[interview] the project story
Project Overview
Today, the offshore oil and gas industry faces serious challenges. Two-thirds of projects are over budget, delayed or cancelled, and three out of four industry leaders agree that assessing risk and returns on major projects is a huge concern. There is an urgent need for change.
It’s time for a new kind of consultancy.
At the end of 2014, four founding members of staff had a groundbreaking model of consultancy in mind. They had a clear vision and the backing of two industry giants, but lacked a name, identity, website, office, and employees. The challenge for branding agency, Bisqit, was to create a standout brand and launch the business to market in next to no time.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Matt Cridland – Creative Director
Michail Kowal – Brand Consultant and Design Director
Britt Erwin – Account Director
Helen Lines – Senior Account Manager
Anastasia Grawe – Senior Account Executive
Ben Jones – Mid-weight Designer
Project Brief
With only a new consultancy model in mind the challenge was set - to launch a business in just two months With a goal of disrupting and transforming the struggling oil and gas sector, this business needed a standout brand. Bisqit were brought on board to create such a brand by delivering a name, visual identity, website, a whole raft of launch collateral and much more.
Bisqit’s PR partner, H+K Strategies had established a communications platform built around ‘Powerful Thinking’, so Bisqit set to work with them to help bring Powerful Thinking to life.
We named the company io, a reference to a moon of Jupiter that played a significant role in the development of astronomy in the 17th Century, just as we hope that io will play a significant role in the development of offshore oil and gas in the 21st Century.
Powerful Thinking is all about experts combining both left and right brain thinking, we reflect this tension through the hemispheres of the logo, split imagery style and provocative headlines. We then decide to turn Powerful Thinking into a constant flow of fresh, mentally and visually stimulating content that lives on the io website.
Project Innovation/Need
During our competitor research we soon arrived at our simple but effective benchmark; if it could work for another company in the sector it wouldn’t work for io; we needed to be bold, memorable and different - and not use any generic pictures of oil rigs!
This was reflected through our choice of name, brand colours, tone of voice, hero imagery, design and build of the io website.
Through the website we continued to evolve the brand's visual style by incorporating photography and illustration and brought movement to the brand’s split style imagery through parallax scrolling. This level of aesthetic detail is rarely seen in branding and communications in the oil and gas sector.
Furthermore we brought Powerful Thinking to life by creating two new pieces of content each week comprising of articles, opinion pieces, animated GIFs, vines, looped videos and infographics. Such branded content that sector audiences do not associate with the conservative world of oil and gas.
The Powerful Thinking hub not only answered the io brief for a constant flow of fresh content, but also allows io to act as their own publisher and position themselves as provocative thought leaders within the sector.
Design Challenge
The challenges of this brief were threefold – first we needed to create a brand that was not only a new, innovative and stand out brand, but also one that is ultimately accepted by the industry.
Second, there was a crucial need for both employees as well as clients. This brand needed to speak to both new talent and new business. The target was set at 12 employees and one client within the first six months.
And third, to top it all off we had to create and deliver a brand that answered and solved these problems in only a matter of months.
Effectiveness
io oil & gas consulting soft launched on January 1st 2015 across social channels, leading with teaser statements from historic powerful thinkers. A full launch followed later that month with a film and website, coinciding with the CEO’s appearance as a thought leader on Sky News and ITV.
After a successful launch, the website has gained 114,000 page views to date, and an extremely high average viewing time of more than three minutes. These figures are simply unheard of for a B2B brand. Furthermore, the website has succeeded in helping meet io’s ambition to attract new talent. On the launch day alone nearly 500 requests for more information and 20 job enquiries were received. Nearly 800 applications have now been received to date.
As for the target to recruit 12 employees this has been met and exceeded, io are now already 25 strong, with plans to continue to grow at an even faster rate across global locations.
Graphic Design - Identity and Branding
This award celebrates creative and innovative design in the traditional or digital visual representation of ideas and messages. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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