As a Creative Director/Copywriter for Kelliher, Samets, Volk of Burlington, Vermont, I conceived and wrote an award-winning dimensional mailing campaign for sports apparel client, Ruds, Inc., resulting in 30% response and placements in Fortune, Outside and Men’s Health.
The Ruds dimensional mailer bested entries of New England's largest agencies to win a Super Bell for Best of Show and a Bell for Best Direct Mail Piece at the Publicity Club of New England's Annual Bell Ringer Awards.
Metrics, schmetrics. Don't get mired in the techno-babble. Avoid the analytic claptrap. Measuring a whole lot of nothing is still nothing. Keep it simple. Concept is king. Concept drives content. Concept, not software, drives sales. Concept builds your brand. Concept makes you money. Always has. Always will. After all, you can always hire more engineers. Try this simple formula: Grow the list, create exceptional concepts & content, contact the list, close the sale and repeat as often as necessary.
At Kelliher Samets Volk of Burlington, Vemont, I developed creative strategy and created campaign that helped increase market share from #5 to #2 and repositioned Skis Dynastar in a declining market.
Created and implemented innovative cognitive-behavioral-based curriculum for substance abuse treatment while employed by the Essex County Sheriff’s Department. Facilitated groups and counseled individual participants. I integrated brainstorming techniques and creative processes culled from my advertising agency experience with group facilitation to achieve clinical treatment goals. I was able to get participants to communicate their feelings in a jail setting without exposing themselves as appearing "weak" to other participants.
Challenge: Get program participants to personalize, take responsibility for and integrate their personal recovery goals outside of the program.
Solution: Laminate wallet-sized Stay Out Of Jail Free card with a participant-created list of ten ways they could stay away from a drink or a drug if the urge arose.
Below: Some of the many handouts I created to help program participants to communicate their feelings in a challenging environment (jail) and foster their addiction recovery.
Carryolo Content always returns measurable business results.
My work includes concepting and writing marketing collateral to win the hearts and minds of elite pension fund managers. The communications had to appeal to readers of intense scrutiny and successfully position Dwight Asset Management Company, as the world's most astute manager of Guaranteed Investment Contracts (GICs).
Integrating Recovery, Picturing Self-Honesty, Front
Integrating Recovery, Picturing Consequences, Back
Created and implemented innovative cognitive-behavioral-based curriculum for substance abuse treatment while employed by the Essex County Sheriff’s Department. Through drawing assignments, such as those depicted above and below, I was able to get participants to take stock honestly, communicate their feelings and assess consequences of their addictions in a jail setting without presenting themselves as appearing "weak" to other participants. I created the assignment to also circumvent the propensity of incarcerated participants to con for curried favors. The openness of the assignment fostered honesty. There was no right or wrong answer. Participants merely had to portray the cycle of addiction as they saw it.
How It Looks, Front
How It Looks, Back
Improving Communication: Created and implemented
innovative
cognitive-behavioral-based curriculum for substance abuse treatment
while employed by the Essex County Sheriff’s
Department. I created the handouts depicted above to aid counselors and participants in the Substance Abuse Treatment for Criminal Offenders (SATCO) Program.
The Challenge:
The founder of Gravity Precision Ski and Board Tuning shop, former World Champion Freestyle skier, Kevin D. Monahan, sought to boost his home-based business online as well as virally with convergent marketing communication tactics. His geographic location, Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, offered an advantage and disadvantage. Beverly Farms and surrounding communities are affluent--a fertile ground for reaching a high concentration of skiers with money to spend on enhancing the performance of their skis. Unfortunately, Beverly Farms is hours away from ski resorts and college alpine race programs where tuning service purchasing decision are made . Targeted users are dispersed geographically. Awareness of Gravity Precision among area high school alpine coaches and racers was zero. Many local ski shops compete for the same tuning dollar.
The Solution:
Create tactics that could be deployed to online ski forums, such as Ski The East, Epic Ski, TGR, Newschoolers. Leverage Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in order to reach prospects within Gravity Precision's geographic area. Create and deploy monthly email campaign, including A/B testing, to current and past clients via MailChimp. Offer discount and contests to stimulate trial. Drive all prospects to Gravity Precision's web site and Facebook page. Leave Gravity Precision business cards in strategic ATM locations and supermarkets throughout targeted affluent geographical areas.
The Results:
Call me at 978 518-2768 today to get a full reporting. Or call Kevin Monahan of Gravity Precision at 978 395-7500 for positive word of mouth.
WARNING: This entry is long. If you suffer from Marketing ADD, social media is not for you. Social media engagement requires a daily, long-term commitment through a number of relevant channels before you can even think of establishing a reciprocal and profitable relationship. If you're looking for a, "quickie", look elsewhere. If anyone tells you, "different," run and hold on to your wallet. They're lying.
As a student (I'm open to always learning more) as well as creative facilitator of Social Media campaigns, I study campaigns that pique my interest. I watch and assess what works, what doesn't and what could have been done differently to garner success.
The, "Snow At First Sight," social media contest created for the State of Colorado Board of Tourism by an agency I won't name had all the earmarks for success--great branding, great creative, great tactics which included a personal blog/forum/video page (YouTube-like), a request for a short video on why you should win, a place for the world to see and vote for your video (15-seconds of fame) and a great prize (a three-month, all-expenses-paid-trip to Colorado) to stimulate participation and viral growth.
Being an avid skier and passionate facilitator of social media engagement, I decided to enter the contest. I wanted to see if I could drive people to the site to vote for my video (I later disqualified myself because I have, in fact, seen snow).
Yet the campaign failed miserably (very low video submissions/participation/viral growth) due to one small, costly strategic error. It barred skiers--the group most likely to respond, participate and extoll the virtues of the campaign virally. During the same time period, Utah ran a similar video-submission campaign targeting skiers that, judging by the number of video submissions, left Colorado standing frozen at the bottom of the bunny hill.
However, it wasn't a complete loss. I learned a great deal just by participating. You can, too. Find a contest online and get in the game.
The Colorado, "Snow At First Sight," contest concept was simple: Post a 60-second video, earn enough popular votes and you could win a three-month, all-expenses-paid-trip to Colorado. Only one requirement-you've never seen snow.
My expertise includes naming and branding companies, programs and promotions.
A1 Exterminators, a large regional pest management firm , leveraged Social Media Marketing to build their business. I utilized – as the lead creative/copywriter/content creator on the 1Stop Design Team – basic social media tools: Twitter, Facebook, the A1 WordPress Blog, the A1 Web Site, LinkedIn and YouTube. I created, wrote and mashed enticing content. Astute SEO and SEM tactics buttressed the content feed. And use of such online sources as Ivy League Schools, The N.Y. Times, The Washington Post and other intellectual brands builds credibility through association for the A1 Exterminator Brand.
More Than Just A Pretty Picture
Each of the displays shown below sells a unique strength of Winbrook, a New England-based provider of print management, fulfillment and digital asset management solutions. A simple guided tour of corporate headquarters becomes an opportunity to speak to Winbrook's strengths individually and collectively as needed. New business prospects as well as long-established clients take away the fact that Winbrook indeed has what it takes to help them to do business better.
I concepted, wrote, creative directed, art directed and strategically placed each display to better tell the Winbrook story and strengthen the Winbrook brand.
An organization is born. Social entrepreneur and former Accenture consultant, Dale Fickett, founded an organization, based on the model he developed, to identify and support those ventures in Sub-Saharan Africa with high potential for financial and social returns. Dale's organization implements insight through a range of advisory and support services for organizations which catalyze social change and collaborates within the private, public and civil sectors to facilitate those investments which have positive social consequences. The new organization's name needed to reflect a brand promise to deliver both financial returns and positive social consequences.
I brainstormed with Dale, who resides in Dublin, Ireland, via phone, text, Facebook and email. Of the many names we came up with, we liked "Soquent" the best. It is a combination of, "social" and, "consequent."
Two simple variable data reminder cards sent to non-attendees and attendees of developer seminars kept the CRM fires burning brightly for Microsoft. Worked on numerous direct response campaigns that did indeed, "put cheeks into seats."
This variable digital direct response campaign positioned DesignToOrder online tool suite as the solution to the high cost of retaining an ad agency to create, manage and implement a direct response program in the SocioDigital Age.
Timing is everything. Change can be unsettling. And opportunities arise out of both. Creative Director, Steven Casey of Rain and I crafted This Boston Globe ad and Empower Program for client, Cambridgeport Bank. It's objective was to communicate how easy an electronic transition was to Cambridgeport Bank. Cambridgeport sought to attract Shawmut Bank customers left powerless and disrupted by the merger of Fleet and Shawmut.
The campaign worked so well that Fleet threatened legal sanctions to halt the ad's Boston Globe run.
