Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

Wow! We’re so busy with 2010 that we’re having trouble keeping track of the accolades that are still rolling in from 2009. Which, in all honesty, is just fine with us.

The SWISS WATER® Process, along with Engine Digital, was featured in the December 2009 issue of Direct Marketing Magazine for our “Relax. Enjoy. Awaken.” campaign as being one of the best of the year. Our relationship with the fine folks at Swiss Water started back in 2008, and the campaigns that we’ve launched since then have far exceeded expectation from both a marketing perspective and as a heavy hitter on the awards circuit.

Unfortunately, Direct Marketing is a print only magazine, but you can still download a copy of the issue that features The Swiss Water campaign via PDF with this link.

The theory of value is subjective. In regards to a product or service, value must be useful in satisfying the wants and needs of the consumer, we’ve also seen value generated when something is in limited supply. While this idea holds up in the comparison of two products side by side, it does not induce a desire of want in the customer who is inundated with hundreds of choices for nearly the exact same product or service.

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Over at i [love] marketing, Ana Andjelic makes some valid and interesting points on the comparison of digital and traditional agencies in her post titled Why Digital Agencies Aren’t Ready to Lead. It’s an interesting issue to consider. With integration and convergence now more or less a no-brainer, you really can’t have a campaign span both traditional and non-traditional channels without providing a consistent experience (can you?).

Ana defines digital agencies as “focusing on experimentation”, spinning their wheels trying to out-create competing agencies by making bigger and more complex digital experiences, while traditional shops “thrive on exploitation”, leveraging their bag of marketing tricks. This equates to more of a typical business model – make it once and sell it over and over again. It’s true, digital shops are terrible at this.

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Vancouver tech nerds and cell phone junkies are pretty excited about the launch of Foursquare here in Vancouver on Wednesday, September 9th. The location-based social networking tool has been burning up on the blogs and twitter feeds since its introduction to the tech community at last years SXSW. Since then, the folks at Foursquare have been adding cities to their fold and we’re happy to see Vancouver included in the elite list of available locations as it legitimizes our fair land as a major center of internet activity and innovation.
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“Engage young people where they are hanging out – and that’s online.” That was the mandate from Vancouver’s Wasserman + Partners when they engaged Engine Digital for this year’s WorkSafe BC’s Raise Your Hand campaign. For the three years that we have worked with this brand, the strategy has been to educate young people about the importance of work place safety and the rights that safeguard them. In order to get people excited and involved with the Raise Your Hand message, we had to swap the negative undertones of a safety campaign into a movement backboned on positivity.
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