French Connection shows a new rugged and bearded face for 2010: The Man.

He's part of a new campaign to raise brand awareness and boost sales of their menswear collections.

At Poke, we were asked to create an online voice to germinate a new breed of born-again man-folk, launching side-by-side with the arrival of 'The Man' at French Connection.

The result is Manifesto, a blog made of manly hints, beefy tips and tough challenges. It's constructed by an editorial A-Team with experience at Vice, The Face and The Juke.

Manifesto also extends to a Twitter profile and Facebook page to spread the manly word around as much of Le Internet  as we can get our big, coarse, man-hands on.
Check the MANIFESTO here.

Skype has launched Skype Mobile for people who need Skype when they’re out and about, meaning you’re free to escape from your computer and use Skype in the garden or down on the beach.

Following on from the success of Skype’s Nomads campaign in 2009, the Skype Outside campaign involves getting artists from around the world to create new art from Skype calls. Five artists from across the globe are on call to help transform people’s personal messages into outdoor art.

The new Virgin F1 Racing car (or "VR-01" for those in the know) was revealed yesterday at Silverstone. As part of the launch hullaballoo, we're asking fans to name Timo and Lucas' rides.

The Twittersphere seems pretty interested, so why not give it a try? Just include the #namethevirginf1car hashtag and tweet away.

Winners will get to be part of F1 history (well, for 2010 at least) and some autographed swag to seal the deal.

Come and join the banter

Just like the Eskimos are meant to have loads of words for snow (because they're snow experts), we wanted the new, open, Yahoo! to have loads of yodels for all kinds of awesome web stuff. What if the internet has served you something gross? Or sexy? Or sexy-gross? Whatever, there's a yodel for that.

The Yahoo! Yodelizer can be used to create a yodel to celebrate ANYTHING you might find on the web.

Making a Yodel is super easy. Using your keyboard, you can create a Yodel from a bunch of pre-recorded YAs and Hoos. Then you can attach it to whatever you like on the internet. There's no logging in, no labyrinthine instructions and it's annoyingly addictive.

It's kind of like a URL shortener. But with added yodelly goodness.

Visit the Site

Richard Branson took the lid of the F1 world's worst kept secret as he unveiled his new racing team, and simultaneously we launched the world's biggest holding page™  ;) 

www.virginracing.com

We’re rather proud to announce our first piece of work for children’s charity, Barnardo’s.

On Christmas Day 2009 we're letting the teenagers of UK address the nation. 

So, after lunch, instead of turning on the telly, visit the homepage of MySpace and see what our country's teenagers have to say about the state of the nation. 

Over the next two months we're asking 13-19 year-olds to share their views and upload videos across a range of serious subject matters. The best uploads will in incorporated into the final film.

The Poke blog is normally a bit flippant and doesn't take things too seriously. But this is one of those times when we need to be a bit less blah-blah about stuff. Teenagers in the UK are having a pretty tough time of it on all fronts, and they get universally panned in our wonderful mainstream media. So we're really hoping that this project can make a genuine difference to the lives of teenagers, and all the people affected by teenagers (that's all of us in case you hadn't figured it out).

Watch the intro film:

- We hope it will empower young people and challenge stereotypes

- We hope it will attract an adult audience that is numbed by charity appeals, but interested in the future of Britain

- We hope it will make people think about the opportunities they have in life and appreciate that chances are not dished out equally

- And we hope it will contextualise Barnardo’s message; because what they do is remarkable, but can’t be fully appreciated without asking people to think a little.

As you’d expect, the project plays out in various places across the web. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, etc. Plus you can follow the story and share your thoughts on The Teens’ Speech blog.   

And we've got a favour to ask, could you please tell any teens you know about the MySpace and YouTube channels.  

And if you want to see how Barnardo's everyday work helps to turn young lives around here's a few short video case studies we created to tell the complex human stories behind Barnardo's work.

Poke have clocked up lots of TV related design and consultancy projects over the years, working in some way or other with four of the five UK terrestrials over here and TNT, BBC Worldwide and 19 Entertainment across the pond. Broadband is in the process of turning all moving image based industries upside down,  just as it did with music before it. The landscape is no less complex and the answers to the “how do we stay relevant, profitable, interesting etc etc?” are no easier to answer. At Poke we love a challenge that combines the touchy-feely of design and digital culture with the business realities created by a fundamental shift in model.

So when the lovely people at the History Channel asked us to modernise their website’s proposition, structure, functionality and design, we jumped at the chance to step-up to some tall orders…

“Create a site to attract a young audience; balance the first steps to on-demand viewing with the current channel viewing; build a site that works across the family of channels and translates in other territories too.”

Well, we’re proud to tell you History.co.uk is now live and here’s how we squared up to the challenge…

On the front page we see an embedded video player present all the freshest stuff in collapsible boxes, stacked up in blog-like reverse chronological order. People now know what is new, the instant they arrive. This also doubled up as a smart way to include multiple banner ads that give a nod to the content they’re displayed next to (good for ad selling as a bit of context is pretty useful for targeting). Video plays in-place rather than always flipping back to a fixed position player (why does everybody do that?)

Show pages include full episodes and clips to get viewers interested, a natural focal point also for SEO as online audiences so often follow the show franchises rather than the channel’s . The trick was to keep people on the site, so there are promotions, competitions, photo galleries and loads of other juicy content to suck them back in time and time again. A neat hook-up button records onto your Sky Box via the site, making for a nimble user-experience. 

We added an interactive timeline to demonstrate how every programme is a snapshot of history, and with thousands of content snippets archived in the encyclopedia, it’s an incentive to stay put and keep reading.

We’re especially proud of our JavaScript TV schedule. We broke with formulaic Excel-style tradition to create a seamless listing that swooshes from left to right.

Over the coming months new content and features are going-up, plus pre and post roll ads on episodes and clips. This site is just the first to go live, with Military History, Crime and Investigation and Bio all set for a facelift soon. Oh, and if you’re in Poland, you’ll be seeing the History Channel site going live over there too. New sites will also roll out over History’s ROW (rest of world – ha, don’t you just love that) territories too.

Big thanks go to our pals at Lshift and Amberlight for building the backend and usability, respectively. And, of course, to the folks at the History Channel. It’s been an absolute honour.

So enough of the chat, head on over there and get digging.

History.co.uk

Poke are proud to present the brand new site for Manchester City Football Club. In the eye of the storm of new signings and a spanky new Umbro kit, we had to get a new website live. We just about got there, albeit it slightly later than planned (ahem!). It's all part of an exciting new era for the Club as they set-out to become a major player in world football.

The site is currently very much in phase 1. Before the whistle blows on the start of the new Premier League season, we'll have added a spanking new ticketing / seat selection area, fully integrated with the online shop - so that's a single basket experience for them that wants it. And, we're hoping the Match Day Centre, which plugs you right into the heart of the action, live, as it happens, is going to win us many new fans from around the globe.

It's been a mammoth project throughout 2009 featuring a huge Poke team, as well as a massive effort from our technical buddies at Aqueduct. Oh, and Endemol have just recently joined the party, creating some lovely videos for the site.

As with any of these things, having a great client is key to producing great work, and without getting all bum-crawly about it, we've been working with some of the best. Respect.

Visit: http://www.mcfc.co.uk

Japan gave us Manga, GameBoy, the Udon and young chicks who run round Shibuya dressed like USB sticks. So we nicked some of their cultural awesomeness, mixed it with a heavy dose of next level augmented reality shizzle and RubberDuckZilla.com was born.

Our brethren at Mother made this killer ad for Oasis (the drink for folk who don't like water) - and we were briefed to make RubberDuckZilla come alive online. So we took them at their word and make RubberDuckZilla come to life (in your hand and on your face).

AR is a bit flavour-of-the-monthy right now - but we wanted to try and push it somewhere interesting. So we've used it at the heart of a bunch of waterphobic Nipponophilic retro-games. Only 2 of the 4 sections of the site are live right now. The next sections are unlocked when major media partnerships kick-in next month.

Here's Chris playing Massive Aqua Rampage:



Oh and in case you didn't spot the URL it's RubberDuckZilla.com

Since we first posted about Bakertweet it's been on a bit of a roll.

It's been in real newspapers, blogs, trend websites, in Wired, on the radio, and someone even filmed a little segment for the tellyvision but that's not been shown yet (as far as we know).

However we were joking last week about how it hadn't yet 'made it' because it hadn't been featured in the Hindustan Times. (A few years ago the Global Rich List made it to the front page of the aforementioned paper and we've used that as the benchmark of PR achievement ever since).

So imagine our joy when we found that Bakertweet had made it onto the HT website. We're not sure if it's in the print edition, but our fingers  are crossed!

Just goes to show what happens when you execute a simple idea in the right way at the right time.

Cobra is a burp-light beer. Which means that whilst your on a session you can go on chatting without being interrupted by gassy interjections. Leading to ehanced banter-potential.

So we thought we'd go a bit further and create an iPhone app that allows you to be a banter-master even if you're not blessed in the wit department.

We pulled together a bunch of 'funny guys' and got them to fill the app with gags and blokey blah blah blah. Even if you don't stick it in front of your gob like in the video it's a sweet way to get funny stuff on your gadget.

Now you're talking.

Well maybe not doughnuts, but certainly lovely warm scones and scrumptious cupcakes.

Everyone knows the best time to get your baked goods is when they're fresh out the oven. So we figured that this could be a killer use of Twitter. Letting followers know that fresh goodies are ready right now. But bakeries don't want laptops or phones lying around in the kitchen. Flour, eggs and technology don't mix so well.

So we built BakerTweet.

It's a bespoke piece of hardware (with Arduino-based guts) that allows our friends at Albion across the road to select what's just been baked and ping the relevant Twitter message to local customers. Meaning that you can time your trips to Albion to pick up the freshest freshness. We're pulling together a 'how we did it' post for all you geeky types to check out. Just give us a day or two...

If you want to see what's coming out of the Albion's Oven you need to follow @albionsoven on Twitter and you'll be up to speed on the latest oven output.

Just a day old and followers are flocking to Albion - even No:10 has signed-up - so maybe Gordon and Barack are planning to drop in for tea and scones after business winds-up at the G20.

The new Orange Gold Spots ads are going to break really soon (we're still not really sure why they're called gold spots, and if you're confused, they're the things that go in front of the films at the cinema). The eagerly-awaited new cinema ads are the first ones to be made by Fallon, the originals came out of Mother.

Anyway, we've been developing a spanky new website to go alongside the new work, the first that the Orange Film Board have ever had - you'll be able to see that in a couple of weeks. And as part of the process we made a bunch of films. And now one of them has been put out as a teaser for the campaign. And it's been picked as the Campaign Live ad of the day. Blimey.

We've just given the Orange Film portal a revamp. Orange customers can now take advantage of 2-for-1 trips to the flicks in three simple steps. Find your film, find your cinema using the handy postcode search, then book your tickets. Done.

There's a glut of trailers to get stuck into. That should send your office productivity plummeting faster than Christian Bale's likability after *that* movie set rant. Have a gander at the latest film choices too. They're listed by the most watched and thee ones people want to see, which makes a change from top 10s compiled by a nameless know-all critic.

Plus there's the usual film fare too, including s'leb interviews and news, polls, quizzes and all that jazz.

And here's a tip. If you're doing an Orange Wednesday you can now double up on pizzas too. Hoorah. So you can either treat a friend, go Dutch and save cash, or, if you're a fat knacker, wait till your friend's gone home and chow down on two pizzas. All for the price of one. Thanks PizzaExpress (and Orange). 

Get in! Orange Film

So, the BAFTAs are back. Kate will be crying her way up the red carpet and Mickey will be wrestling with security, but who will win the coveted Orange Rising Star Award? On the Orange BAFTA website you can see biographies and clips of the Rising Star nominees in action, and you can vote for who you want to win. Oh, and there's a spanky prize for one lucky voter. If that isn't enough, check out the lovely Myleene Klass and her red carpet interviews from last year. We're spreading the word in the Orange Film Clubs on Facebook and Bebo where you can have another go at winning prizes by filming your own BAFTA acceptance speech.