Technically, I can’t add this to the B&B Portfolio without asking for permission from the good folks at TBWA, but I think I can get away with writing about the project on my blog.
So here we go: B&B Project 01, the 2005 Araw Awards site, commissioned by the Philippine Ad Congress as a repository for information and other downloadable materials for their numerous participants and delegates.
We held our first meeting Wednesday night, August 11, a week before the site was scheduled to launch. At this point, I knew next to nothing about the project, except for the charming fact that it was somehow related to the Philippine Ad Congress, and since working with agencies is always an experience, the fact that I was going in blind didn’t bother me in the least.
As it happened, the conference room we entered had representatives from TBWA, McCann-Erickson, Jimenez Basic and Leo Burnett that night, at the (lovely, lovely) Leo Burnett offices at (one of the) Enterprise Towers. The website, as planned, was to contain a rather svelte 5 pages, but the team that was producing it included 1 managing partner from TBWA, 2 executive creative directors from McCann-Erickson, 1 creative director from Jimenez Basic, 1 creative director from Leo Burnett, 1 project coordinator assigned to the project by the Ad Congress Secretariat, and our little company of 3 pulling it all together.
Whenever there are more people than pages in any given web project, I always get a little worried. This was one of those extreme scenarios wherein any one of these agencies could have easily pulled the site off by themselves, with very similar results and in a shorter timeframe, but I suppose the entire point of the exercise was to distribute the work equally amongst those involved.
But I digress. (I know it sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m really not. These are just acerbic, off-the-cuff impressions, not to be taken seriously … like everything else on this blog.)
In classic ad-agency style, we had less than a week to put the site together based on studies (provided by the McCann-Erickson team). Now ordinarily, 5 pages is the kind of thing you can code, test, upload and sign off on in one 16-hour session. Your eyes will be bloodshot and you’ll be well on your way to some permanent carpal-tunnel, but you’ll be finished with time to spare.
And we actually did it too, in less than 10 hours because there were two of us working on it. 2 hours on the Flash animation, and the following 8 hours coding the pages and laying out the various PDF documents. Of course, because we got the brief on Wednesday night, and the materials on Thursday night, we didn’t actually start working until Friday afternoon. That meant that I didn’t get to upload this first draft until Saturday, and feedback didn’t start coming in until Sunday.
We had initially set our sights on a Monday morning launch, but it quickly became obvious that that was impossible. Instead, Monday evening saw me rushing to Makati to receive some last-minute copy revisions and materials. I slapped the changes on overnight and crossed my fingers.
Tuesday afternoon saw some last-last-minute revisions snaking their way into my inbox though, so I guess I didn’t cross hard enough. By Wednesday we were well and truly set, but then we had a small issue with the actual website hosting. (Without naming names, a certain prominent telecoms company neglected to register the proper domain name for the site, which was scheduled to launch in less than 24 hours.)
In any case, we couldn’t have launched on Wednesday even if I’d wanted to, because there was a batch of last-last-last-minute revisions sitting in my inbox when I sat down to hibernate my machine for the night.
So Thursday finally saw the site online, in all of its 5-page glory. Not bad for about a week’s work. With projects like this, it’s way too easy for "too many cooks to spoil the broth" so to speak, but in this instance it seems the broth came out the better from all the additional minding.