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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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