StarRosesAndPlants.com

Star® Roses & Plants gained fame by introducing the world to the best-selling Knock Out® Family of Roses and Drift® Roses. The company asked AB&C for help engaging customers and other consumers online with relevant content throughout the growing season. This year’s successes included drawing more than 12,000 visitors to the brand’s blog and increasing Facebooklikes by 315%. Working together with Star Roses, we helped launch @PlantAStar and Pinterest.

Click it or ticket outdoor print ad

The state of Delaware has seen a marked increase in seat belt usage during the past year. In fact, the use of seat belts statewide rose from 88% in 2012 to 92% this year. A Delaware Office of Highway Safety campaign developed by AB&C has helped move the state closer to its goal of having everyone in every vehicle — motorists and passengers alike — wear seat belts. Campaign messages were featured on TV, radio, billboards, online, and as part of live events.

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Working in the media department, I’ve been learning how to put together digital media reports. And I’ve learned that, while there is great power in facts and figures, a well-told story can move mountains. Numbers are forgotten over time. To engage our clients, we need to shape those numbers into stories.

In our reporting, we use colorful charts to tell a story about impact and growth. For example, in the stacked bar chart below, we show how social media and paid media affect overall website traffic. By breaking out the different traffic drivers, we show month-over-month increases and decreases in site traffic, as well as the dramatic consequences of pulling media campaigns in November.

Using bright colors and simple shapes makes the data visually appealing and helps the audience understand the insights behind the numbers.

Know your audience. If your clients are familiar with analytics, you may want to tell your story with more emphasis on certain data to help them make more informed decisions, decide their next steps and see the bigger picture.Read full post...

Unless you’ve been tucked away in an alternate dimension for the past decade or so, you know about social media. But are you aware of a social media phenomenon I’ve come to think of as adult creep?

Working adults are creeping into the more popular social media platforms.

Social media was originated and initially populated mostly by young people looking for a way to connect with each other, independent of distance and time. Lately, though, we working adults have started creeping into the more popular social media platforms at an increasing rate. And now that mom and dad may be peeking over their social-media shoulders, our younger counterparts are fleeing the established sites in droves, seeking a more congenial (read, less adult-populated) environment.

Adult creep has certainly increased the concentration of working adults plying social media sites. But does that mean business-to-business companies, particularly technology companies, can finally benefit from social media programs similar to the ones consumer-product marketers have found so enticing? Maybe. But tread carefully — it won’t be easy.Read full post...

Recently, AB&C created promotional materials for AtlantiCare Physician Group’s Urgent Care Center. Both the print and banner ads from the campaign won Silver awards at the JASPERs, a New Jersey – based advertising awards competition. We congratulate AtlantiCare on this most recent win!Read full post...

Who better to tell the story of a hospital’s lifesaving heart services than patients who benefited from them? To promote the alliance between MedStar Heart Institute and world-renowned Cleveland Clinic Heart & Vascular Institute, Aloysius Butler & Clark developed an ad campaign featuring retired Navy Admiral Tim Heely and event planner Pat Chisley. Both had suffered traumatic cardiac events, and both attributed their survival to MedStar Heart Institute. They tell their compelling stories in TV, radio and print ads, as well as online. The goal of the campaign is to direct consumers to the new MedStar Heart Institute landing page to learn more about the cardiac care team and the services it offers.Read full post...

WILMINGTON, DE — Aloysius Butler & Clark, a full-service marketing communications agency, won three times at the JASPERs, taking home awards in traditional and digital advertising. The agency’s banner ad for AtlantiCare’s Urgent Care Center won silver in Digital/Interactive Media: Consumer Digital Ad or Digital Campaign. AB&C and AtlantiCare also won silver in the Print Material: Magazine category. And in the Advertising: Billboards & Signs category, the agency’s “Stellar Checking” billboards for Susquehanna Bank won silver.

“AtlantiCare and Susquehanna Bank are both outstanding clients to work with,” says John Hawkins, president and CEO at AB&C. “When the relationship between agency and client is strong, the creative really benefits. These award-winning pieces are proof.”Read full post...

Bench the benchmark, set a target.

Last June, Bank of America’s Small Business Community asked me about setting benchmarks for digital campaigns. There’s no denying benchmarks have a lot of value. We use them to see how our campaigns perform based on the industry standard. Having a hard and fast number definitely draws the line in the sand between what is considered “good performance” and “bad performance.”

But a benchmark is just a number. As much as we want to match our number to someone else’s number, and label it “good” or “bad,” a benchmark can only tell a small part of the story.

Digital marketing is not a one-size-fits-all discipline. One percentage number is not going to determine if the campaign passes or fails. What if we drive only a small number of visitors to our site, but they are extremely engaged, spending ten minutes viewing multiple pages of content? What if those few visitors become ten strong leads or convert into hundreds of purchases?Read full post...

Content has reigned supreme for decades, but now distribution is assuming the throne (or at least sharing it).

If you’re a marketer or small-business owner, you should be creating high-quality content that gets shared and ranks high in search engines. But with more than 750 million websites competing for people’s attention, how can you make sure your online audience is receiving your message?

The answer is effective distribution.

Most of us have heard that “content is king.” And it’s true — no one is going to read your message if it’s not intriguing. According to Chad Pollitt, director of marketing at DigitialRelevance, great content goes unread everyday, and tweeting or posting it on Facebook isn’t going to cut it. In this day and age, you need to create a distribution strategy to connect your content to a larger audience.

Here’s how to get started:Read full post...

Have goals — and make them SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely.

I’m a gym rat. I love lifting weights, yoga, you name it. The days when I leave feeling less than exhausted, I realize it’s because I didn’t have a plan walking into the gym. So I always try to enter the gym with a specific goal — is it a cardio day or a weight day? What muscle groups am I going to work on? Am I going to use heavy weights with limited reps or just the opposite? With a plan in mind, I start seeing results after a few weeks. If I don’t, I know I need to change something.

The same idea holds true in business. For example, at AB&C, we just finished reworking our sales and marketing plan for 2014, and we learned a lot. First, we looked at this past year — what worked, what didn’t, what can we add to our marketing mix, how did our online data analytics look, etc. Then we gathered all our department heads together and had a brainstorming lunch to decide where we needed to head in 2014. As a result, we re-aimed our focus at a national and regional level, and plotted out the tactics to reach our goals.

Don’t have a marketing plan yet? Don’t fret — here is an easy way to get a plan together.Read full post...

The creative director of the future needs a different skill set — he or she will need to come out of the ranks of public relations, social media and interactive digital.

In 2009, there was a terrific documentary on advertising called Art & Copy. It’s an inspirational film that celebrates the most influential creative professionals of the past five decades. And there is something very telling in the title. Most of today’s creative directors rose out of the ranks of art director and copywriter — art and copy. In the era of print, TV and radio, this made perfect sense.

But if, like me, you are one of those creative directors, you may find recent trends to be frightening. Broadcast television ratings have been going down for decades. Newspapers and magazines are struggling to survive. Broadcast radio is competing with iPods and Internet radio. And now, here come the Millennials. This generation is larger than the boomer generation. The oldest of them are entering their 30s. In the next 10 years, they will start to dominate as consumers, employees and clients. Not only do they distrust paid mass media advertising, they’re finding it easier than ever to avoid it completely.Read full post...

Nurture your PR campaigns and plans through to the end … even if that means risking frostbite.

Long before LeSean McCoy rushed into the record books in Sunday’s Eagles-Lions game in Philadelphia, the game itself was already a legend in the making. A surprise snowstorm and a second-half comeback by the home team made a captivating story for sports fans across the country.

Now that I have thawed out from hours spent in the icy stands of Lincoln Financial Field, I realized that Snow Bowl can offer some valuable public relations lessons. Think hypothermia has made me delirious? Consider:

1. Be prepared for anything. Even the most carefully crafted plans could change. This is true whether you’re planning to launch an ambitious PR campaign for a product that suddenly isn’t ready for market, or if you game-planned for a few snowflakes and not a swirling snowstorm.Read full post...

No one can say whether it will be able to monetize its social media platform, but the data suggests that TV broadcasters and cable networks have good reason to use Twitter.

It’s no wonder that broadcasters and some advertisers see Twitter as the ideal promotional partner. The Media Audit reports that nearly 15% of consumers who watch TV during prime time on a typical day have also used Twitter in the past 30 days. That’s an increase of more than 60% compared to 9.2% just two years ago. The latest figure represents more than 13.1 million consumers across The Media Audit’s 80 measured markets.

The way people watch TV is changing. More people are streaming video content and TV shows on mobile devices. Nielsen just announced that they’d be measuring phone and tablet TV viewing by mid-November. And there is a growing number of consumers who post and read tweets about popular TV shows and sporting events in real time, many of whom belong to the much-desired younger demographic. That helps to explain why advertisers and media are interested in Twitter. It lends itself to helping brands or media extend their reach to a desirable younger audience.Read full post...

Michael English, Senior Interactive Art Director

WILMINGTON, DE — Aloysius Butler & Clark has hired Michael English as its Senior Interactive Art Director. He will concentrate primarily on online animation and website design. English will work out of the agency’s Wilmington office.Read full post...

Popular? Maybe. Appalling? Absolutely!

Lack of diversity affects our lives personally and professionally. In this country, equality for everyone — minority, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender — seems like a simple concept. Sadly, I struggle every day to understand why it is not.

Challenges such as marriage equality and feeling safe in the workplace (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) are joined by a multitude of other forms of inequality, such as sexism, racial profiling and gender bias. These issues appear in abundance on the Internet and social media, and on sites you might not expect.

Recently Adweek published an article entitled “Powerful Ads Use Real Google Searches to Show the Scope of Sexism Worldwide.” The campaign, created by UN Women, uses Google’s autocomplete search feature to show how gender inequality is a worldwide epidemic. The study used search qualifiers like “women shouldn’t,” “women need to,” and “women cannot.” Read full post...