What’s the ideal training ground for an ad agency president? If you answered, “being a marching band instructor”, you’re either a master of unconventional thinking, or you’ve spent some time with Scott Lawrence, the President and CEO of Lawrence and Schiller.
Agency Buzz
From travel and tourism to higher education, telecommunications to healthcare, 12 different Lawrence & Schiller clients took home honors Saturday night, at the 44th Annual South Dakota Advertising Federation’s Addy Awards. The diverse collection of winners represent a 25% higher number of clients than any other marketing agency in the awards show.
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March 1 – a landmark day for a lot of reasons. The Hoover Dam was completed on March 1. Ohio was admitted as our 17th U.S. state. And it’s the 60th day of our calendar year, a sign (at least with today’s sunshine) that spring isn’t as far away as it seems.
But at L&S, March 1 will be remembered for a different kind of reason. It’s the official campaign launch of “My Town, My Taco John’s,” the first joint advertising effort between Lawrence & Schiller and Taco John’s International.
Just a few short months ago, our entire office was hanging on to hope that we’d one day get the chance to work with Taco John’s. Today, we’re rolling out a new series of television commercials, point-of-purchase advertising and radio, complete with a new original jingle celebrating the bond between Taco John’s and our hometown communities.
To view the first of many new spots in the “My Town, My Taco John’s” family, click on the links below. And celebrate with us as we say, “olé!” this March 1.
As a precursor to formally announcing his candidacy for Mayor of Sioux Falls on February 1st, Pat Costello, with the help of Lawrence & Schiller, launched his new website on January 15, 2010. Encompassing Costello’s overall position, (the future is now) the website takes a comprehensive look at Costello’s family life, professional and political experience and vision for Sioux Falls, focusing on five platforms: A Safe Sioux Falls; City Finances; City Relationships; Commerce and Entertainment; and Communication. The site also includes a photo gallery, voter information, and a contribution page. With email signup, a constant social media feed and the ability to submit questions or concerns to Costello himself, the site is interactive and user-friendly.
Check out the site at www.costelloformayor.com
The 2010 municipal election for Sioux Falls Mayor will be held Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Just the facts – A great post from our often quoted friends at the Center for Media Research, facts you can use during your reports, speeches and water-cooler arguments during 2010. Ah, we love stats.
Mobile Phones
- U.S. mobile phone users 13+: 223M
- Number of mobile Web users: 60.7M (up 33% from 2008)
- Percentage of mobile devices that are smartphones: 18% (up from 13% in 2008)
- Percentage of mobile device owners that streamed audio: 8%
- Percentage of mobile device owners that viewed video via their mobile phone: 7%
- Percentage of mobile devices sold in Q3 2009 that were smartphones: 25% (estimated 40%-50 in 2010)
Source: The Nielsen Company, November 2009
Looking Ahead To Mid-2011
- Estimated smartphone user base: 150M
- Estimated mobile subscribers: 300M+
- Estimated users of mobile web: 120M
- Estimated users watching mobile video: 90M
Source: The Nielsen Company, November 2009
Growth of cellphone only homes in the U.S.
- 2009… 21%
- 2008… 18%
- 2007… 15%
Top 5 Smartphones (% Ownership)
- Blackberry 8300 Curve: 17%
- Apple iPhone 3G: 15%
- Apple iPhone 3G S: 12%
- Blackberry 9530 Storm: 6%
- Blackberry 8100 Pearl: 5%
Source: The Nielsen Company, November 2009
Top 5 Mobile Web Sites
- Google Search
- Yahoo! Mail
- Gmail
- Weather Channel
Top Social Networks on Mobile Phones
- MySpace
Top 5 Mobile Video Channels
- YouTube
- Fox Interactive Media
- Weather Channel
- Comedy Central
- CBS
Internet
- 195M Active U.S. Internet users
- 160.3M People who accessed the Internet via a broadband connection: (93.3%… up 16% from 2008)
- 138.4M Unique viewers of video (up 11.4% from 2008)
- 11.2B Total online video streams viewed monthly (up 17% from 2008)
- 200.1 minutes Average time spent viewing online video per viewer monthly (up 12.5% from 2008)
Social Networking
- Facebook reaches 56% of the active U.S. Internet universe with an average usage of 6 hrs a month per user
- Facebook is the #3 site visited by users 65 and older
- Twitter grew 500% year-over-year
- Time spent on social networking sites in the U.S. increased 277%
- The average U.S. worker spends 5 hrs a month visiting social networks at the office
- 32% of all mobile web users visited a social network
Back to the basics of Christmas is the approach used in the latest Lewis campaign. No hot toys or gadgets were featured this year, marking a somewhat different Christmas campaign than in years past.
A sound mix to “Oh Christmas Tree” and highlighting a breadth of products from all departments within Lewis lends a fresh, fun feel to this spot. Products from TVs and cameras to baby dolls, champagne and Doritos – it is made apparent that Lewis is your first stop for everything holiday. Whether it be for shipping and packaging, decorating your house for the holidays, gift buying or party planning, Lewis has it all.
Sanford Children’s Hospital partnership with the Great Plains Zoo was featured on ABC Nightly News with Brian Williams last week. What an awesome program for kids staying in the Castle of Care!
This week, Lawrence & Schiller is rolling out one of our newest clients, the University of South Dakota. Many of you have probably seen the television commercial already, but it really drives home what we are trying to say with this fresh, exciting campaign. The aim is to make potential and current students feel that USD is the place to be – that they are getting a private school education at a public school value, incomparable to any other.
The commercial truly says it all: Commitment you can see. Tradition you can feel. An experience like no other. At a place called USD. The University of South Dakota.
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The best practices for designing, developing and deploying next-generation web, mobile and enterprise solutions were on display recently at Adobe Max in Los Angeles, CA. Among those attending was Eric Cross, Senior Interactive Developer at Lawrence & Schiller.
What were the biggest surprises? The biggest takeaways? And how can a conference like Max help L&S clients? Eric shares his thoughts in this episode of The Extra Minute.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:04 — 2.8MB)
It’s always exciting to win an award, but when it comes from your peers – people with whom you compete for business - it often means more. Such is the case for the South Dakota Office of Tourism and its recent winning of the prestigious Mercury Award.
Micah Aberson, Director of Business Development at Lawrence & Schiller tells the story of the award winning Black Hills Digital Strategy in this edition of The Extra Minute.
For season premiere week?! I AM!!! The official start of the 09-10 TV is about to commence, so set those DVRs (or VCRs if you must), dust off your remote and get ready for a busy fall! I’m just giddy…
New shows are bolded. For more information about each show, follow the network link.
ABC
Dancing With the Stars: Monday, Sept. 21, 8 p.m. ET
Castle: Monday, Sept. 21, 10 p.m. ET
The Forgotten: Tuesday, Sept. 22, 10 p.m. ET
Dancing With the Stars Results Show: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 8 p.m. ET (special day and time)
Modern Family: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 9 p.m. ET
Cougar Town: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 9:30 p.m. ET
Eastwick: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 10 p.m. ET
FlashFoward: Thursday, Sept. 24, 8 p.m. ET
Grey’s Anatomy: Thursday, Sept. 24, 9 p.m. ET
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: Sunday, Sept. 27, 7 p.m. ET (two hours)
Desperate Housewives: Sunday, Sept. 27, 9 p.m. ET
Brothers & Sisters: Sunday, Sept. 27, 10 p.m. ET
Shark Tank: Tuesday, Sept. 29, 8 p.m. ET (summer run began on Sunday, Aug. 9)
Hank: Wednesday, Sept. 30, 8 p.m. ET
The Middle: Wednesday, Sept. 30, 8:30 p.m. ET
America’s Funniest Home Videos: Sunday, Oct. 4, 7 p.m. ET
Ugly Betty: Friday, Oct. 9, 8 p.m. ET (two hours)
Supernanny: Friday, Oct. 16, 8 p.m. ET
CBS
Survivor: Samoa: Thursday, Sept. 17, 8 p.m. ET
How I Met Your Mother: Monday, Sept. 21, 8 p.m. ET
Accidentally on Purpose: Monday, Sept. 21, 8:30 p.m. ET
Two and a Half Men: Monday, Sept. 21, 9 p.m. ET
The Big Bang Theory: Monday, Sept. 21, 9:30 p.m. ET
CSI: Miami: Monday, Sept. 21, 10 p.m. ET
NCIS: Tuesday, Sept. 22, 8 p.m. ET
NCIS: Los Angeles: Tuesday, Sept. 22, 9 p.m. ET
The Good Wife: Tuesday, Sept. 22, 10 p.m. ET
The New Adventures of Old Christine: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 8 p.m. ET
Gary Unmarried: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 8:30 p.m. ET
Criminal Minds: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 9 p.m. ET
CSI: NY: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 10 p.m. ET
CSI: Thursday, Sept. 24: Thursday, Sept. 24: 9 p.m. ET
The Mentalist: Thursday, Sept. 24: Thursday, Sept. 24: 10 p.m. ET
Ghost Whisperer: Friday, Sept. 25, 8 p.m. ET
Medium: Friday, Sept. 25, 9 p.m. ET
Numbers: Friday, Sept. 25, 10 p.m. ET
48 Hours Mystery: Saturday, Sept. 26, 10 p.m. ET
60 Minutes: Sunday, Sept. 27, 7 p.m. ET
The Amazing Race: Sunday, Sept. 27, 8 p.m. ET
Cold Case: Sunday, Sept. 27, 10 p.m. ET
Three Rivers: Sunday, Oct. 4, 9 p.m. ET
NBC
The Jay Leno Show: Monday, Sept. 14, 10 p.m. ET (series premiere, M-F)
The Biggest Loser: Tuesday, Sept. 15, 8 p.m. ET (two hours)
Saturday Night Live Weekend Thursday Update: Thursday, Sept. 17, 8 p.m. ET
Parks and Recreations: Thursday, Sept. 17, 8:30 p.m. ET
The Office: Thursday, Sept. 17, 9 p.m. ET
Community: Thursday, Sept. 17, 9:30 p.m. ET; moves to Thursday 8 p.m. six weeks later
Heroes: Monday, Sept. 21, 8 p.m. ET (new time, two hours)
Mercy: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 8 p.m. ET
Law & Order: SVU: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 9 p.m. ET (new day and time)
Law & Order: Friday, Sept. 25, 8 p.m. ET (new day and time)
Southland: Friday, Sept. 25, 9 p.m. ET (new time)
Dateline: Saturday, Sept. 26, 8 p.m. ET
Trauma: Monday, Sept. 28, 9 p.m. ET
Community: Thursday, Oct. 8, 8 p.m. ET (new time period)
30 Rock: Thursday, Oct. 15, 9:30 p.m. ET
FOX
Cops: Saturday, Sept. 12, 8 p.m. ET
America’s Most Wanted: Saturday, Sept. 12, 9 p.m. ET
So You Think You Can Dance: Wednesday, Sept. 16, 8 p.m. ET
Glee: Wednesday, Sept. 16, 9 p.m. ET
Bones: Thursday, Sept. 17, 8 p.m. ET
Fringe: Thursday, Sept. 17, 9 p.m. ET
Brothers: Friday, Sept. 18, 8 p.m. ET
‘Til Death: Friday, Sept. 18, 8:30 p.m. ET
Dollhouse: Friday, Sept. 18, 9 p.m. ET
House: Monday, Sept. 21, 8 p.m. ET (two hours)
The Simpsons: Sunday, Sept. 27, 8 p.m. ET
The Cleveland Show: Sunday, Sept. 27, 8:30 p.m. ET
Family Guy: Sunday, Sept. 27, 9 p.m. ET
American Dad: Sunday, Sept. 27, 9:30 p.m. ET
Lie To Me: Monday, Sept. 28, 9 p.m. ET
The Wanda Sykes Show: Saturday, Nov. 7, 11 p.m. ET
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Since 1999 Search Engine Strategies (SES) has been presenting one of THE best conference series on search engine marketing. Doesn’t matter if you’re a novice or an expert, interested in search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) placement, digital PR or analysis of a campaign’s ROI, SES offers a wealthy of information.
Robin Temple, Director of Digital Marketing at Lawrence & Schiller attended the most recent SES conference (San Jose). In this episode of The Extra Minute, Robin discusses what’s new in search marketing now and what we can expect in the future.
The San Jose SES Conference also provided an opportunity for Lawrence & Schiller to step up to the speaker’s podium. Billie Jo Waara, Director of Account Planning and Research, spoke on “Small Voices, Big Impact: Social Media for the Little Guy.”
Congratulations to South Dakota Tourism and L&S!
The Black Hills Digital Strategy co-op won the U.S. Travel Association’s Mercury Award for most innovative digital campaign. Nicknamed “the Oscar of Tourism” on twitter, the Mercury Award is given out in 12 different categories. SD Tourism joins the ranks of North Carolina, Oregon and past winners such as Michigan, Virginia and Florida.
The 2008 Black Hills Digital Strategy campaign targeted three niches of travelers: history, adventure and RV’ers. Through PPC, banner ad, landing pages and email efforts, the Black Hills promoted vacation packages, online booking and three vacation giveaways. This effort resulted in over 40,000 new leads for the Black Hills, including nearly 14,000 entries for the vacation giveaways. Web traffic to partner websites also saw a 27% increase.The awards gala was held last night in Lake Tahoe. This is the third Mercury Award won by South Dakota.
The best problem a website can have is too much success. Visitors flocking to your site in record numbers, orders coming in faster than you can process them, and advertising revenue is soaring. So why is this a problem?
With increased traffic comes greater resource usage and higher hosting costs. In most dynamic applications, each requested page goes through a series of actions before the content is returned to the browser. Without getting into too much detail here are the steps of a basic request.
- A URL is entered into the web browser. (www.cnn.com)
- A DNS lookup is performed to locate the IP address of the server and the HTTP request is made
- The web server sees the request and begins processing the request.
- If it is a static page the HTML content is returned to the browser
- If the page is dynamic, processed at the time of request, the server calls the appropriate processor to generate the HTML to return to the browser.
- Once the browser has the HTML for the page it begins to render the content. More requests are made to the server to download the required page assets such as images, style sheets, Javascript, XML, videos, etc.
So what can be done to make sure your site is as lean as possible?
There are at least a hundred steps to planning, designing and developing a great looking, fully functional website and none of them should be overlooked. Unfortunately , this article is only going cover some of the best practices for development, but if you have questions about your site feel free to contact us.
HTML/CSS
HTML and CSS design are the building blocks of your website, they should be well planned before coding begins. The site should be well structured and allow for simple changes. Make sure to follow web standards, use a valid doctype, XHTML valid code is preferred (lowercase tags and attributes, close tags, etc.) and don’t forget about accessibility guidelines for disabled users. These options don’t do much for page weight, but a well formatted (X)HTML document will render better and faster in the browser than an invalid one will.
CSS should be used as much as possible and should be in an external file included in the <head> tag of your HTML. This allows the browser to cache the .css file and you can reuse the rules across the entire site without having them hard-coded in every page.
For example <p><strong><u>this text is bold and underlined</u></strong></p> should be re-written as <p class=”bold underline”> this text is bold and underlined </p> . This way if you want to change the color of the bold text to red you can update your .css rule in one place and it will update the entire site. .bold {font-weight:bold; color:#f00;}
CSS is not just used to control text size, color and decoration, it controls the look and feel of the entire site. (margins, padding, spacing, positioning, fonts, colors, sizes, backgrounds)
NOTE: Don’t forget to validate your HTML/CSS files. Failure to do so could lead to hours of wasted time debugging issues that could be nothing more than a typo.
Javascript
Javascript can be one of the simplest things to add to a site to increase user experience, it can also easily double the size of your document in a hurry.
If you are using a Javascript library (jQuery, YUI and MooTools come to mind) don’t just include it to look cool. If you are not going to use it, don’t include it. Also, if you are only going to use 1 feature of the entire library then maybe it is not your best option. All of the great functionality of a Javascript library and its associated plugins can come with a hefty download price, but the good news is javascript files are cached by the browser and should only need to be downloaded once.
Use external Javascript files – If you are not building your script on the fly, there is no reason to put the code directly in your page. Include it in the <head> and pay attention to load order. Again, combine files whenever possible. (Yes, there is debate over loading at the top of the page versus the bottom due to parallel download issues, but that also depends on what your script does and I’m a creature of habit)
Minify your files – The minification process removes comments and whitespace from Javascript files and can reduce the size by half.
NOTE: Don’t assume that everyone has Javascript enabled. Make use of the <noscript> tag.
Images
Watch your file sizes (Save for web is your friend) – I have seen many examples of users just hitting save on a file and including it in their code without ever looking at the size. Right click on an image and click properties. If the image is over 20KB it is too large.
File type is important – jpg, gif, png are not all the same, a 30KB jpg file might be a 5KB gif or vice-versa.
Use CSS whenever possible in place of images. Strategic use of Javascript and CSS can reduce the number of images your page uses.
Don’t use width and height to resize a large image. If you would like to display an 800×600 image as 80×60 create a new image. The thumbnail will download quicker and you are less likely to have image distortion.
Video
Video can be a real catch-22, you want your users to watch it, but when they do your bandwidth usage goes through the roof. Video codecs are getting better all the time so make sure you are using the right one. Finding the right with the right settings will give you high quality video at the best bit rate possible.
The other option is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). They will host your video and stream it using their bandwidth for a monthly fee.
Server/Application
Minimize HTTP requests – The fewer connections you need to make to the server the faster your page will load.
Cache settings – Use Expires or Cache-Control to keep objects in the local users cache. Not only does this reduce bandwidth usage, it will increase the users perceived speed of the site because it only needs to download new or changed items.
Use http compression on the server – it will decrease your HTML, CSS and Javascript files by up to 75%
Best Practices
Do your best to combine resources. You don’t need 5 different CSS files loaded into one page. You are only slowing down the page by creating more connections to the server.
Monitor files created and uploaded by 3rd party processes – there are usually settings to control image quality and that could mean the difference between 100K images and 300K files. Believe me, on a high demand website this makes a world of difference in bandwidth usage.
Monitor your site statistics. They provide valuable information that can be vital to the success of your business.
Review your site frequently, technology changes quickly and it is quite possible that there are now better ways to accomplish something that was done months ago.
And last but not least, test your site in all major browsers. (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari)
Tools
Here are a few tools at your disposal to help evaluate your page validity and weight.
http://validator.w3.org/ – HTML Validation
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ – CSS Validation
http://www.netmechanic.com – slightly outdated, but nice to see image sizes and load time
Firefox Plugins – FireBug, YSlow
Of course none of this makes any difference if your server side code and database isn’t optimized to handle the heavy traffic, but that is a post for another time.
I just received this video link via a digital community news feed. As the video discusses, and as we discussed last week with businesses of all sizes, “Is social media a fad?” and how do we measure its true value? Its great food for thought as I take a few moments to digest all of the notes and information in my literature bag from last week’s national Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference (#sessj).
Last week, Lawrence and Schiller had the opportunity to share our social media expertise with other professionals from across the country in search engine and digital marketing. Great topics, great conversations and I’m excited to share a quick summary of insights discussed during the event.
Search is about people. Not keywords. Search engine strategies to reach customers are not meant to be separate from your social media relationships. Today, and even more in the future, people are expecting results that reflect the most up-to-date and relevant content. User-intent and user-influence are key considerations when understanding and preparing for the way search engines will index sites and the deliver the results we see today and in the future.
SEO adds fire to Public Relations. As quoted in the video, “We no longer search for news, the news finds us.” Using social media tools and best practices for SEO are key to ensuring the right audiences find the relevant news we all want to share. Researching keyword trends, editorial calendars, writing the way the audiences are searching, keeping headlines short and simple are just a few ways we can ensure “news” continues rank well and has maximum reach with leading search engines and social media platforms.
Social CRM. Its here. Discussions on ways to integrate existing CRM technologies with social media conversations piqued my interest last week. We’ve begun the path of integrating the newest CRM 2.0 or social CRM tools within our existing enterprise systems – but the world is always changing and there’s more that we can do to ensure our clients have the tools they need. Businesses are always looking efficient ways to respond to customers from a variety of communication sources, and that includes the most popular social media platforms. Engaging in customer-driven conversations, and measuring those efforts, is the next stage in building effective relationships. These effective conversations lead to relevant search results, which in turns leads to more people finding you.
In short, no matter what the next stage in search strategies, social media, or any other aspect of marketing that leads today’s conference topics, its clear that the fundamental value of any communication hasn’t changed. The goal of great marketing is now, more than ever, about RELATIONSHIPS. The tools, the strategies and the places in today’s world are dynamic and evolving, but the basics of a good conversation never go away.
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5280, Full Circle Marketing.
It’s the mantra of Lawrence & Schiller. The playbook we use to go beyond simply creating and placing advertisements to developing fully integrated marketing programs that deliver measurable and meaningful returns on investment. It’s a proven process that works for clients such as South Dakota Tourism, Deadwood and Lewis Drug.
In this installment of The Extra Minute, Mark Glissendorf, Vice-President of Operations and Multimedia Services at Lawrence & Schiller, explains our 5280 approach to full circle marketing.
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Going to the hospital can be scary business if you’re a kid. Ok… let’s be honest… it can be unnerving for parents too.
Often the fear is based on the unknown. What is it like in the hospital? What will the room look like? What can I bring and what has to stay home?
Providing answers in a kid-friendly way is the goal of the Kid Zone. The Kid Zone is a colorful, animated and interactive micro-site developed by Sanford Health. It includes a guided tour of the Sanford Children’s Hospital, links to health information and now, an online coloring book.
In this episode of The Extra Minute, Natalie Eisenberg, account executive at Lawrence & Schiler, explains why the Kid Zone has been created and why Sanford believes it’s an important service to provide.
Kevin Perlic has joined L&S as a Broadcast Producer. An Ohio native, Kevin earned his degree from Cleveland State University and worked at a production company in the city for ten years. At Lawrence & Schiller, Kevin will work with several clients to edit and produce TV commercials and videos.
The agency has also added two full-time interns to the mix.
Katie Fritz joins L&S as a recent graduate from South Dakota State University. Katie graduated with a graphic design degree and will work as a Production and Graphics Intern with the agency’s client and web teams.
A previous L&S intern, Jamie Bulian will return to the agency as a Copywriting Intern. A University of South Dakota graduate, Jamie also works as a freelance writer for 605 Magazine and the Ribs, Rods, Rock & Roll event in Vermillion.
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If you live in the small communities that make up Middle America, you are used to hearing about new technology… and not having it available in your area. It’s the ultimate dangling carrot. The technology tease.
But not this time! Midcontinent Communications is bringing DOCSIS 3.0 to the heartland. In fact, West Fargo, ND is getting the high speed Internet network before Manhattan!
In this issue of The Extra Minute, hear how Midcontinent Communications is using digital public relations and social media tospread the word of this exciting technology advance.
Related Links
MidcoNews blog
Midcontinent Communications
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Is advertising art? Is art ever advertising?
These questions are much more than rhetorical. They stretch all the way from the design studio to the board room. In this episode of The Extra Minute, Dan Edmonds, Vice President of Design Services at Lawrence & Schiller, weighs in with his thoughts on the subject.
