Musings of the Creative Noggins

The Creative Noggin Crew at San Antonio ADDY Awards

Creative Noggin may be one of the smaller shops represented at the 2010 ADDY Awards in February, but we were proud to walk away with four ADDY awards.  Three of which were gold!

Kudos to our amazing team and even more incredible Creative Director, Trish McCabe Rawls.  Couldn’t have done it without your brilliance!  Bravo!

–Tracy Marlowe

Loved and had to share this video posted on AdWeek surmising the outcome if ad agencies were to plan kids birthday parties.

Hilarious!  Hope it brings a smile to your face.

–Tracy Marlowe



Lately, many of my friends have been going out and buying TOMS shoes. You know… the ugly looking alpargatas shoes you get a Whole Foods while grocery shopping.  It turns out, you can also get them at Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom’s and Bergdorf Goodman and get exclusive styles through these retailers and a pair costs you anywhere from $50-100 depending on the style.  

If you haven’t heard of TOMS shoes yet, let me tell you the story:  Entrepreneur and Amazing Race contestant Blake Mycoskie founded TOMS shoes in 2006 after a trip to Argentina where he would witness every day children living in poverty and without shoes to protect their feet. Wanting to help, he created TOMS Shoes, a company that would match every pair of shoes purchased with a pair of new shoes given to a child in need. Blake returned to Argentina with a group of family, friends and staff later that year with 10,000 pairs of shoes made possible by TOMS customers.  And as of September 2010, TOMS has given over one million pairs of new shoes to children in need through Giving Partners around the world.

TOMS has done most of their marketing through social media having a YouTube station with dozens of professionally executed videos, telling their story and giving different perspectives. The PR has virtually come to them with big name pubs like LA Times and The Wall Street Journal writing about their story; no pitch required from Blake and his staff. Even their retail partners have become brand evangelists where one retailer describes how they have a picture of Blake putting TOMS shoes on the feet of a child in Argentina right above their TOMS shoes display.  

So now you can see what makes this brand so special. But from a Marketing perspective, what this brand has done in terms of grassroots PR and Marketing is just as amazing. TOMS has done virtually no advertising. Their success is all through word-of-mouth marketing; a true grassroots case study.  You can also argue that the reason word-of-mouth marketing is so successful in this case is because the story behind the shoes – every person that wears a pair of TOMS shoes becomes a marketer for the brand. They now have a story to tell when they talk about their shoes and they can feel good telling that story because they  now can talk about how they have helped those in need through their purchase.  Just take a look at their holiday video that talks about how you become their marketing engine.

So what do you think… has this brand revolutionized how we approach word-of-mouth Marketing?

- Isabel

Thirty-eight percent of American mobile phone users — 120 million people — access the web via their mobile device; fewer than 30 million are iPhones or Android phones. (Mobile Access 2010 Pew Internet and American Life Project) and according to a research report by Morgan Stanley, mobile web usage will exceed all other web usage by 2015.

So this begs to ask the question: Should your organization “mobilize” its website?
I think this question could be best answered by looking at aspects of your organization and determining if the user could benefit from a mobile website experience. Some examples of taking parts of a site and making it mobile friendly could be:

• Ordering take-out or making dining reservations
• Getting information about a property for sale
• Accessing bank accounts
• Checking transportation schedules or checking into a flight
• Purchasing concert tickets
• Finding a class schedule at the local gym

The mobile consumer is a hunter, not a browser so something to always consider when making this decision is to ask yourself: what content on my website would the consumer just want to quickly do or find and therefore benefit from a mobile site? Mobile web pages are effective when they deliver precisely targeted information so it’s not really about taking an entire website and making a mobile version of it.

If your answer is yes to the question above and your organization could benefit from a mobile site, something else to consider is that mobile sites are also most commonly accessed via links from either text messages, Twitter, Facebook and email and secondarily, through mobile search. So it goes without saying that you should have a marketing strategy that supports engaging this mobile audience through those channels.

And since your mobile site could be accessed via search, it’s also key to make sure that your mobile site is coded with a style sheet that detects mobile devices. For example, I just about fell out of my chair last week when I entered southwestairlines.com in my Palm Pre only to be taken to the regular website. I thought surely Southwest Airlines has a mobile version of their app so that I can check in? Well, they did but it just didn’t detect my phone as a handheld device to redirect me. This can get tricky and I’ll leave the tech speak to the programmers but basically it’s important to remember that the mobile user is broad with the various use of IPads, IPhones, Blackberrys, etc so getting your style sheets right to reach a large market share of mobile devices needs to be considered.

So based on this, what do you think… is it time to mobilize?

- Isabel North

Facebook came under fire this week for violating privacy policies where they were revealing your name, the names of your Facebook friends, and potentially tracking the websites you visit online to some advertisers. We’ve all seen the ads on Facebook; mine are all about healthy eating, baby products and sometimes I even get advertising professional ones. I don’t mind these ads since they are relevant to me and they aren’t obtrusive in any way, but at what point is the line crossed?

I started to think about the evolution of the internet – 20 years in and social media – 8 years in and wondered, is this just what is going to become of online advertising? At the end of the day, I’d rather get advertising that is relevant and very targeted to me than just noise (and I’m not just saying that because I’m an advertiser). I understand that boundaries must remain; I mean I don’t want my credit card number to be out there for the taking when I do my online shopping. But so what if marketers now know that I live in San Antonio, have a 16 month old daughter, been married for 6 years, have a BBA, MBA, work in advertising, love to run, eat healthy, etc, etc? The websites I visit will reflect these attributes about me too. Although I was likely not at risk since I don’t subscribe to 3rd party apps like Farmville, my reaction to the scandal was kind of passive.

I’m by no means excusing the violation; there is a reason why I don’t subscribe to those third party apps and games. After all, they don’t exist for our pure entertainment; they want something in return, which is why you must click “allow” in order to subscribe. But the whole notion of our online behavior and it being tracked for advertising purposes is something that has been happening for a long time; even Google knows all about this (yes, when you “Google” something, you are being tracked). It’s just a matter of where do we draw the line? Or do we?

- Isabel North