It’s that time again, and we’re reflecting on the year that was. It’s been exciting for us for many reasons, and we want to celebrate those successes and our amazing team that makes them possible. To open the reflections, here is a piece from Neil Munro, We Are Cognitive’s General Manager.
Although 2022 has been a challenging year for many businesses across many sectors, I’m really pleased to say that 2022 has been a successful year for We Are Cognitive.
We’ve continued to grow our global client presence, resulting in year-on-year sales growth. This is due to the fantastic contribution, skills and enthusiasm of everyone across all our teams at We Are Cognitive, which have grown by 40% over the last year to aid the delivery of our increased sales.
As we near the end of 2022, I’m really excited about the prospects 2023 holds for us. We have a fantastically talented team, and I’m convinced our continued marketing efforts will also bear more fruit with a steady stream of new clients, as they have done so this year, resulting in our continued growth.
Finally, to say a big thank you to our teams and our clients for all your help in making this year a great success as well as your support on our journey into 2023, as we continue to maintain our presence as the global leaders in Whiteboard Animation.
The headlines
No year is ever the same at We Are Cognitive, and 2022 has seen us reach exciting new milestones!
Starting with our clients, the passport has gained plenty of stamps this year. We’ve worked with clients from 14 different countries, and new countries this year include Norway, Columbia and South Africa. The only continent without a We Are Cognitive animation is Antarctica.
And working with these clients has meant our creative team has realised visions and ideas in 13 sectors, our top sectors being education and business services.
Altogether, we’ve made over 300 minutes of whiteboard animation this year.
We’ve made these animations in 10 languages. Some of our favourites include Arabic, Norwegian and Tagalog!
Original content
This year we achieved our ambition of planning and creating our own content. Sharing the ideas the world needs to hear and flexing our visual thinking muscles are important to us. This year we got to do both. It was an honour to work with the last recorded talk from Sir Ken Robinson; we miss him still. We are very grateful we got to bring his insights and words to life one last time in the animation ‘A Future For Us All’, and so far, Sir Ken’s message has been viewed over 41,000 times.
We also launched our Talk To The Hand series. We are very proud of this series and episode one featured Matthew Taylor, now Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation. His take on cultural theory offers a lot of food for thought. Though we can’t reveal them just yet, we have several other interviews recorded that we can’t wait to release as new Talk To The Hands!
Visual thinking can connect and add new dimensions in even a short amount of time, and we made the most of this with our new BLT series. For each BLT (Bringing Life Together) episode, we scour the web for intriguing news and bring it together in one video. There has been no shortage of strange news this year, and the team has been especially great at finding odd news about animals. Watch out in 2023 for even more.
High profile projects
One of our favourite things is working with clients from a whole host of different industries. Collaborating with all these clients has given us the opportunity to work with messages ranging from onboarding in the construction industry to the potential of philanthropy in Latin America. Every idea and message are important, but a few this year have taken the profile of our work to new levels.
Working with the ClimateWorks Foundation, we explained the pressures that greenhouse gas accounting places on businesses, solutions to these problems and the goals of the Carbon Call campaign. It was a fantastic and important project to work on, and the amazing work of our team premiered at COP27 itself.
In the UK this year, one issue that has been in the minds of many has been the dumping of untreated sewage into our rivers and the waters around our coast. Scientists at the University of Manchester linked this dumping to microplastic pollution, and their research was mentioned in the UK’s Houses of Parliament. We worked Professor Jamie Woodward to explain the University of Manchester’s process, findings and the implications of their research in a whiteboard animation.
Party political broadcasts are a staple of elections the world over. This year, our talented team translated the vision of the UK’s Green Party into an animation played on multiple TV channels. From TV screens to billboards; if you visited the Westfield shopping centre in September, you might have seen more of our visual thinking. The big picture from our animation for healthcare company Haleon was put on one of Westfield’s billboards; an exciting first for us.
Our growing team
One of the best things about our business successes is that they have allowed us to grow as a team. As Neil mentioned, We Are Cognitive has grown by 40% across our teams and we have new faces everywhere, from Project Management and Marketing to Illustration and Animation.
Our team isn’t just growing, it’s developing. We’d like to congratulate Illustrator, Alex Hedworth, for adding animation to his skillset, Marketing Executive, Dave Horn, for stepping up as Scriptwriter, and Illustrator Patience Nottingham, for stepping up as Senior Creative.
We’re very proud of our team and the animations and live scribing we have been able to create, and we’re looking forward to what we will be able to achieve together next year. We have lots of plans, from more original content to even more high quality and pioneering whiteboard animations. There are exciting times ahead!
“My time so far at Cognitive has been a rewarding and enjoyable experience. Everyone is so friendly, helpful and hardworking which is exactly what you want when working in a team.”
“The Cognitive team has been very supportive and welcoming to me and is very unique. I can’t think of a better company to continue to learn, grow and create with.”
Business successes
Like the ingredients of a successful recipe, the combination of a talented, growing team producing great work, our high-profile projects and some skilled, targeted marketing has brought us some lovely sales ‘wins’ this year. Coupled with this, we’ve transformed the way we start a conversation with clients, immersing them in our creative process from the first engagement, which is helping to forge great collaborations.
BLTs became Big Minutes and it’s been great to be able to offer these cost-effective, bite-sized films to clients who have a short and snappy message to spread, want a slice of our visual thinking but don’t have a huge budget. We hope to do many more next year.
With the pandemic mostly behind us, live scribing became possible again and we were delighted to get out on the road and scribe at some great events, large and small.
And last but certainly not least, when a potential client contacts you in August and says they’d like to discuss a large number of educational videos you sit up and take notice! Being open to the possibilities meant we were able conduct great negotiations with the client and sign a sizeable commission that will make a real difference to the way they deliver content to their audience.
It’s a very exciting time at We Are Cognitive and next year promises to hold even more whiteboard animations, surprises, innovations, and great visual storytelling for our clients. We want to thank the We Are Cognitive team and every client we have worked with this year for making 2022 a great adventure. See you in 2023!
Every explainer animation we create is a collaboration between us and our clients. Guided by each client’s essence, goals and message, we create scripted and visual storytelling that is informative, engaging, memorable and relatable. The result is a carefully crafted and bespoke explainer animation.