Not long ago I sent the following email to our entire agency:

I’m writing a blog entry on how we keep score. I’d like your help in making a list of all the ways we measure success.

Ready? Go.

Here are some the of the answers I received, in no particular order:

• Increased public awareness of client/product
• Increased sales/inquiries for client
• Client goals/expectations met or exceeded
• When the client tells other people good things about us
• When the client hangs the creative on the walls at their corporate office
• When the cash register rings
• When the client brand becomes a part of pop culture
• The number of stories we place and the resulting sales increases
• Success is when you make the competition nervous
• PR lineage
• Incoming calls/leads
• Awards
• Web analytics
• Improvement in perception
• When we truly help craft a client’s brand culture
• Isn’t the prime measure of success client happiness?

These are very broad definitions of success, and each can be further broken into subsets of more precise metrics. Web analytics, for example, can get extremely detailed. Personally, I prefer quantitative metrics like sales (not that there’s anything wrong with qualitative success).

The most interesting facet of this little email experiment is the widely varying replies. All are correct, which I think leads to the takeaway: you must define what success is before implementation of any marketing initiative. And it must be measurable.

Last night I read a post by eConsultancy about JetBlue’s latest promotion. Brilliant stuff. September is their slowest month, so they’ve decided to offer an all-you-can-jet price of $599 for the entire month. Their ultimate goal was to “fill seats,” but the success far eclipses sales:

Between September 8 and October 8, travelers can take to JetBlue’s planes as often as they’d like. For only $599. The airline, which is known for its social media savvy, sent out a press release about their offer and tweeted about the deal yesterday. Since then, they’ve sold out 1/3 of their inventory.

According to JetBlue spokesperson Jenny Dervin: “September is a slower month for us. Peak seasons are the holidays and summer. So we thought: ‘Let’s find a way to fill seats.’”

And it appears to be working. To announce their offer, JetBlue sent one tweet to their over 1 million Twitter followers, a general press release and a newsletter to their frequent flyers yesterday.

Since making the announcement, JetBlue has found over 10 million mentions of its brand on blogs and news sites. They’ve seen hits to their trip planning route map grow 861%. Meanwhile, other sites are piggybacking on the deal. For instance, travel mapping site Evelater is encouraging people to post their All-You-Can-Jet plans. They were a trending topic on Twitter yesterday and the positive word of mouth continues to grow.

As we say in the Red Square house rules, always keep score.

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This month’s Red Tuesday presentation was all about TV production. Diana Nichols, our fearless ACD, presented on how we make magic for screens big and small. As the title implies (“From 0 to :30″), the gamut was covered, with examples from the Red Square archives. Good show!

I would tell you more, but that would be spilling mystics.

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It’s not every day that a business turns 100 years old. It’s not every day that a bank turns 100 years old, especially in the market we’ve had recently. So when our long-time client, First Community Bank, wanted a campaign celebrating their 100th anniversary, we felt compelled to do something a little different. Instead of the typical, “hey we’re XX years old!” campaign, we’ve taken the opportunity to make a meaningful statement.

Our strategy for the past several years has been simple and consistent:  position against the big banks. This has seen numerous incarnations, most recently UN_BIG. The tag succinctly states what First Community Bank is, big enough to get the job done without sacrificing conveniences or customer service. Bank president Glen Davis has always said, “We’ve remained a successful bank by treating our customers like people instead of account numbers.”

What does being in business for 100 years mean? In a word, stability. And in banking, stability is king right now. So how do we make this statement within the overarching positioning strategy? Given many big banks are unstable (with some even failing), what else big has had trouble?

The biggest of the big failures had to have been the dinosaurs. So our metaphorical story line was cast. We’d explore the different theories explaining the extinction of the dinosaurs, illustrating that “being big leads to big problems.” Then we’d deliver our point, First Community is 100 years old and going strong. The anniversary is given meaning, and we continue to position against the big banks.

The budget was tight, so we had to get inventive on the television production. We partnered with our friends at Shiny Object in Austin, Texas–and then the fun began: table-top sets, toy dinosaurs and DIY props. Picture kids in a candy store.

The resulting spots are quite different for the category. Have a look.

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