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.

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.

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.

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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.

Here’s a sweet new toy that we’ve just launched for The University of Alabama School of Law. We’re working with the college to develop a social media program, and our first order of business involved creating an aggregator site that pulls all of their social media channels and content into one spot. The focus of the overall program is student recruitment, and given the core audience, social media is a logical place to focus. But you’ve got to do it intelligently.

So behold, The Open Brief. The site features a dashboard on the homepage, and the navigation/animation is pretty slick (if we do say so ourselves). Overall, a nice way to organize content.

C-Rowe rocked the design, and our friends at New Uniform slayed the code.

We go big for the holidays. “Why go big for the holidays?” you ask. I’m happy you asked, because I’ve been thinking about it. There is intense pressure to one-up the previous year’s effort, and let’s be honest: we’re in advertising, so we’ve been working on holiday promotions and campaigns since August or so.  That’s an unfair jump on the rest of the population.

Before you cry foul, consider that by the time you are enjoying your white-chocolate-peppermint-mocha latte from Starbucks, we’ve moved on to Spring campaigns. We’re in a constant state of seasonal confusion. It’s the price we pay for holiday glory.

Stay tuned for our 2009 push. Should be entertaining.

This year, we’ve ramped up our interactive capabilities in a massive way and have some great product to show for it–as well as many lessons learned. Most importantly, there has been a solidification of process. Our agency now applies best-of-class interactive production practices–learned from partners all over the country. Our projects are run methodically (obsessively), with tightly defined scopes of work, production requirements documentation, timelines, approval checkpoints and deployment processes.

A lot of these systems are borrowed from the software industry because web sites really don’t have a finish line. Think about it. Software development is known for versioning. Your site is no different. Your “launch” is just a starting point, with improvements made along the way.

Recently in Advertising Age, Rick Webb of The Barbarian Group described this mindset perfectly:

What [the ad industry] should have been taking away all this time–and have increasingly begun to–are the concepts of the constant beta and agile development. Marketers need to abandon the time-limited campaign online and start to think of it as a constant application of a rigorous discipline.

In other words, quit tinkering with the site and launch. Test in real time. Use the web as a place to experiment. If something doesn’t work, adjust. There’s no reason you can’t move quickly. If stuff does work, move anyway. Throw social media into your interactive mix, and change becomes a must. Remember, the shelf-life of content on the web is very short.

If you want to get real results (increased brand awareness, affinity, sales) out of your site, you’ve got to keep working on it. It’s like riding a bike. You can only coast so long. To make progress you’ve got to pedal.

Here at the agency, we do category-defying, intelligent, zig-when-everybody-else-zags type work. But we can’t blow minds and make advertising you talk about without a tightly defined strategy. No strategy means run-away, irrelevant creative. And that’s about as cool as jean shorts.

Our new campaign for Van Kampen Investments and the Alabama State Treasury Department provides a good example as to how we work. First, our task: create a campaign for the 529 college savings plan product that increases enrollment. After conducting research, studying previous efforts and competitive/peer/aspirant work, many internal strategic meetings and client meetings, we arrived at our strategy–the CollegeCounts 529 Fund is a smart gift.

That’s it. Seems really simple, right?

All solid strategies are simple, but as you know, simple takes some doing. Simple requires eliminating, distilling, the stripping away of anything unnecessary. We could’ve arrived at the “invest in your child’s future” strategy, or some other been-done-a-thousand-times thought. Instead, we looked at what kids tend to get when they are young, and most of it winds up in the trash. Or stuck up their nose. Or breaking in five minutes. This isn’t about not giving your grandchild a big wheel. (We’ve got no beef with the big wheel.)  It’s about giving him or her something a little smarter than that.

So the campaign, in a nutshell, uses humor to position the college savings plan as a smart gift by juxtaposing it against unwise gifts given to children. Exaggeration is key to pulling off the humor. Why humor? We liked going with that tonality for several reasons. Not a lot of financial brands are using it right now, people like and remember funny advertising and humor communicates confidence. In this economy, confidence is everything.

Here’s the first spot, called “Knives.” In it, a couple explains to their child’s grandfather that giving to his education would be smarter than giving him a knife-throwing set. We’re betting most will agree.

And here’s the second spot, “Nuclear,” in which a father is reminded of what happened when he ordered plutonium off the Internet for his son’s science kit.

The production itself was beautifully and smoothly executed. We were lucky to work with Sam Crawford and MOM Worldwide, Melissa Larson, Technicolor, editor Adam Svatek at Beast, LA and several other incredibly talented people. Here are some great behind-the-scenes production photos.

Many thanks to all of the hard-working and brilliant people at Red Square. From media planning, negotiation and placement to the strategic development, to public relations (which is now working in overdrive), this is a great collective effort.

We hope you enjoy our gift to investment advertising. It’s been and continues to be fun.