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Archive for October, 2011

Agencies Tap Into Universities for Insight

By ⋅ October 12, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

It’s nothing new for brands and their agencies to try and find innovative ways to tap into specific consumer audience to gain learnings. Many agencies are taking a more proactive approach to ensuring that these opportunities are available for their clients.

Empower (my employer) has been very involved with two unique undergraduate programs, the first being MOJO AD, a student communications agency at the Missouri School of Journalism. Our founder, Mary Beth Price is a Missouri graduate. The second is a new variation on the MOJO program at Northwest Missouri State University. You might ask why two schools in Missouri for an agency that is headquartered in Cincinnati? Our founder, Mary Beth Price and her husband Bill attended Missouri and Northwest Missouri State.

While both of these programs are important to our clients, tapping into the undergraduate demographic is a segment that every brand desires to crack. More importantly for agengies like ours, we need a solid stream of new entry level associates that we can bring on as our clients’ business (and ours) grows and evolves.

Knacktive, the new program at Northwest Missouri State was launched earlier this year. It was great to be part of the client team here working with our client LasikPlus vision centers as their innagural client. Our team and our client worked with student groups at Northwest via Skype and phone, then we flew out to see their pitches and get to know them and ultimately understand how college students percieve the LasikPlus brand.

We were all blown away with the amount of effort and the campaigns that were presented to reach the demographic, the wining team focused on a niche audience of military, fire fighters and safety personel (all professions that work for the better good of everyone). The campaign Eyes Save Lives was such a impactful idea that our client chose to run the campaign for special events such as the World Police and Fire Games in New York City and focused on specific digital properties to test this message.

If you are a brand or an agency looking to get a better understanding of college students would tackle a communication challenge to their demographic and help students learn in the process, I would highly recommend both of these programs.

Below is a video that Knactive put together talking about the inagural program at Northwest Missouri State.

Z Generation = Jobs Generation

By ⋅ October 7, 2011 ⋅ 2 comments

Steve Jobs

After a full day to soak in what we all new was going to happen since Steve Job’s stepped down as CEO of Apple, it got me thinking about what his legacy will be in the years to come. It is easy for reporters to talk about how Steve impacted them or the generations leading up to the millennials but from my perspective, Steve Job’s most impressive legacy will not what he did with the Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad but rather how these innovates in the aggregate have shaped the lives and underlying culture of the Z Generation (people born in the mid 1990s through early 2000s).

As a Millennial (Y generation) Apple not only shaped how I create, discover music and information but it can’t be the same for the Z generation, from day 1 they had technology that I didn’t have until age 15, those are precious years. There is no other company or visionary leader that I can think of that has impacted so many generations of people on this planet.

I can’t even imagine what we will see from Gen Z, let’s hope they step up to the plate and start where Steve left off, on that note – shouldn’t we all step up to the plate?

To quote Steve, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Let’s hope we can continue to Think Different.

RIP Steve.

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