Approach: Through a contemporary approach to typography and youthful approach to color we were able to develop a visual brand identity that bring emphasis to digital. Their new positioning statement “Choose To Evolve” serves a dual purpose: 1. It is a constant reminder to the agency to always push the boundaries of digital brand communications and 2. It speaks to the agency’s potential clients reinforcing the point that evolution and change is a conscious choice.

Through the brand identity system we were able to address the importance of each Myjive team member with the introduction of persona characters unique to each individual placed on business cards, agency self promotion and throughout their new website.

Outcome: A youthful and energetic brand, existing predominately in the digital space, which communicates the purpose and passion of the team behind it.

Approach: Break down the common statement “Holy Guacamole” into a visual translation. Using a tangential connection to the partners of the studio and impact they have on their finished product, the focus was placed on the core ingredient in guacamole, the avocado.

Outcome: A mark that can stand independently and be successful in the studios communications as well as their broadcast animation sequence located pre and post film.

This modest and brief guide is intended to provide the reader translations to a few of the most common methods of saying hello and understanding others that are greeting you.

Click To Download The PDF

Clients take a dim view despite agencies’ investment in talent and services

Feb 8, 2010

- Andrew McMains

Traditional agencies are continuing to invest in digital talent and services but, based on a new survey from RSW/US, clients aren’t that impressed with the results.

Ask to rate their traditional agency’s digital skills on a scale of 1 to 10 — with 1 equating to “poor” and 10 meaning “excellent” — only 3 percent of the 277 client executives polled chose excellent, and almost half – 47 percent –  ranked their shops between 1 and 5.

The finding in the latest study, “A Client’s Perspective on Agencies,” mirrored that of a September RSW/US report, which illustrated a disconnect between how clients and agencies view their skills in social media. In the previous report, less than half of the client respondents agreed that they are “cutting edge” in the use of social media, compared to more than three-quarters of the respondents from public relations agencies and two-thirds from ad agencies.

Based on both reports, agency rhetoric about digital skills appears to be ahead of reality, said Mark Sneider, president of RSW/US, a Cincinnati-based consultancy that helps agencies hone their new business development efforts.

“Simply doing social and digital, such as creating Facebook accounts and developing banner ads, isn’t going to be enough as marketers get hungrier for better direction — and results — in the digital/social world,” Sneider said. “The agency that can help clients understand how to use social/digital and how to integrate these [media] effectively into more traditional initiatives will, in the end, win the day.”

RSW/US’s latest survey also further quantifies the shift in client marketing dollars toward digital and away from traditional media. Ask what percentage of their total marketing spend has shifted from the traditional to digital realm in the past three years, 27 percent of the respondents said 30 percent and another 39 percent said anywhere between 40 and 90 percent.

And while many clients shifting to digital say it’s because they’re following the consumers, clearly they’re also looking to cut marketing costs. Ask how much of a factor cost was in their hiring of a digital shop in the past year, 56 percent said it was important to very important. Only 12 percent said it was not a factor at all.

The respondents came from some 200 companies, including Nestle, Pfizer, Kraft Foods, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton and Harrah’s. The survey, which was conducted online in January, consisted of 23 questions.

The event will consist of 6-8 speakers (live and video) with short breaks between, lunch and pre- and post-event hospitality. There will be entertainment and opportunities for speakers and attendees to connect throughout the day.

Visit TEDxCharlotte.com for a list of confirmed speakers, additional event information, directions, updates and to join the TEDxCharlotte community. You can also connect with TEDxCharlotte on Facebook and Twitter (@TEDxCharlotte).

Says steering committee chair, Candice Langston, “TEDxCharlotte is an opportunity to celebrate our richly creative community and at the same time shine a bright light on the innovative people and ideas that contribute to a great quality of life in Charlotte and the region.”

ABOUT TEDx
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x=independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self- organized.

ABOUT TED
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 25 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. The annual TED Conference invites the world’s leading thinkers and doers to speak for 18 minutes. Their talks are then made available, free, at TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Nandan Nilekani, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The annual TED Conference takes place in Long Beach, California, with simulcast in Palm Springs; TEDGlobal is held each year in Oxford, UK. TED’s media initiatives include TED.com, where new TEDTalks are posted daily, and the Open Translation Project, which provides subtitles and interactive transcripts as well as the ability for any TEDTalk to be translated by volunteers worldwide. TED has established the annual TED Prize, where exceptional individuals with a wish to change the world are given the opportunity to put their wishes into action; TEDx, which offers individuals or groups a way to host local, self-organized events around the world, and the TEDFellows program, helping world-changing innovators from around the globe to become part of the TED community and, with its help, amplify the impact of their remarkable projects and activities.

His work has remained relevant through 11 US Presidents, the sexual and digital revolutions as well as countless imitators. Why do I find it inspiring even today? Simply put, Saul Bass had the unique ability to graphically communicate elements of the human condition. His influence can be seen in the world today from the grocery store aisles to new major motion pictures. Don’t think so? Just take a look at the poster for “Burn After Reading”.

Ultimately it comes down to this: His work reminds me that above all else in the branding and advertising, be a storyteller. Thanks for the reminder.

The following post describes why traditional broadcast efforts are changing because of Platforms. And how some of today’s largest brand marketers are focusing their efforts on social, digital and platform in lieu of the almighty Superbowl commercial. Enjoy!

Why Marketers Will Shift to ‘Platforms’

The teams playing in this year’s Super Bowl have already been decided, but the Super Bowl shuffle for advertisers began in earnest last month when marketing mainstays like FedEx, General Motors and Pepsi made news by announcing they were opting out of this year’s ad extravaganza.

But for those looking to gauge the health of the ad industry, Super Bowl advertising is a bit of red herring. CBS is charging about $2.5 million for 30 seconds of commercial time — and rightly so. Rarely do you get so many Americans watching one event and actually enjoying the advertising. It’s a tremendous opportunity for most brand marketers and we’d be foolish to look at this year’s Super Bowl as proof of either the rejuvenation of the 30-second spot or the rejection of it.

That doesn’t mean some won’t try. After all, last year Hulu saw a 50% increase in site traffic after running ads during the Super Bowl and Denny’s traffic to its website soared nearly 1,700% as consumers sought information about its free breakfast promotion.

There certainly will be advertising winners (and losers) on Super Bowl Sunday but let’s hope that the Monday morning quarterback chatter doesn’t obscure the larger shift at hand for marketers this year. 2010 will be the year of the “platform” for advertisers.

Unlike a website, banner, Facebook application or 30-second spot, a platform is an always-on digital environment that allows brands to run specific or multiple programs. The goal is to meaningfully engage consumers on multiple levels. For some brands, that means creating an immersive experience with integrated commerce. For others, it means enabling consumers to connect with each other in valuable, unexpected ways.

But for marketers, the real winners this year will be the brands who have built these platforms to engage consumers well after this year’s Super Bowl becomes a distant memory — there are another 364 days to worry about after all. Here’s a look at some of the more interesting platforms in play today:

Community Action Platforms: Perhaps the biggest, and most noteworthy, push into this space comes from PepsiCo, which opted to sit out the Super Bowl to tout it’s cause-marketing program Refresh Everything. The platform, which is inspired by crowdsourced ventures like Kickstarter, enables Pepsi to award grant money to consumers who suggest various ideas and iniatives for their communities. The effort is akin to other cause-marketing efforts like Procter & Gamble’s Tide: Loads of Hope, where consumers purchase T-shirts, among other things, to fund Tide’s effort to help families stricken by disaster with basic laundry services.

Best Buy’s Idea

Crowdsourcing Platforms: While not exactly new, enough brands are finding success using crowdsourcing platforms to generate insight and drive deeper consumer participation that we will surely see more this year. Starbuck’s MyStarbucksIdea.com is clearly the outsized success here with tens of thousands of ideas collected and a vibrant community. Dell’s Idea Storm falls into this category, as does Lego’s Mindstorm. The most recent entrant is Best Buy’s Ideax, which shares similar elements of the category but goes somewhat further by allowing users to search/browse by ideas generated “Nearby.” The community here is both virtual and local.

Commerce Platforms: As more marketers move toward a platform model, clearly one of the benefits is allowing consumers to have a direct relationship with the brand that’s not dependent on an existing network like Facebook or Yahoo! or a publisher like the New York Times. A natural outcome is that more and more brands will want to sell direct to consumers. Procter & Gamble announced that it will go direct to consumers this month (challenging Amazon and Walmart online) with an “eStore.” Similarly, General Mills and a host of other CPG marketers are moving onto Alice.com, which is enabling direct e-commerce for heavy hitters like General Mills and Johnson & Johnson. Other more CPG-oriented players like Mattel are making similar moves, it recently launched its own e-commerce store too.

Brand Experience Platforms: Experiential platforms come in many different shapes and sizes. Nike has shifted its marketing dollars to better support athletes through programs like Nike Plus and selling direct to consumers via its estore. Best Buy is building credibility in the music-instrument category by offering up expert guidance and videos. But some of the most interesting efforts of late find brands using either making a connection directly with consumers via tactics like blogs or providing functionality that better connects consumers to their peers. Lufthansa’s MySkyStatus automatically sends flight updates to your peers via Twitter, Facebook and e-mail. Similarly, JetBlue allows consumers to vote on actual plane designs through its Jet Blue Tails program and Southwest Airlines uses Nuts About Southwest as a social hub for its dedicated customers. Similarly, Whole Foods uses its Whole Story to speak to consumers directly about its brand, food recipes as well as an aggregation point for its social presence on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

Social CRM Platforms: Both the most nascent and promising area for brands this year is in the emerging space of social CRM platforms, where customers rather than just company employees, provide support. Best Buy has made the most visible move here with Twelpforce. Consumers are encouraged to simply tweet tech-related questions to @Twelpforce for support from hundreds of its “Blue Shirts.” Another interesting player here is GetSatisfaction, which powers companies like Dopplr, Mint.com, Nike and Microsoft among others. GetSatisfaction builds customer support communities that connects customers with their peers and a brand’s employees for help. Integration with Salesforce.com’s AppExchange bodes for bigger thing ahead.

These are just a few examples of the kinds of platform moves brand marketers will make in 2010. There will certainly be more — especially with the rise in mobile and emerging technologies such as “touch” and augmented reality. The big question, however, will be whether brand marketers look to extend or “distribute” across existing social and experiential platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and their ilk, or will they create their own platforms? The smart money should be on both. It’s one thing to “fish where the fish are” but quite another to create experiences that will sustain consumers once the hubbub of Super Bowl Sunday has faded way. Creating an always-on platform for consumers is a winning play for the Monday morning after.

Original Post

With increasingly powerful mobile devices, we are in the early stages of creating what sci-fi author Bruce Sterling calls a spime – an always-on, broadband-enabled device that knows where it is in space and time. These ever-present devices will make sending a message to a receiver at a time of perfect reception entirely possible. Not only will this transform marketing, but it may actually improve the lives of consumers as well.

Currently the technology is rudimentary and fragmented, but several startups are attempting to simplify it. GeoAPI, recently acquired by Twitter, is creating a digital library of exact locations (currently it has 16 million). This geo-database can help a startup looking to get into location-aware services. Similarly, SimpleGeo sees itself saving developers months of work by building and scaling location infrastructure for them. Xtify lets you location enable your web application without writing any native mobile software. Atlas CT provides a number of SDKs and APIs for easy development of location-based apps. Other players like Navteq and Foursquare are crowdsourcing Points of Interest for their own APIs.

While these API services are paving the way for creating an open-source digital representation of our world, this information alone will not suffice. If networks were to push advertising based on location alone, it would most likely be spam. This is because location isn’t the same as context, or the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event or situation.

Developers are beginning to release examples of applications that combine location with a specific context. Happy Hour app takes the motivation of finding a quick drink and provides. GateGuru (think Yelp for the airport) drills down to an average user’s layover experience. Brightkite is experimenting with targeting users with advertising through predicting context using past behavior. We are creatures of habit, and once enough check-ins are captured, ads can be served through pattern recognition.  Meanwhile. Foursquare uses a more social strategy to provide context.

At the end of the day, a vast amount of data is important, and this is a why all eyes are on Google this year. The company is pushing hard into the mobile space with its recent announcements for Google Goggles, Favorite Places, Nexus One, and even an attempt at acquiring Yelp. While these moves are impressive, they only scratch the surface of what the company intends on accomplishing. Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products and User Experience, has in mind the ultimate goal of intuitive search, or presenting information to users before they even know what they’re looking for. The only way to accomplish this is through taking a user’s total context, and that is only possible through powerful, always on, mobile sensors – our mobile phone. Essentially, Google hopes to bring its behavioral targeting of the web to the physical world.

Google is in the same boat as every other service hoping to target the future of mobile consumers. To be able to reach an individual in that moment where an advertising message is considered relevant is the next step in marketing. With startups and giants alike laying the essential locational groundwork and building upon it, perhaps this will be soon to come.

Original Post.

Here are there thoughts on what the future may hold.

1. Mobile will completely revolutionize the way local advertisers can connect with potential customers.

While online display advertising has been incredibly effective for many companies, it hasn’t offered all that much value to small, independently owned businesses. For one, the web is good at scale, not so good at precision. It’s difficult for mom-and-pops to reach the relatively small audiences that might reasonably be expected to patronize their stores.

A number of new location-based services are beginning to provide attractive alternatives for such small-scale advertisers. Foursquare, for one, allows small business to target offers based on a user’s actual proximity to their location. These offers can deliver heightened relevance by appealing to a player’s status, nearby friends, or demonstrated preferences. A similar service, Gowalla, has experimented with branded badges and actual prizes that users can win if they check in at a location. Google is also catering more to local businesses by making their Place pages more mobile-friendly. Advertisers can now create Place pages that are accessible through Google Maps, attach mobile coupons, and even include QR code stickers in their window that lead you to these pages.

These examples are really only scratching the surface of what’s possible for local businesses through mobile. Expect to see more mom-and-pops jump on these platforms in 2010.

2. Growth in adoption of mobile shopping applications will continue to alter in-store consumer behavior, increasing the significance of mobile in point of sale decisions making.

There are a number of mobile applications and tools emerging that consumers can use to make their shopping trips more efficient, productive, and fun. First, there are mobile price comparison apps such as Shop Savvy, Red Laser, Amazon Mobile. These allow shoppers to compare prices at a given location against nearby competitors and online properties — an incredibly powerful proposition. There are also crowdsourcing tools like Fashism and BazaarVoice’s MobileVoice that help shoppers get outside opinions and feedback before purchasing. These types of apps are prime territory for marketers looking to inject a brand into a target audience’s psyche at a critical juncture in their decision making process.

Then there are, of course, mobile coupons, which are finally getting some traction. Zavers, Yowza, mobiQpons and Cellfire are actively signing up small businesses, and it’s only a matter of time before big box stores get on board. Add increased consumer adoption, POS redemption infrastructure and a social dynamic and the appeal to marketers will be greater than ever.

All of the above will provide inroads for more effective CRM, specifically, loyalty programs. Consumers checking their phone just before they buy something will create opportunity to deliver more effective personalized messaging derived from prior purchase decisions.

3. Brands and agencies will continue to build branded apps, but will also have more attractive display media options, thanks to Google.

In 2009, we saw a number of brands scramble to check mobile off their lists by creating apps. But now that the marketplace is crowded, many will take a step back and look at media-buying options instead. Google recognizes this; it’s why they recently acquired AdMob, i.e., to get a corner on all that in-app content. Google will also build up their network of native app content by making development and deployment of ad-supported apps on their Android platform much easier than it currently is on the iPhone. This is all with the aim of more effectively extending it’s AdSense platform to mobile.

Yes, you may say that consumers are obviously keen on micropayments for mobile content. They did, after all, spend $6.2 billion on apps this year, according to Gartner. But consumers are even more fond of free, and in 2010 one way Google will challenge the iPhone is by creating a competitive alternative business model for developers. And where good apps are, consumers go and dollars follow.

Most major carriers and handset manufacturers have multiple Android devices slated for 2010 launch dates, so expect Android’s user-base to catch up to the iPhone’s by the end of 2010. The web-based Android app store is a hurdle to the experience and doesn’t come close to the experience of the iTunes’ desktop app. If Google can fix this, then developers may start putting Android first on their product roadmaps.

4. Advertising’s outdoor real estate is fast becoming another connected channel capable of delivering high-fidelity digital experiences as unique, varied and measurable as more well-established mediums.

Outdoor advertising has traditionally been very difficult to measure. People move past signs through various modes of conveyance at varying rates of speed making it difficult to know who actually notices a given media unit. Add line of sight and dwell time, and the problem is further compounded.

Digital out-of-home (DOOH) signage is changing all this, and mobile is becoming the key to true measurement and engagement. Using their handsets, once-passive viewers can actually interact with an ad now. For example, Toyota released an iPhone app that let users to draw on the Thompson-Reuters screen in Times Square. Nike’s “Chalkbot” allowed cycling fans to have a robot stencil messages of support for Tour de France riders on the pavement via SMS or Twitter. Vans’ “Be Here” allowed its users to submit video, photo, or text messages from any of the brand’s online properties to be displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square.

In all of the previous examples, mobile served as the glue or connective tissue between outdoor and the web. Indeed, the real potential of DOOH is to blend the digital with the physical world in public spaces. It will also eventually allow advertisers to customize once-mass ads to specific individuals based on data that their phone can reveal about them.

5. Consumers have new power to express their opinions through social technologies from anywhere, anytime. Smart marketers will do all they can to encourage and act on this real-time feedback.

While the crowds may not always be wise, they sure are vocal, and mobile devices are their microphones. In unprecedented numbers, consumers are using mobile-enabled publishing platforms, mainly Twitter, to instantly share their thoughts about products, services and brands.

The best companies have started closing this loop by listening to and acting on consumer’s feedback. Some are even creating dedicated apps and services to collect it. Taxihack is a service for commenting live on NYC taxi drivers. SeeClickFix and CitySourced both give users mobile applications for reporting things like potholes and graffiti while out on the town. AT&T recently used a similar tactic with an iPhone app, Mark the Spot, which crowdsources areas of weak reception.

Much of the power seen in these mobile applications is through context attached to consumer feedback. Universal Theatres relies on a SMS response system to test out trailers and gauge audience response during screenings. This in the moment feedback makes for a much more accurate representation of viewers true opinions.

Whether brands carve out a dedicated mobile channel or simply rely on Twitter customer service, we’ll see more embracing the feedback loop. The challenge going forward will be an internal one, setting up efficient systems to make sure consumer feedback can be acted on and implemented once it’s heard.

This article was originally published online at AdAge.com, where we contribute content for the Digital Next blog.