Check out our killer creative from the past year. Thanks to everyone involved for all your hard work.

Our client, Athletes for Hope recently posed a thought provoking question to professional athletes and their fans – Are athletes obligated to give back to the community?

It’s the question at the heart of Athletes for Hope, founded by former super agent Ivan Blumberg, and embraced by hundreds of professional athletes including Tony Hawk, Lance Armstrong, Annika Sorenstam, Andre Agassi, Mia Hamm and many others.

It’s an intriguing question, because there are so many ways to interpret it. Is community where an athlete lives? Where he or she plays? Where they were raised? Is community defined as a neighborhood, a town, a city, or even a state? And for that matter, what does ‘give back’ mean? What should they be ‘giving’, exactly?

Community can be defined as whatever is most appropriate to each individual athlete; there is no wrong answer. Similarly, giving back can take many forms, including mentorship, speaking to kids, community service, and in-kind or monetary contributions. For many athletes, it’s a combination of several of these elements. Regardless of the form, any of these ‘giving’ elements can have a positive impact on the lives of others.

At Allen & Gerritsen, our answer to this question is a definitive yes. Professional athletes (and even collegiate and high school athletes) are in a position where people look up to them, whether the athletes like it or not, or even whether they know it or not. They may or may not be ‘role models’, but in our society athletes are in a position where their actions can and do impact others. They have a platform that most citizens simply don’t have access to, as well as the opportunity to influence others.

We’re proud to be a part of this discussion as a partner with Athletes for Hope and their mission of community service. Weigh in on the discussion here - we’d love to hear your thoughts…

The 14th Annual MITX Awards was a celebration of a decade of media and technological innovation in the Boston community.

Allen & Gerritsen was a finalist in 5 award categories including:

1. People’s Choice Award, Interactive Agency of the Year

2. Best Educational Institutional Web Site, Berklee College of Music, Summer Programs



3. Best Direct Response Campaign, Bright Horizons Family Solutions



4. Best Use of Analytics, MFS Investment Management



5. Best Use of Targeting, MFS Investment Management



The hero of the evening was Interactive Designer, Charlie Guerrero, who created, produced and played through a video game that Allen & Gerritsen put together for the show. Using Little Big Planet as a platform, Charlie built a custom level based on Allen & Gerritsen which he then played on stage for the 1,100 attendees

In an effort to raise brand awareness in time for the holiday season, global toy company, Toy State, marketing toy vehicles under the brand names Road Rippers and Caterpillar, teamed up with Allen & Gerritsen to create an advertising campaign and brand mascot that cut through the clutter.

From the article…

Allen & Gerritsen’s makeover of [the cartoon brand ambassador] Ripp presents him as “like a cool older brother,” Mr. Coleburn [Toy State’s Senior Vice President] says, which ought to increase his appeal to the young male target audience for the toys…The commercials that are part of the campaign signal the fun ahead by mimicking the coming attractions for action films, complete with a breathless announcer. A spot for Road Rippers begins with an advisory on screen, mimicking the movie ratings system, declaring that “the toys advertised are rated A” for “Awesome.” On comes the voice of the announcer. “In a world filled with ordinary toys,” he intones, “one boy picked up his tools and changed playtime forever.”

Read the full article at The New York Times.

How effective can social media be in raising money to support a charitable cause? That’s what eight a&g employees and many other social media mavens in Boston and Austin are investigating this November – well, Movember, really.

The Society for New Communications Research & UMass Dartmouth reported in June 2009 that 89% of the top non-profit organizations use at least one form of social media. And Chris Brogan and Julien Smith wrote in their 2009 New York Times best-seller, Trust Agents, of an instance where building community in social media resulted in easily generating in just 2 hours the remaining $500 needed for a Cambodian woman to go to college – driven much by a tweet from Brogan asking followers to chip in a few dollars.

So, we figured, let’s see for ourselves. During this entire month, we’re growing what’s considered somewhat of a lost “art form”, moustaches, in an effort to raise donations to support the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Livestrong Foundation. We’re participating in the largest, worldwide charitable event in support of men’s health: “Movember”. Since 2003, men have raised over $50MM for the cause as they’ve sported furry upper lips for the month of Movember – a moustache is known as a “mo” in Australia, where this cause started.

a&g is championing Team Boston and is going head-to-head with fellow Magnum P.I. admirers from social media mecca, Austin, TX, to see who can raise the most money for the cause – and look pretty slick in the process. We’re using all sorts of means for fundraising – with particular focus on what social media can do.

Have you tried social media to support fundraising efforts? What’s worked? What hasn’t?

We’ll be sure to report on what we learn – we should have some free time by month’s end; our wives aren’t all that big on hanging out with us these days! :{D

To support a&g’s efforts to raise awareness for men’s health and fight prostate cancer and testicular cancer, please visit the Team Boston “Mo Space” page and make your donation online: https://www.movember.com/us/donate/your-details/team_id/10775

For more on Movember: http://us.movember.com/about/

For all of us working in marketing, one of the most critical issues we face is quantifying our discipline’s contribution to the business goals of our organization. To answer this question, however, we first need to ask: “How does (Insert company name here) define success?”

The CEO may answer “Profitable growth” (or this year, maybe just “Profit”)

The CFO may reply “Return on assets”

The CMO may be concerned with “Increased market share”

The Advertising VP could answer “Top Two Box Score Unaided Awareness Increase”

The VP DIgital Strategy “Lower cost per action or cost per acquisition”

The Sales VP . . .. “Well, increased sales of course.”

The point here is that corporations, brands, and yes, advertising, are part of complex ecosystems where assigning a  single success metric is, well, overly simplistic. That’s why we need dashboards that contain Business, Brand and Behavior data. Any one data set on its own misses an opportunity to see what impact, if any, the deltas have on other data sets. For example, if my cost per click decreased, did this have any effect on sales, or even brand attributes and awareness? If my TV campaign increased awareness, did this awareness impact my web traffic? Did my redirecting my budget from offline to online effect my brand awareness?

Today we have to have a view of the ecosystem, not just one element of it. We need to look at the outcomes of our media investments in a “Holistic” way. On a practical basis, this does not have to be a complex predictive model based on three years worth of regression analysis. For clients that don’t have six figure analytic budgets it can simply be a question of importing data that already exists into an Excel spreadsheet and looking at the outcomes directionally. As Lord Kelvin famously said a century ago “If you cannot measure it you cannot improve upon it”. Today, you just need to measure more dimensions.

We’ve used this space in past blogs to talk about the growing green movement. From a pure marketing sense, we can’t emphasize enough that, as a company, if you haven’t been asked what you are doing in this space…you will be asked soon. And those questions aren’t going away. Most importantly, it will begin to have a dramatic affect on your business if you can’t articulate or demonstrate efforts here in a real, credible and genuine way.

Our advice: As always, start with audience intelligence. Get to know your customer counts and attitudes in this space. You may be surprised what you learn. LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) segments consumers into five separate buckets, based on their attitudes in this space.

As you can see, there are far fewer consumers these days that fall in the “unconcerned” space and that number gets smaller by the day.

“Green has evolved to where it can be a mainstream consumer proposition in many categories. While nearly 20% of consumers fall into the LOHAS ‘environmental steward’ category, more than 60% have at least some interest in green, and are willing to try products that are relevant to their needs” (Nielsen BASES-Winning at Green Innovation 3/09).

Once you’ve identified your customer attitudes in this space, work with them to review and design business practices and messaging that everyone feels comfortable with. At a&g, we have a four-step process called “CRED” to literally help clients gain credibility in this area.

CRED refers to four principles:

1. CUSTOMERS and COMPETITIVE
What percentage of your CUSTOMERS care about Green issues and how do they slice up and segment against your brand? What are your competitors doing in this area?

2. RELEVANCY:
What messaging will be RELEVANT to your customers? Is it
appropriate given your existing brand attributes, values etc.?

3. EFFECTIVENESS
What are the tenets of an EFFECTIVE campaign (measurement and connection points) and the business case for taking on such an initiative?

4. DIFFERENTIATING:
How is what you do DIFFERENT from your competitors, aims to make a difference, and doesn’t fall into the greenwashing trap?

We’re encouraged by the amount of companies taking note of this movement. The level of involvement in this area ranges from making green/sustainability the very essence of their brand (e.g. Patagonia, is a great example) all the way down to companies implementing a recycling program in the company cafeteria.

The New England Marketing Summit was recently held at Boston’s Liberty Hotel, the site of the old Charles Street Jail. (The difference was that guests at this event were free to leave whenever we wanted to). George Johnson, The Boston Business Journal and The Ad Club of Boston put together a great panel including: Karen Coppola, SVP Marketing for TJX Corporation, Bill Fox, SVP, Fidelity Communications, Dwight Griesman, CMO, Forrester Research and Christopher Heye, VP Marketing/CMO for Welch’s.

Not surprisingly a fair amount of time was spent on the topic of social media. Who isn’t talking about social media these days right? Clearly, however, one of the morning’s biggest moments was in a passing comment made by two of the panelists indicating that the old website just isn’t the center of their marketing communications universe anymore. . . to the point where traditional website metrics (unique visits, time spent on site, etc) aren’t getting the attention they once did.

Everybody has a social media strategy these days. If they don’t have one, they’re in the final stages of putting one together. In the rush to participate in the social media conversation, many marketers have forgotten that implicit in the implementation of that strategy is the need for an evolved website and website strategy. Three hundred page (and larger) websites are populating the Internet loaded with content that either no one is reading or no one wants to read: because it was written by a marketer. Despite our best efforts to sizzle up our websites with flash, live chat and other technological bells and whistles, dare I say it… is today’s consumer putting those websites in the same light as a 300 page brochure: (”What’s a brochure, Daddy?”).

Do yourself a favor and start the “what does this all mean for our website?” conversation, today. If all that great content that your CFO paid for is now being dropped into blogs, Ustream videos and the like, do you even need it on your website anymore? If so, do you need it in its current form? Will the potential customer hold that content in higher regard if you provide them with links from your site to that content in other environments? What’s the impact of your website’s (pending) extreme makeover of content on architecture and navigation? And lastly, if it’s not about unique visitors anymore (since your promotional offers are on Facebook instead of your website), what are the new metrics that will be meaningful and relevant to your organization?