Author Archives: Darren Kennedy

We’re probably going to be talking quite a bit about Brew Day in the weeks and months ahead, so I thought I’d go ahead and define the concept for posterity.

In a nutshell, Brew Day is about innovation.

Yes, it’s a play on our agency’s name, Bottlecap, but the “brew” really has more to do with new ideas, refinements and experimentation with all things that relate to our business. It might be sexy (augmented reality) or subtle (internal process revisions), but at the end of each Brew Day it’s our goal to have our entire team inspired about what it is we do for a living.

As of now, our typical Brew Day looks something like this:

Brew Day at Bottlecap: Innovation on Tap

• 9:30a | Team members pitch their Brew Day ideas to the office and project teams begin to form
• 10a – 1p | Teams work on their projects, defining roles, responsibilities, requirements and more on the fly
• 1 – 2p | Lunch. We may try to bring in people from other local shops to educate and inspire the team during an interactive lunch-and-learn. In August we talked about the potential of Microsoft Kinect with the awesome team from The SuperGroup.
• 2 – 4p | People re-form their teams and wrap up their projects
• 4 – 4:30p | Show & Tell. Project teams reveal what they’ve been working on all day

And that’s it; one day dedicated to investigating things, revisiting things, and trying a bunch of new things in between.

Not all of these projects will stick – but that’s not the point. We’re in an industry that requires us to think strategically and creatively every day. It’s our job to keep testing our digital mettle to ensure we’re ready when our clients come calling.

And if we end each of these innovative sessions at a location that lives up to the Brew Day name, well, that’s OK, too.

Friday, August 19^th marked yet another Brew Day at Bottlecap. But it wasn’t just any Brew Day; this one had a little more structure from the outset: a focus on our brand, our process and our work.

The goal of every Brew Day is simple: spend eight hours or so working on those little things that will help us learn and grow – either as individuals or as a company.

Gabe (left) and Elliott from The SuperGroup talk about Microsoft's Kinect platform.

Easier said than done.

Most of us made it until about 2p when the demands of our clients pulled us away from our pursuit of innovation. Some folks never even got started. And that’s something we’ll continue to work on each month, allowing each member of the team the freedom to step away from the day-to-day demands of agency life in order to work on projects that draw from each individual’s professional passion.

Still, we were able to accomplish some exciting things in a somewhat limited timeframe:

• One of our developers worked on an automated deployment feature that would allow us to automatically launch websites at a certain date and time. It may not sound like much to you, but when’s the last time you had to leave a family picnic because you had to push a website to a production environment?
• Another developer worked on a proprietary bug-tracking tool that will allow us to keep our QA efforts separate from our project management system. Clear paths of communication + better issue resolution tracking = win.
• Our Traffic Manager collaborated with our Creative Manager to talk through our existing traffic process and see if we could streamline how information is passed from resource to resource.
• We brought in our friends from The SuperGroup to discuss cutting-edge technologies, like Microsoft’s Kinect platform, and how they could be used in practical marketing applications today.
• We researched solutions that would allow for automatic browser caching, as well as cross-site performance reporting … but not at the same time.
• Our senior designer created an app that will allow our designers to turn a series of screenshots into an interactive, online proof that will eventually be enhanced to track comments/notes.

And we attempted to document the whole thing on Twitter, too. It’s our goal to make Brew Day an inclusive experience, one which inspires not just the people participating at Bottlecap, but others who catch a glimpse of what’s going on via blog entries, tweets, and Facebook posts.

And what should only be seen as a harbinger of things to come, Team Bottlecap easily handled the mustachioed men from Team Scoutmob in some post-Brew Day bocce at our favorite after-work establishment.

It’s still early, but we’re getting there. And we’re going to enjoy every second of the ride.