Free beer! Putting customers first in a small Irish Wisconsin pub.

So there’s this small tavern in the small town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin a few miles from my home. It’s called Paddy Caughlin’s Irish Pub. It’s wonderful.

Alas, I didn’t celebrate my Irish brethren there this year. (This photo was taken last summer.) But the photo shows an incredible idea for how you can put your customers first – let other customers buy them something. In this case, it’s a beer.

This simple “pay it forward” chart shows who bought a beer for a pal, and who has a free beer coming their way. This idea plays into the neighborhood hangout brand that they’re trying to carve out. It encourages word of mouth. And it means instant revenue for the bar; with 15 to 20 percent of gift cards going completely unused, it’s likely that this is a pretty profitable tactic.

Free beer? Great idea, Paddy.

 

 

Video Blog: 3 Cool Free Schwags Show How Maker’s Mark Ambassador’s Club Puts Customers First

These are bourbon ball ice cube makers. It makes four ice cubes. Four enormously huge, whiskey-loving ice cubes.

It’s simple. Give away exclusive cool stuff, for free.

That’s one way how Maker’s Mark puts the customer first. This short video blog shows three cool gifts I’ve received just by signing up for the Maker’s Mark Ambassador Club about five years ago. It’s a really cool loyalty program that rewards customers with exclusive perks. The letter that came with the gift this year encourages folks to go to the Maker’s Mark Facebook page to “share the laughs.” (Although it doesn’t look like a lot of folks did.)

Word of Mouth.org calls it one of the best fan clubs of all time in this great story. They’re right. Maker’s Mark is making a huge number of fans feel special just by doing things a little differently. This disruptive tactic goes a long way to build not just long-term customers, but long-term fanatics. And hey, volume was up 16% for the first half of 2011 according to Nielsen. (See their entry into the Ogilvy Research Awards.)

Here’s Maker’s Mark website where people can sign up for the Ambassador program. And here are some neat photos from Maker’s Mark fans over at Flickr.

New Monsters University Ad and Website Use Brilliant Parody to Get Old People

Young monsters looking for an excellent post secondary education should strongly consider Monsters University, says the beautiful new recruitment television ad. It’s a place “Where those who embrace their history become those who create it.” Potential applicants can learn more about MU at a nifty new website.

But wait – the ad isn’t meant to recruit monsters to go to a real animated university for real animated monsters. The ad’s job is to promote the Monsters University movie, premiering June 21, 2013. It’s a spot-on parody of the awfully scary, terrifying ads for colleges that we’ve all seen. Some are gouge-my-eyes-and-ears-out-awful. Hey Appalachian State, you are not, in any way, hot hot hot. Sorry.

But wait – the website’s job isn’t merely to sell movie tickets and toys. It’s to boost the whole Monsters franchise, which is smaller than Cars and Toy Story. The movie Monsters, Inc. will be 12 years old when the sequel comes out, so the website will give the whole franchise another thing for fans to talk about, which helps Pixar, which helps Disney. Oh, happy anniversary Disney. It’s almost seven years to the day since you and Pixar got married.

The Monsters University campus map.

It’s a great website, spoofing education communications really well. At the Alumni page: “Seeking intern or employee talent? Don’t forget MU’s ‘Monsters Hiring Monsters’ initiative.” Easter eggs and surprises are baked in, and the writing pimps the platitudes of communications in academia. There’s a login feature, but it goes nowhere. Gotta be a tease for future functionality as we get closer to the premier.

Back in June 2012, this Monsters University trailer was released, but it was just a typical, average trailer, and the site was launched back in October to little fanfare. That’s a pretty fractured and boring release strategy. But this parody spoof campaign seems new, and really smart.

The movie is an animated cartoon for kids, right? But wait – the recruitment ad and the website aren’t targeted to kids. Hey, the recruitment ad broke during the Rose Bowl, which doesn’t exactly pull in the youth market. And kids won’t get the parody of the ad, or the website. Disney/Pixar’s target is old people, like me. The strategy here is “get adults into Monsters University.” That’s smart business. 

Amazing video: Cool Blue Note jazz record covers recreated, animated.

(Here’s a repost of a favorite video – a recreation of some great Blue Note album covers, from August, 2010.)

What a cool idea: take some classic Blue Note album covers from the 1960’s, and recreate them with live action and animation. What a big job.

Check out the original covers below.

The video was created by Bante to promote the Bellavista Social Club‘s concert season. Here is another wonderfully-designed music video he/she/they did.

It would be appropriate at this time to offer a four beat rest moment of silence for iconic jazz photographer Herman Leonard, who passed away this week. Leonard invented (accidentally) a style of side lighting for photographing jazz musicians in clubs that perfectly captured the feeling of the clubs, the players and the music.

Herman Leonard’s photo of Duke Ellington in Paris, 1958

How symbols will change text, social media and digital communications forever.

Above: how we currently text. Below: how ETC technology will allow us to communicate more with symbols, images, and logos.

Happy birthday, text messaging. Today marks its 20th year as a communication form. So what a great day to pontificate on the next big thing in communications, which is right at our fingertips. Or, should I say, our thumbtips.

Imagine using pictures when you text and message and write online, in addition to words. It’s almost here, it’s cool, it’ll change how we communicate, and it came to me in a really neat way. Better grab a cup of coffee. This could take a minute.

I’m President of KW2, an ad agency in Madison, Wisconsin. We bought our building around 1990 from Towell Advertising, which was the longest-running ad agency in Madison. Three generations of Towells made ads here for long-time Madison businesses. But soon after we moved in, Towell Advertising changed its name to Roundhouse, and completely changed their business model to become a promotional agency.

Can you imagine? Here’s Bill Towell, all of 36 years old, telling his dad and grandfather he’s going to toss away the model they spent a couple of lifetimes growing. I bet that was an interesting conversation.

I’d known Bill over all these years, because a couple of good pals of mine worked at Roundhouse. Bill was always kinetic and intense and full of passion. His office was in a train car. They made their employees take a one hour lunch every day from noon to 1:00 PM on the dot. This is when I knew it wasn’t an advertising agency any more.

Well, Roundhouse worked really well, is still going strong, and Bill sold his share in the business a few years ago. In “retirement,” Bill drove around folks from the Porchlight homeless shelter for a year, mastered the art of lounging, and took a few classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I bumped into him on LinkedIn, and invited him to see what we’ve done to the building he said goodbye to some 20 years ago.

It was fantastic. So much history. The names of classic Madison advertising folks and brands and campaigns was great fun to hear about.

Then in the “see you later” home stretch of our chat, Bill kind of blew my mind. He told me about how he and a team of digital folks across the globe figured out how to get pictures seamlessly integrated into digital communications, in the places words would typically go. Wow.

He invented the next big thing. It was one of those that you hear about and go “duh” and you smack your palm on your forehead. Palmsmack! Of course!

It’s called Enriched Text Content (ETC). It allows people to insert images, pictures, images, logos, and graphics into alphanumeric text. Palmsmack! What took so long?

If you go to their site, baddonkeysocial.com, it would seeeeeeeem to appear that Kraft is one of the first big brands to jump on board. And given that Forbes has Kraft ranked as the #14 social brand in the world, well, this could indicate that one of the world’s largest food manufacturers thinks Bill is on to something.

This makes so much sense. We’re going more and more and more visual as a species. Instagram had 10 million shares just over Thanksgiving weekend. Do you think we’re a visually-driven bunch of mammals? Seems like it. Words are work. Pictures are not. Pictures are fast. Words are . . . less fast. Poor boring old word-based texts. They’re going to look like black and white TV next to high def, wide screen LCD TV.

Look at how just the last few years of digital evolution has already changed how we communicate. A cursor arrow. A trash can symbol. A colon with a parenthesis next to it. New shortcuts in communication are getting created and used all the time.

What are the long-term implications? I think this will significantly change things. Are we headed towards a visually driven language, or alphabet? Will new symbols be created to visually communicate?

There’s value to the user. In the time that it takes to text the word weinermobile, a texter could send an entire ETC message, like the one here. Reading messages with symbols is faster as well. Palmsmack!

The value to brands will increase. A text or email or blog post with logos in place of pictures will make those branded messages worth more, yes? Many logos will not work, and will have to be tweaked. Nike, the NFL, sports teams, and Apple will look great. Other brands like Harley-Davidson Motorcycles may need some identity work to get their logos “text logo” ready.

More symbols and fewer words in the future? Makes sense. We’ve always loved symbols. Thirty-five thousand years ago, some French communicator tagged cave walls with symbols of the giant creatures that they hunted. He (or she) didn’t graffiti the word “DINNER” or “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!” on the wall, the caveman/woman made symbols. Then the Egyptians, over 5,000 years ago, invented symbols to depict words, giving birth to the idea of written language. Then there’s the 15th century sign in an English street that showed a symbol of a boot on it, indicating where a black plague survivor could pick up a pair of sensible Mary Janes.

And then there’s ETC, the technology that paves the way for more symbols being used more often in some of the most popular forms of communication in this era.

We’ve gone from pictures on cave walls to pictures on social walls. Pretty cool.

The shape of stories, by Vonnegut

(Here’s a great repost from earlier in 2012.) What a great idea – design the idea of Kurt Vonnegut’s master thesis. By Maya Eilam, a designer in New York City.

www.mayeliam.com

Creativity in movie posters? Sometimes not so much.

This post from Design Taxi crystallizes the argument against creativity in Hollywood. Granted, that’s not a hard argument to make. But its a shame. Hollywood should lead the way in creativity. But alas, with big money comes big fear and aversion to risk which is why it seems my wife and I sometimes spend more time searching for a movie than actually watching them. Some nights, it seems like they all suck.

The Design Taxi post is about the idea of a French film distributor named Christophe Courtois. He found reoccurring trends in the graphic design of Hollywood movie posters. Yellow backgrounds. Women in red dresses. Great big eyeballs. But then he did something really creative with his insight.

He made mosaics out of the repetitive, boring, same–same approaches that Hollywood studios seem to lean on again and again. He kicked Hollywoods butt at their own game: creativity. And uh, why is Tom Crusie always show in profile?

For a breath of creative fresh air, here are a couple awesome offerings from the great Saul Bass.

And here’s a nifty take on the top 20 movie posters of all time.

Is this the world’s best TV ad?

John Lewis is a British department store. Their advertising is generally excellent.

I absolutely hate, loathe, despise, and abhor any type of communication about Christmas that happens before Thanksgiving. However, this ad rises above my belief.

Today, this ad is 6 days old. It already has 1.5 million YouTube views. Wow.

 

 

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Nike has created a nation for a soccer team in Brazil. That’s a pretty dang big idea. Check it out. Here’s more on the idea from BestAdsOnTV.com.

Selling blue jeans and economic hope, from Levi’s.

You may have seen this great effort from Levi’s and Weiden & Kennedy (the same company behind the Old Spice “I’m on a Horse” ads). They all hunkered down in the city of Braddock, Pennsylvania just outside of Pittsburgh, and didn’t just shoot some TV ads. They invested real cash money into its community center, library, and an urban farm.

It’s a fantastically cool idea. Advertising, reality TV, cause marketing and economic investment, all in one. Awesome. It takes a lot of hustle to pull something like this off.

Levi’s got a lot of crap for doing this. “Why didn’t they put jobs into Braddock?” “Why help just one city?” “Levi’s are made in Mexico, not the U.S. for Pete’s sake!” Parts of the ad community hammered it, calling some of the lines trite (“We are all workers”) and the whole thing too precious. It stirred up debate. Good.

Listen, Braddock is hosed. This town is dying before its eyes. But Levi’s put $1 million into this dying city. The State of Pennsylvania didn’t. General Motors didn’t. The critics who called the advertising crappy didn’t do a damn thing for Braddock, except help raise Braddock’s search rankings. Levi’s got off it’s denim ass and tried to do some good, and should get some karma points for that at the very least and profit at best.

I’m a die hard Levi’s guy. It’s practically all I wear. And despite thinking that most of their advertising has stunk for the last 15 years (including the Spike Lee stuff – sorry Spike), I really hope this one works for Levi’s. They’re sales are up worldwide 8%, so it may be doing them some good. But (much) more importantly, here’s hoping it does some good for the people of Braddock.