Conventional thinking in regards to Charlie Darwin’s theory of evolution is that biological change is the cumulative result of slow, continual and incremental processes. Think of changes happening in several, barely-perceivable units.

Another change model, punctuated equilibrium, states that species exhibit little change for long periods of time (stasis) interrupted by sudden and radical clusters or bursts of change.

Punctuated equilibrium has been applied to explain how change occurs in economics, organizational behavior and politics. And while an esoteric thought, it certainly seems applicable to the advertising business right now. Technological advances are revolutionizing the way people consume information, and those tasked with creating content for consumption are having to figure out how to adapt. Profoundly and at lightning speed.

Just a thought.

When it comes to a symphony, I prefer the playfulness of Ravel or Debussy to the ponderous progress of a Beethoven Symphony—like No. 5’s DAH, DAH, DAH, DAAAH. (You know, the heavy stuff.) But whether our hearts flutter to the flute or the sudden drop of an imposing bass note, I am captivated by the seamlessness of great music.

The difference between good music and great music—true for all art forms—is the attention paid by the creator to the details which illuminate the whole. Effect and affect are both in the details.

The quick, playful interactions between the fingers of a pianist and the keys. The harpist’s hands tracing back and forth over the strings like they were skimming water, appearing to do nothing. It’s a kind of behind-the-scenes magic happening right in front of you. And every piece of it determines the whole.

Think of the Traffic Department as the agency maestro. Except we’re not ensuring that every piece is played in the right chord. We leave that to the players. (Also, there are ACDs and CDs for that.) We don’t tune anyone’s instruments or clean anyone’s spit valves. What we do is move the creative parts to the players to let them apply their expertise before returning it to us where it can be exchanged for the next motion. Some people say their door is always open to the agency. Ours is always revolving. The process has to be seamless. God forbid it moves like DAH, DAH, DAH, DAAAH.

The mobile revolution is upon us. We all walk around with these devices practically sewn into our hands, and smart marketers are beginning to realize implications of the tectonic shift happening in the digital world. According to Gartner Research, by 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

So when Full Sail University, one of the most prestigious entertainment-media schools in the country, picked us to design and produce the mobile site for their mobile development program, we ran around high-fiving. Then we sat down and got serious.

The site’s purpose is simple: generate prospective student interest. But in order to attract the minds that will architect the future of mobile, we needed to innovate rather than simply build.

The result is a mobile site that performs like a native application. Clean iconography, sophisticated navigation movement and sliding infographics deliver a fresh experience. However, the feature we’re most proud of is the “content shift.” We designed the site such that the content changes upon shifting from portrait to landscape mode. Why not create an alternate path of information that the visitor can discover? The landscape mode also allows us scale to flow in additional content, such as graduate profiles and videos, as the site grows.

Here’s a little overview of the project. Results have been great so far—we’ll share some stats soon.

We’re very excited to announce that we’ve been selected to work with Hilton Hotels & Resorts on a global creative assignment. The work will cover more than 550 Hilton properties in 78 countries across six continents.

Red Square is honored to be partnering with one of the most famous hotel brands in the world. We’ll share more soon. In the meantime, you can quote us as saying this.

We’ve recently been privileged to work on various e-commerce sites. The fundamental purpose of these sites is to transact business, so a cardinal rule must be: make the payment process as painless as possible. Conversely stated, each hoop a user must jump through lessens the probability of purchase completion.

Usability expert, Paul Rourke, may have said it best, “Provide the visitor with all they need to know for them to be happy to progress to checking out, without any un-answered questions.”

We think ASOS does shopping carts justice. According to their e-commerce director, James Hart, one small change to the first step of their checkout process resulted in a 50 percent decrease in abandonment of shopping carts. What was this magical change? Simply allowing the user to continue unimpeded to checkout without having to create an ASOS account.

“People talk about the number of steps they will have to go through, all the extra information they will have to provide, and the fact they haven’t got time to be creating an account. What I find most fascinating is the response I get from people when I ask them ‘what additional information do you expect you will need to provide if you create an account compared to a guest checkout option?’”

The only additional info required is a password. ASOS asks users to create accounts in the checkout form, by including “password” and “confirm password.” The new UX design cuts out steps that waste the user’s time and makes account creation way more approachable.

The definition and use of traditional shopping carts still apply online. The cart should be a tool, provided by the shop, for transporting the user’s merchandise to the checkout counter for purchase. It should help users, not delay them. Spending time upfront on usability and focusing on the sole function of the shopping cart will aid customers in completing purchases without distraction.

New Year’s Eve is the Ron Burgundy of holidays. It’s kind of a big deal. As such, we work with our gaming and hospitality clients to go all out for the big event. This year, we’d like to share two projects that were especially fun.

For Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Biloxi, which is having a rockstar/superhero themed party, we created an elaborate comic book for the invitation. Our creative team concepted the characters and storyline, art directed, wrote fantastic dialogue, and storyboarded. Then our production team partnered with a talented comic illustrator to deliver the final goods. Have a look at it here.

Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tulsa is having a 70s themed party, so we wanted to produce something authentic to the time period. We licensed the Bee Gees’ “Night Fever” and cut records for the invites. Check this bad boy out.

It would be fitting to close this post with the words of Mr. Burgundy: “we’ve been coming to the same party for years, and in no way is that depressing.” All thanks to our great clients.

“Short and sweet.” It’s a cliché. It’s also a condition which everything from wedding vows to Academy Awards acceptance speeches should strive to be. To a copywriter, headlines are the supreme articulation of shortness + sweetness. That said, the quest for the right headline is almost never short or sweet. It’s long. It’s painful. It’s the copywriter’s crucible.

Some just think of the process as headline writing—the scribbling out of a small batch of lines and picking the winner. Others practice a more formal approach to finding the ideal headline. It’s known as the “100 Headlines.” It goes like this: you need a headline. Ideally, it will be a headline that can raise a brand’s sales by double-digit percentages and define it through future decades using fewer words than you find on a Surgeon General’s Warning. For this, you will need to write 100. Then junk 99 of them.

If you went to ad school then you know the 100 Headlines as the process popularized by Luke Sullivan, but immortalized by Sally Hogshead (She would want me to point out that yes, it is her real name). Hogshead’s “800 Headlines” were for BMW Motorcycles. Her agency needed eight ads. You might say, “Well, it’s easy to sell motorcycles to men.” And it is. But, writing copy that defines a company like BMW when you’re simply a junior copywriter—not so easy. So, why 100? Why not scribble out 10–15, hand ‘em off and jump back on Facebook?

Because your first 15 are usually junk. And so are your first 30, 40 and sometimes 50. Like rock music, greatness doesn’t even become possible until the mid-50s.

Let’s say I am writing headlines for a car insurance company. Chances are they aren’t my insurance provider; I’ve never been to their office; and I am unable to tell their policies from those of their competitors. Odds are good that my first shot at a headline will not make its CEO invite me over for dinner. Indeed, Hogshead wrote those 800 without so much as ever revving a motorcycle—let alone a BMW. Let’s choose an everyman’s car insurance company and go with State Farm. In just over one minute, here are five headlines:

- Life happens fast. State Farm happens faster.

- You’ve been there for others. Now let us be there for you.

- Some auto insurers claim to have your back. We’ve got your front too.

- Take some of the risk out of turning the key.

- It’s funny to think that such a small piece of plastic can cover so much ground.

Bleh. Blah. Yuck. People turn mountains into gravel looking for diamonds scarcely bigger than a pencil eraser. It’s a lot of work for such a little thing. In the process: people die, limbs are lost, and countries tumble into civil war. All of this when we have labs making diamonds so stunning that no one except an expert can tell them from the genuine article. So why not get by with imitations? Why do so much for so little? Because it’s a diamond, and people have gotten divorced for much less. And most headlines suck. Next time, write 100. It won’t be short. It won’t be sweet. But if you survive, your boss and your client will thank you. They might even invite you over for dinner.

When Google calls, you answer. That’s pretty much what happened and how we came to work with Google on “Mobilizing Mobile,” the global kick-off of their Go Mo initiative aimed at making the world more mobile-friendly. And what better place to start than our fair city of Mobile, Alabama?

The event was an enormous success, with more than 400 local businesses getting free mobile websites, scores attending seminars on mobile strategy, and a “marketing summit” featuring talks from Jason Spero, director of mobile advertising at Google, and Edward Boches, chief innovation officer at Mullen, held at our offices.

Here are photos from the launch party, and here is a video profile of our agency that Google was kind enough to produce.

A big THANK YOU to our new friends at Google, Mullen, Duda Mobile and all the other great partners that helped make Mobile “the most mobile city” in the United States.

Information technology involves gobs and gobs of data—its organization, analysis and utilization.  So our guiding thought for rebranding CPSI, a national leader in healthcare IT, was simple: information is beautiful.

While the project was multi-faceted, including a new identity system and collateral, the focal point was the website. Our team worked diligently with the client to organize the user paths so CPSI’s multiple audiences can intuitively find the information they need. Then we placed a beautiful design on top of that framework. Maximizing aesthetics while minimizing the time it takes to find the the right information. Now that’s a thing of beauty. Click here to check out the site.

Could we get any more metal? Apparently so. Our ambitious crew scored eight 2011 W3 Awards, which honor outstanding websites, digital marketing and mobile sites/apps created by the best of the best worldwide. There were 3,000 entries from all corners of the globe this year, so we’re excited to have our work selected. Nice nice people, those W3 judges.

Here’s a map of the U.S. winners (we’re the little dot on the Gulf Coast). A big congratulations and thank you to the hungriest, hardest working kids in advertising.