ScreenMates

THE ADTOOLS STORY or "MY LIFE IN PIXELS"

Adtools (now part of the Indimi group) was a small British animation company started by James Everard all the way back in 1998. It rose to fame and glory with its unique vision and irreverent humour.

Employing some of the UKs most talented cartoonists, programmers and animators the company developed imaginative, irreverant products. The ScreenMates (www.screenmates.com) brand proved hugely popular. Inspired by the now legendary lamb.exe the site delivered small downloadable characters who inhabited the desktop and entertained the user (imagine the office assistant running loose on your PC). These characters lent themselves to corporate branding which allowed Adtools to do what other dot com start-ups could only dream of - make money!

More fame and success came with MessageMates (www.messagemates.com) which again attracted millions of visitors and downloads. These were short animations unleashed onto the desktop (imagine a 20 second blipvert) and again they readily lent themselves to branding. The company had caught the dot com wave and cracked the dream of effective viral marketing.

Viral marketing was the advertisers holy grail. Simply - its an advert that is so good you send it to your friends. The cartoons delivered advertising to the desktop as well as jokes and entertainment. They are small stand alone executable files that would run on any Windows machine. The sites and products were incredibly popular and enjoyed a cult following.

I spent quite a bit of my time producing ScreenMates (www.screenmates.com) for a wide range of advertisers. They proved incredibly popular and on this page are a selection of the products I programmed. I worked there as an analyst programmer from January 200 until July 2001 when I was made redundant - easy dot com, easy dot go.

These products were produced using Microsoft.Visual C++ using Win32 (there's not a single line of MFC) and the Adtools Codebase, oh and just a dash of XML with a sprinkle of HTML.

All the products on this page are almost certainly copyright of Indimi, Adtools, Codehammer, ScreenMates.com, MessageMates.com or the property of the various companies, corporations, individuals or groups that paid the money for me to sweat and stress over them. I really ought to have asked them if they mind me having them on my site but to be honest I simply haven't got round to doing it yet. But do check out the sites:

www.screenmates.com and www.messagemates.com as well as www.pumpiworld.com and www.indimi.com and www.tooned.com. not forgetting the excellent www.planster.com

The company is still there (albeit with a reduced staff in the UK), their rates are reasonable, their code is solid and the products are, as you can see, unique online marketing tools that still enjoy a a global following.

Goldie				Goldie II
PissyBunny				Jogo
Reebok				PeeWee Herman
Snowman II				Snowman
Original Lamb				Jack
Anita Kraft				Felix II

	Lotta Chest - bustin' out like a hero in a half cup - designed by Steven Baskerville of 2000AD and the Beano fame.
	The Grinch - advertising the Jim Carey movie, drawn by Jerry Carpenter and apparently running on Ron Howard's desktop to this day.
	Sonny Day, another Steven Baskerville classic reflecting .
	Anita Shortcut commission by Kraft foods. Enter your ingredients and she will suggest a meal. Kinda cool really.
	Little Monster, Adam Schofield animated a series of monster message mates and this was intended to launch their very own web site.
	Goldie II - so good he swam back for more. Steve Jones animated and Brenda tore her hair out over this job
	Rehab - a beat combo apparently. But they never troubled the guys that compile the charts
	Snowman - Steve Jones animated this nasty fella and it proved so popular he created a sequel.
	Sparkledrive - another ScreenMate advertising a pop band, whaddaya mean you never heard of Sparkledrive??!
	Snowman II - This is the sequel, much nicer, in fact so good butter freezes in his mouth, he is pure as the driven snow....
	Pissy Bunny - there never was a ruder bunny rabbit ever.
	Jogo - this cheeky monkey was an advert for JobGorrila.com. I came up with the name Jogo and they its stuck ever since.
	Goldie the goldfish was commission by Pepperridge Farms who make a fish shaped snack thats popular in the US and gets mentioned in TV shows like Friends and The West Wing every now and again.
	Jack is the Wells Fargo dog and he was used as an internal promotion and was the first ScreenMate I worked on. Poor Ian Willey animated him and had to put up with my inane questions for simply ages
	Felix II, without a doubt the most successful ScreenMate ever. Originally this was just a cat food advert but it now has a cult following and adoring fans...
	Pee Wee Herman needed to advertise his video collection which gave Jerry Carpenter an excuse to model for the walk sequence.

	These are the Nickleodeon DigiBabies, Chuckie, Tommy, Angelica, Phil & Lil and their new French friend, Kimi. They were commission to advertise the 'RugRats in Paris' movie and are cut down versions of the full blown ScreenMates. Collect all five and you can download a sixth. I was going to paste Reptar here along with the rest (he is my favorite after all) but I didn't have the heart to ruin all the fun.....go on, grab em all - you know you want to....

If you have any queries or comments, or if you would like to instigate an expensive law suit for infringement of copyright please mail

matt@frescom.com

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