The Communication Matrix

Explaining Exchanges

NL-ix are the sandal-wearing Oompa Loompas behind the Internet. They don’t just run one of the world’s largest peering exchanges, they were also the first to distribute it geographically, offering a range of interconnection services across most of Europe. But they could never quite explain this – or their many other brilliant ideas – concisely. …

Professional Focus

Canon make some of the world’s best professional photographic equipment. This is one of the main things that drives consumers to buy their products. We gathered stories of high-end users and products into the European HQ’s first ever online press pack program. The quality of the images and the personal stories of the photographers –…

Liquidity

Diageo has several dozen leading brands and sales operations in more than 180 countries. Implementing new software and management processes – and the working culture that goes with them – is a major operation. We worked with the Diageo HQ team to design and launch an effective global campaign to promote next generation Sales &…

Big Year for Beer

The year that InBev took over Anheuser Busch to become AB InBev was a milestone for the world’s beer industry. Belgian-Brazilian brewer InBev (the second largest beer company in the world) acquired the iconic American brewer Anheuser-Busch (owner of Budweiser and the third largest beer company in the world) and also a custom rolling papers…

An App in the Ocean

About 3700 apps launch every day. As Android Apple and Amazon head for the 6 million mark (and Chinese developers add several million more) it’s worth asking what happens to them all. Smartphone users open 10 apps a day on average and 30 apps a month. While those numbers are not growing fast, users are…

Enter the Matrix

The Communication Matrix is an international network of freelance multi-disciplinary experts. It was established in Amsterdam in 2003 and is now based in Scotland and Spain. We offer practical advice and implementation in a wide variety of languages, disciplines and sectors. Because we are freelance, we can scale for anything from one-off projects to full international programs….

Virtual Reality

Immediate business benefits are the real drivers of change, but in the case of virtualization and the cloud, these benefits have not always been easy to express. We helped Microsoft overcome this challenge in Europe, promoting their Hyper V/Dynamic Data Center products to partner CXOs in the hosting and independent software segments. Working with a…

Peace through noise

We developed the messaging for Amnesty International’s Make Some Noise campaign, which issued new covers of John Lennon tracks by artists like Stevie Wonder, REM and The Black-Eyed Peas. The rights to the tracks were donated by Yoko Ono, and the campaign supported Amnesty’s Minute of Noise for human rights urging a new generation to…

Award-winning

We worked for several years with Equinix, the world’s largest carrier-neutral data center operator. Initially, as they established their reputation in Europe, we worked with the CMO as a bolt-on Quality Control office for their marketing and media relations program in EMEA, making sure that the messaging and style of announcements from multiple agencies across…

Opening Lines

A good opening seduces like a winning chat-up line. In advertising they call it AIDA (Attention-Interest-Desire-Action!). “It was the day my grandmother exploded” (Iain Banks, The Crow Road) is up there in terms of impact. Or Anthony Burgess, in Earthly Powers makes you want to know the character more: “It was the afternoon of my…

Options for Africa

As part of a broader internal communications programme for Celtel International (now part of Airtel) the first borderless network operator in Africa, we were asked to support the launch of a company-wide stock option programme. Stock options can be confusing even to people well-versed in stocks and shares. To make sure everybody understood how and…

A Very Broad Church

A project for an old friend, this was a short workshop to focus on messages and future directions for the remarkable Union Chapel in Islington. The Chapel does a lot of different things for a lot of different people; it’s a world-leading performance venue, a miracle of non-conformist architecture (hence the breadth – it’s circular)…

Driving Sustainability

When it comes to sustainable car design and manufacture Toyota could claim to have written the book (in fact on this occasion it was a brochure on the subject written by The Communication Matrix). Their claims to sustainability are based on years of refinement, superhuman effort and analysis, as well as a deep-seated culture and…

Rewarding Tech Start-ups

The Deloitte Technology Fast 500 is an extremely effective global ranking and awards marketing tool for Deloitte’s Technology, Media and Telecoms division. Based on national ‘Fast 50’ programs, the Fast 500 charts and celebrates the fastest-growing young tech businesses by global region. Key to successful exploitation is the interpretation of ICT trends from the ranking…

All Systems GO

For many years TomTom has been synonymous with satellite navigation, developing ground-breaking software, devices, and business-to-business apps. The Communication Matrix was the company’s go-to content provider during one of the most exciting phases in the company’s history, when the first ever portable navigation device – the TomTom GO – was launched and the company was…

Millions of Trees, Thousands of Lives

Why plant a tree when you could save a life? By supporting TreeMad you can do both. After 25 years of working with and listening to the poorest communities in Madagascar, Scottish charity Feedback Madagascar’s TreeMad project addresses the short and the long-term threats to the people, plants and animals of Madagascar hand-in-hand. The program…

Inspiration

Part of the Danone Group, Nutricia Advance Medical Nutrition is a very successful specialist supplier of nutritional products which improve the health of people with a variety of diseases and conditions. The Communication Matrix was buycbdproducts to help bring the company together and illustrate the strategic goals of the business with an inspirational and simple theme….

Vertical Ascent

Interxion is one of Europe’s leading providers of colocation data centre services, with over 1600 customers and 40 facilities. The Communication Matrix worked closely with the HQ marketing and sales team and other agencies to define the right key messages for the business overall and for a range of vertical customer and prospect segments. Once…

New Directions

This was a fascinating high-speed project where we looked after everything from brand design and positioning to packaging and PR. Route 66, a medium-sized satnav software business was keen to add hardware to their software. To compete with consumer products the company needed a complete rewrite; new feature-driven messaging, a new aspirational strapline, a new…