Let’s face it - us Brits are a bit nutty about our pets. They’re part of the family, and just like any family member, we all tend to worry about their health and welfare. We were approached by a company that wanted to promote responsible pet ownership and engage pet lovers.

Ogilvy, one of the leading advertising agencies in the world, was looking for a solution to an age-old problem - how can enormous organisations react nimbly and generate ideas quickly? As Rory Sutherland, Chairman of Ogilvy Europe, pointed out there are no advantages in being a big agency unless you can truly utilise your most important resource; the brainpower of your staff.

Ogilvy was also looking to optimise the creative process. Just as the first 48 hours in a police investigation are absolutely critical, so the same can be said of the first 48 hours after receiving a client brief. This is a time for investigating different approaches and challenging the brief. Finally, email usage was at an all-time high, meaning Ogilvy’s employees were spending most of their time answering their emails, rather than doing their actual job.

We were asked to create a network by a professor at Harvard Business School to support his executive education courses. Harvard wanted to be able to quantify and qualify the output from the courses. Harvard was already trialling a methodology of getting people to write any ideas that were generated during the sessions on yellow ideas cards which were stuck on a wall so that people could comment on them.

London, a global cultural capital, is teeming with talented yet unsigned musicians. Without the luxury of managers and PR focus groups, and with previous safe havens like MySpace being taken over by the big labels’ latest protégés, it has become increasingly difficult for these bands to get noticed. What was needed was an independent online space exclusively geared at unsigned bands, allowing them to promote and manage themselves and above all, to get heard.

As one of the world’s pre-eminent trade bodies for marketing communications agencies, the IPA has over 270 of the UK’s brightest and best agencies in membership who between them handle an estimated 85% of all UK advertising spend.

The IPA wanted a space where creative work from all media could be showcased. But how could this work be shared and shown easily and effectively? And how could the IPA really limit the amount of time it would need to spend on administering such a space?