Craig Brown, Account Supervisor (left); Paul Pomeroy, Managing Partner (center); and Steve Yarrow, Senior Director (right) visit To-Jo Mushrooms in Avondale.

WILMINGTON, DE — Following a national search, To-Jo Mushrooms selected Aloysius Butler & Clark as its new marketing agency. Among other services, AB&C will perform brand positioning, website redesign, retail customer engagement and public relations for the Avondale-based mushroom grower. AB&C and its business-to-business marketing team won the account despite being the only contending agency outside of the produce category.Read full post...

A happy, relaxed workplace leads to better thinking and a better product.

Ding! New email comes in. Subject line: “Who needs a drink?!” You waver a little bit before responding. On the one hand, it’s been a long day and you really need to unwind. And there’s nothing important that you had to do after work. On the other hand, you just don’t know if you feel like going to happy hour.

Go.

A happy hour may be spontaneous, or it may be planned months in advance — but either way, it’s always a good idea. At Aloysius Butler & Clark, we try to plan a happy hour each month, hosted by one of the departments in the agency. We’ve had a creative department tailgate party in the parking lot, a public relations Halloween happy hour in our spooky garage, and a media team Oscars gathering complete with red carpet — just to name a few.

Don’t have the space or energy to plan a themed happy hour? No problem! Just grab a couple of colleagues and head down to the local brewpub to enjoy some of their happy hour specials. Do it. It’s good for you. It can actually be healthy. Read full post...

When it comes to social media, LinkedIn often gets overlooked. Think about it like siblings from TV’s most famous sitcoms. I’ll go with shows from three eras — The Brady Bunch, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Modern Family. Facebook is the pretty and popular older sibling (Marcia Brady, Hilary Banks, or Haley Dunphy). Twitter is the younger, lovable cutie pie (Cindy, Ashley, or Luke). And then we have LinkedIn — the middle child (Jan, Carlton, or Alex) — not as flashy, not as fun, definitely more nerdy.

If your website is indeed awesome, LinkedIn is an outstanding conduit to drive prospects there.

On “the world’s largest professional network,” your profile might suffer from inattention — only getting updates when you’re gearing up for a job search. But this modus operandi is outdated and you need to shake it off. Long known as the least-social social network, LinkedIn is slowly improving its social skills. Status updates, endorsements (love ’em or hate ’em), and now Pulse (news curation) make interacting with your connections — and, more important, prospective clients — both easier and more essential.Read full post...

Bottom line: I feel better about the Walgreens brand based simply on this seemingly minor customer service tweak.

I’m about to place a national brand in a positive light. But in the interest of full disclosure, our agency has not, and never has had, any relationship with this brand. In other words, we have nothing to gain by pumping up this brand within the hallowed halls of the AB&C blog-a-teria. So now that we have that straight, let the games begin!

The other night, I visited my local Walgreen’s pharmacy. I bought two greeting cards and a gallon of 2% milk. As the clerk handed me my receipt she said, “Thanks — and be well.” On my way out I thought, “Did she just say ‘be well’?” Suddenly, a warm, life-affirming feeling washed over me — just as it does when those cute little yorkies scamper across the floor at the Westminster dog show. What happened to the standard “Have a nice day,” I thought. Or even the beloved “Take ‘er easy”?Read full post...

Happy 30th birthday, Mac.

I had the TV on Sunday morning as I sat down to write about an Advertising Age article claiming that 80% of Super Bowl ads flop. In the background I hear Charles Osgood, host of CBS Sunday Morning, mention that this week marks the 30^th anniversary of Apple’s famous “1984” Super Bowl commercial. A commercial that ran only one time, mind you. That is the antithesis of a Super Bowl ad flop. Thirty years later and people are still talking about it. Amazing. Do you think that in 2043 people will be marking the anniversary of the Go Daddy commercial in which supermodel Bar Refaeli makes out with the nerdy Walter? Not very likely.

The one-minute commercial — directed by noted director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator) — was made for a then-unheard-of production budget of $900,000. It went on to garner millions of dollars worth of free publicity, as news programs rebroadcast it that night. It was quickly hailed by many in the advertising industry as a masterwork. Advertising Age named it the 1980s “Commercial of the Decade,” and it continues to rank high on lists of the most influential commercials of all time. “1984” was never ever broadcast again, adding to its mystique.Read full post...

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.

Read full post...

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...