Moskito Design 2016 year in review
This has been a great year for our agency. Ten years ago Moskito Design was two eager college grads with a laptop, and in mid-2016 we gathered to celebrate our 10th anniversary at an offsite event in Piedmont with nearly 30 of us. That was June. As of writing, we’re now a team of nearly 39 graphic and web designers, web developers, copywriters and marketers.
To be honest, we’ve never been one for tooting our own horn, but this year we decided to start letting the world know we’re here: we got this blog rolling and took to social media platform Twitter, as well as to the local stage to give our first talk on email marketing.
This post will continue that trend, with some highlights of 2016 and what we’re looking forward to in 2017.
People
New faces
The Moskito team has grown by leaps and bounds this year. Gaia joined the copywriting/localization team and Alessandra joined us in marketing. But the most significant influx was the 8 new graphic and web designers who joined our team throughout the year ― Diana, Amandine, Chiara, Alice, Francesco, Girolamo, Alessandro and Fabiola.
New roles
Of course, one of the biggest challenges of this year has been managing such rapid growth. When a company’s reach exceeds its grasp you always run the risk of not making good on your commitments, or imploding as an organization. To help, we’ve created 6 new Project Manager roles within the organization, and elevated six of our best and longest serving people to those roles. From the design teams there’s Giulio, Iris, Paola, Thiago and Giamma, and in development, Gaetano. They’ll each lead teams of 4-6 people while remaining the first, expert point of contact for clients (in an agency that’s never believed in having account managers). You’ll be hearing more from each of them in an upcoming blog series.
New life
Finally, among other growth milestones, Jeanet became our first active Moskito to give birth to a baby (joining three other mothers and fathers on the team). Welcome to planet Earth!
Projects
eBay’s new look
While we continued to produce a number of onsite seasonal and single-event campaigns for eBay France, Italy and Spain, one of our biggest projects of the year was helping eBay launch and apply its new global brand guidelines in Europe, a massive undertaking. We helped create the look for the Europe-wide launch at a seller networking event in Naples, Italy and have been working to evolve all communications toward the new look in the France, Italy and Spain (FRITES) markets.
Communication on rails
Some of our favorite projects this year included public transportation: billboards and bus wraps for Royal Air Maroc, a buzz-generating domination campaign for Twitter Italy that turned the Milan Assago metro stop into one big push to register new users. And for AGOS, a video to help launch their new money-lending app that was seen in metro and train stations throughout Italy.
Now, with video
Video is the story that keeps getting bigger, and this year we were proud to produce a number of different types of video for a range of different clients. In addition to our work for AGOS, we created animated explainer videos for TripAdvisor company TheFork and Automobile.it and a high-impact promotional video for TwitterSport. We churned out numerous animated gifs for eBay’s Facebook pages in France and Italy as well as a live-action DIY video for eBay France. But our biggest video hit of the year was scripting, storyboarding and producing a series of four comedic live-action push videos for eBay Italy which each garnered over one million views.
Turning a page
Yes, the world is going digital, but reports of the death of books have been greatly exaggerated. In 2016 we were happy to take part in cover localizations for two of the year’s biggest publishing phenomenons, both published by Salani: the June re-release of Roald Dahl’s collected works for the 100th anniversary of his birth, and September’s release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the first Potter book in an expanding Wizarding World.
Challenges
As mentioned above, the biggest challenge within the company has been trying to manage growth. We thought for a while that the way to do that was to create a single alter-ego project manager role for owners and directors Giulia and Evelina. But from Moskito’s inception as a two-person agency, partnership and equality is in our blood. We’ve always been a fairly horizontal team, even in our last years of growth, and so we decided that in creating a new layer of management we would introduce a home-grown team ― rather than take on an individual from outside. We believe this team will help us to do great work by understanding and exploiting the talents and technical capabilities of our people.
In other challenges, losing a client is part and parcel of any agency work, but we were especially sad to see one of our favorite new clients, Twitter Italy, close up shop this year despite robust country growth.
What we’re looking forward to this year
New contract
Our biggest new adventure (so far) this year will be taking over all seller (B2B) communications and seller CRM for eBay Germany and UK, which adds to our our current responsibility for B2B and B2C communications in the France, Italy and Spain markets. Adding these two new countries to our B2B email marketing portfolio for eBay will be a great new chance to test our communication chops in some big new markets.
New office
The Moskito family has pretty much outgrown the house, so we’re most looking forward to at the beginning of this year is moving into our stylish new nearby offices (via Staurenghi 36). Renovation is set to finish at the end of January, which means (fingers crossed) we’ll be luxuriating in a little more elbow room by the middle of next month.
Conclusion
It was a great year of experimentation and growth for Moskito Design ― and we couldn’t have done it without the support, encouragement and engagement of a great team, great clients, and great co-conspirators across Europe. Thanks to everybody who played a part in our success last year, and we look forward to making this year even better.
At Moskito Design we’re excited to be entering our second decade in the business.
