At last night’s B2 Awards Reception in Chicago, the Business Marking Association (BMA) handed out its annual awards for premier examples of “strategy and style in B2B marketing.” That gave us at AHA! great cause to celebrate the awards we picked up—all four of them.
Yep, four. And we swept an entire category!
In the “Corporate Brand/Identity—Annual Reports” division, AHA! walked away with all three trophies awarded. We took home Awards of Excellence for three CR reports we created over the past year: the Microsoft 2013 Citizenship Report, the 2012 ESCO Sustainability Report, and the Comcast and NBCUniversal 2012 Corporate Social Responsibility Report. Each of these publications was the result of months of diligent, difficult work, taking truly complex data and program information and creating narratives of impact that pushed our clients’ great work forward. We’re very proud of all three.
We’re equally thrilled with our fourth winner. The rebrand we did for our friends at Cadet Manufacturing, which helped them transform their identity to match a new market strategy, earned an Award of Excellence in the “Corporate Identity Program” category. It’s welcome recognition for work we loved doing!
See the complete list of winners here.
There’s a battle for snack supremacy happening locally, and AHA! was asked to help settle the matter with a recent taste test of tortilla chips here at our office.
Gordon Oliver, business editor at The Columbian, wrote a story in March about a new Frito-Lay product—called La Cocina De Josefina Mexican Restaurant Style Tortilla Chips—that’s competing against local favorite Juanita’s, a 30-year-old brand based in Hood River, Oregon. The story lived on for many weeks, circulating mostly on Facebook. Both brands say they are local, and the Frito-Lay Josefina’s chips are, in fact, made here in Vancouver, Washington. Josefina’s is doing heavy marketing at Fred Meyer and other local grocery outlets, with a higher price point than Juanita’s.
Because of strong reader interest in the story, the newspaper staged the face-off to determine whose chip is the champ. A photographer and videographer captured reactions and comments, which included our analysis of the remarkably similar package design and messaging.
Although it was a “blind” test—tasting unmarked chip samples, with optional salsa—most of us could identify them by appearance. Apparently, we know our chips around here, and the clear favorite was Juanita’s. Sorry, big chip maker, market research doesn’t lie.
Natural light can be your vibrant room’s best friend—or its worst enemy. But the fear of fading needn’t pale your palette.
A recent project for our clients at Eastman Chemical Company allowed us to creatively explore that scenario. The goal of the campaign was to make homeowners aware of the benefits of LLumar® window film. One of Eastman’s brands of professionally installed film, LLumar helps protect home furnishings and artwork from the sun’s damaging UV rays.
Production shot at Studio 3
To bring the message to life, we created a 60-second video with a cast of colorful “characters” using a stop-motion animation technique. (Thanks to our partners at Studio 3 for the beautiful photography work.) We also developed a number of other supporting assets, including customer testimonials, geo-targeted banner ads and a humorous 30-second pre-roll video. Early signs point to exceptional campaign results.
Watch the full video here:
http://northamerica.llumar.com/help-protect-what-you-love-from-fading-285
If we had just one word to describe this past year at AHA!, it would be growth. We’ve welcomed aboard several fantastic clients—including Comcast and NBCUniversal, ESCO, Eastman, Silicon Valley Bank and Cadet—and that’s been cause for recruiting that same caliber of in-house talent.
We have a new guy in our top creative post and a slew of new team members throughout our agency. We’ve landed the cream of the crop for sure, so let’s get right to the introductions!
Meet Brent Wilson, our new creative chief
We’re thrilled to announce our new executive creative director, Brent Wilson. He joins us from Momentum in St. Louis, where he’s been senior vice president and group creative director on a number of national clients, including USPS, Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch and the Craft Brew Alliance.
Brent is a proven and passionate leader who has a solid record of doing best-in-class work for a broad spectrum of clients. He’s also cultivated a generation of best-in-class creative leaders.
We’re looking forward to his and his family’s arrival in Portland. Congratulations to Brent! (And to us.) (And to you!)
Feel free to send your own note to Brent to welcome him to AHA!. He’d love to hear from you.
We’re gonna need a bigger whiteboard
From our new HR director and project and account managers to an interactive creative director, designers and writers, here are the two dozen new folks we’ve welcomed in the past year.
Learn more about these team members and others on our website.
Look for Besty Henning at the Business Marketing Association annual conference, BMA2014, in Chicago in late May. Her Firestarter presentation, “Ignite Employee Passion with Your Corporate Responsibility Report,” will spotlight how companies can tap into their CR work to engage employees and build loyalty. See the session abstract and full conference agenda here: http://www.bma2014.com/agendas/agendaday2.aspx
The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. And to marketers competing for increasingly inundated audiences, that’s a death knell.
That message kicked things off as our lead strategist Christian Hicks presented at a recent AMA PDX luncheon at Bridgeport Brewery in NW Portland. His talk, “Five Keys to Effective Content Strategy,” outlined principles every marketer should consider when crafting a content strategy:
- Have a clear editorial mission.
- Know your audience inside and out.
- Map the audience journey.
- Tell an integrated story.
- Focus on life cycles, not deliverables.
“Content strategy gives brands a reason to be loved,” Christian said. “It creates opportunities to express powerful ideas and to tell a story that builds over time to deepen engagement with your brand.”
Now the rest of Portland knows why we love Christian and his sharp strategic thinking.
After putting in the hard work to deliver great communications for our clients, of course we love hearing their positive responses. Receiving extra recognition from our industry peers is just the icing on the cake. We’ve been fortunate to enjoy some of that spotlight recently for award-wining work.
PR Daily’s 2013 Corporate Social Responsibility Awards were announced in March, and we proudly received three honorable mentions in the Best Report category. Our content was recognized for the sustainability reports we did for Comcast NBCUniversal, Microsoft and ESCO. See the list of winners here: http://www.prdaily.com/Awards/CSR2013.aspx
And on April 7 the PR News 2014 CSR Awards were announced, with AHA! garnering another honorable mention in the Annual Report category, again for Microsoft’s 2013 Citizenship Report. See the list of winners here: http://www.prnewsonline.com/2014-csr-awards/
Mark, Bridget, her son Dillon and Michael joined 250 Comcast and NBCUniversal employees last week for Comcast Cares Day, a nationwide volunteering event. The AHA! team helped clean up Faubion School in NE Portland. 
We’ve added some powerhouse clients to our roster. We’re working with Comcast and NBCUniversal on their CR report. And we’re keeping it local with Cadet, one of the region’s largest manufacturers, on a brand refresh. Look for new work examples to hit our Portfolio section soon!
It’s no secret we’re big Timbers fans. Last week, we expressed our love in almost 12,000 stickers on our graffiti wall. The design, inspired by Brent Diskin’s captain’s arm band, was brought to us by our own Rachel Harrison. It was a true team effort, and a lot of fun, but most of us won’t be doing any craft projects involving stickers again for a while.
This month, we collected 1,200 items for the Walk & Knock food drive, benefiting Clark County families. Three AHA! teams battled it out to knock on doors and collect food donations. The winning team gets a free lunch served up by the rest of us. What a great way to combine three things we love: food, a little competition, and the chance to help our community.