Marketing and Nerdom collide in glorious fashion this week in Austin, Texas, site of the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. And because Red Square lives at the center of both worlds, we’re there.

Digital wunderkinds, Karen Sullivan and Jeff Whitlock, are on hand to absorb as much knowledge as humanly possible. They’ll be tweeting, facebooking, blogging and flickr’ing the whole deal, so stay tuned. If you want to catch up with them in Austin, hit ‘em up.

Also, a small aside: We are quite humbled and excited to be on the list of finalists in the interactive awards show for our BCBS work. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

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Our digital work for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama has been selected as a finalist for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Awards. Please excuse the serious tone with which that intro sentence was written, but this is some seriously awesome recognition. SXSW is the digital/media/tech equivalent of the Super Bowl. The awards “uncover the best new digital work, from websites to web applications and beyond, while celebrating those who are building tomorrow’s online trends.” Just to be considered a part of this movement is pretty amazing.

Our “Be You” social sharing site was selected as one of five finalists in the business category. Awards are given in an assortment of categories, and notable nominees include (watch your feet—we’re droppin’ names) Groupon, The Social Network, US Census, Unilever, Jay-Z, the Pepsi Refresh Project and Conan O’Brien.

We’ll be deploying to Austin in March to absorb as much knowledge and inspiration as our brains can handle, and hopefully we’ll bring back some well-deserved hardware for our great clients at BCBS.

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The kids at the Square just picked up more hardware for the Van Kampen campaign. This installment of metal comes courtesy of the 2010 Telly Awards. We won in categories like financial services, humor, B-to-C campaign and sound design. And we’re betting if there had been categories like “best use of the phrase ‘horse hockey’” or “best use of tear gas,” we’d have pulled those down too.

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Our Van Kampen TV spots won gold at the District 7 ADDYs. This means we’re finalists for three national ADDYs, which would go a long way in stroking our fragile egos. Come on, no whammies!!

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Hey Mom, look! We won some more trophies for our advertisements. Yesterday, the American Advertising Federation—Mobile Bay held their 2009 ADDY Awards.

The kids from the Square needed two trips to get the awards back to the office. We took home:

-Best of Print for our Senior Bowl posters

-Best of Broadcast for “Nuclear” for Van Kampen Investments

-8 of 9 Golds awarded

Good stuff. But perhaps the nicest recognition was that our man Stephean Grimes was named Art Director of the Year. Well deserved for a guy who works like a maniac and has a great attitude. (FUN FACT: Stephean can also grow a beard on command.)

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