Liquid Interactive 2015 A Year in Review

This is Liquid Interactive. We create great digital experiences and aim to improve people's lives through our work.

2015 was Liquid Interactive's 16th year of delivering important digital communication solutions to our customers. It was a year of great achievements for our team and clients and marked a shift in our brand positioning and our standing as premium digital partners.

We have always worked at the intersection of marketing and education where there are exciting opportunities in behaviour change. The maturity of digital channels is helping that value proposition to benefit our clients. 2015 was a standout year; we gained global and national recognition for our work, built strong partnerships and made our own contributions to our brand promise and to advancing digital engagement.

Our powerful combination of versatile and multi-disciplinary teams working in tight-knit groups to solve difficult challenges is a proven process. Working alongside our clients and partners it leads to remarkable success and we look forward to what we can achieve in the year ahead.

On set with Julia Zemiro and the team for MindMatters.

The year was off to a frantic start and from the beginning of January we were in the middle of production on the MindMatters project and gearing up for a panel shoot at ABC studios in Melbourne featuring Julia Zemiro.

This is typically a busy time of year with campaigns for our biggest digital marketing clients Devine and Isuzu UTE Australia ongoing through the Christmas and New Year period.
On top of that, we were working in the background on our own brand refresh that included a new website and logo.

Our own project Writelike , was being prepared for focus testing in schools and we'd just received approval for our first project in South Australia with the Department of Health and Ageing.

In February we launched a significant project for Queensland's first operational LNG plant at Curtis Island. The Case Study for this innovative QCLNG project can be seen here. Over six months of planning and development went into this exciting project.

In March we pitched and won Brisbane's Airtrain digital account in the same month. We also launched our own brand refresh with a launch party held at the Liquid Studio with clients and staff enjoying a great night replete with technology showcases involving 3D printing, virtual reality demonstrations, games and social media activities.

Liquid's new brand launch - plenty of fun with some exciting digital trends being showcased.

Liquid Interactive was represented at the 2015 SXSW event  in Austin Texas. It was an exciting opportunity for our Group Account Director Samantha Pearce to survey the global digital landscape and to bring back insights for our own clients.

After the energy of the first part of the year, we used this quieter time in April to review and improve our digital analytics capability and incorporated market-leading data visualisation software, Tableau  into our suite of tools that help create better insight into user behaviour.

In May we were delighted to win an innovative App project for QLD Urban Utilities and leveraging our own IP, the project is designed specifically for the leaders of the organisation to improve their skills.

The MindMatters website project was launched to great acclaim through the collaboration between Liquid Interactive and beyondblue. Once again, innovation was at the forefront of our approach and the result sets a new benchmark in this important area. At the launch attended by beyondblue Chairman Jeff Kennett and ex-Prime Minister and beyondblue board member, Julia Gillard, the "world class" project was credited with creating a new benchmark in mental health education.

Our Account Director Hazel meets Julia Gillard at the MindMatters launch.

Gearing up for the end of the financial year, Isuzu UTE, Devine, and Mr Rental were in full swing with visits increasing and campaigns flourishing.

Our appetite for innovation and product design was not diminished and we were engaged in June by Dreamworks to design a new online platform. This meant working closely with their team in the USA over several months to conceive, design, prototype and test the product prior to its development.

July was hectic and began with an award from the Marketing Science Innovation Xchange(MSIX) for Purchase Behaviour. The inaugural national award was announced at the MSIX conference in Sydney and coincided with Google's annual ‘Think' conference, which we were presenting at on the same day. Andrew Duval, our Creative Director was a standout performer and only Agency speaker at the event, talking on the subject of Micro Moments and the success of the Isuzu UTE's responsive website.

Andrew Duval, Creative Director talks about why Micro Moments matter to Isuzu UTE Australia.

Our SiteCore Partnership took effect in July and allows us to apply our extraordinary insights in marketing and behaviour using the world's most sophisticated customer experience platforms.

In August it was all aboard for the Airtrain website launch. This fully responsive website helps travellers book and purchase tickets and has a strong integration with digital campaigns and ecommerce elements.
The Ekka is on every year in Brisbane, and this year we created an interactive experience utilising video and touch screens so that visitors could explore Brisbane's bikeways. It's another important community initiative from Brisbane City Council we're proud to be a part of.

Before September had really started we were ramping up our activities interstate and developing bigger plans for Melbourne. Our Project Director in Melbourne Natalie Verheggen, has vast local experience, and in October had already laid the groundwork for a local office in Richmond. This lead to the wonderful news that we were successful in winning the next stage of the very successful MindMatters project and we were soon on the hunt for more local talent.

It was also in September that some of the digital marketing team based in Brisbane were invited to visit Google in Sydney to share our insights on integrated digital marketing, and they also brought back some great insights from the Loves Data analytics conference.

Brandon Hall is one of the world's most prestigious education awards and we received a Gold Award for Excellence in Learning from the international judging panel. This rounded out an exciting month of learning and industry recognition.

Accepting the AITD Excellence Award for our MindMatters Project

The MindMatters project continued to receive accolades and in November was awarded the prestigious AITD excellence award  for best Blended Learning Solution. I attended the award ceremony while several other key team members were in the UK working on digital strategies with our newest client Kaplan International English, based in London . Our team was invited to work closely with this global company to develop comprehensive communications strategies for a worldwide target audience.

In the same month we also learned that we had received a distinction from AGDA (Australian Graphic Design Award) for the design of the by now well-recognised Isuzu UTE site. It's hard to believe we fit it all in, but seven of the Isuzu UTE team were delighted to attend a full day on Moreton Island with the clients for the I-Venture project  and drove the newest D-MAX and MU-X vehicles in exciting conditions.

Our creative director Andrew Duval (in puppet form) spending some time demoing www.writelike.org with our project officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Our Creative Director came home from London the long way and has some great stories from the offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, where he demonstrated the innovative Writelike project, visited Google in Silicon Valley and then Dreamworks in LA, docking in to check on our newest mobile project.

Early in December we launched our first activity for Dreamworks aside from the prototype project. It is an activity designed for the Dreamworks Create website  that incorporates mobile printing in association with Hewlett Packard. It's built in HTML5 and is an excellent example of utilising leading front-end technology that supports desktop and mobile platforms.

We were delighted to be reappointed to Brisbane City Council's Digital Panel during this time and we are keen to evolve the site we delivered last year .

The team, including Daniel Lynch and Chris Macer from Isuzu UTE Australia, visit Google HQ in Sydney.

We should also mention that we were approached back in March 2015 by Google, for a Case Study on the success of our Isuzu UTE's website. Google noticed that we were performing remarkably well and that we understood and could deliver the core concepts behind micro-moments that drive mobile usage. Good things take time and in December we were delighted to see the results of the Case Study, which culminated in the production of a video that was released on December 22nd 2015 and can be seen here.

We can't sign off without thanking all of our clients and employees who are the core of our company's success, and who at the end of 2015, were already gearing into the Christmas and New Year campaigns along the lines of those that kicked off this review. Our 2015 festive season e-card raised the bar again and if you want a good laugh on us, click here.

We can't wait to see what 2016 has to offer and we look forward to working with our wonderful team, clients, partners, friends and supporters.