The day before the show I set a redirect rule to make the live stream and twitter crowd the home page on liannelahavas.com.

To ensure the big screens at the Big Chill House always displayed something engaging, I built a custom page to fill the screen and display the Twitter crowd. I could then easily switch between the twitter crowd and the live video feed when ther time came.

The gig was incredible with Lianne and her band putting on a phenomenal show. Everything ran smoothly so the live stream looked and sounded amazing, both online and on the big screens at the Big Chill House. The #liannelive hashtag worked like a charm and made the event a trending topic in London, Dublin, Paris & Belgium.

Running a campaign with so many elements left a lot of potential for errors, but we covered all the bases and the night was a huge success.

I started working at Warner Bros two years ago and have been wanting to launch a new label website throughout that time. Artist sites and campaigns have always taken preference so I’m pleased to finally unveil the new official website for Warner Bros Records UK.

Each artist page is focussed on connecting people with the act’s official channels in the simplist way possible.

The site has a dedicated press kits area, offering the latest photographs, logos, biographies and press releases for all the acts on the label. This also includes a quick delivery mechanism where the site sends links to all the resources directly to your inbox.

The site was designed by Kate Brighouse to look beautifully clean and minimalistic. I project managed the development by Isle Interactive where Steven Moore lead the project. We worked on some great CMS enhancements to simplify image uploads and make it possible for the promo team to update press releases without adding Word’s garbled html formatting.

Patrick Shine was a great help as he gathered all the assets we needed and tackled the huge task of setting the site up most of the content.

The downloads section is a collection of all the free download widgets I’ve built over the last two years. I had to go through all my old widgets and gather the embed codes for the Warner Bros site.

Considering how a lot of traffic on a label website comes from artists hoping to get signed, we decided to embed a Soundcloud dropbox. This is a simple way for the A&R team to explore submissions without giving out any personal information.

The website is very easy to update and will require as little maintenance as possible. The clean and simple site impressively showcases all the acts on the UK label.

To introduce a UK audience to Kimbra we created a splash page with attention focussed on her 3 latest videos, a link to buy the EP and her forthcoming tour dates.

Kate Brighouse designed the page and I put all the html together to make bring it to life. The design included hands holding each of the videos, which would have caused numerouse issues for embedded content. Instead of embedding the videos I used Fancybox to open each of them in a lightbox. I added some badic css hover effects to the containers so they’d display a play button when the user’s mouse enters the frame.

We only wanted UK fans to see the splash page so I put together a geolocation script using the maxmind database.

I sent the files over to the Warner Bros US team who run the Kimbra website and worked with their developers to get the location script working within their system.

On the 29th February Smiler released an incredible free mixtape. To maximise the spread of the mixtape I built an embedable widget.

The key purpose of the mixtape was to increase Smiler’s followers on Twitter and Likes on his Facebook page, so the first thing the widget needed to include was a Facebook like button (linked to his fan page) and a Twitter Follow Button.

The widget also includes sharing buttons to like and tweet a link to the widget itself. I included an embed button that launches a lightbox with the embed code ready to be copied for use on blogs and websites. The Like and Tweet buttons both have counters so I decided to add a counter to the embed button too. I stored the number of clicks it gets by making an ajax request to a php script that posts to a MySQL database. I used the same method to retrieve the embed count when the widget is loaded.

To streamline my workflow I gave the widget a responsive design, allowing the elements to fit snugly whether the page is viewed as an embedded iframe, full page site or a mobile site. The packshot adjusts to fill the available space while the countdown and sharing buttons fit neatly alongside or above and below the image.

The plan to release the mixtape at 2pm on the dot meant that the widget would have to display the player and download links when the timer reached zero. I modified Soundcloud’s Premiere App to build a beautiful player that would replace the packshot when the countdown ended.

When the time came, the mix tape launched on a wave of twitter and facebook activity, while the embed code allowed loads of blogs to easily add the entire widget with the soundcloud player, direct download link and sharing functionality.

Biffy Clyro are one of the key acts at this year’s Download Festival. We had a pair of weekend tickets to offer fans as a prize for joining the mailing list.

After the success of many past free download and competition widgets I built a widget with a competition template in mind. Kate Brighouse designed the widget for this competition and I got to work on a dynamic system similar to the one I built for Tawiah’s Run EP download. Competitions generally require more data (first name, last name & mobile number) so this project required a new template.

The new template needed to include these additional fields in both the HTML and Flash versions. The Flash version is only ever used for Facebook sharing where treating the widget as a video allows people to enter their details without ever leaving their Facebook news feed.

This campaign helped me make a lot more progress with the system so I am getting closer to a complete, quick and user-friendly system for building socially focussed promotional widgets.

To promote All the Young’s headline UK tour in March we launched a competition that included social sharing as part of the entry mechanism.

I built a php page with thumbnails for each of the dates on the tour. The thumbnails switch from black and white to colour on rollover, making the competition page look very slick.

To enter the competition fans simply have to leave a comment on the show they want to attend. This functionality uses a Facebook comment box which will post a link to the fans’ facebook walls along with the comment.

I used querystrings to reduce the number of pages I had to build and enabled the meta data to be customised for each show, sharing the date, venue and city in the title and description posted on Facebook.

The quick and simple entry mechanic encouraged a lot of entrants and the virality of the competition helped it spread beyond the core All the Young fanbase.

Smiler already had a fairly strong online presence when he signed to Warner Bros, so we decided to maintain his Tumblr blog and enhance that to be his official website.

Kate Brighouse designed a logo and header navigation for the site while I got to work on a custom Tumblr theme.

The theme demonstrates that a Tumblr site can serve as a very effective website. Smiler’s blogs all appear on the home page along with social sharing functionality. His blog is linked to Facebook and Twitter, automatically notifying fans about new posts.

I included a sidebar which has a php twitter feed. The widget has a caching feature to ensure that the api request limit doesn’t cause the site to display an empty feed.

I manually added additional pages to display videos (YouTube embeds), Music (a Soundcloud player with all the latest tracks), Lyrics (manually added), and tour dates (using the BandsInTown javascript widget).

The website is clean and simple, but a very efficient use of Tumblr to power a blog-focussed site.

My worst kept secret is how much of a Smashing Pumpkins fan I am. They were the first band I dedicated my fandom to and I always found a way to include them in projects or assignments throughout high school and university.

When I first started working at Warner I was very excited to find a signed Zeitgeist poster in the office. It now takes pride of place on the wall next to my desk. Sadly the band is no longer signed to the label but I still found a way to work with them.

Paper Crows are one of my favourite bands out of the new acts I’m working on. As if I wasn’t convinced at first they completely won me over when they quietly recorded a cover of ‘Disarm’ and posted it on their social networks. The recording was well received but fairly low-key until I spent some time testing the sharing functionality on their tumblr blog.

During my tests, I tweeted about the song and tagged The Smashing Pumpkins. When I got home that evening my inbox had an unusually high number of notifications for new followers and retweets.
Then I noticed where all the attention was coming from – I’d been retweeted by The Smashing Pumpkins!

Paper Crows were really excited about the sudden influx of traffic and new fans and wondered if there was any way we could get the song posted on the Pumpkins’ Facebook page.

A few months earlier I’d had a similar Twitter experience when Billy Corgan retweeted my feedback on the first of the two Smashing Pumpkins gigs I went to in London. That retweet gave me two important new followers @SmashingPumpkin and @Rynda. The latter being the digital manager for all the official Pumpkins online destinations.

I contacted Rynda and she agreed to post the song on Facebook as long as it was a video so we had Hugh Denn edit together some super-slow motion footage of a burning paper crow, previously used for the band’s take on Cloudbusting.

The video was very well received after being posted on The Smashing Pumpkins’ Facebook page and Twitter feed. It was incredible to be directly involved with my favourite band and fascinating to see the influence that one well placed tweet can have.

From the start of the Stooshe campaign we had a strong focus on mobile users. One of the key digital points in the campaign is a brilliant location based web app built by 8linQ.

Where’s Stooshe is a cross-platform app, optimised for iPhone and Android smartphones. Fans can install the app on their devices by simply visiting http://wheres.stooshe.com and adding the site to their home screens.

The app tracks a user’s current location and drops a series of markers around them. These markers map the location of events, happenings and goodies. Goodies are bits of hidden content like remixes, exclusive videos, wallpapers and competitions. By visiting the location with their phones, fans can unlock the goodies and store them in a virtual locker.

The app is also a stalker’s dream; showing the location of the StooshBus as the girls tour the country.

Project managing the app development involved a lot of testing to ensure that the app would be as flexible as possible going forward. I wrote some custom php scripts to easily embed html5 capable videos as goodies as well as a variety of other content.

The app launched along with the new Stooshe website and went down incredibly well. Where’s Stooshe will be an integral part of the group’s digital campaign going forward with new goodies being added constantly.

The new Stooshe website includes loads of interactive features. The site is intended for the A.D.D. Generation so we crammed it with additional engaging content.

One idea was to regularly release simple flash games that provide random off-shoots of entertainment within the website.

I scoured the internet for various Flash games and tutorials that could be reskinned for use on the Stooshe website.

The first game we launched with was a simple driving game where fans could race the StooshBus around a track.

I found a tutorial by Emanuele Feronato and reskinned the basic driving game to match Stooshe. Then I enhanced the game by adding sharing functionality so fans can easily post their scores to Facebook and Twitter.

To enhance the Facebook sharing functionality I wrote a php script that would personalise the post on Facebook as well as embedding the game directly into the user’s news feed and timeline for their friends to easily play along.

Finally I embarked on much more complex enhancements by adding a leaderboard system to the game. On completing 5 laps the user can submit their name and score to a leaderboard ranking them alongside other players.

The first game was a big hit with Stooshe fans and even Warner staff members started competing to be at the top of the leaderboard. I’m looking forward to the challenge of making more games for the site.

One of my biggest projects to kick off 2012 was project managing the development of Stooshe’s new official website.

Kate Brighouse did a great job designing the site before handing it over to me to brief Isle Interactive on the development.

Stooshe’s target audience is very young so it was important for the website to be fun, colourful and mobile friendly.

Andy Jones at Isle Interactive did an incredible job applying responsive design to the site’s layout. The website adjusts to provide the best views across desktop, tablet and mobile devices

Project managing and testing the site proved to be a massive task with lots of specific integrations. The responsive design also meant that I had to keep testing the site across multiple browsers and devices.

The sidebar includes a module for the Where’s Stooshe Web App, allowing fans to track the StooshBus and search for goodies without leaving the home page.

The StooshBus Racing game that I built is also integrated into the sidebar as well as modules for videos, photos and the mailing list.

The website header acts as a prime space for marketing messages. I assembled a banner with rollover states on each of the girls. When you hover over them they react and switch to a crazy pose. To ensure that people are aware of the animation I added a timer that makes switches each of the rollover states on every few seconds.

Additional features include an Agony Aunties section; allowing fans to submit any question to the group and a StooshUp the Bus feature where fans can submit photos to be included in the wallpaper of the StooshBus.

I manually added lyrics and profile pages for each of the girls. Bearing the responsive design in mind, I included CSS rules to ensure that the profile pages adjusted according to the user’s browser or device size.

The website was incredibly well received, driving more traffic on stooshe.com than any previous day. The interactive features continue to engage fans making the site a fun destination for repeat visits.

Rounding off the campaign for The Wombats’ latest album we released a deluxe iTunes LP covering everything that was released to accompany ‘This Modern Glitch’.

The iTunes LP includes the full 10 track album with lyrics to each song. Additionally all the b-sides from This Modern Glitch’s six singles are included as well as loads of remixes. 4 Acoustic Glitch songs are also included bringing the total number of audio tracks to 38.

The LP is heavily loaded with great video content. All 6 music videos, 3 behind the scenes videos, an interview with the band and live footage from the album launch party. There are an additional 4 videos from the Acoustic Glitch session and a video for the Afrojack remix of Techno Fan.

This iTunes LP is loaded with so much content that the biggest challenge was simply making sure it was all available. Once we’d gathered the full list of content Kate Brighouse designed the LP and I got to work building it.

To promote the album I commissioned the team at Electric Light Station to create a preview video and they did a superb job. The Wombats’ This Modern Glitch iTunes LP was released worldwide on the 13 February.

Stooshe’s music video for ‘Love Me’ got a lot of attention when it launched. We encouraged a lot more traffic to the video with a link sharing competition.

Fans could generate a unique link to the video and earn points for every click their link receives. The fan at the top of the leaderboard won tickets to see Stooshe live with Labrinth in London. 9 runners-up would all receive a signed copy of the StooshTape on CD.

Having run similar campaigns for All the Young and Clement Marfo & The Frontline, I had a solid template to work from. It didn’t take me long to set the competition up and launch it as a Facebook tab.

The system includes an admin panel allowing us to monitor total clicks and unique clicks for each entrant as well as retrieving their details to contact the winners.

The competition did incredibly well driving thousands of clicks and YouTube views.

The music video for ‘Bada Bing’ launched as a ‘like to view’ tab on Benny Banks’ Facebook page.

Building on the design by Kate Brighouse I used the same set-up as the holding page to insert a jQuery countdown timer styled with @font-face.

A few minutes before the launch time I set an unlisted YouTube video to be embedded and played as soon as the countdown hit 0.

The tab also included sharing functionality to promote the video across social networks.

To hype up the anticipation for the release of the ‘Bada Bing’ video I built a holding page counting down to the second the video would go live.

I used Keith Wood’s jQuery Countdown plugin to render a timer. The script was very easy to use and the additional settings made it easy to style and configure. The timezone setting allowed me to specify that the countdown should end at 11am UK time rather than the visitor’s timezone.

By using @font-face, I was able to render all links and even the numbers in the timer with the same fonts used on the single artwork.

The video premiered on a ‘like to view’ Facebook tab. So at 11am on Fri 13th Jan the countdown was switched with a message and link to watch the video on Benny Banks’ Facebook page. After the premier finished I embedded the video directly into the holding page.

We wanted to engage Clement Marfo & The Frontline fans and get them to spread the new video for Mayhem (feat. Kano) like wildfire.

I took the link sharing system I’d built for All the Young and made some major improvements. To start with I created a setup file and optimised the app to make it more templated. Now all the text, links, sharing optimisation, competition details and php functions only need to be defined once for the entire app.

We wanted to reward the fans with the links that genuinely get the most clicks, so I added functionality to count unique clicks separately. The leaderboard ranks users based on their unique clicks but the total activity on their link is still recorded and accessible through the admin section of the app.

I built an admin section that allows us to view all link activity, user details and the total number of clicks that the campaign has generated. This section is password protected to ensure that the results are secure.

To improve the app further I integrated bit.ly url shortening to automatically generate a short url for each fan that signs up.

The app was created to run as a Facebook tab so sharing had to be optimised for Facebook sharing. Each user’s unique link is bundled with personalised sharing meta tags. So posting someone’s url will share a link with a title and description explaining that you can help them win the tickets by simply clicking on the link.

I’ve recently had a go at really ‘cheating the system’ by manipulating some photos to remove distracting elements as well as combining the best elements of different pictures.

The first photo on the left was taken at a skate park on Venice Beach in L.A. While I was really chuffed to get the timing right for this photograph, it bothered me that the two people in the background were distracting and detracted from the distance between that skater’s feet and his board. So using a combination of Photoshop tools I removed the people. I primarily used the clone tool, deleted layers witha very soft eraser and a little bit of Photoshop’s new content-aware fill to remove the people and replace them with the beach, ocean and concrete. A large portion of the concrete was covered so I had to make that up with portions of concrete from other parts of the photo.

The second and third photos I edited were taken over Christmas in Scotland. Trying to freeze active children is quite a challenge, so I got into a habit of taking numerous photos and hoping for the best. In both the examples on the left I had two images of the same scene. Unfortunately neither image was right on its own – someone in focus in one photograph would be blurry in another. So I combined them to get the photograph I was hoping for in the first place.

While I’m pleased enough with the results, I doubt these edits would pass any forensic analysis. I’d rather just capture the image I want in the first place, but it is nice to know that all is not lost if the shot isn’t perfect.