Post Haste

You never quite know what a client’s going to ask for. And sometimes you never quite know if you’ll be able to pull it off.

Our client, The First National Bank in Sioux Falls, came to us with one of these requests: a mascot to help promote high-return children’s savings accounts.

It turned out to be pretty cool.

Wabli’ (which stands for “Eagle” in Lakota) is the mascot version of The First National Bank in Sioux Falls’s iconic eagle statue and logo. And he/she took a tour of bank branches, showing off his style and preening his polyester wings.

Wabli’ and The First National Bank in Sioux Falls’s Executive Vice President Bill Baker.

Wabli’ standing beneath his shape-sake, the original FNB eagle statue.

Attempting a heist.

Relaxing after a hard day of strutting around with a head that’s seventeen times larger than it should be.

And just like that, a new mascot is born – from idea to reality, Wabli’ is now among us.

No more mess! No more time-wasting mixing! IT’S PANCAKE BATTER IN A CAN!

WATCH THE VIDEO NOW.

“Make better breakfast faster! BATTER BLASTER!”

Who says we’ve run out of things to invent?

(Unfortunately, it is not available in South Dakota yet.)

I love Guinness ads. The combination of the traditional Guinness glass and the contrast of dark beer/white foam makes for a striking image. It’s an icon that’s recognizable to anyone who has come in contact with the beer, like the Budweiser bow-tie logo or a Stella Artois glass.

I especially enjoy these ads, where a concert has been illuminated in the shape of a Guinness glass, filled with a pulsing mob that represents the rolling thunder of the beer’s patented post-pour brewing process.

Click to enlarge

Pretty neat visual.

What?

Wait. What are you saying?

Oh. How embarrassing. My bad.

Apparently, this is a Heineken ad. Heineken. Not Guinness.

Hmm…

Looks like this is another lesson in being careful what image you portray with your ads. I wonder how many people see this Heineken ad and say, “Yeah, a Guinness WOULD taste pretty good right now.”

I noticed the weirdest thing the other day while I was watching television.

Someone had taken all of the Dixie commercials and replaced them with something completely different.

Now, when I say different, I mean to say that, while they were still showing Dixie commercials, they certainly weren’t the Dixie commercials I had grown up with.

You know the ones: Make Life Easy! Throw Away! No More Clean-up! No More Germs! Dixie promised a life of ease and convenience, of victimless consumerism and trash collection. The only thing you hurt was the pride of those who didn’t have the same foresight as you, who looked on in agony as your life’s schedule miraculously cleared up, while theirs was still tethered to the yoke of washing dishes!

Now?

The trend toward green products has placed disposable plates and cups in the same realm as oil spills and burning tires.

So let’s switch the spin, for a little bit.

Now, Dixie cups give you back your identity. You are no longer a woman washing dishes – you are a caring mother. You are one step closer to raising children who will make the right decisions. That’s what throwing away your dishes (instead of spending a crucial 15 minutes washing) will do for you.

On one hand, I applaud them for reinventing the brand, even if it means combating the onslaught of mainly beneficial Go Green messaging.

On the other, the pandering to Them Cute Kids seems so forced and non-genuine. It’s a play to every parent’s fear of not caring enough about his or her children. “I will no longer be defined by the number of dishes I wash!” she claims. Who said you were in the first place?

Of course, I already feel guilty enough when I throw away when I throw away a paper plate. So take it for what you will.

We’re reaching a point in our industry where social media is starting to become more and more accepted by those Seth Godin classifies as the early majority - the people who are catching onto the trend because they’ve heard enough about it to put a little bit of trust into it. The value is at its highest. Everyone is scrambling to catch up.

But do newcomers really understand what the benefits of social media are?

If you find yourself needing to explain social media to the uninformed (or if you are still hazy on it yourself) CommonCraft has created an easy way to do it: Social Media in Plain English.

There. That was easy.

CommonCraft also has great videos explaining the relevance of blogs, social networking and, of course, my new favorite social networking tool, Twitter.

We’ve tilled the dirt and pulled the weeds and prepared every tool we can scrape together. We’re ready to drop our plants into our gardens. The only problem is that we don’t have any plants yet.

Of course, when we finally DO get some plants in, there’s a huge chance that we’ll

The thing about planting your own gardens is that you get to see behind the scenes, like a Behind the Music for the produce section. You see the twisted stumps of carrots, the bulbous tomatoes with goiter-like lumps, the cucumbers that curl up like horseshoes – in other words, the stuff that’s not fit to sell on an aesthetically-pleasing grocery store level.

Which is why I love this ad series for Tramontina. The headline reads: “The Perfect Knife for an Imperfect World.”

(Click on an image to see full-size.)

In fact, I think those carrots might actually be from my garden.

(Via Ads of the World.)

We do a lot of great stuff here at HenkinSchultz.

Most of us do a lot of great stuff away from work as well.

For example, our very own Wendy Wills was honored at last week’s Sales and Marketing Executives, Inc. (SME) Past Presidents Banquet. She was named Outstanding Committee Member for her work on the annual Women In Business program.

The Outstanding Committee Member award was presented by President Dave Stadheim and Women in Business Committee Chair Lisa Schultz.

Wendy received a trophy and everything!

The Past Presidents Banquet recognizes all of the programs put on by SME throughout the year. Women In Business is an educational, networking conference that provides fresh perspectives and positive outlooks in regards to women in the workplace. This year’s speaker was Mary Lou Retton.

Congratulations, Wendy!

Is web 2.0 actually dividing us?

The Internet has provided us with an open market of ideas, contacts and experiences from around the globe. Or at least the opportunity to find them. But what was that saying about a horse to water?

Now, I love the idea of a global village. But there is a roadblock. It’s called “the constitutive other.”

Here’s one fine example of that being exploited. According to polls on voting habits and approval/disapproval ratings of incumbent representatives, Americas political rift has been splitting exponentially within the past few years.

Many scholars, media minds, politicos and culture watchers speculate that this fissure’s break really hit its speed with the establishment of the Fox News Channel. My argument to that would be perhaps NPR, or to a lesser degree, CNN were there first. The differences are political leanings and the tenacity at which they lean. But, before any of that there were AM radio pundits.

TV. Radio. That’s the old media. The new media is a wild stomping ground of opinions from the left, right and center (and some seemingly from outer space.) But how many people peruse the spectrum? Apparently, very few. As a Stanford study points out, the vast majority of people who follow old and new media get their news from few sources. Those sources being of one political bent or another. Furthermore, it seems that the bigger the issue, the more the source adherence.

So, who is to blame for people only wanting to hear one side of the story? Is it the corporations that own the media peddlers? I suppose one could say that, and many do.

But looking a little deeper points out why media venues go political. It makes marketing sense. So let’s string up the marketers!

Wait, one step deeper - if people weren’t buying, no one would sell. So, who do we direct our ire towards?

Ourselves, I guess. Dammit.

People like to hear what is within their view of the world.

Web 2.0, 3.0, etc, has a lot of promise ahead. It could be a road to a digital shangri-la. Now we just have to master our own nature.

If nothing else, we at least we have factcheck.org to help us sort things out.

Blogs, wikis, etc. They all allow us to participate in the sharing of ideas, a constant conversation that has proven to produce some pretty big results.

So what’s this century all about? Mass innovation. And this movie - promoting Charles Leadbeater’s new book We Think - sums it all up pretty nicely.

Via: brandflakesforbreakfast

Advertising is everywhere.

We see it on television and we hear it on radio. We page past it in our magazines and newspapers and we drive past it on our way to and from work.

But that’s just the typical. It’s in our video games. Our novels. Sprinkled throughout the Internet. On our mobile phone.

It’s on the conveyor belt at the grocery store. It’s in front of us as we’re relieving ourselves in the bathroom. It’s installed in public places, stenciled onto the sidewalk, hidden in images and piped into our elevators and bus stations.

It’s in the water. On the grass. In and around every natural landscaping element known to the human race.

And thanks to Flogos – branded logo clouds - it’s in the sky.

I wish I was making this up. But there it is – Flogos. Cloud advertising. (Check out the demo video.)

What’s left? Our own children?

(Oops.)