KPMG tasked Eight’s iPad publishing team with producing a digital version of their printed report. The digital version contains content customised for iPad viewing. Eight redesigned the report for enhanced tablet performance and usability, and added a host of extra features including video, interactive charts, a live news feed and audio from a KPMG podcast.

“KPMG is committed to sharing market insights as a value-add to our clients,” says Michael Hurle, Senior Marketing Manager with KPMG China. “Eight’s work on this app has helped us share our knowledge of doing business in China with a wider market. The ability to exploit additional digital communications channels is a great complement to the work of our internal team and our existing operations.

“We believe this report is particularly suited to promotion through an app given the breadth of interest in China that exists across the world; particularly as there are few comparable sources of free business information about China currently available on iPads. Most multinationals have had a presence in China for many years, but there is now a much wider universe of businesses that are keen to understand the business culture in China and also how best to tap into opportunities,” says Hurle.

Jonathan Magee, Account Director at Eight adds, “We took KPMG’s existing report and enriched it by adding additional multimedia elements from KPMG and building some of our own interactive components. We wanted to take it beyond a pdf conversion, which just doesn’t take advantage of the capabilities of the medium.”

The new issue features a three-minute “behind the scenes” video produced by New york-based fashion director Daniel Garriga, covering a fashion photography reportage in-the-making for the printed version of the magazine. This “produce-once, use-many-times” approach is central to Eight’s enhanced content production capabilities for their clients.

The Fall/Winter 2011 issue of i66 – the bilingual style magazine for Hang Lung Properties’ shopping malls in China – also includes interactive articles, HD image galleries and exclusive clips from the grand opening of Parc 66, Hang Lung’s newest property in Jinan, China.

“It’s a great time to be working on tablet publishing. It really is a new generation of media, combining the focused editorial content of a magazine with the entertainment features of a TV channel and the interactivity of a digital application,” says Dave Wong, i66 Editor and Head of Editorial at Eight.

“Adding features like a making-of video, or additional footage from our travel photographers brings new depth and extended dimensions to the magazine,” says Wong. “They are fun for our creative teams since they allow us to build much more dynamic content than a printed magazine. And readers and viewers are already telling us that they love it.”

Eight is also making back issues of i66 available in the iPad format. All issues are free to download. Visit the iTunes store to download i66 for iPad now.

Fresh findings were compiled by Eight’s financial communications practice during several international assignments this year, through interviews with top corporate finance professionals, sell-side investment banking analysts and buy-side fund managers.

“In the finance sector, we’ve never been as data-rich and time-poor as we are now. Communicating with both sides of the brain is essential. For the first time, we’re measuring with hard data the impact of design,” says Jonathan Magee, Account Director at Eight.

Another recent study in the United States has drawn similar conclusions, entitled “When and how aesthetics influence financial decisions”. From the study’s results, the authors found that, “including an additional colour throughout in a corporate financial report will have the same impact on the investment ranking as a 20% improvement in revenue from the previous year.”

Investors are increasingly relying on visual design to help them with mission-critical decision making, enabling them to quickly isolate the relevant information and core stats. As the number of available reports, emails, delivery channels, devices and data sets rises, financial stories are drowning in a deluge of noise.

“The pay cheques of established analysts are often hitting six-figures – add in the support expenses, and the unit cost to produce a single research report soars to astounding levels,” says Chris Fjelddahl, Partner at Eight. “Yet, most are structured and designed like everyone else’s reports. It’s very commoditised. But this mindset seems to be changing very fast.”

Eight, who also designed the brand strategy, identity and communications for Odin Property, chose to engage acclaimed New Zealand designer Jamie McLellan to design the chair to enrich the living spaces of Odin’s growing portfolio of mountain resort properties in Niseko, Japan.

“The brief was to draw from the pillars of the brand, and to fuse the simplicity of Scandinavian design with the aesthetic sensitivity of Japanese culture,” says McLellan. “I must say I am very pleased with the outcome, I always favour pure and essential silhouettes and an honest use of materials.”

The award marks a successful brand extension for a property brand, a leading-edge strategy advocated by Eight in working with developers large and small. “Creating a capsule collection of furniture with pure lines and natural materials complements and enriches our brand story”, says Odin Partner Nicolas Gontard.

“Eight’s philosophy is to start with the brand and anchor everything around it. From there, the brand drives all aspects of the property – the architecture, interiors, the furniture, the marketing and communications. With the brand leading the creation of stunning design, the media exposure gained in magazines, blogs, awards and other channels strengthens both the Odin brand and the desire for our products. We are obviously thrilled with the award, and I personally think Jamie has created a timeless classic.”

The New Zealand Best Design Awards is an annual showcase of excellence in graphic, spatial, product and interactive design.

The Odin Chair has a dedicated website designed by Eight at www.odin-living.com.

About Odin

Odin Property is a boutique developer of high-end mountain resort properties in Japan. Situated in the heart of the village of Niseko, in snow-rich Hokkaido, their growing portfolio includes residential, hospitality and retail properties. With a unique emphasis on natural luxury, their vision is to achieve the highest standards for architectural design, impeccable interior design and environmental responsibility.

www.odin-property.com

www.odin-living.com

www.kimamaya.com

www.nisekobarn.com

“An iPad app should be more than just a PDF with page-turn animations. It is important to fully leverage the capabilities of the medium,” says Chris Fjelddahl, Partner at Eight. “Whether it’s an annual report or a high-fashion magazine, you need to not only add the videos, slideshows, etc., but also craft the user-experience to align with the content.”

Eight is currently working on several tablet assignments for a range of clients and product types – including lifestyle magazines and investor relations publications – that will be released later this Autumn.

The MerComm International ARC Awards, now in its 25th year, promotes excellence in annual reporting. This is the fifth consecutive year that Eight’s work has been recognised by MerComm, which held its annual awards dinner ceremony on 22 September in New York City.

“Our team is thrilled with the awards, and the recognition they bring to Noble is great – they work very closely with us in the creative process and are always keen to push the envelope to produce clear, striking content in their investor communications,” says Jonathan Magee, Account Director at Eight. “Building on this year’s theme of ‘Powered from Within’, we sent photographers around the world – to Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China and the United States – to capture some of the people who manage and run Noble’s local operations. Noble’s strength has always been its people, and we wanted to put them front and centre.”

Eight produced print and digital versions of Noble’s 2011 Annual Report, including a standalone Annual Report mini-site. This year saw the creation of a lighter summary version in print, with key financial highlights and a CD containing the full report and financial spreadsheets. This new version, coupled with the other digital components, enabled Noble to reduce the paper used and transportation requirements, aligning with their global carbon neutrality initiative.

“As the cornerstone of our investor relations (IR) communications and commitment to sound governance, we need our Annual Report to be a clear and open channel to shareholders,” says Ricardo Leiman, CEO of Noble Group. “We are proud of the partnership we’ve developed with Eight over the years, which has helped strengthen and sharpen our IR communications.”

“This practice continues to rise very fast and our visual finance story has resonated well within the sector – surprising for a sector generally seen as conservative. Clients are in fact increasingly keen to break the mould and find more engaging ways to tell their stories,” says Chris Fjelddahl, Partner at Eight. “We’ve recently been retained by a bulge-bracket London-based investment bank and this momentum is continuing – the launch of this dedicated site is another step in that process.”

New financial communications and strategy consulting division opens its doors to service global players

Check out the news release >

“We already work with 1 in 7 of the world’s leading investment banks and publicly-listed Fortune 500 clients. It was a natural next step for us to formalise this as a dedicated specialist division,” says Managing Partner Chris Fjelddahl.

Concurrently, Eight has divested from a number of low-margin business assets in traditional marketing services to focus on high-margin services and sectors. To cope with the accelerating expansion, the company is actively recruiting to build upon its in-house talent pool, in particular qualified business writers, multi-lingual editors, digital developers, video specialists and graphic designers.

“Our team is now spending a lot of time in London advising the boards of banks in Canary Wharf, redesigning equity research publications in Singapore and Seoul, building websites in Kuala Lumpur, and developing financial applications for mobile and iPad here in Hong Kong,” continues Fjelddahl.

“The edge of this division is the in-depth understanding they have of the inner workings of listed companies and the sell-side/buy-side. We speak with analysts and fund managers almost daily. This launch is really the culmination of work we’ve been doing for the past 5-6 years.”

The new unit offers strategy consulting and corporate brand communications programmes: corporate identity, financial reporting, digital communications and advertising. Clients include pre-IPO and listed companies, investment banks, fund and asset managers and insurance companies.

“Outside the events and press services offered by public relations firms, there is an almost complete vacuum of specialists in financial communications,” says Account Director Jonathan Magee. “Our data visualisation expertise, for example, is a competence in very high demand.

“The financial services sector is hugely commoditised,” continues Magee. “And we’re not the ones saying that. The banks themselves are telling us this. Brand differentiation is a hot topic.”

Marketing Magazine names winners based on feedback from more than 1,000 independent marketing professionals asked to name their top three preferred firms. This is the second year running that Eight has won the Brand Consultancy and Creative Agency awards.

“It’s great to see that our work continues to be noticed and valued,” says Chris Fjelddahl, Partner at Eight. “Our brand consulting is done at very senior levels, most often in the boardrooms with CEOs and executive management teams. And we’ve recently seen a rise in the scale of assignments. We’ve been called to advise large investment banks in the City of London for example. And the same goes for some of the large publicly listed companies.”