eROI Days Email Agency

www.LogoBama.com:

My friends over at a relatively new Portland, interactive agency, Substance, launched this site a few weeks ago. I asked founder Stephen Landau about his inspiration to do the site. He responded, “We figured if we’ve been talking about beliefs and change for the last 15 months, we should support the candidate who says the same stuff. Plus, it was a fun little project to work on. Not sure why we set the donation goal so high ($5,000) but then again, what’s the point in shooting for a small, attainable goal when you can aim for a bigger, more audacious goal.”

I especially like the way the logo you create can map into Flickr automatically and can be ported at any size into Flickr and a dozen other social networking sites. Nice work.

Here’s my quick, uncreative creation using the site:

I know my employees aren’t going to like this level of transparency, but I have to admit that I was a little disappointed with myself for NOT heavily promoting this non-profit workshop that we created from scratch for the benefit of The Boys and Girls Club of Portland. We had a lower than expected turnout at both workshops the past 2 weeks, but on the bright side, we learned some critical take-aways that could make this program a big success this summer or fall when we try it one more time.

Here’s the concept behind the Communication Breakdown Workshop:
The acceleration of technology innovation like Web 2.0 and other online tools is having an adverse effect on family dynamics. Kids and their parents have always struggled to communicate, but these days, they don’t even speak the same language - (IM’ing, hanging out on social networking sites for kids 8-13 years old like Microsoft LiveSpaces, Yahoo! Kids, Disney, and Millsberry). Parents want a way to communicate, connect, and bond with their kids, but still protect them from the predators that they fear in “online communities.” The workshop is a lot like an online scavenger hunt with cool discoveries of safe music-making sites and blog posts on LiveSpaces.

What we learned:
1. Promote it heavily in email, web, search, in-kind media partners, and on-site at The Boys and Girls Club.
2. Don’t schedule the workshop during Spring Break - bad idea.
3. Instead of having a wide age range like 8-13 years old, keep it to 11-13 year olds and their parents or 14-16 year olds. A four year age difference is like light years for kids at that age.
4. FREE pizza will always be the best on-site marketing ever.
5. Try a test run for this workshop at an organization like Friends of the Children where mentors are a huge part of the equation.

It’s Easter morning before the kids wake up and I wanted to quickly write this blog post. On Friday afternoon, I gave the Commencement Address to the graduating class of the Art Institute of Portland and I must admit that it was a phenomenal experience. I had attended their Portfolio Show just a couple hours before and was awestruck and inspired by their design talent, creativity, and diversity of design in web, apparel, gaming, interior design, print, advertising, and more. Everyone has heard about Portland being recognized for its “Creative Class”, but the Art Institute is at the center of it all. They teach their students to not only design well but present their designs with maturity and confidence. After the ceremony, I had drinks with many of the professors and administrators and was encouraged to see their passion to continually improve and draw inspiration from their students. I’m excited to see the future of the Portland creative community as more talent comes out of a growing Art Institute of Portland and more agency owners are collaborating on client work and community projects.

So here is my 15 minute speech (which is slightly more formal than when I presented it and had all the graduates stand and the audience of 350 people give a huge round of applause, high fives, etc for their milestone accomplishment):

“• I’m honored to be here. Thank you. I’m not a traditional choice for a Commencement Speaker of this esteemed college of insanely talented designers and professors. I am not a designer and do not have a design background.

• However, I am inspired by design, creativity, and innovation. Five and a half years ago, I started an interactive agency called eROI that is now 50 people strong. In just the past couple years, I’ve hired 7 of you - graduates of the Art Institute of Portland. And, I’ve got to be honest, you are some of the smartest, most talented creatives in the country, making folks from brand-name New York design schools pale in comparison. I’m even more convinced of this after visiting your Portfolio Show earlier today - wow, some great work there.

• Management guru, Peter Drucker, said that business has 2 functions: marketing and innovation. And, if you look at the market today, you’ll notice that companies like Apple, Google, and Nike are rewarded with huge premiums in their stock prices due to a sense of creativity and innovation through every element of their products and how they conduct business. From this, we know that design isn’t just about making pretty pictures, it’s about having a profoundly positive impact on the world.

more…”

(more…)

Here at eROI we go to great lengths to keep you up to date on the latest trends in email marketing. Our latest survey asks for your input on the Subscribe/Unsubscribe Process.

This survey should take just a minute or two, and we will share the results with you when complete.

All survey participants will be automatically entered to win one of a handful of iPod Shuffle mp3 players!

Take the Survey Now »

Greenlight CEO Tim Priest shared this really insightful report of Greater Portland’s economy and which areas are most ripe to recruit for. Here is just a small sampling of the Recommendations from that report:

“Considering the data as a whole, Greenlight has selected these clusters for its first RECRUITMENT initiatives:

1 - ALTERNATIVE/RENEWABLE ENERGY combined with ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES AND RECYCLING TECHNOLOGY

Rationale:
• Our region has a significant electronic services workforce that can easily transition into renewable energy.
• Significant venture capital is flowing into alternative/renewable energy.
• Our region has momentum in this cluster, with recent announcements from Solar World and other companies, and other regional economic development groups are embracing it.
• The Oregon Legislature recently increased incentives for renewable energy companies.

2- COMPUTER SOFTWARE and IT SERVICES

Rationale:
• The greater Portland region has significant human capital, 20% greater than the national average, in the cluster.
• Software is the number one cluster for venture capital.
• Of the region’s specializations, the cluster provides the highest-paying jobs.
• The region has a strong software community and reputation for both open source and software that interfaces with hardware.
• Portland is strategically positioned to capitalize on the Bay Area and Seattle’s software strengths.

3- DESIGN

Rationale:
• The region boasts big consumer brand names — Nike, Columbia Sportswear, Adidas.
• The cluster is consistent with and feeds the region’s green, sustainable brand image.
• We have a 40% higher concentration of talent in these fields than the national average.”

At the OMMA Hollywood event, finally, a true creative breathed inspiration into an event dominated by metrics, analytics, and agency and media organizational models.

Chuck Porter talked about the power of a story that are sometimes bigger than life, like Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, which has become a cult following in Spain and Japan (long after the site had its heyday).

Also, it’s not always about a new medium. Porter’s agency took an age-old marketing medium in print magazines and placed ads in Cosmopolitan, Maxim with cheesy 80’s style male models with puppy dogs,and Molson Beer, then placed ads in male-targeted magazines about the psychographic effect of 100,000’s of women having a positive association of the male species due to these ads. The creative implementation of both real and faux ads and even made-up magazine covers placed on the back-cover of real magazines was all done brilliantly with a huge comedic and viral impact.

In Porter’s last anecdotal story about the difficulty of selling a risky idea into a brand, Chuck said that Burger King franchise owners wanted to kill Porter if he implemented an idea about killing their best selling product - The Whopper - with a campaign called the “BK Whopper Freakout.” The agency recommended trying it on Cable TV in a zip code for 1 restaurant in Las Vegas and it turned out to be wildly successful.

Takeaway for MediaPost - get more creatives as speakers and show the work - Porter rocked!

Here at the OMMA show in Hollywood, a gorgeous sunny break from Portland rain, it’s been great to connect with the Email Insiders crew, the EEC, KickApps, and others in the social networking / online video world here.

From a presentation standpoint, I was most impressed with Patrick Keane, CMO of CBS Interactive. He talked about trends in online media and marketing:
1. Engagement - advertisers don’t want vanilla users, they want engaged users who spend a lot of time on a media site like CBS or social platforms like Facebook, MySpace.
2. Cross-platform - advertisers want to buy across ALL mediums and channels.
3. Flexibility and Customization
4. Branding + Video - moving faster, demand video
5. Data - need better Audience Analytics

Most interesting, however, was Keane’s central theme of how the online medium is an incremental effect, not cannibalizing in any way. He used the show “Jericho” as an example - on TV, it had a 4.2 Nielsen rating, but online video views added another 0.9 points to it - 1.4 million video views of the current and past shows in the few days following each show.

TV, web, and mobile all work TOGETHER to have an incremental engagement effect. No cannibalization.

Another key takeaway: media sites like CBSSports.com appears like its all original content, but there are actually a significant portion of community features and user-generated content (e.g. Fantasy Leagues, etc.).

BTW - CBS is streaming all March Madness games this Thursday - I hope no one at eROI finds out about this.

One trend of online marketing and the tech world as a whole is that there is an acceleration of distraction and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). And, I’m sitting next to the King of ADD, Dylan Boyd. We are listening to the first keynote at MediaPost’s OMMA show in Hollywood, but Dylan has been showing me how Twitter works and it’s quite addictive. Yes, it’s unusual (from my Twitter Virgin perspective) that respected CEO of ReturnPath just Twittered details of the birth of his child and it’s also weird to learn when some of my business associates have a bowel movement.

But, there are some newsworthy uses of Twitter, as the ADD King showed me. The Oregonian is feeding its news into Twitter, Tri-Met has its traffic updates posted real-time to Twitter.

Lessons learned from a guy who started an email marketing company - many people WANT to communicate all the time - don’t fight this human need / addiction - fuel it. Why not?

I love entrepreneurial passion and how both Jason Calacanis and Mark Cuban’s blog posts ‘tell it like it is’. In the process, there has been quite a bit of controversy from Jason’s blog post “How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)” that got picked up by TechCrunch and the TechCrunch blog comments were charged statements of brutal opposition or strongly in favor of Jason’s tips, especially #11: “Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it–go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life. For realz.” Jason goes onto give advice of where to spend money and where to cut back. I have to admit that I disagreed with a lot of Jason’s perspective, especially expecting all employees to work as hard and long as a founder/owner when there is much less upside for that employee. Jason - 16 hours a day, 7 days a week is not sustainable. Startups are marathons, not sprints. Make sure you got some honest perspective from your employees, your spouse, your family, and their spouses and families to see if everyone is enjoying the creative process of starting your startup when they are burnt out. Mark Cuban had some good advice on his blog post “A Couple of My Rules for Startups” - very opinionated - but surprisingly mature comments. You can tell he really knows what he’s talking about. I think Cuban is a hot-head, wannabe cool guy, but he is hell of a sales guy from his past success in startups and growing $billion companies. Here are a few key excerpts: “1. Don’t start a company unless its an obsession and something you love. 2. If you have an exit strategy, its not an obsession. 3. Hire people who you think will love working there. 4. Sales Cures All. Know how your company will make money and how you will actually make sales. 5. Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies. Get the best. Outside the core competencies, hire people that fit your culture but are cheap 6. An expresso machine ? Are you kidding me ? Shoot yourself before you spend money on an expresso machine. Coffee is for closers. Sodas are free. Lunch is a chance to get out of the office and talk. There are 24 hours in a day, and if people like their jobs, they will find ways to use as much of it as possible to do their jobs.” (more…)

I’m surprised this ad has less than 9,000 views on YouTube. It’s brilliant and has the potentially to be passed around from inbox to inbox because it hits the mark with nearly everyone older than 24 years old who will always view themselves in that 24 year old body. I need some Centrum Silver vitamins. Check it out: