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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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