What Is Mindfulness?

The word itself is straightforward. Mindfulness suggests that the mind is full with what is happening around us, inside our bodies or with the task at hand. Yet finding that intensely present and aware mind is hardly an easy task. It seems that when we are doing one thing, our mind is already on to the next project.
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June 1 marks the 119th anniversary of Mark Twain’s well-known quote: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

It seems an appropriate time then to report that any rumor suggesting that marketing is dead (and branding is meaningless) is also an exaggeration. Last month, SSRS, a full-service market and survey research firm (www.ssrs.com), completed 1,000 interviews with adults ages 18+ across the United States. The SSRS Omnibus Survey uses a dual-frame model (RDD and cell) with 60 percent of the sample cell-phone respondents. Two of the survey questions suggested by ab+c Creative Intelligence were related to consumers’ current opinions of marketing and branding.Read full post...

What are your marketing resolutions for 2016?

The New Year gives us a clean slate and an opportunity to make resolutions to improve our lives. Typical goals and resolutions include losing weight, exercising more, improving finances, getting a new job or procrastinating less. Which, I’m sure we’ll all fully accomplish this year.

Yeah, right.

According to recent research published in the University of Scranton Journal of Clinical Psychology, while nearly 45 percent of us make New Year’s resolutions, only 8 percent actually keep them.Read full post...

Mayor Michael Nutter joined the managing directors of ab+c’s Philadelphia office and ab+c’s managing directors to cut the ribbon officially opening ab+c’s new Center City office.

PHILADELPHIA, PA (December 14, 2015)—ab+c Creative Intelligence, one of the region’s oldest full-service marketing communications agencies, recently made a major commitment to expand its footprint in Philadelphia to help build its presence in the Mid-Atlantic marketplace. ab+c officially opened its Center City Philadelphia office at 1429 Walnut Street with a major celebration on December 2 and a ribbon-cutting featuring Mayor Nutter and other city officials.

“Over the past several years, we’ve found our client base growing significantly beyond our home base of Wilmington, and the time was right for us to establish a strong presence in the Philadelphia region,” said John Hawkins, ab+c’s founder and CEO. “We took a full floor in an exciting historic office building downtown in the heart of the City Read full post...

Writing is quickly becoming an important skill for marketers to have.

I’m no writer. Which might become evident as you make your way through this. When I was in college, nobody told me how important writing would be once I landed a marketing job. Maybe they didn’t think it was important because of how fast everything in marketing and advertising changes. But I’ve come to accept my fate as a marketer—I must be a writer. As marketers, we can’t deny it or pretend it isn’t a huge part of our jobs. With marketing and advertising making a shift from traditional to digital, more of our everyday job has become writing. Emails. Blogs. Content. Tweets. Press releases. Proposals. StrategiesRead full post...

Brands don’t happen over night.
image credit: Latimre Appleby

In my career I have built, enhanced and even created numerous brands for multiple organizations in healthcare, higher education, and other industries. And people always ask me, “How long does it take to establish a brand?”

My answer: five years.

In the first phase, you’ll develop your brand. This requires qualitative and quantitative marketplace, stakeholder and competitor research; positioning and brand platform formation; and creative execution, messaging, and brand guideline and internal collateral development. You’ll need careful planning and patience—and about 18 months.Read full post...

“TheSkimm,” a free email newsletter skimming three to five top stories in the world geared toward female millennials, recently announced it would start pairing up with other companies to bring in advertising revenue. It will do this through strategic “partnerships” rather than typical ads. Approaching its third anniversary, theSkimm has grown exponentially in popularity and recently completed a fundraising push bringing in .25 million in capital from backers like RRE Ventures (Buzzfeed) and Chelsea Handler. While its main focus has been growing its readership, now at 1.5 million readers daily, founders Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg decided it was time to make theSkimm profitable.Read full post...

Bad emails can ruin your nurturing strategy!

Earlier this week I received the following email, and because of their confidentiality notice I’m just going to paste the copy:

Subject: Additional Sales Leads

Hi,

Are you currently in need of help in generating leads or appointments for your business? We can help you through our Multichannel Marketing Solutions.

I’d be happy to talk to you and discuss our program. Please let me know the best way for us to connect. Read full post...

Tips for your marketing plan in 2015!

If you’re anything like me, you’ve already plunged headfirst into planning for 2015. But with the marketing industry in a constant state of change, you have to hustle to keep up with the latest ways to reach your customers. What will your most effective marketing efforts look like in the New Year?Read full post...

“These three clients represent a series of firsts for recruitment marketing at ab+c,” says senior strategist Shawn Kessler.

BLOOMSBURG, PA — ab+c Creative Intelligence, a full-service marketing communications agency, has begun recruitment marketing efforts with three new clients — GoHealth Urgent Care, Synchrogenix and University of Colorado Health. GoHealth Urgent Care and Synchrogenix will take advantage of ab+c’s full gamut of recruitment marketing services, including messaging through placements. For University of Colorado Health, the agency’s tasks include an employment branding discovery, messaging development and creation of a recruitment website.Read full post...

Conferences are still a good marketing tactic

Conferences come in all forms and sizes. They can be cheap or expensive, close or far away, worthwhile or totally pointless. As a marketer, should you still attend?Read full post...

Pew Research Center says 59% of U.S. adults have looked online for health information in the past year.

We know you. You’re a hospital or a healthcare system looking to increase your brand awareness or service-line volumes in your noisy city. You’re one of many hospitals patients can choose from when they have an emergency, need a doctor or are looking for preventive programs. And you’ve probably noticed that when patients come in for appointments, they’ve done their research — they are informed.Read full post...

“We haven’t killed anybody yet” or “Most people think we’re pretty good!”

Let’s say that you own a grocery store with several aisles of frozen food. Now let’s say that your freezer’s compressor — which works hard to keep your food frozen — breaks down. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll try to fix the compressor yourself. But more than likely you’ll need to call an electrician — an expert — to do the job and get you back in business. You consider him an expert because you found him by Googling “expert electrician.” And he shows you a license and certificate as proof of his training.Read full post...

PHILADELPHIA, PA — The Lightning in a Bottle Competition is gaining momentum in Philadelphia. The competition is searching the city for businesses that can help Philly grow, and offering a free year of marketing services to the winner. Current entries reflect a wide spectrum of industries. Businesses with a viable product, an innovative way to create new jobs, a service to benefit residents, or similar ideas, can enter at LightningInABottleAward.com.

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Now that we’ve gone over some basics in Part 1, let’s look at how the Agile methodology can work in your agency.

Assemble your team of T-shaped people.

As with any project, your team members are your most important assets. Agile doesn’t call for the smartest, fastest or most specialized team members available. Instead, it works best with T-shaped people. I know what you’re thinking: Great, let’s add another piece of jargon to the mix! An uppercase T has two parts: the horizontal top bar and the vertical stem. The top bar represents a broad range of skills from left to right, and the stem represents the depth of knowledge in a specific skill. T-shaped people — those who specialize in a specific skill but have a broad range of knowledge across multiple disciplines — understand how all of the different skills work together to ensure the project is compatible across all specialties.Read full post...