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.

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.

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.

Our latest round of television work for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama has just launched, and the spots feature an amazing mixture of typography, CGI and music. But to blast this work into the stratosphere of awesome, we hired some of the finest paper-doll acting talent in the business.

The result is quite different for the category—friendly, approachable and product focused. Hope you like it!

We’ve been living on Tulsa time a lot recently, which works nicely because we’re in the same time zone. Anyway, the ladies and gentlemen of Red Square Agency are ready to share the fruits of our labor with the rest of the class. Ta da! The most comprehensive campaign Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa has ever launched.

“There’s Only One” is based on a simple truth. There indeed is only one Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa, and you can pretty much live there if you need (want!) to. They’ve got it all. So we just had to articulate this, in a way that cannot be disputed and that takes the ultimate leadership position in the market.

The campaign employs vast tactical executions, from traditional to non-traditional, from TV spots all the way down to the room keys. And it tells the full story of what the brand offers, with personality and style.

We launched this past Memorial Day Weekend. In case you missed that earlier link, here’s our first TV spot: “Hotel.” Enjoy! Thanks to our great clients and production partners, and we promise to share more soon.

A couple of months have passed without a post. Sorry about that. Let’s catch up. Here are some of the things we’ve noticed, bookmarked and talked about since we last wrote:

1. Keith Richards authored a book called “Life.” This fact alone should be interesting enough, but there are some real lessons for creativity in Richards’ story. The guy is a student of his craft, studying ceaselessly. Everything is a potential source of influence and inspiration. He also goes into great detail regarding his creative process. Grab a copy.

2. The writer behind the Letters from a Nut series of books has been revealed. I’m kind of upset it’s not Jerry Seinfeld. Regardless, this writing has been as influential on my advertising copy as anything from our industry.

3. We’ve just launched a holiday outdoor campaign for Dixie Lily. We’re excited to be working on this resurgent brand, and there promises to be more including some pretty awesome packaging work from our design arm.

4. Red Square #2 just opened. The office, which is a bit of a mess presently, houses our creative department (now numbering 24). We’ll post proper photos and more details soon.

5. “Big” announcements from Apple and NASA disappoint. Really, Apple, adding The Beatles to iTunes was something “I will never forget?” Really? And NASA, next time you tease an announcement regarding extraterrestrial life, you’d better have found E.T.

There’s plenty more, but no need to get wordy. We do have some great news coming this week. Be warned: none of it will change your world like having The Beatles on iTunes or the discovery of an arsenic-based bacteria. Nevertheless, we’re excited.

Yankees/Red Sox. Cats/Dogs. Paper/Plastic. We could go on. There are many great rivalries out there, but perhaps none greater than Alabama v. Auburn.

As part of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama’s “Be You” campaign, we’re giving fans a chance to win tickets to the biggest football contest in the land. All you have to do is hit bcbsal.com/BEYOU and share your favorite fan story and photo. We’ll choose a winning story at random on November 15, 2010, and send the lucky storyteller to the game. So let’s hear what you’ve got.

Our first campaign for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama launches today. Hey hey! It’s their first new branding campaign in over twenty years, and to prepare for it, we studied closely how they’ve advertised most recently. Campaigns have focused on specific customer stories told through well produced, documentary-style television. For instance, spots have featured a middle-aged man whose daughter was diagnosed with cancer, a young man who contracted malaria while traveling abroad and the HR manager of a mid-sized company. The implicit audience take away: because these people have Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama, they are able to be a father, to be adventurous and to be competitive, respectively.

Sound strategy. We just needed to execute against it in a fresh way. So we began the distillation process:  BCBS exists to help its customers live life to the fullest -> BCBS provides peace of mind that allows you to be whatever you need or want to be (a father, adventurous, competitive and so on) -> when your health is protected, you can focus on being you -> BE YOU.

Be You. This articulates the key consumer benefit BCBS delivers, but does so in a very open manner, such that anyone at any stage of life can identify and relate with the brand. And though the campaign utilizes traditional media (TV, print, newspaper, outdoor, radio), we’ve added digital and social media to the mix to allow a new kind of emphasis on storytelling. We want you to tell the stories.

First, have a look at a couple of thirty-second television spots for the campaign here and here.

We also produced a series of fifteen-second television spots with the message tailored to the programming in which the spot is placed; for example, we will have spots airing in Dancing with the Stars and American Idol that play off the content in those shows. And it’s football season in Alabama, so we absolutely had to produce a spot for the Crimson Tide and one for the Auburn Tigers.

Customer storytelling has been at the epicenter of BCBS’s advertising for many years, so we built a social sharing site that allows the public to share their own “Be” stories. The site is promoted on all of the traditional media (tagged with bcbsal.com/BEYOU) and through digital media placement on sites such as Facebook, Pandora, YouTube, Weather.com and al.com.

At the site, visitors can browse stories and/or share their own. The stories are rated, are searchable and can be shared via Twitter, Facebook or e-mail. Content is moderated and monitored for appropriateness.

The “Be You” campaign is unlike anything else in the healthcare insurance industry: in its tone, in its breadth and in its thoughtful utilization of digital media. Needless to say, we’re excited about the launch. Hope you like it. And be sure to share your story with us.

__

We’d be complete jerks if we didn’t thank a few people who helped get this campaign birthed in a compressed period of time. First, our amazingly trusting clients at BCBS of Alabama. Just awesome. Second, our incredible production partners: Sam Crawford and Crossroads Films, Miller Mobley, Tim Vece and Jason Dettmer at Outback Editorial, Chris Bodie, Artifact Design, Struck/Axiom, New Uniform Design and Dennis Gould at Soundworks. Thank you.

Great American designer and filmmaker Saul Bass once said “design is thinking made visual.” We added, “yeah, what he said.”

So when it came to our first campaign for MAX Credit Union, we took inspiration from Bass and created a series of television spots that marry kinetic type and animation. And (drumroll please) here they are: Service, Spotlight, Mattress, Loan and Climate.

Long distance high fives to our friends at Shiny Object for helping us birth these bad boys.