rehabstudio Joins Aarra
Joining Aarra’s portfolio of premium interactive talent is rehabstudio, a London- and Belfast-based shop with a hand-crafted approach to digital creative and production.
rehab does it all — interactive, user experience design, technology, front end, back end, mobile web, you name it.
And unlike some other blokes, they’ll take you out for a whiskey when they’re done.
Okay, two whiskeys. Three, maybe three.
rehab was founded as a collaboration between creative guru Tim Rodgers (below left) and technology specialist (*cough* hacker) Jurgen Prause (below right). Together they created a working philosophy called “Hand Built Digital,” and it governs rehab’s entire thinking and process.
Hand Built Digital
“Hand Built Digital is diverse groups of highly specialized experts collaborating openly and seamlessly,” rehab describes it. “It’s our mantra, it underpins everything we do. Approaching each brief as unique and building a bespoke solution to suit.
From strategic understanding, design, technology and engineering to the way we work with people. It brings a tangible, analogue feel to the work.”
- Strategic insight
- Expert craftsmanship
- People first
- Transparent & collaborative
One of the latest and most successful products of rehab’s process was the groundbreaking YouTube experiment, “Life in a Day. The channel started as a couple scratches on a page when Google Creative Lab approached rehab for a treatment. It became an FWA Site of the Day, with over 37 million views and the record for most video uploads for a YouTube campaign.
The campaign solicited footage from users over a single day, to be edited into a crowd-sourced feature film by director Kevin MacDonald (The Last King of Scotland) and produced by Ridley Scott.
“We wanted users to get a feeling that the campaign was live, so we focused our energy on designing data visualization views that showcased locality, time and emotion,” said rehab.
On July 24th,2010, 80,000 users from 192 countries uploaded over 450,000 hours of footage. “On filming day we knew there would be a lot of activity on the site. So to turn that activity into participation we created a simple tagging system that geo-located each video on the 3D globe, and a heat-map view that showed which countries were more active, in a bid to encourage users from all corners of the globe.”The final 90-minute film contains 1,025 videos.
It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was simultaneously streamed live on the YouTube channel on January 28, 2011.
The channel has 37M views and counting. During the live premiere, Life in a Day trended on Twitter as one of the top three topics for 48 hours. Read some press about it here and here, or go behind the scenes with rehab here.
Other projects rehab has under its belt include collaborations with BlackBerry, Last.fm, Red Bull, D&Ad, Google, and Universal Music Group. They’ve teamed up along the way with Publicis, Saatchi & Saatchi, Draftfcb, Fallon, Profero, The New Cruelty, and several other agencies.
The result?
- 4 FWA SOTD awards (Google Life in a Day, Cadbury’s Spots V Stripes, Google AdWords and Doritos iD3)
- an IAB Creative Showcase Award plus recognition as a New York Advertising Awards Finalist for Doritos iD3
- Top marks at the Deloitte 2010 Technology Fast Track 50, with top 5 in Northern Ireland & top 50 in the UK.
Before kicking back to toast their success, we sat down with Tim to find out more about where exactly rehab’s beer money comes from.
Some of us Yanks don’t know rehabstudio yet. What are you guys known for?
Irreverence. Intelligence. Ironing. Honesty. Beards. Craic. And our work. You might have seen our most recent project for YouTube, Life in a Day.
Craic?
Google it.
How was rehab born?
Two Irishmen walk into a bar. One’s a hacker, one’s a designer. After several days of non-stop partying, they decide it’s time for rehab.
Agencies in the US have a lot of choices stateside. Why hop the pond?
rehab is the aggregation of 2 companies in one: a world-class development company with 25 of the best devs in the world at our Belfast office, and an award-winning creative agency in London with 15 creatives and producers. The result is that we can handle any type of project, be it heavy dev, purely creative strategy and design, or (ideally) both.
We’ve been working with US-based brands and agencies for 2 years now and have disciplined systems in place to compensate for the time difference.
In addition we’ve developed our own backend campaign platform software which we bring to the party, it’s a robust suite of applications to allow agencies to manage and control modern digital campaigns in-house.
What’s your ideal job?
We’re huge fans of Ice Road Truckers.
Not a microsite or anything like that then?
Nah, Ice Road Truckers is better.
What are you looking forward to in your new relationship with Aarra?
Meeting with, working with and having a beer with some of the best creative talent in North America.
