Zer0 to 5ive

Thursday night, I was at the PRSA’s Silver Anvil awards and we won in the Integrated Communications: Business to Business category for our work with the School Systems group of Pearson.  As I watched the highlights of the winning campaigns, one thing became apparent.  Not only was it about the results — the awareness and brand building — it was about the research, strategy and subsequent “big idea” that held all of these campaigns together to get the results.  Big ideas are important — they are the breakthroughs that help engage your audiences. For me, it’s the excitement of marrying strategy with creativity.  Even with the onslaught of social media, the big idea hasn’t gone away, it’s just found additional outlets to engage.

Key elements of the integrated Powering Performance marketing and communications program centered on the Powering Performance theme and engaging and informing all of Pearson’s key audiences. The campaign also included a major customer migration program, a new web site, ongoing education-leadership initiatives, industry research, consumer surveys and top-tier media coverage.

This Silver Anvil represents work from all four Zer0 to 5ive offices and encompasses research, branding, creative, public relations, writing, marketing and social media. Nine 0to5ers touched at least one part of the overall campaign!

This was my second Silver Anvil, and it was as much of a high as the first time around.  We also won the Silver Anvil Award of Excellence in 2004.  If you would like a copy of our Anvil submission, send me an email or give me a call.  In our world, all companies, large and small, deserve award-winning work and we’re happy to share our approach. 

(posted by Michelle Pujadas)

I took my daughters to see the new animated Disney/Pixar flick, Up, last night. After hearing early reviews, we made sure we saw the 3D version. Truth be told, however, I didn’t notice the 3D or killer animation. The story was that good.

And this morning it hit me: What Disney/Pixar did with Up is what all PR pros should be striving for. Despite the whizbang technical prowess and army of the world’s best animators at their disposal, Disney/Pixar is first and foremost a storyteller. If we as our clients’ storytellers are doing our jobs correctly, the reporters and bloggers we pitch shouldn’t even realize they are being pitched. Because we shouldn’t be pitching; we should be telling (or helping to tell) stories (minus the traditional hard news stuff we do).

All too often, PR pros get lost in their clients’ marketing-speak, forgetting that the best stories — the best pitches — have heros, villains, supporting characters, conflict and resolution. Disney/Pixar knows this. We associate Disney/Pixar with great animated movies not because of the animation, but first because of the stories they tell and later because of how they employed their animation expertise to tell those stories better.

Because at the end of the day, it’s the stories we tell, not the products we pitch, that make us (and our clients and the reporters and bloggers we work with) successful.

(Posted by Mike Maney)

Have you ever cringed when you were given a research question for a business plan or product launch and you don’t know where to start? Upon first glance, it seems impossible to find something like the total people who were locked out of their homes, or the market size for clinical trials.

As silly and rare as some of these questions may sound, I’ve found that sometimes even a small piece of research can help drive the development and execution of critical business decisions. I’ve developed a market research cheat sheet of free resources to help you gather information about market sizes, trends, competitors, pain points, pricing, key influencers and more.

Here’s a list off free sites and resources to check out:

• Leverage Library Assets – Many public libraries offer free versions of paid databases such as Hoover’s and Dun & Bradstreet (and some will even grant you remote access). I’ve found reference librarians to be helpful and passionate; many are now using online request forms. Before you panic, fill out a few of these forms at your local library and don’t rule out your alma mater library – universities have cutting-edge databases.

• Visit Industry and Government Sites – Industry organizations, non-profits, state and government organizations will often post a resources page with statistics, reports and surveys. When promoting an international trade event in Pennsylvania, I used the NewPA site to reference relevant statistics. I even found full survey reports on sites such as Pew Internet when studying adult usage of social networks.

• Use Blogs and Messageboards – Blogs and message boards can go a long way. For example, I had a client who needed a list of the top 1,000 churches for targeting his technology to Houses of Worship. Before buying an available list, I was able to obtain an Excel list of the top 1,200 churches ranked by size and contact information from a passionate church blogger! I’ve found LinkedIn’s answer page to be very helpful by posting research questions to people in targeted industries and verticals.

• Read through 10K Reports – Did you know that public companies include a section on competition and industry update/trends in their 10K reports? Even for companies I’ve researched that are private, I’ve found public companies in a similar industry to use as a benchmark. Free 10K reports are usually available through AnnualReports.com or a company’s website. Yahoo Finance also provides valuable financial information and has an easy-to-use interface.

• Subscribe to Industry Newsletters – I’ve found industry newsletters to be valuable as far as staying up-to-date with new trends and research. For example, I use Chief Marketer to stay in the loop with cutting edge marketing tactics. My firm also launched a marketing newsletter called Take 5 that is getting great feedback from marketing pros. Pick a few newsletters in your industry and stay committed to them.

• Create Targeted Searches – We can all search through Google, but the majority of us come to a dead end when looking for something rare such as the number of people locked out of their home or an emerging technology’s market size. I’ve found that using targeted searches can increase my searches 10-fold and. For example, when conducting a targeted search, be clever and include keywords such as “market size”, “billion”, “million” and/or “competitive landscape”. This has helped me find credible reports, PDF documents, surveys and articles online.

Those are some of the most useful research tactics I’ve discovered lately – how about you? Feel free to post other valuable resources in the comments to share with our readers.

(Post by Zer0 to 5ive’s Michael Levey; image “Inside the Thomas Crane Public Library, Quincy, MA.” via Creative Commons courtesy of Paul Keleher.)

“Let me just give you a little advice. Son, a fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan. And what we’re afraid of is, what your mother and I are afraid of, is that we have a son who is a fool with no plan.” — Thomas Boone Pickens Sr. (found at mathoda.com)

The same could be said for companies that jump straight into tactical marketing execution. It’s why every program we design and run for clients — whether a full-scale annual campaign or a new product announcement — starts with a plan. Plans get agency and client on the same page, force clear objectives and metrics, and provide the detailed tactical roadmap necessary for execution (a critical element as marketing, communications, business development and customer support functions continue to collide and overlap).

Plans are more than just a one-time exercise. Companies (and their marketing teams) should re-visit them regularly to ensure the objectives, messages, audiences, strategies and tactics they’ve put in place are still relevant. Things change quickly in business and companies need to move fast. Without a solid plan, though, they risk letting off-target tactical execution run the asylum.

(Google Master Plan image via Creative Commons courtesy of Jurvetson.)

I gave a presentation on brand building recently and someone asked me about Twitter:  should he be using it or not? I answered his question with one of my own: who are your customers and prospects and how do they communicate?

One of the keys to successful communications is knowing your target customer. How do they get their information? Who influences them? Are they on Twitter, or are they more likely to meet at seminars or read the industry and financial pubs, either online or in hard copy?

What we are seeing is that more and more companies and media are getting on Twitter and making valuable connections. For business people and marketers, Twitter provides a fast action communications channel that can be leveraged for brand — and business — building. However, at the end of the day, I believe that it will take more than 140 characters to “seal the deal;” in the meantime, the rise and excitement around Twitter makes it even more important for companies to re-examine who their customers are and how (and where) they communicate.

(Posted by Michelle Pujadas)

Michelle and I are on the flight back to Philadelphia after facilitating a Chalk Talk to help a new client refine its message. Once again, I was witness to the power of how getting to the right message can inspire and inject excitement into a company.

Like others I’ve been a part of, this Chalk Talk was a definite high. We knew an hour into the session that we were on the right path and that the client knew they were on the right path, too. Even in raw form, you could see how the new message was creating a sense of excitement and possibility and getting them to think bigger about where their brand could go.

That’s the power of having the right message.

If you’re like me, you probably hear or read about a new product every 30 seconds.  I suspect that, also like me, you don’t remember more than a handful of those products.

But if you are the one launching a product to audiences within your own industry, they’ll be sure to stand up and take notice, right? Well unless you just launched the next iPhone, it can be a challenge – a big one!

In the fall of last year, we faced such a challenge with a client in the financial technology sector – CashEdge. Their services enable financial institutions to engage customers in new ways. After launching a couple of products earlier in the year, they wanted to introduce a new, cutting-edge, third-party transfer product before their annual customer conference.

Should we do another product press release and send an html email to our customers? Sure, we could have done that. But we wanted – and quite honestly needed – to tell this story in a new light. The company was at the point in their corporate evolution where their story had changed and this new product really was a compelling example of that change. The challenge – how do we make it compelling to anyone outside of our strategic planning meeting?

We decided to go big – yet simple. This was a great time to do something we’ve been hoping to do for this customer for a while – create a new vision and do a brand refresh. Given their unique position and expertise in the market place we decided to tell the new story in three simple, yet strategic words - “Intelligent Money Movement.”

Of course no story is complete without the pictures so we put our creative team to work and executed a total brand refresh by updating the logo and designing an entirely new website and new collateral to support the new story.

Occasionally we need to resuscitate a brand and reposition it for the changing marketplace. Sometimes going big is exactly what you need to do. Next up…an iPhone designed just for online banking needs? Well, maybe someday.

Posted by Cheri
(Image by borman818 via Flickr licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-2.0 Generic)

Image via Creative Commons courtesy of Tim Boyd www.timboyd.info.

The call came late in the day and I was on deadline for a project. It was a Chicago number – I needed to let it go into voicemail. Twenty minutes later and with my stellar copy sent, I took a listen to the message. Fifteen years in the business and you’re still never quite ready for a call from Tarana Harris, Producer for the Oprah Winfrey show. Heart pounding, palms sweating, jaw planted on my keyboard space bar, I vowed to pull myself together. After all, I KNEW Tarana, right? I’d sent her how many emails over the years? Left her how many VMs?

And so I called her back, enthusiastic but cool. Excited, but level-headed. We needed to get the ClearCount Medical Solutions Smart Sponge System out the door, that day preferably, if we were going to stand a chance for having Oprah’s Dr. Oz talk about the technology on his show about medical errors. I had that emotional moment that any PR-pro with a true love for her client should have, the “No DUH they want to have the SmartSponge System on Oprah. Isn’t it about time?” After all, between 1,000 and 1,500 surgical sponges are left behind in patients each year, causing untold pain, heartache, lawsuits and more – thank god ClearCount is doing something about this, in an easy way that actually has the potential to SAVE hospitals money.

Of course when Tarana and I talked, she was very explicit that there were NO GUARANTEES. They were having a few patient safety technologies shipped (I didn’t ask if any of them were SmartSponge competitors – didn’t want to put any ideas in her head!).

What a great client. ClearCount was exemplary about turning on a dime – in less than 24 hours we had the system shipped, the CEO had reviewed our letter and communications package and emailed it off to Tarana. And now there was only the waiting.

I don’t think it crossed anyone’s mind that the system wouldn’t even get to go through the “visual” test. Tarana had said that they’d have to see how it looked on-screen, on-stage, next to Oprah, etc.

But as the week up to the scheduled taping day transpired, it became clear that the system hadn’t really made it past Tarana’s office. It was a long show, with a big name celebrity, and only a minute or so that was dedicated to technology (something smaller than our technology, but thankfully not a direct competitor). She lets us down gently and spent time explaining what happened. It was a “great looking system,” she said, but they’d never even sight-tested it because as the show’s planning unfolded it just became more clear that there wouldn’t be time. That’s all it was. No time. Our system was an extra that never got filmed.

We heard later in the week, as we worked to have the system shipped home, another company in Pittsburgh with a cool medical device had had a similar experience years ago – only they made it all the way through filming. They heard the footage would be used – but it never showed up on-air. O, to arrive in this manner, and not really arrive!

O, the agony.

But you know, when she calls again (and O she will – that’s how cool our clients are) – O, we will do it all Over again!!!!

Which brings me to some lessons learned:

Lesson #1: I heart Oprah as much as the next guy.

Lesson #2: Relationships are relationships – Tarana will (fingers crossed) remember how accommodating we were, and maybe she’ll introduce us to a new Executive Producer coming on-board.

Lesson #3: There are never any guarantees – until someone 1-degree separated from Oprah has a sponge retained during a surgery (and unfortunately it’s possible), there’s no such thing as a “no-brainer.” That’s why this job is so hard, so exciting, so crazy.

Maybe we should pitch the other O, Ozzie. He’s still crazy, and gory enough to do a video featuring a retained sponge, right?

(Posted by Zer0 to 5ive Principal, Jen Bannan)

How many presentations have you sat through where the speaker droned on reading every word of 12pt text on every slide? Too many to count, I suspect. It’s an all-too-common malady among presenters. Matt Helmke, a senior strategist here at 0to5, is one who is not afflicted with this illness. Recently, Matt produced a slide presentation where he discussed the best practices in presentation design, development and delivery based on Garr Reynold’s seminal book, Presentation Zen. Reynolds is an internationally acclaimed presentation designer and communications expert living in Japan whose clients include many of the Fortune 500. His book combines strong design principles with the tenets of Zen simplicity to help readers develop simpler, more effective presentations. While you can download a PDF of Matt’s presentation, I encourage you to watch and listen to Matt talk about what he learned from Reynold’s book and how you can apply its teachings to your next presentation.

Image Credit: Mike Finklestein via Flickr/CreativeCommons

Every brand has a story to tell. Finding that story is the tough part. Tougher still is crafting that story into something compelling.

As communicators, storytelling is at the core of what we do. We uncover, craft and find the right audiences for stories that convey — directly or indirectly — the messages we want customers to hear. In years past, telling our stories was simple: we pitched reporters, produced print ads and talked with prospects at trade shows. Today, we have untold numbers of channels with which we can potentially get our stories told — or lost.

This response by Hanson Hosein, the director of the University of Washington’s Master of Communication in Digital Media, on the topic of information overload drives the storytelling point home:

“It is not just about social media to me, it is also about really effective storytelling. If you are a good storyteller, you are always going to break through.”

Good stories don’t require 200 page manuscripts. They don’t require two hour-long screen adaptations. For some, all it takes is 140 characters typed on a keyboard. Or a blog post. Or, gasp!, an actual conversation. Good stories hook people, they reel them in with colorful characters, keep them engaged with conflict and resolution, and let them walk away with a sense that their time wasn’t wasted.

Hollywood writers don’t hold eminent domain on storytelling. Companies have stories too (more than they probably know). Can you find your Oscar-worthy company story? Have you built your syndicated run of episodic stories?