• by Christine Champagne , October 26, 2006

"To succeed at Naked Communications, we often say you've got to be an inventor - it's got to be part of your DNA. You've got to want to do things in unique ways," says Paul Woolmington, who, along with M.T. Carney, cofounded the New York outpost of the international communications strategy firm nearly a year ago.

Certainly it took some inventiveness on the part of Naked Communications staffers working with Nokia to conjure up Music Recommender. The service, which will be offered in a beta version starting this month, is designed to complement Nokia's Nseries phones and keep consumers abreast of the latest must-hear music in their favorite genres with the help of recommendations from 40 leading independent record stores.

"Recommender is really a product innovation, a service innovation, and a marketing innovation all rolled into one," Woolmington enthuses. "The idea behind it was that we needed a compelling service to activate the consumer, change the way they think about products, and change the way they use products."

While the Recommender service qualifies as a bona fide Big Idea, Woolmington points out that Naked appreciates the power of smaller ideas, too. Case in point: Last spring, Naked's London office launched a successful yet traditional in-store marketing effort to encourage Boots customers to sign up for the pharmacy retailer's online prescription ordering service. The effort quadrupled the number of customer sign-ups previously achieved through a conventional (and much more expensive) campaign involving a TV spot designed by an ad agency.

"This is a prime example of the benefit of objectivity," Woolmington says. "It is difficult to think of any other people in marketing services that would have recommended this approach."

The media-agnostic Naked doesn't have an in-house production or media-buying arm to support, so the company can create ideas free of executional bias and based purely on what's best for a client, Woolmington asserts. That doesn't mean, however, that Naked lacks a strong point of view about channels of communication. Notes Woolmington: "It's just that we don't come to the table assuming any one discipline is the best solution."