Behind the Scenes: Amnesia and Lynx

The Lynx brand has been built on a solid basis consisting of beautiful women and… not much more! Australian agency Amnesia didn’t fail to remember a winning formula when it came to the brand’s new website.

No disrespect intended to those who live in the Midlands, but swapping the windswept streets of Leicester with the sun-soaked scenery of Sydney, Australia must sound like a dream to most. In 1996, that dream was made a reality for Iain McDonald, co-founder of interactive agency Amnesia. And with clients like Pepsi, Xbox and Lynx on its books, his dream has never looked in danger of fading. In 1998, McDonald co-founded Amnesia along with Terry Carney. Amnesia is the Australian office of Avenue A | Razorfish, and has been awarded the AdNews Interactive Agency of the Year in Australia for the last two years running. Charged with the task of bringing the Lynx brand firmly into the advanced digital domain, Amnesia set about creating a site that would keep users coming back regularly and also prompt them to tell their
friends about it. The Lynx Effect website has certainly accomplished that, with a multitude of interactive components. There’s 101 Lynx things to do before you die on the Profile page, a minigame that goes under the intriguing name of 3 Girls, 2 Cans, not to mention the pages that encourage you to sign, clean and zoom in on large images of bikini-clad women. Don’t waste time in a search engine – go there directly with www.lynxeffect.com.au.

IM: Iain McDonald, executive creative director and co-founder of Amnesia

WD: To kick off, could you tell us a little about Amnesia and the type of creative work you do?
IM: It sounds like a cliché, but like most creative agencies we like to try to get closer to the ‘bleeding edge’ and push the boundaries hard (both creatively and technically). It means we often go through a bit of pain getting there, but the rewards are high when it comes together. In Australia it’s a highly contested creative space, but we’re lucky enough to have some amazing clients like Pepsi, Disney, Smirnoff and Xbox,
who keep us on our toes day to day. Having a great technical team also makes life easier during the ideas phase of a project.

WD: Regarding the Lynx site, how did Amnesia come to work on the project?
IM: Lynx is one of the ‘golden creative advertising accounts’ in Australia and we were one of five creative digital agencies invited to pitch a little over a year ago. It was a huge win for us. Interestingly, we presented very little creative at the pitch, and no finished artwork at all. We went in heavy on strategy and big ideas. It was slightly risky, especially when you know that competing agencies will be presenting amazing
visuals, but a great idea presented in a compelling way can sometimes do the trick, which luckily for us, it did.

WD: What was the original brief for the project, and how close was the finished product?
IM: Surprisingly, we did not have the usual client brief of ‘build a website’. In fact, the Lynx Effect site was born out of an overarching digital strategy rather than a specific task/objective. Lynx’s task to us was little more than: ‘We want to do amazing things in digital – tell us how’. The site was a part of the answer, but as the newly appointed digital agency, we had to think well outside just what the website would look like. As for the idea behind the Lynx Effect site, our strategy had revealed that all you really needed to show was the body of a hot girl and a can of Lynx. Job done! I think the final site we delivered is pretty much true to that. It’s so ridiculously simple, but I think it works.

WD: When working on the Lynx project, what roles did Amnesia take on in the site development? How active were Lynx throughout the process?
IM: Naturally, the client has to buy into the ideas and sign off the finished product, but in-between that, we own the whole creative process. It’s easier when a client trusts you to do this, and Lynx gave us that. Nick Boyden, the brand manager for Lynx, is a great person to work with – he’s a ‘go for it’ kind of guy. It makes the job easier, although the pressure is on to get it right.

WD: Flash is the primary technology used throughout the entire site. What obstacles/problems/issues, ie optimisation, did this introduce to the design/development team?
IM: It was important that the site felt very simple to use. This often means that you end up spending more time getting the technology to work. We didn’t hit  any major bumps, but we’ve been ironing out a fewcrinkles over the last six months. I think that when we launched, we were one of the first sites to really use the Flash full-screen feature – this took a bit of work to get the UI spot-on, but it all went pretty well.

WD: The whole site is awash with great ideas that are clever and well executed. One of our favourites is Dirty Girls, but we also loved Fakeovers, Sign the Girl and Boss Mode. How much input came from Amnesia with regards to these elements?
IM: The ideas are all from within the Amnesia team, and it was hilarious going through brainstorming on this job… we probably have about 50 more concepts lined up that we’d love to squeeze in. That’s the beauty of the site… it is really just a shell waiting for content. Perfect for a fast-moving brand like Lynx.

WD: What type of design assets did the Lynx people provide Amnesia with, and how much did you have to create yourselves?
IM: We had some can shots and logos. That’s aboutit! Everything else you see, we shot or designed from scratch – with the exception of the supplied TVCs in campaigns.

WD: How many designers/developers were used to finish the project, and what role did each of them take?
IM: In all, I think around 18 people have been involved (there are around 70 at Amnesia in total). The team was split across Account Management, Strategy, Creative, Interactive and Dev. There are about eight still active on this site – and it gets updated fairly regularly. We
have a big cultural mix of people in here, heaps from the UK and quite a few from the US and Asia. It’s one big melting pot and a lot of fun.

WD: What was the timescale for the project? How long was Amnesia given to produce the finished product, and at what stage did you start testing?
IM: The initial site took about ten weeks to build; since then, we’ve just been adding in new girls/pages/widgets as new campaigns come out. We have bursts of activity lasting around six weeks, and then we go back into planning for the next ‘girl’.

WD: What kind of testing was done in terms of browser compatibility, and was the site tested across desktop and mobile platforms before thesite went live ?
IM: We test everything we humanly can on staging servers, then we keep testing after it goes live and after each update. Most of the browsers are solid for this kind of site. It’s a tougher gig on mobile, so right now the content mobile is very thin compared to the main Flash site. We enter into these projects expecting issues to occur at some point – it makes life more bearable when you expect the worst.

WD: The site is obviously a promotion that runs in conjunction with other promotional material, ie TV adverts. What is the expected life cycle of the website, and what happens to the finished site when its life cycle is complete?
IM: We think the site has a minimum two-year life expectancy, but we’d like to keep it going if people stay enthusiastic and the feedback is good. We’ve got loads of new girls already shot, ready to go into the site over the coming months. Personally, I’d love to see the Australian version go global… that would be the best result. The site has a very flexible framework, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed.

WD: Finally, what up-and-coming projects, obviously ones that you can talk about, does Amnesia have in the pipeline?
IM: We must be the luckiest agency in the world moving forward. Not only do we have amazing clients (and an office only a short drive from Bondi Beach), I think we have an unfair advantage being owned by one of the world’s largest digital agencies (Avenue A | Razorfish… which is now owned by Microsoft), so we have access to some really cool technology long before our competitors. You can lay some pretty safe bets
around the sort of projects that might lead us down the track. We are a creative bunch at heart, but we all possess the geek gene, so the future is pretty exciting right now.

See if you possess the Lynx Effect by visiting Amnesia’s cheeky web creation at www.lynxeffect.com.au.