BSL Wins Three Davey Awards

BSL is very pleased to announce that we have won three silver 2011 Davey Awards*, in the category of Online Video. The first video that was recognized is the Iridium Extreme video, which won in the categories of ‘Graphics’ and ‘Other’. These honours come on the heels of the Iridium Extreme launch just over two months ago, and serve to affirm the many days and nights of hard work that went into the final piece. The third award was given to the ng Connect Solution Concept videos, an exciting three-part series that was the result of an extraordinary team effort in late 2010. We are tremendously proud of both videos, and are truly grateful to our clients for giving us the opportunity to produce such award-winning work.

*The Davey is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from a "Who's Who" of acclaimed media, advertising, and marketing firms. IAVA members include executives from organizations such as Condè Nast, Michael Kors Inc., Disney, The Ellen Degeneres Show, Microsoft, HBO, Monster.com, MTV, Polo Ralph Lauren, Sotheby's Institute of Art, Victoria's Secret, Howcast and many more.

A Simple Force

I love this ad! And I am not the only one, having been watched close to 44 million times on youtube I don't think I am alone. It has garnered tons of hype and praise from industry people and audiences alike. It is clean, simple and memorable, contrasting the traditional high production and special effects that dominate this advertising market. It takes one of the most iconic brands and one of the biggest movie series in the world and through humour and emotion it shows off one clear selling point to the car. Advertising doesn't get much better.

How To Create Your Own Mayor - Foursquare for Businesses

By now you've heard of the basics of Foursquare, from a user standpoint.
Now it’s time to review the platform from a business perspective. More specifically for those who have a brick and mortar type of business. Sorry e-businesses, this part of Foursquare is not for you. There is an option for Brands, but more on that another time.

This nifty little video explains the basics but the process is fairly simple: With an account set up you just need to a) claim your venue b) create one or many specials, and then c) monitor your results.



Claiming your venue
Go to the Foursquare page of your business by finding it in the search, or adding your location into the system and then follow the link that says "Do you manage this venue? Claim here." It’ll walk you through the rest of the steps to confirm that you are who you say you are.

Creating specials
Once your venue has been confirmed, you can start to craft your specials, there are many types of specials available but they fall under two main categories: Attract new customers to your business and Encourage loyalty among your existing customers. Both have their advantages depending on what results you are looking for. See the images below for more specifics.

Monitoring your results

As the venue manager you have several real-time statistics available to you:

• Total daily check-ins over time
• Your most recent visitors
• Your most frequent visitors
• Gender breakdown of your customers
• What time of day people check in
• Portion of your venue’s foursquare check-ins that are broadcast to Twitter and Facebook

The trick is to use the information that you gather to help tweak your specials to help with your marketing goals.

With a few simple steps, you can be well on your way to attracting new customers and rewarding the loyalty of those you already have.

Have any of you already created a Foursquare special? Let us know about it in the comments.

BSL Gets Reel

Over the last two years BSL has been rapidly expanding its capabilities in video production. So much so that we now have an official in-house video department, equipped with some of the best talent in the city, and the state-of-the-art tools to go along with it.

From original concept development and scriptwriting, to talent sourcing and location scouting, to shooting through to final editing and production – there isn’t a whole lot we can’t do here at BSL. And we’ve got the hardware to prove it! In the last two years, some of our top video projects have won us two Telly awards, two Communicator awards, a Davey award, a W3 award and a Platinum Creativity International award.

Video is more than just a communications tool. It is becoming the communications tool, and we can’t get enough of it. Check out our new demo reel for some highlights of what we can do now.

BSL Helps Iridium Dawn a New Age in Communication

Anthropologists used to judge how far a civilization has come by the sophistication of its weapons. While this is still a primary meter stick for our progress, there are other, more relatable categories of measure that have emerged – proving that we’ve come a long way, baby.

Nothing says progress like the way we communicate. Communication is a vital part of our lives, our jobs, and even our safety. The more progress we continue to make, the more possibility lies ahead for what we can do next.

BSL is fortunate to have a client that is at the forefront of this kind of progress, and we’re celebrating a pretty awesome milestone this week: the launch of Iridium’s new communications powerhouse, Iridium Extreme. While it may look like just a simple satellite phone – news is traveling fast that this thing is truly revolutionary.

Iridium Extreme is the first satellite phone EVER that can track your location online, from anywhere you are on the planet. And since this is Iridium, we do mean anywhere. As the world’s toughest, most rugged satellite phone, it lets users keep their family, friends and employers up to date under virtually any conditions, all over the world.

On top of being a reliable satellite phone and a mobile tracking device, Iridium Extreme also has accessories that create instant Wi-Fi hotspots, anywhere. This means never having to say goodbye to your smartphone, tablet, or laptop – even if you’re scaling a mountain, crossing the desert, or just in a dead zone at the cottage.

Iridium Extreme marks the dawn of a new age. An age with fewer limits, and greater possibilities for what we can do and how we can interact. And for communications junkies like us – we see nothing but extreme potential.

Check out the official Iridium Extreme video, created by BSL.

Canadian Geographic Teaches Some Carbon Footprint Fitness

I can’t predict who will actually read this post, but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that most of you should probably go on a diet.

Now hold on – before you get offended – I’m not talking calorie consumption. I’m talking energy. The gas in your car, the oil in your furnace, the number of appliances you have, the amount of electricity you use – for most of us, energy is our largest expense. With the increasingly ominous threats of climate change looming over all of us, the importance of cutting back on our carbon emissions is becoming harder and harder to ignore.

In an effort to help, our clients at Canadian Geographic have decided to put six Canadian households on an Energy Diet, and pit them against each other. Each household will spend three full months taking all kinds of steps to slim down their consumption. While they learn effective ways to cut down their energy use they will keep the rest of the nation updated on their progress by blogging about their experience – complete with photos and videos to increase the excitement. Also to keep things interesting, each household will be participating in a few ‘mini-challenges’ organized by Canadian Geographic.

After entries were submitted from coast to coast, the final six competing households were chosen, and off to the races on September 1st, 2011. BSL was responsible for the design and development of print ads for Canadian Geographic and Geographica, to promote the various stages of the Challenge, as well as the official Energy Diet Challenge Guide and foldout poster featuring over 100 tips and tricks for you to start your own energy diet. Canadian Geographic and their partners at Shell have also developed a website with helpful online resources anyone can use, which includes a carbon footprint calculator, and personal energy dashboard.

While technically we all win when anyone makes an effort to help the environment, the Energy Diet Challenge will indeed have a champion. The household that shows the most enthusiasm and commitment to finding creative and efficient ways to reduce their consumption, in combination with receiving votes from viewers across the country, will be crowned the winner.

Follow the Energy Diet Challenge and start trimming some of your energy fat right now!

Generating Content for Your Business Blog

Now that you have your blog up and running (if not, you might be interested in the previous post: Get Your Business Blogging (Successfully)), you may be experiencing the common struggle of content generation. A lack of content makes maintaining regularity in your posts quite challenging. This is a hurdle for so many business bloggers, leaving them asking the key question: Where do we get the content?

It can really be quite simple and here are a few suggestions:

Repurpose stuff you already have

As a business, you very likely have an abundance of content, it just may not be written in a suitable style for a blog. But tailoring it to appeal to your online audience will be the easy part. Do a thorough audit of existing content and internal communications, and choose things that you may be able to adjust for a blog post. For example, disclosing the inner workings of your business can be a very successful approach that attracts great interest, because it’s not something expected or common. The story of your company, business or industry may be familiar and perhaps even boring to you – but to someone on the outside, it could be new and highly intriguing. Invite contributors from different parts of the organization to post from their own perspective and see what kind of feedback you get.

Watch for current news and trends

If you post items that are trending in social media and search spaces, you will attract interest from your readers. Try to provide something fresh, new or cool that people will want to share. And do it with personality. If you are flexible in your content creation process (writing posts quickly as news or trends arise), you will be rewarded by search engines and see an increase in traffic.

Use a variety of bloggers

As mentioned, generating content is a major struggle for so many business blogs, however if you enlist the help of multiple people in the organization, you may be surprised by the ideas that emerge. You will not only have more contributors, but also more diversity. And diverse voices mean you can attract more types of audiences.

I came across a post by Social Media Examiner, ‘11 Ways to Find New Content for Your Social Strategy’. It shares some great tactics to ensure you never run out of content:

#1: RSS Reader: Scan It Daily

#2: Make Every Employee a Marketer (get employees in all areas blogging)

#3: LinkedIn Groups (join based on the most active, listen and participate)

#4: Forums (check out discussions to see what people are talking about)

#5: Make a Tag Cloud (find relevant online content – ie/ tweets about your product or industry and drop them into a tag cloud application to find unexpected keywords)

#6: Eavesdrop (listen in on conversations online and offline)

#7: Crowdsource (ask your audience for content topics)

#8: Audio Books

#9: Google News

#10: Attend Industry Events

#11: Frankenblogging (combine your half-written posts to create one full post by finding the common link)

BSL Wins the Bid for NAC

BSL is celebrating an important encore this season, having been awarded another two years as Agency of Record for the National Arts Centre.

“BSL was the successful agency following a thorough RFP process. Their successful bid was founded on their superior project management skills, ability to handle large volumes, excellent client relations, and fair price”
Shannon Urie, Associate Director of Marketing

Since 2007 BSL has been the Agency of Record for the NAC, and in this role we have developed marketing strategies, communications plans, media strategies and media buys through to creative concepts, design, artwork production and print management.

BSL has been responsible for the creative development, media planning and buying for all single-ticket salescampaigns for NAC Presents, NAC Orchestra, NAC Dance and NAC English Theatre, as well as other featured projects. In the last two years we have had the opportunity to develop both the NAC Orchestra and NAC Dance subscription campaigns, as well as the 2010-2011 English Theatre subscription campaign.

Over these last four years BSL has gained invaluable experience navigating through the unique requirements for each NAC discipline (and their respective audiences) to deliver compelling, on-brand, results-driven marketing pieces and effective advertising campaigns with targeted imagery and messaging.

New Faces on the Design Front

When BSL stumbles on great creative talent, we find it pretty hard to resist. This season our creative studio swelled with the addition of two new graphic designers, Zoey Liu and Filippo Di Trapani. Here’s a little background on why their talents were so hard to ignore.

Zoey Liu
Originally from Beijing, Zoey holds a background in fine arts, which inspired her to pursue a career in graphic design. After moving to Canada, she attended the three-year Algonquin College Graphic Design program, where she achieved honour status and several MAD Awards for her exceptional work. Having studied both traditional and new media design in school, Zoey is particularly interested in designing for the web. She comes highly recommended from her placement at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Q&A with Zoey:
What drives you crazy about bad advertising?
Awful typography.

What movie have you seen a million times, and could watch again right now?
I’m a big fan of cartoon movies. I’ve seen Kung Fu Panda five times and am willing to watch it again.

Name a book that has taught you something you will always remember.
‘Who Moved My Cheese’ by Spencer Johnson.

Filippo Di Trapani
Filippo was raised in South Africa and moved to Canada in 1998. Having sprouted an interest in art and design at an early age (thanks to a penchant for comic books), Filippo graduated from Algonquin College in both the Graphic Design and Interactive Media Design programs. His experience in the field grew transcontinentally, with a year spent in Italy working at an interactive multimedia agency, while freelancing for clients in Canada. After returning here, he worked as a Graphic Designer for iBrand and the Canadian Wildlife Federation, after which he expanded his experience as a User Interface and Interaction Designer and Applications Developer for Real Decoy.

Q&A with Filippo:
Name a book that has taught you something you will always remember.
‘Long Walk to Freedom’ by Nelson Mandela.

What career might you have, if you weren’t in marketing?
I might have taken university courses in Industrial Design, Architecture or Computer Science.

Whose advice are you most apt to take?
My wife’s.

BSL Helps QNX Recruit Ottawa’s Hottest Talent

Responsible for developing the world’s leading real-time operating system technologies, QNX Software Systems harvests the most talented technical and business teams in the embedded software industry. Those who are lucky (and skilled) enough to join the QNX team are awarded a career that has them pushing the boundaries of innovation, and developing solutions that truly make a difference in the world, all over the world. QNX approached BSL to design and develop a recruitment campaign that would:

• generate buzz around the exciting possibilities of a career at QNX.
• acquire 200 high-quality software developers over a six-month period.

Our approach to the campaign theme was to acknowledge the ol’ “been there/done that” many developers are faced with when looking for a new job. Software development positions can be dry and uninspiring – but a job at QNX offers more. It offers excitement and impact. Nowhere else in Ottawa is a developer able to work on systems for brands like Blackberry, Corvette or NASA.

Campaign elements included print (Ottawa Citizen, Metro, OBJ, 24Hours) and outdoor media (king bus boards and vinyl headliners) as well as on-campus advertising (backlit signs, large banners and floor decals at Algonquin College, Carleton University and University of Ottawa). Elements also included larger-than-life video projections displayed on walls in high traffic areas in the Byward Market during Winterlude 2011. These projections were featured in May at FITC, a Design and Technology Conference held in Toronto.

The number of qualified applicants has tripled since campaign launch, which also translates to a three-fold increase in the number of subsequent interviews and hires. During the campaign’s peak advertising spurt, visits to the QNX Careers page doubled – averaging approximately 2500 to 3000 visits per week, with one week reaching 3500 visits.

Lightbox

Print ad

Transit Ad