Recently we announced Red Square Agency had been named finalists in the OMMA Awards for Online Advertising Creativity, specifically in the “creative use of Facebook advertising” category. The awards show was in New York last night, and we’re excited to share that we won. It’s humbling recognition on (quite literally) a national stage.

Other brands recognized for digital and social media innovation at the show were: Google, Major League Baseball, HBO, 20th Century Fox, Gatorade, Disney, Volkswagen, Coca-Cola, JetBlue, Fox Home Entertainment, Paramount, Levi’s, AMC, adidas and Jay-Z.

And us. Wow. Thanks to everyone at the agency who works tirelessly to make great work happen. Here’s to leveling the playing field.

Read More

Willingness to experiment is a key to success with digital and social media. Sure, there are emerging fundamentals, which (surprise!) mirror closely those of all media. Chief among these is the principle that people respond when something breaks from the center of the bell curve and delivers the unexpected.

Our own Facebook ads—a nice collection of them reside here—have been thusly treated as an experiment. We’ve been lucky enough to receive a good deal of press for our efforts, and now we’ve been named a finalist in the OMMA Awards for Online Advertising Creativity. Specifically, in the “creative use of facebook” category. Other OMMA finalists include the likes of Google, Disney, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, DreamWorks, Volkswagen, HBO, JetBlue and several other big companies my mother has heard of.

Our agency is humbled and honored to be mentioned in the same show as these brands. Winners will be announced in September in New York. Thanks to everyone for playing along with us.

Read More

Let’s start with a question as old as social media advertising itself. How do you make an effective Facebook ad if the majority of them get ignored? We stumbled upon an answer while making our own Facebook ads for Red Square Agency.

Space limitations are a big reason why many Facebook ads are considered about as exciting as watching paint dry. With only 25 characters for the title/headline and 135 characters for the body copy, brevity is at a premium. But shorter is sometimes the enemy of storytelling.

Our solution was to create fun, entertaining ads targeting the personal Facebook pages of CMOs and other marketing decision-makers. The ads married with the ever-changing hero banners on our website, giving our messaging some consistency.

But a funny thing happened on our way to making this campaign. An idea emerged to create an ad that pokes fun at social media advertising in general with the simple goal to entertain. And with that, the legend of Cous Cous was born.

Cous Cous is a real cat. He belongs to a friend of Red Square’s own Ryan Lundy. We decided to use Cous Cous as a “control” and turn these four Facebook ads into an experiment of effectiveness. In one corner stood a consistent, well-crafted campaign of three ads, and in the other corner purred a ridiculously irreverent cat ad. In the five weeks that we’ve been collecting data, Cous Cous has destroyed the competition.

Nerd Section: We base our ad performance on Click Through Rate (CTR) and Cost Per Action (CPA). After five weeks, Cous Cous had a CTR of 0.026% compared to 0.016, 0.014 and 0.014%. Cous Cous also had a huge leg up in CPA with $1.46 compared to $1.83, $1.92 and $1.92. And Cous Cous led the way with 919 visits compared to an average of 630. So the data told us that a ridiculous cat ad outperformed all other ads by 39%. That’s right. 39%.

So what did our little experiment teach us? Well, being different and entertaining stands out in the Facebook ad world and elicits positive responses. (Seriously, we have emails to prove it.) And while the ultimate measure of success will be if ads like Cous Cous can lead to new clients, the data thus far speaks for itself. Now if you’ll excuse us, we need to make some more ridiculous Facebook ads.

Read More

We’re experimenting a lot with Facebook, from the conceptual to paid advertising. As for the latter, these placements are proving to be some of the most cost effective in our arsenal right now. The ROI is pretty incredible.

eConsultancy just posted a great article on advertising via Facebook.

We are fans. I mean, we like.

Read More