Thanks to my brother Stu for the video tip off.

Thanks Kelley for the video tip

I am pleased to announce our latest launch with the Washington Post, a social video project called OnBeing.

www.washingtonpost.com/onbeing Read the rest of this entry →

Video and Photos from Finnish Embassy Event: Making a Successful Mobile Application
Panelists include Jason Siegel (Qorvis), Head of Nokia Ovia Mobile Marketing, Isaac (Point About) Ken Burge (President - iFart)

Look close at the image above.  Youll notice two different advertisers.  Trusted ID and VerticalResponse.  One is an ID Theft Company while another is an email marketing company.  Howver, they have the exact same logo and are buying ad space on the same site at the same time.  I wasnt planning on writing about this, this morning, but this slapped me in the face as a major branding problem and one that someone should recognize and hopefully notify these companies about.   Brands are supposed to be unique to the industry and brand essence or brand attributes that the company stands for.   Here though, I feel like we have a game of CTRL C + Ctrl V

In 1967 — when I completed my first photography assignment, digital photography was the stuff of science fiction. In 1968, I recall watching the landmark film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in which a photographer is summoned to photograph a group of military men.  The photographer walks out, aims something that looks like a gun at the group, pulls the trigger, and takes a picture – no lighting setup, no muss, no fuss.  I recall thinking that “some day photography will be that easy.”  (All the more interesting in that it’s director, Stanley Kubrick, was himself a former still photographer.)

Now, 42 years (and nearly 200 awards) later, with a rich and rewarding career shooting advertising for lots of Fortune 50’s, I have to look back and marvel:  what was science fiction in ’67, is now history: yesterday’s future arrived about ten years ago. Read the rest of this entry →

On ABC News with Charles Gibson discussing Navigating Washington (New York Times App of the Week and 2009 Webby Award winner)

I am pleased to announce that one of my latest projects has won a 2009 Webby Award for best iPhone Application for the List / Directory Category.  This application also won New York Times application of the Week.    This work was also featured on ABC News with Charles Gibson.  Watch the video clip here
Read the rest of this entry →

AdAge’s recent article entitled “4A’s Rebrands, Dives Into Digital” is a clear indicator that Qorvis‘ no silo mantra is way ahead of the industry and they now have a 9 year jump start on the competition.  My favorite quote is:
Silo-less conference
A new structure to its major conferences might help. Ms. Hill told Ad Age, “Engaging the entire marketing-communications community, rather than each discipline in isolation, is a natural and important evolution of where the business is today — and where it’s headed.”

Emerging Media - Mobile and Search Media by Jason Siegel

I gave this presentation today for the organization called Women In Government Relations

Thanks for the share Ira!

Bart Cleveland has written a great article that completely justifies Qorvis’ business model and why we are growing leaps and bounds past the competition.  When your a one stop shop every one is your competition - from interactive niche studios to bloated integrated firms owned by holding companies like WPP and Publicis.   The interactive shops cant deliver the multichannel creative the worlds brands demand, and the holding companies have so much overhead and silos established that they are constantly tripping over their feet in a barely profitable manner as they try to evolve and quickly turn the cruiseship around.   But when you try to turn a big bloated ship that fast what normally happens is - TIP OVER.   In the past, meeting a client’s every need was accomplished by its ad agency contracting certain tasks to specialists. Today, fragmented media and the personal-communication revolution (how media is consumed today) create a need for clients to employ agencies that can act as, for lack of a better term, a one-stop shop. Agencies are required to do more for less with a greater expectation to meet projected goals. The pressure to deliver has created a situation of both opportunity and danger. The opportunity to execute in-house offers more control over the brand elements and more revenue to the agency. The danger is incompetence. Read the rest of this entry →

This is a Guest Post by Doug Poretz, co-founder and partner of Qorvis Communications, and a colleague of mine. Doug has 40 years of experience in the communications business; he can say “been there/done that” about virtually every communications challenge. Since January 1, 2009, Doug has devoted the major portion of his day to being involved with new and social media, writing his own blog , and reaching out to a wide variety of people he respects both inside and outside the communications business. I asked him to try and very briefly summarize his major conclusions from the past three months. Here is what he sent back:

• Ideas exist. Where? How? I can tell you how this laptop exists. I can measure its physical properties. But ideas have no physical properties. So how do they exist?
• Regardless of how you prove the existence of ideas, we accept that they exist. Some ideas exist so strongly (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill”) that they are fundamental to our individual lives and anchor societies around the world. Some ideas become very well know and become married to a product (e.g., “You deserve a break today”). Some ideas become part of a corporate culture (e.g., IBM’s “Think).
• To the degree that a message exists, it can be considered an “organic” message.
• It seems to me, the goal of communications is to develop a message(s) that becomes as organic as possible with the audiences that matter.
• Presentation and frequency will help a message become organic; but message/content trumps both. If the presentation and frequency aren’t very good it will hurt the efforts to make the message exist, but it will not kill a great message; case in point: Susan Boyle. On the other hand, a great presentation and a brilliant media plan cannot overcome a bad message.
• Message/content is king.
• All the new tools that can be used to distribute a message (social media) need to be exploited to make a message become organic. But the current focus and attention to new tools within the communications business is being over-done. Twitter is great. A great Twitter campaign is shallow without great message/content. Businesses need to make certain they have their focus on the right goals and priorities.
• The chances of making a message organic increase in direct relation to how much the target is “surrounded” with the message through many distribution channels, some formal (an ad, for example) and some informal (through an employer’s remuneration policy, for example).
• It is therefore necessary to avoid asking the question: “How can we advertise this? Also, avoid similar questions that focus on any single distribution channel, such as “How can we promote this on the web?” The legitimate question – after addressing the core issue of message – is: “How can we get this message to these people with a frequency and presentation so that it achieves these specific goals?” The first two are distribution-centric questions; the third is client-centric. The first two questions are basically commodity in nature; the third is value-add in nature; the first two focus attention on execution; the third focuses attention on strategy.
• But the communications industry is currently organized and defined by distribution channel rather than effectiveness of message. Thus, the industry is based on a fundamental flaw.
• The best – most effective and efficient – way to get a message to “surround” a target and therefore have a greater chance of becoming organic is to use any and all distribution channels, but that is difficult because distribution channels define silos within the industry.
• There may be 50,716 ways to break down silos, but I’ve been in this business for 40 years, have seen many efforts, and have seen only one thing actually break down silos: the communications business needs to kill the tyranny of time. It isn’t time that is being sold; it is value. No client cares how busy you are or aren’t – they care about the value you provide. The time sheet has to be blown-up. Not revised. Blown-up.
• I think the communications revolution is much broader than most people envision. What was once known as “journalism” is dying, being replaced by a “neo-journalism” that lacks the professional standards and ethics of what used to be the very vital Fourth Estate. The consequences to society can be enormous, especially in a period of political, cultural, social and economic upheaval as we are currently experiencing.
• The communications revolution will result in a restructuring of the industry; Communications firms will increasingly become content strategists and content providers (which rationalizes the expense we just incurred to build our own TV studio inside our offices).
• The next big fight will be over grabbing space for apps on smart phone screens. Those enterprises that get on the smart phone desktop sooner with high value content will be winners for a very long time.

Having lived so close to internet innovation and watched brand hypergrowth on the web since it all started in the mid 90s…it seems a few things are happening and eventually should happen. 

First, every year the world like a hurd explores, engages, and hypes a brand.  Valuations fly off the charts and the public eventually owns these brands.   First it was AOL, then Yahoo, then Google, then Facebook, and now Twitter.  Everyone is Tweeting, even Oprah.  I do believe if they expand correct they will quickly catch up to facebook in usage.  When it becomes unbelievably obvious that Twitter is the next facebook, Google should consider an aquisition fast for the following reasons. 

1.  Google needs a social branding strategy.  Google is search, its a darn verb…YouTube, it owns web video (although hulu is interesting)…and why not own Microblogging with Twitter.   Microblogging really is lifecasting, and as innovation keeps happening in interface technology, lifecasting can be very interesting.   when lifecasting truly happens, data storage is off the charts…plus data to be indexxed ….how google would have to crawl  it would be very very processor intensive.   Owning the database, and indexxing an in server database would be much cheaper and effective to own that huge database.

So besides needing a social brand like Twitter, the cost to index and present twitter in their search results is much cheaper by being a Google Company.

Speed of innovation, features, reliability, and high tech scaling are all key to these companies future and eventual success.   Dont be a walled garden like AOL was and dont ever get comfortable in the lead.   And the exciting thing is another Twitter will be born any day now and we dont even know it yet.  Let me know what you think will happen between Twitter and potential aquiriers….who do you think? 

google? facebook? yahoo? amazon? microsoft? time warner? fox? ebay? skype?

Foldable screens will enable such a diverse set of innovative products when commercialed and go mainstream.  Even digital communications will become more physical again like the days when print collateral was all the rage Coree77 writes about a great concept.  Kyocera’s EOS folding concept phone incorporates a flexible OLED screen, changing its form factor from a clamshell into something more closely resembling a wallet or clutch-purse. Explains Kyocera industrial designer Susan McKinney:

The concept Eos envisions a future where we have a more humanistic relationship with our phones. Appealing to our haptic senses, a soft, semi-rigid polymer skin surrounds a flexible OLED display. The metaphor of a “living” skin was used for its notions of protection and constant evolution, providing a heightened user experience.Shape memory allows keys to morph up from its surface when needed and fade away when not in use. The flexibility of the screen allows for greater adaptability of form and interaction – it maintains a compact shape (the size of a small wallet) for simple phone calls, and unfolds to reveal a large widescreen display. The device feeds off of our physical interaction with it, translating kinetic energy into an electric charge via an array of nano-scale piezoelectric generators. The more we interact with Eos, the more energy it creates - without using batteries. Read the rest of this entry →

Dominos has an online reputation management problem, they need a firm like Qorvis fast, before the world thinks boogers are the secret ingredient of their products.  Watch the video above and the article below to learn more. Read the rest of this entry →

Pic courtesy Getty - buy here

Studies are showing Facebook isnt good for college students grades. Well it is a media and the more media you consume vs study then your obviously not going to do as well. Same would go if listening to the radio was blazing popular like Facebook is currently…..for now. What I think Facebook needs to do is really think about their roots and make sure those are so locked in. When parents first “allow” their kids to be on a social network, Facebook wants parents to think Facebook. Read the rest of this entry →

Below is a link to a really nice site for a new game coming out from UbiSoft. What’s really innovative is if you have a camera hooked up you can interact with the augmented reality feature in the site, a cool and functional feature since the game’s theme is built around a virtual world. Have a look see here.  Thanks to RW McQuarters for his tip for this post.