Is this a calf or what?
The lower leg muscle of our very own Steve O, copywriter/leg model. I challenge everyone in the agency to work the legs this summer. First day of fall we have a leg lineup for a Calf Competition. 
Digging Deeper Into Facebook Conversation
With more than 200 million users Facebook is packed full of conversations. With so much chatter it is critical for brands to see what consumers are saying about them and issues surrounding their products. This can be challenging, but a tool called Lexicon helps to make this process a little easier. Lexicon allows you to look at the level of conversations about a topic or multiple topics. As you can see in the image above it is easy to see the amount of conversation between “natural” and “organic” and can see the dates for the level of each conversation.
For example your company launches a new campaign with a goal of generating online word-of-mouth. Lexicon would be a good component of the measuring process as a way to show an increase in conversation around a product or issue.
Facebook can be very noisy and Lexicon help brands sort the conversation in a better way.
Agencies and Social Media Marketing: A Corporate Prespective
Marketing agencies have long been part of the marketing mix. The rise of social media as a platform for building customer communities and engaging directly with brand advocates has generated questions about the role of agencies in social media marketing. Many agencies have added social media marketing to the practice areas and additionally new agencies have been created or spun-off to focus directly on social media.
With this transition period in marketing it seemed like a great opportunity for an agency guy “me” to sit with an internal social media marketer to discuss the role of agencies in social media marketing. David Thomas, Social Media Manager at SAS Institute, Inc. was kind enough to spend a few minutes with me to talk about agencies and social media marketing.
Journalist Tweets The Gateway To Reporter Updates On Twitter
At the intersection of social media and public relations you will find Journalist Tweets, a new service from Cision, a company that specializes in media intelligence. Journalist Tweets categorizes journalists who use twitter to allow public relations professionals to easily follow their updates. For example you can follow all of the health journalist tweets. The service isn’t perfect is does not auto refresh the page and it doesn’t let you further filter the journalists Twitter streams down to a certain topic. However, it does serve as a good tool for public relations professionals to use especially those that don’t yet use Twitter.
Beyond being a good tool for PR people, Journalist Tweets is also a great example of aggregation marketing. Cision’s customers are public relations agencies and professionals. By creating a free service that helps provide actionable information for the public relations industry Cision has created a branding and lead generation tool that is sticky. It is a tool that PR pros need to come back to everyday giving Cision a valuable community of supporters.
Will you use Journalist Tweets?
John Moore Celebrates 10 Years
Senior Art Director, John Moore recently celebrated his 10th anniversary with Howard, Merrell & Partners, the oldest full-service advertising agency in the South. With more than 15 years experience in advertising, marketing communications and graphic design, Moore has planned and created a host of successful branding campaigns and marketing elements, some of which have received national recognition.
At Howard, Merrell & Partners, Moore’s involvement in brand campaign development ranges from initial concepts to art direction and final layout. Over the last decade, Moore has brought his passion for design and eye for detail to the agency for advertising, collateral, web development, corporate identity and direct marketing. His knowledge of design and technology combines to create exciting and relevant solutions.
Most recently, Moore led the design of an integrated campaign for CORDURA® Baselayer which received Gold and Judges Choice Awards at the Triangle ADDYs. In addition, the campaign posters received a Gold Award from Graphis, where they will be featured in the upcoming Graphis 2010 Poster Annual; and the campaign website received a W3 Award from the International Academy of Visual Arts.
“John is meticulous in everything he does,” said Howard, Merrell & Partners Creative Director, Billy Barnes. “You can see it in all his work. The attention to detail. The uniqueness of his concepts. John is a great art director, and a huge asset to the agency. He’s also a great person. We’ll happily put up with him for another 10 years.”
Moore has worked on a wide variety of campaigns for the agency’s clients such as BB&T Bank, Sappi Fine Paper, CORDURA® Fabric, SAS Institute, Colonial Bank, Atlantic South Power, William Marsh, Texas Farm Products, Georgia-Pacific, Thorlo, UltraPet, IBM and Kimberly-Clark. He has also lends his creative talents to select non-profit projects, including the NC Mile of Hope and the Duke Cancer Center’s Ovarian Awareness Walk.
Moore graduated from North Carolina State University with a bachelor’s degree in verbal and visual communications.
A favorite memory . . .
One of my most cherished memories growing up involves jazz music . . . Out of all the types of music that we have today – jazz holds a dear place in my heart. Jazz is the music I grew up listening to every morning with my dad. I remember walking down our stairs (which seemed to take an eternity at the time being only 3/4 years old), dancing in out of the shadows of the sunlight coming through our french windows in the dining room to finally the music room. I would then hear my dad’s voice say amongst the music notes in the air, “We’ve been waiting for you babygirl.”
As to the “we” – my dad would be referring to the piano strokes of Duke Ellington, the organ of Willie Smith, the guitar of Wes Montgomery, the notes of the tenor saxophone from John Coltrane, or perhaps one of the many jazz singers – Johnny Hartman, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, Billy Holiday, Arthur Prysock, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong and the list goes on . . . .
To this day jazz music and my dad are one in the same – and always will be for me.
. . . So what is one of your favorite memories?
Raleigh – Snakes! Have you seen any?
As I’m entering my first spring in Raleigh, I’m learning Raleigh has snakes. Snakes are one of the things that I have an unreasonable fear of, and I really am not a fan of encountering them. Below are my two first experiences:
Encounter 1
- When: Sunday, May 3rd – 1:00pm
- Where: Greenway trail off Anderson Dr – mile marker 1/4
- What: 4-foot (ish) black snake with yellow bands
- Action: Turned around and went home – shortened my run
Encounter 2
- When: Sunday, May 10th- 4:30pm
- Where: Greenway trail near Lassiter Mill Rd
- What: Copperhead (couldn’t tell length, it was coiled up)
- Action: Sprinted for a while, ran in the middle of the Greenway path the rest of the way (avoiding the sides of the trail/grass)
Has anyone else seen any snakes this spring? Any idea when we’ll stop seeing them? Tips?
Howard, Merrell & Partners Brings Food To Life For Dixie®
Menu favorites speak their mind through the new integrated Dixie brand campaign launched by Georgia-Pacific Professional Food Services Solutions. Created by HM&P, Food & Drinks on Dixie® features popular food items as characters who share what they love about the innovative line of Dixie® foodservice products. Through the campaign’s three main characters – affectionately referred to as Hamburger, Coffee and Ice Cream – customers get a first-hand look at what it is like “going out on Dixie®.”
The campaign has been very well received in the media. Through the outreach of HM&P’s public relations team the campaign landed on AdWeek’s blog this morning.
To see more videos created for the campaign, visit DIXIE’s YouTube channel.
Media choice and emotions
One question we hear from clients is, which media are most effective to achieve the maximum impact on the emotions, and on the brand. On judgment, it seems likely that a medium like television, where you can impact both auditory and visual senses, is likely to be more impactful than a one-dimensional medium, like print, or radio. Finding science to support that isn’t so easy, though. For that you need evidence that, for example, the emotions evoked by a piece of music are similar to, and can influence, other emotional experiences. So far the proof for that has been elusive.
But a new study, which has just been published in Neuroscience Letters, reported here, provides both behavioural and physiological evidence that the emotions evoked by music can be transferred to the sense of vision, and can influence how the emotions in facial expressions are perceived.
Two experiments were performed.
“In the first, 30 participants were presented with a series of happy or sad musical excerpts, each lasting 15 seconds. After each piece of music, the participants were shown a photograph of a face, expressing either a happy, sad, or neutral expression. The photographs were flashed on a screen for 1 second, after which the participants were asked to rate the emotion on a 7-piont scale, where 1 denotes extremely sad and 7 extremely happy.
Thus, the visual emotional stimuli – the photos of faces – were “primed” by an emotional state conveyed by a piece of music. All the participants correctly identified the emotions expressed by the faces in the photographs presented to them. However, happy faces primed by a happy piece of music were rated as happier than when primed by sad music. Conversely, sad faces primed by a piece of sad music were rated as sadder than those primed with a happy piece of music. Finally, neutral faces were rated higher when primed by a happy piece of music and lower when primed by a sad piece.
The size of the priming effect for neutral faces was found to be almost twice that of the effect for happy and sad faces. [Emphasis mine]This may be because neutral faces contain less information than those expressing one emotion or the other, and hence are somewhat ambiguous. We know that the brain integrates information from different senses to construct representations of the external and internal worlds; thus, in the absence of relevant visual information, it may therefore become more reliant on information from other senses when generating these representations.”
If we think of the brand as a (relatively) emotion-neutral element, at least compared to the faces in this experiment, it seems obvious that the ability to prime the emotions with music makes an audiovisual medium more flexible, and potentially powerful, than a visual medium alone.
It was already known that music can influence the perception of emotions in visual stimuli when presented simultaneously, but this new study is the first to show the emotions evoked by music can affect the perception of emotional content in visual stimuli presented afterwards.
According to this study, these new findings also suggest that emotional processing takes place outside of conscious awareness, rather than being based on judgments and decisions.
CAKE FAIL
In my last post I talked about Griffin’s FAIL Marker application for the iPhone. Earlier today this picture came my way and I had no choice but to put Fail Maker to good use. The picture says it all…..
