How do you combat tired Facebook status updates? With the Emergen-C Share the Good app, of course. It lets you send real Emergen-C vitamin drink mix packets to friends in need via Facebook, AND it generates a personalized video that will cheer them up while they wait for their samples. Try it out here.
We’re proud that the “Expense-A-Steak” Campaign for Maloney & Porcelli has been included in this year’s Ad Age Small Agency Awards 2010.
News Flash: The Maloney & Porcelli expense-a-steak site just won a bronze cyber lion in Cannes: http://www.canneslions.com/work/cyber/index.cfm?award=4
Interesting article in MediaPost about our new Emergen-C campaign (interesting because it’s about us, of course). Read it here.
CW-X’s new Ventilator shorts, a solution to a problem that’s widely known, but rarely mentioned: the curse of the wispy running short. See how long you can last before clicking: http://walrusnyc.com/test/cwx/shorts_makeitstop/ and here: www.cw-x.com
The single post on Emergen-C’s Twitter feed went up some time over a year ago. Since then the brand gathered 102 followers, yet no new tweets were forthcoming. In our efforts to get the feed going again, we felt that it was only appropriate to recognize those 102 stalwarts, and what better way than with one of these:
The Emergen-C feed is now live again, and already sporting three times the amount of posts that were there all last year! Follow along: http://twitter.com/emergenc
We received a nice mention for our Maloney & Porcelli fill the hole campaign on Creativity today. It’s part of an interesting article featuring digital work that meshes with the real world (a specialty of ours). Give it a read here.
The MTA is rerouting the LIRR to Grand Central, and they’re digging the hole right in front of Maloney & Porcelli. It’s supposed to take a LONG time, and we want to be sure that it a) doesn’t take any longer than it has to, and b) that people still come down the block to the restaurant despite the giant hole. This campaign incentivizes the workers to keep digging and the patrons to bear with them. Every time they hit a milestone on schedule, Maloney is hosting an open bar, and if they finish the entire thing on time, there will be a huge beefsteak banquet for the entire construction crew. A series of cherry picked phone kiosks alert pedestrians to the program; a big sign in the window keeps the workers encouraged; and a microsite (complete with a crater cam) keeps patrons abreast of the progress.
Our Expense-a-steak campaign was mentioned in Bob Garfield’s farewell column this week as one of his favorites of all-time. See it here. Garfield reviewed a bunch of our work over the years, and it was always a thrill to see whether he loved it or hated it (it was a mix of both). Good luck, Bob!
Remember an online prank last fall from a Manhattan restaurant, generating real-looking receipts that were offered up as a way to pad expense accounts? Some of the folks behind it are back with a Web site that generates realistic-seeming “hand scans.”
The Web site, ultimatehandscanner.com, is part of a campaign to introduce a moisturizing hand sanitizer from the Gold Bond line of skin care products sold by Chattem. There are conventional ads for the new item, Gold Bond Ultimate Hand Sanitizer Moisturizer, as well as the fiendishly clever Web site.
On the Wall Street of today, cold hard cash is an increasingly rare commodity. With the 2009 bonus season ushering in a new era of stock-only bonuses, bankers are struggling to maintain their cash intensive lifestyle. Smith & Wollensky is ahead of the curve in this regard, and will now be accepting NYSE and NASDAQ stock certificates as payments. This full page New York Times ad ran on February 2nd, 2010, and attracted quite a bit of press. Coverage has included CNN, Money Magazine, Dealbreaker.com, Eater.com, New York Times, Ad Age, and Wall Street Journal to name a few. CNBC’s “Power Lunch” did a little math and figured out that 2 Goldman Sachs shares will buy 4 filet mignons, 2 Citi shares: 1/2 order of creamed spinach. Of course, you can do this math yourself on our handy converter at www.steakforstock.com.
Another year, another set of cool new CW-X products. These print executions will be complimented with digital (of course), and continue on our latest product-centric theme, which has been really well received. Turns out, runners get pretty excited by call-outs.
Everybody has a germaphobe in their life. That certain somebody who’s constantly washing their hands, is repulsed by crowds and will only touch doorhandles with their elbow. The Ultimate Hand Scanner is a friendly way to reinforce this paranoia, and possibly make it worse. Log on and in just a few minutes you can have a friend or loved one believing that 1) their computer monitor actually scanned their hand and 2) that they are completely covered in microbes. Luckily for them, there’s Gold Bond Ultimate Hand Sanitizer, Moisturizer - the world’s first hand sanitizer and moisturizer. It won’t dry out your hands, so they can reapply 20 times a day if necessary. See the scanner in action here.
The Three Walrus Moon T-Shirt, the one thing that everyone wants for Christmas (whether they know it or not).
One of the biggest casualties of the financial crisis has to be the expense account meal. With the financial industry in turmoil, and unemployment higher than it’s been in decades, it’s easy to understand why those who still have their jobs are hesitant to appear brazen with the corporate card. Upscale steakhouse Maloney & Porcelli sits at 50th and Park, in the heart of expense account country, footsteps away from the likes of Citigroup, Blackrock and Morgan Stanley, and is working hard to help. Their clientele has always considered them a top spot to enjoy a 24 inch steak but with CFOs keeping tabs on every cent, it takes guts to turn in a receipt from a huge meal.
Enter the Maloney & Porcelli expense report generator (expenseasteak.com), a website that makes it easy to turn a decadent meal into a responsible expense. Simply enter the cost of a meal, and the generator will create a printable sheet of expense report-friendly receipts (office supplies, business how-to books and taxis) exactly totaling the amount of the meal. See it here.
And that’s not all we’re doing to help. Maloney & Porcelli is also famous for basketball sized pork shanks that are nearly impossible to finish. This poses its own unique set of problems since coming back to the office with a doggie bag emblazoned with a Maloney & Porcelli logo might raise a few eyebrows. Taking a cue from luxury boutiques who began offering their customers plain white shopping bags earlier this year, M&P’s doggie bags are utilizing a unique form of camouflage - the logos of other, less pricey restaurants. That way, as a small paragraph on the back of the bags reads, a customer will be “free to roam wherever you please, completely invisible to the watchful eyes of the etiquette police.”
Outside the restaurant, if you happen to be passing by - we’ve provided a long list of messages that will help people remember that there’s nothing like a good steak, even if times are tough.
The Park Avenue Bank is a local bank in New York City with branches in Manhattan and Brooklyn. They have an entrepreneurial spirit that pervades everything they do and they’ve made a mission out of helping small businesses get a leg up. While this has always been part of their DNA, they’ve never really said much about it. 2009 has turned into a huge opportunity to win over new customers as the image of big banks has grown more and more tarnished. We were tasked with helping them update their image and messaging to better emphasize their small business expertise. In the end, we updated everything - signs, posters, brochures, their site. Steering away from your typical, generic looking stock photography, we wanted to give them something completely unique - and that something came in the form of illustrations. Take a look:
As part of the redesign we also completely overhauled the Park Avenue Bank site. We wanted to keep it simple, clean, and most of all easy to navigate.
The Park Avenue Bank is there to help small businesses in everything they do. To help reinforce this fact, we wanted to create something that really, truly is helpful. Introducing the Park Avenue Bank Small Business HQ. This online resource for small business owners features constantly updated content with the sole purpose of helping small business owners better deal with the unique complexities of owning a business. The news section features articles of relevance to small business owners (for instance, how an SBA loan works), and a news aggregator collects articles of interest from all over the web. The Entrepreneur’s Corner is for those who are just getting their business off the ground and features tips on everything from writing a business plan to negotiating a lease. The bank’s existing clients aren’t forgotten here either, we’ve put in a section devoted entirely to them with interviews and profiles. Hopefully we can drum up some business for them along the way.
