Review of DU's Progress against its goals in 2009

This isn't a self-serving PR piece. Digital United's journey so far has been rapid, profitable and immensely satisfying, taking us from publishing, through the games industry, a slight detour into the Pharma sector and on to the Film Industry!

This is a review of DU's activities and successes since commencing trading on the 27th January. It is not a sales piece, I hope it will merely serve as a transparent, objective review on progress on our plans and big ideas, discussed and progressed when it was just Jay and I operating in Chapel Studios. Creative Director Laurie Shepherd's arrival was the catalyst to conceive Digital United and bring it to life - Laurie and Jay arrived at our logo and Laurie produced the designs for this very website.

As a simple measure of DU's growth, Chapel Studios has gone from just Jason Anscombe and I to a buzzing studio of 9 top notch creative & techie types, a professional coffee machine (grinds its own beans doncha know) and me, who brings these talents to bear on a bespoke, managed basis influenced by rigorous requirements gathering and constant collaboration / proper partnerships with clients by DU's core team.

  • Our opening piece of business was very auspicious, a Strategic Consultancy engagement and workshop with the Publisher Dorling Kindersley (DK), for a very exciting new concept book going to press next year. We fully hope to be involved in the full campaign implementation promoting and driving engagement around a DK title which is frankly like nothing you've seen before from there, so stay tuned!
  • We then progressed into a technical consultancy and project work proposal for the BPA (British Parking Association), centred around doing something very clever with auto-updating the most popular sat nav devices with proprietary information from a large dataset held by BPA. 
  • Other quick-turnaround jobs came in and were quickly delivered to customer delight by purposefully-assembled expert DU Project Teams.
  • We then brought DU's combined expertise to bear for the Pharmaceutical client Adelphi Group, producing a totally bespoke, multilingual content managed, product and corporate communication-oriented website with some very nice creative treatments whilst sticking to rock-solid, established (for 70 years plus) Brand Guidelines. More detail in this on a future blog post.
  • Whilst the pharma packaging complex web build tested us to a degree, we've acquired a very fun and challenging new specialist sector, yes Digital United's in the Film Business, working on an online Film Festival, competition and showcase (of high profile, never-seen-before content) web service and online community. We're currently in closed Beta on this, with a soft public launch coming next week, we're awfully excited at both the advanced technical platform we've built (Content Delivery Network, Online Transcoding and hassle-free delivery of high quality video content) and the community functionalty we've laid the bedrock for. More on this to follow when we go to public soft-launch next week... 

The first raft of Cooperative Members have passed their qualifying periods and their full membership has been sent out, meaning they have an active role in the direction this company takes and get a real (profit) share and financial dividend on our success.

As ever, we're always looking to expand our managed network for skills right across our practice areas and specific skillsets and to hopefully work with new folk on long-running engagements so they can qualify for Cooperative Membership. 

Overall, it's been an exciting ride so far and our immediate future is looking not only good on a commercial level, but allowing us to deliver with real passion and have fun with some great clients.

If you're interested in working with us, and so you should be for we look after our clients and form long-term relationships with all, or if you're interested in joining either our extended Managed Network, or even better, our core in-house team (though bear in mind that we have only a couple of spaces left in our thriving creative coworking community @Chapel Studios), you can contact me via this site or direct: ralf(at)digitalunited.co.uk

Onwards and Upwards!