Petit Bourgeois

I started working on the Cloudraker offer to Onitsuka Tiger in January 2008, began supporting the ASICS office on a rent-a-brain basis in March, and became a full-time employee in May. So it's been a little over a year that I'm involved in shaping the online presence of ASICS. As I was pointing out last year, this is a highly interesting job for me, because I have the opportunity to practice a lot of what I've been preaching for years. Looking back, I'm quite happy with some of the results, although there's still much to be done.

I don't like advertising. While I must acknowledge that ads in fact do develop business for most companies that indulge, and while I'm actually a huge fan of the creative process and its better byproducts, I can't reconcile myself with the inherent waste it represents, and the fact it is based on lower instincts and tricking people.

Over the past year, my team has largely stayed away from advertising, mostly because we had more pressing priorities. This stance is currently changing as we have solved some key issues, freeing up some time, and are becoming more determined in ads, across all media. For me, the challenge will be to defend a certain quality of the engagement with people. ASICS and Onitsuka Tiger are beautiful brands with a very positive image, and we can afford to stick to the facts (apparently an immense luxury). I expect we should be able to step up our communication and amplify this image without having to betray our roots.

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The web site of France's serious evening newspaper Le Monde, as well as the newspaper itself, publish weekly a translated version of the BreakingViews.com columns (no free content on their own site). The print version allows for a quick identification of that poor content, but the web site flags it inconveniently, exposing readers to garbage without warning.

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The ASICS head office web site has been renewed a while ago to implement the designs we've developed globally.

I'm quite excited to see such a large and complex web site integrate our work. Several other improvements have gone into that new version. Congrats AQ and HQ web team!

A large disappointment: we don't make the awesome Tarther Brace RS-D 2 in my size.

ASICS Spain and a few others launched this week, we've got most of Europe now. Russia, Poland, Belgium and Switzerland still coming up.

And this weekend: check out the Paris marathon!

ASICS Germany has launched, and I'm very proud of the team for this one, which had all sorts of idiosyncratic problems, and a track record of being troublesome. So a big shoutout to Holger and Mairéad in Amsterdam, and to Doris in Neuss, keep up the good work.

But this time, I've got some extra news. It's been over 2 months since we launched the UK, and we're starting to have representative traffic stats for the new sites.

The results are very encouraging:

• with (unfortunately) no particular extra marketing effort, traffic is up more than 40%: doing the Right Thing does help, event just on its own (though of course it'd be better to have a complete marketing plan around it)
• visitors who go through the new "knowledge" section spend more than twice as much time on the site than the average
• the new Onitsuka Tiger site draws 4 times as many visits as before the relaunch, and I can't wait for the next upgrades

There are still many mountains to climb (we barely started twittering, the sections about Athletes and Events is not yet up, our email newsletters are a mess, and we're not quite fluent in the editorial maintenance of the site despite the launch of really great articles), but I feel overall we're doing pretty good.

Getting a little monotonous, but the ASICS.fr site has launched.

Thanks Chris for the design upgrade (more legible typography, fixed width, refreshed header). There had been no design update since the launch of this version in 2004, was long overdue. Now I should also upgrade the software (to WordPress of course) so page titles are fixed and to make use of the awesome admin interface, but we'll see about that some other time, I've been procrastinating enough lately. I'd done this site by myself entirely (that is, using ready-made open-source packages), so this is a bit of a departure from the original idea, but I guess I'd better focus on the content, and putting pride in my design skills is simply misguided!! Seriously, thanks Chris, I appreciate it!

Jean-Marie Colombani, ex helmsman of quality French evening daily Le Monde, did not join his ex âme damnée Edwy Plenel at digital online journalism co-op Mediapart. Instead, he launched Slate.fr, a French edition of the ex-Microsoft, currently Washington Post-Newsweek owned Slate.

I suppose French versions of Slate articles will stop appearing on Mediapart rival Rue 89 (the last translation was published in August last year).

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The ASICS Netherlands web site was refreshed today, following the UK a couple weeks ago. This site features our own store locator, as well as the SportStyle collection of casual sneakers, which was produced by Amsterdam Worldwide, the ad agency in charge of this collection (and of many other projects for us).

Congrats Lisa and the team for this launch! Now we're moving on to the rest of Europe, at full speed.

After 8 months of hard labor, the ASICS UK site has launched.

With my Digital Communications team at ASICS Europe, Mairéad and Holger, we've explored the boundaries of patience, but also reached incredible peaks of elation.

I might take some time to post about this later, but I already want to tip my hat to the agencies I've worked with:

• my former employer CloudRaker who had the first crack at redesigning the site, when I was still with them and a supplier to ASICS. They're doing a great job with Onitsuka Tiger.
• AnalogFolk who helped frame our strategy, and worked with JH-01 to create user journeys that are a crucial piece in the quality of our work
• AQ who've done an outstanding job on visualizing the strategy, and getting it to work in the practice
• the incredible team at The Plant who stayed nights and weekends to pull off a launch within a week of the planned date -- after an 8-months project

We're using Merb to power this all, and I'm damn proud of the work that's been done.