Creative marketing has always started with creative children.

‘Puppets’ is a developmental tool on the iPad aimed at helping children use the latest technology to grow their creative and social skills.

They can connect an iPhone to their iPad to control a selection of marionettes within six beautifully designed sets. They can also record their ‘shows’ to be shared with friends and family or the web.

‘Puppets’ began as a technology showcase, demonstrating how an iPhone’s gyroscopes could be used to control a puppet on the iPad. As we presented this early technology, it became clear quite quickly that many of our clients who were parents were aware of the growing use of tablets and smartphones to keep children quiet. This led to discussions about the impact of this on their creative and social development.

If you are reading this as a parent, you may feel the same. So we became passionate about creating a technology product to spark debate about this issue and to show how technology can be a great tool for creative learning.

‘Puppets’ became a self-funded project , in which we overcame many technical challenges and drew on the goodwill and talent of many different agency disciplines, to make a contribution to a debate which, in the long term, affects us all as a part of the wider creative industry.

It was launched onto the app store as a market-leading piece of technology, designed to compete head-to-head with more polished mainstream gaming experiences on iPad, which do not give a balanced learning experience.

Still in an early phase of development, ‘Puppets’ is already cited by media, and in debates run by organisations like UNESCO, as a prime example of the ways in which technology can boost creative learning and imaginative play.

By creating tools like this, we believe we can tap into the vast & fast-growing commercial market for digital education. But we will also use this and other, ongoing experiments in this area, to drive a much broader ambition of ensuring that we continue to get the talent we need in this industry to do great marketing.