L&S Unscripted

After more than a quarter of a century in the advertising industry, Lawrence & Schiller’s Kevin Van Westen was honored with the South Dakota Advertising Federation’s prestigious Creative Legacy Award at the 43rd annual Addy® Awards.

The Creative Legacy Award is presented to individuals who have led creative progress, originality and innovation in the fields of marketing and advertising.

At Lawrence & Schiller, Van Westen has spent 25 years developing creative work for almost every L&S client and serves as a mentor to the agency’s production artists. As Director of Production Services, Kevin not only oversees the art staff’s technology and software needs but also serves as a valuable creative resource.

In an industry with high turnover, few can say they’ve spent the bulk of their career in one spot. After all, only three people have been at the agency longer than Kevin: cofounders Craig Lawrence and Paul Schiller along with President and CEO Scott Lawrence. As for the future, Kevin says he plans to stay put, continuing to love what he’s doing.

“In 25 years, I’ve had the opportunity to do many things, welcome new technology, work with people all across the industry and enjoy the challenges of the business. I found my fit,” he says.

According to a recent Mediapost article, Twitter is the next big thing for b2b marketing. Starbucks, Microsoft, Motrin, Best Buy are all jumping on (and sometimes being smacked by) the frenzy of tweets created by micromedia messaging. According the information cited in the article, 56% of the 700 surveyed said that they use the chat space for business purposes.  So it leads me to ask all of you – why do you tweet?

As I was reading online comments from other articles, I love this quote, “Twitter or Fritter? Who needs to know when someone sneezes three states away?” So true. 

So why do I twitter? (@billiejowaara) I admit that I am more of a follower but every once in awhile, I do like to respond to the ridiculous or let the peeps know what this twitter princess is thinking or doing right now.

On the other hand, a new development has started to take place at the agency. Yes, people are requesting new business proposals and other information from TheExtraMile and you guessed it, they found us and our expertise on Twitter. 

So like other social media sites, you have to offer something that is relevant and interesting to your Twitter followers.  While we can’t predict happen next with this engagement channel, we can all sit back, have fun and enjoy the times in which we all live, and work, in.

Self-proclaimed Twitter Princess,

Billie Jo

I have read many articles lately with headlines like “Social Media will Save your Business” or “Social Media is the Best New Business Strategy”. This may seem foreign to some – as if you need to launch a whole new line of business or an entirely new effort. Good news: for many people – it’s just doing what you do on a personal basis and applying it to business. You’re using social media tools, but is your content really social-worthy? Is it applicable to a large group of people? Is it content that positions you as a thought leader or provider of tools that will help others in their line of business? It can’t be a sales strategy – it needs to be a relationship strategy. Remember, the reader is always thinking to themselves “what’s in this for me”… and the takeaway can serve a variety of purposes: educational, professional development or pure entertainment. It just has to provide an “ah-ha” moment so that they, in turn, add it to their social dialogue.

Despite a droop in the nation’s economy, there was no shortage of creativity at this year’s 43rd annual Addy® Awards. Lawrence & Schiller took home two Best of Class awards at the February 21 event, with 11 gold and silver awards total.

L&S swept the Non-Traditional Advertising category, taking home the group’s only two awards, including a gold Addy for DAKOTACARE’s “Body Cast Guy,” campaign. Showing up at sporting events and community festivals, street team participants wheeled around a man in a body cast to let consumers know how not having health insurance can cost you. “Body Cast Guy” went on to win Best of Class in the Non-Traditional category.

The agency also took home Best of Class in the Out of Home category with Augustana College’s “Viking Logo Reveal” billboard campaign. For four weeks, the college’s new Viking logo was slowly revealed in a teaser billboard campaign. These efforts culminated in a logo reveal celebration on the Augustana campus and exclusive announcements to alumni and the Sioux Falls media.

Several other L&S clients took home hardware including CHCS Services, Shock Land Company, Great Bear Recreation Park, Black Hills Digital Strategy, Midcontinent Communications, SDSU and the South Dakota Symphony.

The Bespin Code Editor

I can program your website in Notepad. If you dare me, I’ll totally do it. Any programmer would. The geek cred for doing an entire website in Notepad is off the charts. People familiar with FrontPage, iWeb, or Dreamweaver shudder at the thought of being forced from the warm embrace of these applications to the cold, emptiness of Notepad. I would quickly embrace such cold emptiness. Any programmer would. It is that, we tell ourselves, that separates the true developers from the WYSIWYGers.

The honest truth, though, is that I would hate nearly every second of it. A hammer and a nail gun accomplish the same task, but I’ll take a nail gun over a hammer any day. Any programmer would. (Plus, a nail gun is cool on so many levels.)

Some background: behind every website is a bunch of folders and text files. Because of this, programmers have a lot of tool options since folders and text files are two of the most fundamental components of computers. The tool a programmer uses to manage and write his code is called an IDE. FrontPage, iWeb, and Dreamweaver are all IDEs, as are Notepad, Visual Studio, and Eclipse (to name a few).

Enter Bespin.

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If any of you out there manage blogs, you know the battle fought with spam comments. For a long time, they were complete gibberish, often coming in the form of public domain literary works cut-up and strewn together like an over-zealous ransom note. Then they became intelligible but racy. It was this shift in content (often promising much more than it could ever deliver [don't ask]) that spurned the blogging world into action, much like a father of young children racing to the DVD player after remembering just how lenient the ratings were on movies produced in the ’80s. (MPAA film ratings tip: a 1984 PG is slightly less wholesome than a 1960 R.)

Since that time, spam-collection plugins and techniques have become much more advanced. They have become so advanced, in fact, that we are ushering in a new era of spam content: the spamversation. It is my belief that this spam tactic aims to be general and complimentary in hopes that the blog administrator will leave their comment intact. The benefit here is that their URL (which they so desperately want you to click) is now displayed to the public.

To use an entomological metaphor, the spamversation comment is a moth, unassuming and harmless. But we crush moths, don’t we.

Today, I ran across a little gem as I went through my email. The comment has been eradicated, but I wanted to share it with the world.

My brother has a blog similar to yours but it is written in Spanish. I like yours better to be honest.

Like a moth, it caught my eye, dancing ever closer to the bare light bulb that is the comments section. Alas, floating moth dust is all that remains. (I don’t have a “blog administrator” metaphorical equivalent for that visual.)

The Sanford Project 2009 (http://www.sanfordproject.org)

Occasionally, we get the chance to work on projects that don’t just promote a product, a service, or a company but also hope, promise, and potential. Nothing better embodies that then The Sanford Project (http://www.sanfordproject.org/). For the unfamiliar, The Sanford Project is devoted to finding a cure for type 1 diabetes, also known as diabetes mellitus or juvenile diabetes. This type of diabetes affects between 500,000 and 1 million people in the United States, which makes finding a cure a big deal.

Usually, the audience that we craft our sites towards is pretty cut and dried: our client’s customers. That can be easier if your client’s customers are people who bank in the Midwest or people who love flowers, but what if your client’s customers are as varied as people who have a body? Our challenge for the design of this site was to appeal to anyone touched by type 1 diabetes: patients, parents, physicians, and even researchers. A design like that has to say a lot to many people. Taking a cue from existing Sanford Health print materials, the design for the site is dark blue and technical, showcasing that serious medicine and research is behind this initiative.

Even if your life hasn’t been affected by type 1 diabetes, you can still find plenty of insightful and interesting content with regards to this monumental project. You can learn more on the Sanford Project page. Browse the Newsroom to see what latest Press Releases have gone out. Don’t forget the Video Library, where you can hear the stories and see the people who are helping make this cure a reality. For those feeling generous of time or money, you can easily Sign Up For Updates or Make A Gift Online.

A site like The Sanford Project is a good reminder that not everything a marketing and advertising agency does is about selling something to someone. Sometimes it’s about lending a helping hand to make the world a better place. Those are some of the best times.