C Squared launches Cream online service for the global marketing industry

Cream is an online service that indexes and analyses the world's media, marketing and business innovations. Launching with a library of more than 2500 case studies from more than 100 countries, Cream's sophisticated search engine allows users to filter the world's best work by brand, marketing category, agency, country, date, media owner and even through the selection of desired marketing strategies such as “promote trial” and “rebuild reputation”.

The service's built-in technology also manages brand comparisons and includes a variety of benchmarking and analytical tools. A network of 200 writers and select industry bloggers contribute to Cream's data and daily news services and the service also houses the entries to The Festival of Media Awards, as well as all the presentation materials and video footage from the last three years of the Festival of Media in Venice and Valencia.

For individual users around the world, Cream is designed to act as a “window on the world of marketing innovation” and for many global businesses and the service's architecture can be appropriated and tailored in order to create bespoke knowledge sharing internal systems, pre-loaded with the service's information. This facility is designed to help global brands share and re-apply innovation and best practice across their local teams. Cream has already begun working with one of the world's largest brewers, SABMiller on driving their innovation, internal communications and training.

Innovation deemed more important than cost-cutting to future growth

Sunita Anderson, group marketing knowledge manager from SABMiller said: “We have only been subscribing to Cream for a few months and already it has become quite the global phenomenon. Intended as stimulating brain food for our marketing community - particularly at key times in our brand planning cycle - we took the initiative to also share this resource with the full business: cross-functions, across levels and throughout our regions”.

The service is the product of more than 12 months of research and IT development as is being headed by David Morgan, the former global chief client officer of Universal McCann and previously the CEO of MEC Asia.

Said Morgan: “According to a recent Accenture survey, 89% of US and UK executives agree that innovation is as important, if not more important than cost reduction to their companies' ability to achieve future growth. Added to this is the fact that C Squared has been hearing for many years the challenges that brands face in trying to share and re-apply the best thinking globally. Cream has been designed to address these two areas. But we also aim to save our clients money - by saving many of them the costs of building and maintaining costly intranets and, for the bulk of our users, the time involved in finding creative insights for pitches and RFPs and in establishing benchmarks of performance”.

The service is live at www.creamglobal.com.