Oliver McIntyre Recommendation - How I love to work with Creative Executives

Oliver McIntyre was the account executive at Raketu who I worked with to create the online ads and presence for

Raketu

Here is how he described the working relationship

Hollywood and the Cartoonist that changed my life:

Four months ago we embarked on the task of reinventing the Raketu world. We needed to differentiate the brand and transform it from one that merely offered a great service to one that had a personality. It had to entertain, be engaging and communicate the raft of different services to the very broad 15-75 year old target group. The brand had to be truly global.

In the ad agency world where I had spent all my life we always started by defining a brand’s USPS before drafting a strategy/positioning. However, Raketu had multiple usp’s and all appealed to different elements of the target audience. Every member of the family has different communication needs and I had to figure out how to show which aspects of Raketu would appeal to each.

My want was to create a Simpsons type cartoon family online, a family that could show off different elements of the brand/product.
The brief from my peers was to establish the Raketu family and drive downloads and users ASAP.

Then in mid November 2006 I talked on the phone to this cool guy called John K. The guy didn’t really say a lot during our initial telephone conversations but he was funny, talented and most importantly, he got it. I knew he was “the one” that would help me to develop the Raketu family.


Just before Christmas John came to NYC. Meeting in a café on the corner of 38&8th we started to discuss/develop the family. I didn’t give him a break all day and I remember the guy must have had 20 Diet Cokes throughout the day.


John suggested creating a mascot, along the lines of Tony The Tiger for Raketu. He came up with Raketeena the space imp. Raketeena lives in the far future and she visits our time to show today’s primitive humans about how this great brand called Raketu can make their lives better. She would explain to each member of the family in a funny way which aspects of Raketu could work for them.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/raketu-roughs-and-pencils-cartoon.html

Raketu does so many things that it would take a lot of patience to read through pages of text, so having animated cartoons do the explanations in an entertaining way was the perfect solution for us. Who likes reading manuals? But everyone loves cartoons!
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/raketu-universal-instant-messaging.html

The role of the blog campaign was two fold, first to get some brand understanding and awareness here in the US and secondly to test the Raketeena concept. When we first put up the banner, the click through rate went through the roof and so we knew we were on to something hot and we decided to then redesign our website and use John's characters to pitch our products and services.

http://www.raketu.com/en/index.php

The past two months have been awesome and have had the late night calls, the occasional drama, the constant explanations but I have to say I have really enjoyed working with John and his team. He’s a true pro, and I want to thank him and his team as I think they have done an amazing job.


Sincerely,

Oliver McIntyre,
VP Marketing, Raketu

http://voiptelephonyservice.blogspot.com/2007/03/raketus-sexy-new-look-multi-messenger.html