Recently I attended a San Diego Ad Club event called “Mingle Bells.” This was not the first event I’ve attended that the Ad Club has put on and this is not the first time I’ve been to one with out encountering any other “creatives.”
What’s the deal?

We can’t be the only shop in town that sends people to these things. We went to see Alex Bogusky speak at USD this summer and Jeff Goodby this fall and really the only people there were advertising students and voice talent.

Let me just put it this way… there was nobody there who made me fear losing my job except for maybe the free Moltsons and the possibility of me asking an absurd question like, “Why did you give us free drinks for an hour and lock us in this room without beverages for 2?”

Anyway, back to Mingle Bells and its lameity; I suppose I was under the impression that I was going to finally walk into an ad event and meet some other creatives. This is important – it’s like seeing basketball players chum it up before the game. It’s nice to know what the happenings are around town in the world of advertising. This is normal. It happens all over the place. Usually when any kind of ad event is thrown creative people show up. I just moved here from Minneapolis where that happens. A lot.

I guess I sound like I’m complaining about the events that the Ad Club throws for its advertising community… When really I’m complaining about the community the Ad Club is trying to throw parties for. So I would like to thank the Ad Club for all of their efforts and as a creative agency we’ll be sure to show up to support the cause.
San Diego; I’m calling you out. Next time an ad event is thrown, you can guarantee Bailey Gardiner will be there rocking out! Here’s a little taste of what goes on when BG shows up to the party.

When will you represent?

Ok you procrastinators, I know you’re out there. It is now December 22nd. You have exactly 3 days before Christmas Day or if you celebrate with family like I do on Christmas Eve, you are down to only two! Yikes…it is time to brave the masses and SHOP!

Don’t panic, I am here to help. Working at an advertising and public relations agency we have a lot of retail clients that are perfect for getting the inside scoop. I compiled a few helpful tips to make your last minute shopping experience a little less painful:

Stop by Hazard Center  in Mission Valley: all you need, all in one stop. Have a book lover in the family? Check out Barnes and Noble where you can find a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction books. Can’t decide what to get your boss? Pick up a Starbucks gift card for him and an Eggnog latte for yourself. (My personal Favorite).

 Tiffany & Co. San Diego in Fashion Valley is doing something they have never done before. I think it is pretty cool too! They are offering “boxed, bowed and ready to go” gift options to make your last minute holiday shopping a snap. Just think of the look on that special someone’s face when they see a gift under the Christmas tree wrapped in that timeless Tiffany blue box.

Tiffany & Co. not your style? Try heading on down to Seaport Village for a little shopping along the waterfront. Can’t find a sitter for the kids? No Problem, Seaport Village offers lots of stuff for the entire family. Free entertainment, street performers, waterfront dining, and don’t forget to take a spin on the 1895 Loof Carousel. With over 50 shops to choose from, you’re sure to find something for everyone in the family. Even your old Aunt Edna who is hard to please. Have a teenage girl in the family? Check out Urban Girl Accessories to find tons of things to choose from for that perfect gift.  Still not convinced? Seaport Village is OPEN Christmas Day from 10am-6pm and is offering free all day parking! What’s better than that?

So, you are done shopping and now you have a ton of gifts to wrap. What now? Try Holiday gift bags. All you need is a the gift bag, some tissue paper and you are done. No wrapping, no tape, no scissors and no gift tags. Fast, easy and efficient.

There you have it. A few helpful tips to get you through your mad dash of last minute holiday shopping. I hope you find everything you are looking for!

No doubt, this time of year most offices are being inundated with the usual barrage of candied, chocolate coated and nut-rolled holiday gift confections.

So for our holiday gift, we decided to give something different.

And we decided to make it ourselves.

After all, each project we work on here at BG has our own hand-crafted touch—there’s no reason our holiday gift should be any different.

Using water-based organic matsui inks and organic cotton bags from terratote the team screenprinted a series of five bags. One for each area of BG’s expertise—advertising, public relations, media, interactive and design. And each with it’s very own representative icon created by art director Nik Helgaas.

Right here at BG we burned the screen printing screens using photo emulsion and printed each bag with our own little hands. It was a little stinky at times (thanks to the screen cleaner) but overall lots of fun and a true team effort.

To finish, the bags were tied together with hemp rope and an accompanying note and hand or rush delivered to each recipient. Thanks to all involved!

Oh, and don’t forget to keep an eye on your inbox for our holiday e-card. It features Jon and Indra in tacky Christmas sweaters (not to be missed!).

Not so long ago, it used to be that companies seeking to hire new employees would run recruitment advertising to lure potential candidates.  As though a promise of a better life in sunny San Diego was enough, here is an historic 1960s example of a local company’s efforts.

These days (although the recent news reports on layoffs and rising unemployment figures would suggest otherwise) companies are still hiring, but the most modern recruitment methods are far more sophisticated and targeted.

For example, our agency has recently hired several people — all of them sourced without running the traditional “want ad”.   Being the social media experts that we are, our agency utilized our online resources to get the word out.  Here’s some successful avenues to consider if (and when — and there will be a when again) you are hiring up and trying to find the best talent to join your company:

• Your company blog - We’ve hired all our recent interns this way.  Young, web-savvy college students and recent grads live online, so it’s natural they would find your job posting there.
• LinkedIn - Great connection site for professionals of all makes and models.  There are groups to join for your own specialty area, plus ways to ask your network if they know anyone who might fit your job opening.
• Online job posting sites -  These have been highly successful for us.  In our industry, we use TalentZoo and Creative Hotlist.  AdWeek, Monster and HotJobs are okay too, but frankly have not worked as well for us.  Craig’s List is a bust — too many yahoos.
• Club/Organization website - AdClub, PRSA, IABC ,and AMA all have sites with job listings.  Whatever your industry area, there’s plenty of opportunities for networking.
• Twitter - 140 characters to let your followers know about the link to your blog post on the job opening
• Stalking - No, not the creepy kind.  The in-person kind when you literally go to meetings and places intending to introduce yourself to potential candidates.  We hired a fantastic new copywriter right out of Miami Ad School by going to their graduation ceremony and meeting him there.  (Thanks for listening, Mike!)

And the best way to entice potential employees to consider your company for their next great success is your own website.  Let it be known you seek top talent, and when someone sends you a great resume, save it!  You never know when you might need to fill a position fast, and having a mailbox full of resumes helps you leapfrog the collection process.

Here at Bailey Gardiner, we’ve formed an online specialties group. Each person is responsible for becoming an expert in one specific online specialty. One of our social media and online consultants, Jason Baer, has helped each of us find specific ways to help our clients grow through doing more online marketing, SEO, etc… The area I’ve been becoming an expert in, is email marketing.

I’ve learned, it’s pretty amazing how much companies can benefit from just making a few simple tweaks to their current emails. Of course, if you really want your open-rate, click-through rate or even your profitability off of emails to skyrocket, you really should contact us. But for now, here are a few simple tips to help you send more effective emails:

1)  Send your email to half of your list on one day and the other half on another. I recommend Wednesday or Thursday as those two days have the highest click-through and open-rate. This will allow you to see and test what day of the week your target audience is most likely to open or click-through an email.

2) Subject lines are key. People are more likely to open an email if the subject line relates to the company or a specific product, not the actual promotion. Try testing a couple different subject lines on the same day and see which one is more effective at reaching your target audience.

3) For the best results, add 6-10 links per an email. Don’t over do it, but make sure all relevant information has a link, ie “click here for products”, “$10 off”, etc… Make sure each link goes directly to the page they are wanting to see and not just to your homepage. That involves more time, more clicking and could potentially result in losing that customer.

The amount of marketing emails people receive every day is outstanding. Just look at my Yahoo! inbox. I haven’t even clicked on one of them…

Make your email be the one that stands out!

I know, awkward question. Now the age-old question “What is your budget?” doesn’t seem so uncomfortable.

Believe it or not, we don’t ask the budget question so we know how many kegs we can buy for the Holiday party (we’ve been saving money for Holiday booze since March). Understanding a client’s budget not only saves time, it leads to a stronger strategic plan.

Here are three (of 100) reasons to share your budget up front:

1. We will recommend the best strategies and tactics to meet objectives within the budget. When we plan a program with an open-ended budget (i.e. the client says “they don’t know what their budget is” or “they need us to recommend what it should be”) the client, inevitably, treats the plan like a Chinese menu — not necessarily selecting the items we would recommend with a limited budget.

2. We need some guidelines. Keep in mind that we are creative AND strategic. We can think of a million and one ways to promote your brand - keep us grounded. Don’t worry, you will still get creative solutions. Just more realistic ones.

3. It’s hard to get excited about the more affordable campaign that fits within your budget when we originally suggested that you buy out the halftime show at the Super Bowl (Remember, we didn’t have any budget parameters so opportunities were endless!)

Keep avoiding “How much do you weigh?” and “Why do you always smell like pickles?” but certainly be prepared to answer the budget question.

Either you’re already following the Bailey Gardiner troops on Twitter, or you’re tired of hearing about it. Chances are if you know what it is and you’re tired of it, you’re not on it. So to simplify the trial and error process, here are a few steps to get you started. I promise it will take no more than 10 minutes. Need some convincing? Here’s 12 reasons to join Twitter.

1. Go to http://www.twitter.com. Enter your chosen user name, and I recommend making it something easily recognizable. So, if for example your name is Jon Bailey, I’d recommend using the name “JonBailey.”

2. Let twitter search your contacts to start you out with some familiar faces to follow. Spare your friends and skip the invite to those in your address book who aren’t already on Twitter. It’s like AA, they’ll get there when they’re ready.

3. Now you have an official account and it asks you, “What are you doing?” Don’t answer that. Nobody cares what you’re doing. Give us something good, like a helpful link, a comedic realization, a timely piece of news.

4. Write something! First note that your name is no longer “jonbailey”. It’s now, “@jonbailey” and I’m “@lizzied.” So if you want to say something to someone in particular, you write just that, “Hey @lizzied, nice blog post - look I’m on twitter!” Remember, you only have 140 characters per post.

5. Follow and be followed. What does it all mean? The great thing about twitter is that you don’t get littered with info you don’t want. You pick who you want to receive info from (follow) and others choose to follow you. So everything you post is visible to only those who follow you and those who search you. Use the search tool to find people talking about your interests. Find people in your industry and look at who they’re following and who is following them - go ahead and snag a few of them for your own. If you want to be followed, just write some interesting things and consider your key words if you want people with common interests to find you. Chances are once you follow someone, they’ll return the favor.

6. Try a direct message. Being that anyone can find you and read what you’re posting on the World Wide Web, if you want to say something private, follow this format, “d jonbailey Don’t tell jamieortiz that I put all her office supplies in jell-o molds.” Because of the “d” no one but @jonbailey will get that message.

7. If you’re unlike me and you sometimes leave your computer, consider clicking the “settings” tab, followed by the “devices” tab to set your twitter account to your phone. You’ll only receive direct messages to your phone, but you’ll be able to twitter your messages through text message.

8. And my best tip of advice for getting started: Go to http://www.twhirl.org and download the time-saving platform that feeds your twitter feeds into an Instant Message-like platform, eliminating the time it will take you to continually check the twitter website.

Now you’re tweeting, but you’re a novice. In the words of @samirb, “Once you set up a twitter account, remember there’s a short learning curve, like going from a PC to a Mac.”

Have no fear, I’ll be back with some best practices in a following post.

What questions do you have? Don’t ask me what that picture is, you’ll figure it out on Twitter.

Being the Administrative Assistant here at BG, I go through the mail everyday. I am amazed at the amount of junk mail this office receives. Catalog after catalog, mailer after mailer. It is quite overwhelming and makes me a little sick because all I do with all that stuff is throw it into the recycle bin.  As mentioned before in Jon’s blog, we conducted a one week experiment to see how much junk mail our office received. After just ONE week of everyone saving their direct mail, we had over 14 lbs of JUNK. Here is a little reminder picture of what all that junk looked like.

As part of our effort to become a more eco-friendly company, I did some research to find out how to stop this overload of direct mail. I found some pretty great tips on the Privacy Rights Clearing House website. I wanted to share a few with you. These tips were taken directly from their website:

Pre-Approved Offers of Credit:

1. To have your name removed from this particular mailing list, you must contact the credit reporting agencies directly by mail or phone.  You can find the addresses and numbers for these agencies here.

US Postal Service Change of Address:

1. To notify senders of a change of address, it is better to contact your credit card companies, family, friends, utilities,  and magazines directly to avoid the junk mail following you to your new address.
2. If you fill out a change of address form at the post office they in turn will send out a change of address card to mailers who have your old address. This will include any current junk mail you are receiving.

To remove yourself from as many national mailings as possible:

1. Contact the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) sign up for their Mail Preference Service (MPS). Once you register your name will be put into a “do not mail” file that is updated monthly. You MUST re-register after three years. There is a $1 charge to register by mail. Their address is: Mail Preference Service , Attention Dept: 27478505, Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 282 Carmel, NY 10512.
2. Or Register with the DMA online here: DMA Choice Website

These are just a few tips from their website. It was pretty helpful to me and I hope it will be as helpful to you. (I did find a few errors on their page regarding the DMA and I have made the changes here on this blog.)  Let’s all send a message to companies who use direct mail marketing by taking our names off the list. If enough of us do it who knows we might start  something. Maybe they will try using Social Media instead.

Recently I was at a Halloween party. It was Halloween, coincidentally, and into my buddy’s basement-turned-dance-club walks Colonel Sanders with a bucket of chicken, offering it to everyone. At the time I remember thinking, “wow this guy is seriously costume committed.” The costume was spot on. It looked as if the Colonel himself had risen from the grave. So having started my third beer, I did what anyone else would have done and grabbed me a delicious piece of extra crunchy deep-fried yum-yum.

That moment, I smelled something besides the Colonel’s secret recipe. What I smelled was marketing in disguise. Here’s what made me suspicious:

KFC is hardly doing cool enough advertising right now that somebody would roll into a Halloween party dressed as such. The Colonel is certainly an icon, but most Halloween getups are based on what’s current i.e. Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, Michael Phelps and what have you. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that guy just really liked KFC and wanted to be the Colonel for Halloween. I guess I’ll never know.

What I want to believe is that KFC had this awesome guerilla idea and executed it to a tee. My buddy lives in a house with four other dudes. They sent out a massive event invite on Facebook and half of San Francisco attended this thing. How easy would it have been for KFC to go onto Facebook, find a bunch of big Halloween parties and send Colonel Sanders out to them to give away free chicken?

Later I mentioned the encounter to my buddy and asked him what he thought. Neither of us knew the guy, but we both agreed it was pretty cool that someone would come as Colonel Sanders handing out chicken.But if we had come to find out that KFC paid for the Colonel’s attendance that night, it would have been instant lame. Why? Because true guerilla marketing occurs when the target doesn’t know they’re being advertised to. It has to be sneaky. The advertiser’s cover can’t be blown.

You hear “guerilla” used all the time now to describe marketing tactics that are unconventional. And while unconventional is a big component of effective guerilla marketing, we need to remember to keep incognito because now more than ever no one wants to be caught by advertising.

When your client is Chick-fil-a (a fast-food chain based in Atlanta that serves lots and lots of chicken entrees)…you present a campaign featuring nothing but cows.

Can you imagine the look on that Marketing Director’s face? How about the awkward silence that followed the presentation? Believe it or not, the best campaigns are the ones that are so different, they make you feel uncomfortable. They make you think it could never be done. They aren’t what everyone else is doing. What makes it a great campaign is just that — they are so unconventional that they actually spur a response from the consumer you are trying to reach.

The Chick-fil-a Cows have been in circulation for over a decade. They are a team of cows that joined forces to encourage people to eat chicken rather than beef (aka a hamburger at competitors).  The campaign is genius, differentiating Chick-fil-a from its fast-food rivalries like McDonald’s and Burger King. A truly guerilla effort on the cows’ part, they hold signs that are misspelled and often have local messages. The cows have reached all types of media including TV, outdoor, events and sponsorships.

Hindsight, the campaign seems like a no-brainer. A funny, tongue-in-cheek way to get attention. However, it probably wasn’t that easy from the beginning. There was probably some squirming. Some doubt. Some push back. But lo and behold! Creativity prevailed! Hats off to you Mr. (or Ms.) Marketing Director, for going against the grain. For letting your agency give you a great creative direction that has spanned a decade!

Marketing Director Moral of the Story: Do something different. Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different response. Can we really expect consumers to respond to us if we keep feeding them the same thing over and over?

Agency Moral of the Story: It is our job to make our clients feel uncomfortable. To make them rethink the way things are done. To make them step outside the norm. It is our job to make consumers pay attention.