Turn Key Blog. Things we've done and the things we love.

Creative Director Richard Colvill loves… the work of Graphic Designer Dana Tanamachi

Dana Tanamachi is a graphic designer and custom chalk letterer living in Brooklyn, New York. We love this style she has developed and so do the likes of Adidas, Ralph Lauren & Google to mention a few.

Our blog header has taken inspiration from her work!

See www.danatanamachi.com for more examples and follow her on Twitter

It’s time for the latest instalment in the Porsche Strasse ‘Seven Sins’ series and this genius gem is from Turn Key Designer, Sean Simmonds.

‘Greed’ is a simple, but very effective concept which we think demonstrates the point perfectly and after all, who doesn’t dream of having a different car for every day of the week?!

Leeds Met final year student Will reflects on his two weeks with Turn Key PR…

I first came across Turn Key three weeks ago when my tutor spoke highly of them at a Leeds Met lecture.  The TK team were looking for PR students to help out and my tutor advised us all to apply for the job. I’m a third year student studying Public Relations at Leeds Met and have spent a year in the industry at a national heart charity in Leeds, so I thought the opportunity to work at a brilliant innovative agency like Turn Key was too good to turn down! Within a day of the job being posted online I had sent a covering letter and CV; as the saying goes, the early bird catches the worm!

After coming in for an interview and speaking to Samara and Claire, I knew this could be a perfect piece of experience working within a well-known agency – so I was delighted when they offered me the chance to help them out!

Since starting my placement two weeks ago, I’ve worked on a variety of different campaigns for a diverse range of clients.  The most interesting job was promoting a new gourmet snack to influential bloggers and journalists – what a way to start the week!

Overall, I couldn’t have asked for a friendlier, more welcoming group of people to work with. It’s been such an interesting experience spending time as part of an agency filled with designers, web developers, marketers and PR professionals all under one roof! The knowledge and confidence I’ve got from helping Claire’s PR team has been brilliant and I can’t thank Carys, Claire and Samara enough!

Thank you to everyone at TK and good luck with anything you’re working on in the future!

Pinterest is possibly the most buzzed-about social media tool on the market and is set to take the online world by storm. For those of you who haven’t heard of the platform it gives users the chance to capture and organise images from the web onto their own “virtual pinboard”.

Considering that Pinterest is still an invite only platform, it’s has seen tremendous growth over the last two months. According to research company Shareaholic, Pinterest has over 4.9 million users and has driven more referral traffic in the last two months than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined!

Pinterest has seen many players making use of the website with more and more American brands and even a few UK companies starting to recognise the platform’s potential. In the last week it has gained a rather well-known social media user; the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg himself! He has posted very little content so far, but if he’s interested then surely more will follow. I know that we are desperate to get signed up and are looking forward to seeing Pinterest grow and grow in popularity!

We may be going a couple of years back, but as its social media week we couldn’t resist a shout out to the Old Spice campaign, which may very well go down in history as one of the most popular digital marketing campaigns amongst this generation of man.

Old Spice wasn’t particularly well known for its interesting social media campaigns, until they burst onto the scene with an incredibly funny viral video featuring actor Isaiah Mustafa as ‘Old Spice man’.

This impressive and well-worked rebranding campaign helped give Old Spice a younger image, and we think its a sterling example of digital marketing at its finest.

Innocent helps drinkers label their love

To celebrate yesterday’s day of love Innocent Smoothie s, renowned for its witty and imaginative packaging, got its drinkers in the mood for Valentine’s Day by offering consumers the chance to create their own ‘love label’ to wrap around their favourite smoothie bottle. After creating a heart-warming message drinkers could either print out their personalised label, or share it on and – a nice little idea to get those creative juices flowing.

Heineken celebrates Valentine’s Day with ‘The Serenade’ Facebook app

Heineken is well known for its engaging and creative social media campaigns, so it was no surprise to see them jump on the day-of-love band wagon and help internet users share the love. Heineken created the Facebook app to let consumers send personalised songs to potential partners, inviting them on a Valentine’s Day date.

They’ve also spread the word on , where millions of people from across the globe will be able to participate and create their own songs via this viral platform. Check it out

Spread the love

This year, Marmite teamed up with renowned artist Pete Fowler to create a series of e-cards for users to send to their loved ones this Valentine’s Day. After ‘liking’ the Marmite fan page fans got the chance to send three bright and quirky messages of love, these included – “I need you in my life”, “spread the love” and “let’s get together”.

This clever campaign drove people to the Facebook page and encouraged Marmite lovers to share recipes, videos and much more to win fantastic prizes – now that’s some serious social love!

Our hats go off to Royal Dutch airline KLM, who executed a brilliant social media campaign targeting bored passengers waiting for their flight.

Passengers were encouraged to check-in via Twitter and Foursquare and were awarded with a personalised travel gifts from the tech savvy airline – nice!

Get your hashtags and viral videos at the ready as today marks the beginning of Social Media Week.  With over 1,000 events taking place in 12 cities around the world, this year promises to be the biggest SMW to date.

Here at Turn Key we are social media mad so every day this week we will be showcasing some of our favourite social media campaigns from the memorable, to the most creative.

To get the week started we have the PR team’s personal fave – Yeo Valley’s Tractor Factor.  In February 2011, Yeo Valley launched an official search for the next farming number one single.  Farmers were asked to upload their rendition of a chart song and the video with the most public votes went on to be crowned the Tractor Factor winner.

The worthy winners were DJ Wooly (ft. Will.I.Lamb) with Plough On – we love it!!

Keep an eye on the TK Twitter for tomorrow’s top pick #TKsocialfix

Whether you are currently wading through snow or not, it’s impossible to escape the ‘cold snap’ of weather; with reports of travel disruption, commuter chaos and frozen pipes dominating both the media and general conversation. But what opportunities can the snow bring other than the inevitable boost in sales of sledges and wellington boots?! A quick Google search came up with these little advertising gems – the ‘polo stamp’ is our personal favourite – but what do you think?