Insights
Guerrilla campaign covered by industry blog
Checking your site stats can tell you things. Lo and behold, our top-referring page for May 05 was from Adrants.com, and that came at the end of the month.
Adrants is an advertising industry site with constantly updated news and opinion. Named the number one advertising blog by Fast Company, and AdAge named it the number one “website you should bookmark” it’s an interesting site to keep you informed on the latest trends in advertising, including guerrilla campaigns by The Next Wave.
Found another article- from an Italian site called www.ninjamarketing.it- the Google translation is entertaining:
Agency makes publicity with techniques from road
“An agency of the Ohio has made publicity using technical of guerrilla marketing to a held seminary gives to the Lautenslager, Co-author of the book “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 days”. The participants to the seminary, clearly professionals interested to the not conventional techniques, have been received from numerous simply written provocative messages with of the gessetti color to you on the walls. In this way agency The Next Wave has intentional to above all demonstrate to the own creativity and the ability to create campaigns of impact to low budget.”
see the whole thing in Googlish- here: ninjamarketing
If you want to know what it really says- my father provided a proper translation from the Italian (he’s fluent in 5 languages)
“Agency uses street marketing to plug itself
An Ohio agency advertised itself by using guerrilla marketing at a seminar held by Al Lautenslager, co-author of “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 days.” Participants at the seminar, clearly professionals interested in unconventional techniques, ran into numerous provocative message simply scribbled on the walls (sic) with chalk. In this way, The Next Wave agency wanted to demonstrate its own creativity and, above all, how to run a campaign at a low budget.”
Note- Google is great for finding things, not so good as a translator.
See, this guerrilla stuff really works. Our ideas have always been too big for Dayton, now we’re proving it.
Yeah, we know what you think on this one…
BMW’s next brilliant marketing move for the Mini!
Yes, you heard it here first. After the amazing success of relaunching a car based on a car that only the British could love, what do you do for an encore? Well, the obvious was the convertible, and then maybe a 4 door version- a mini-wagon, but, the real brilliant next move is for BMW to launch their scooter- which “sips, not guzzles” (to steal the ad line from the campaign by the ad godz at Crispin Porter Bogusky) with the best of them.
In the world of $7 a gallon gas (the rest of the world for those of you who don’t travel much) scooters rule the streets. Just starting to catch on here on the coasts, scooters are a very efficient, fun way to get one person almost anywhere, as long as it’s not raining, snowing, or idiots in cars on cell phones aren’t trying to run you over.
Enter the BMW solution- the BMW C-1, not available in the USA, yet, and you have a scooter with a roll cage, roof… just what the doctor ordered- safe, dry, visible, and another fun vehicle to bring customers into the Mini showroom.
When I was in Europe, I lusted after one of these. Even if Mini didn’t want to bring in the C-1, a Mini branded scooter of the more conventional sort, would fit the brand mystique quite well.
The next Mini?
What do you think?
Five Rivers MetroParks catches The Next Wave
Five Rivers MetroParks recently selected The Next Wave to develop the brand for a new program set to launch in 2006. The new program will be part of a major push to connect outdoor recreational opportunities to regional economic development efforts. Communities that provide a complete package of cultural and recreational activities are more likely to attract high-growth potential companies in cutting edge industries like high-tech and bioscience. The Next Wave’s understanding of new media and strong brand building capabilities attracted Five Rivers MetroParks officials in their search for a marketing partner. The identity should be released to the public in mid-summer, with the preliminary programming introductions this fall.
The Next Wave implements web standards
They say the cobbler’s kids always need new shoes, well; we needed to update our site. Although people were always impressed with it, we did it 3 years ago, before CSS was fully implemented, and (x)HTML wasn’t quite 1.0 yet.
So we recently, quietly, went under the hood and rebuilt it, faster, stronger, better than it was before (and it didn’t cost 6 million dollars for those of you that got the reference).
Many of you won’t see any difference other than a few pages that no longer require you to continue to another page to finish the story. The site now features (x)HTML 1.0 Strict programming and is compliant according to theW3 Consortium. The site is now; handicapped accessible, works better with all current and future browsers, better optimized for search engines like Google, and of course, work and look just as cool as it did before.
Why should you care? Well, if you are a client who has an outside vendor building your site, lack of compliance can actually hurt your sites effectiveness, and your bottom line. You’re not getting the site you think you paid for. We often hear clients ask for fancy Flash sites thinking they look hip, but when we explain that search engines can’t index the vector images embedded in a Flash site, they trust us to build them something to standards.
As a designer, building a compliant site is just good craft. You wouldn’t ship a print file to a printer with low-rez RGB jpg’s anymore than you should build a site that isn’t compliant.
Our site gets hits from all over the world, and brings us inquiries about employment from as far away as Hong Kong, Finland and Austria. We’re actually embarrassed that it’s taken us this long to tighten it up, but the cobbler’s tale holds true- our customers always came first.
If you are interested in having your site evaluated for compliance, and effectiveness, please give us a call. We’ll rebuild your site to be faster, stronger, better than before too.