HQ recently had the opportunity to leverage our digital marketing and brand design strengths to pitch and ultimately win the agency of record assignment for the Cincinnati based, Buffalo Wings and Rings restaurant chain. What’s even better is the fact that we will continue to leverage our passion for all things food to help build this nation-wide, 54 restaurant business (and who doesn’t like wings?).
For 2010, our efforts will be focused on developing an integrated campaign utilizing social media, loyalty, customer advocacy as well as both traditional and non-traditional media launching later this summer. Our recent return from the Buffalo Wings & Rings annual franchisee meeting in New Orleans, LA gave us a great chance to hear directly from the dedicated front line teams of owners throughout the US.
“Buffalo Wings & Rings is a different kind of restaurant brand centered on catching up and connecting,” says Roger David, CEO of BWR. “Families and friends choose us because of the unique BWR experience. We want our marketing to reflect and build on that experience and sense of engagement. As a leader in experiential marketing, consumer connection and new media technologies, HyperQuake is well positioned to help us.”
Thanks Roger and the entire Buffalo Wings & Rings team. We look forward to helping build your business and our own knowledge of your 45 wing sauce/heat combos in the future.
HQ wanted to know: can physics be simple and fun? OhmartVEGA, a manufacturing company specializing in sophisticated measuring devices, came to HQ requiring a simplified tool to easily and accurately configure their products. A manual and time-intensive quoting process (requiring advanced mathematics and hand calculations) was preventing their global sales and engineering teams from quickly and accurately turning around customized quotes for their clients.
To alleviate this issue, HyperQuake developed a fully customized application for OhmartVEGA called ProSize. HQ designed the user interface for ProSize with a flexible graphics library and a real-time drag-and-drop drawing module. The application was created entirely in Adobe Air, leveraging Flex as the development framework to produce a user-friendly, portable desktop application. The project also showcases our in-house familiarity of advanced trigonometry and geometry to deliver accurate field calculations.
HQ successfully transformed what was once a complex process into a user-friendly, globally-distributed application for the OhmartVEGA sales force. ProSize delivers an endless array of customized product configurations that can be shared with the Engineering teams as well as with customers. A clean, easy-to-understand report, along with flexible project files, can be outputted from the program and shared among the various stakeholders throughout the process, saving OhmartVEGA time and money.
…and the internet killed pretty much everything else.
A recent study conducted by the Chief Marketing Officer Council found that 64% of consumers find that promotional offers account for the bulk of the email and direct mail they receive and that only 41% consider them must-read brand communications. Of the opt-outs, 46% cite relevancy as the primary reason they no longer wish to receive that brand’s messaging. With inbox growth expected to double or triple within the next five years, how can you stay ahead of the curve (or at a minimum catch up)?
The first and last rule of email marketing: Stay Relevant
What do you know about your database? If the answer is “not much” then you have some work to do. Email marketing has evolved to a place where you no longer need to position your brand and message to the lowest common denominator. There’s no longer a need to simply say everything to everyone (and there hasn’t been for a while now) when you can say something to someone. Technology has enabled us to deliver extremely relevant information based on behavioral, demographic and psychographic information. And, most importantly, consumer choice.
Instead of inundating inboxes with branded “stuff” develop your online relationships and truly engage your consumers with meaningful, beneficial and segmented content. Imagine what happens when you take your email marketing to the next level. Increases in open rates and clicks, decreases in opt-outs and spam… what more could you ask for? The added value of this approach not only deepens the relationships you have with your regular users, but has the potential to re-energize and engage your less active users.
PowerPoint at its finest
So where’s the ROI? With the right acquisition and retention programs you build scale. With scale and proper motivation your database is no longer a faceless group of people referred to only in opens and clicks, rather, a powerful resource to leverage at a moment’s notice.
“Type has always been something static. In considering type we speak, for example, in terms of bold, thin, grotesque, classical, roman, italic: terms that all describe a defined variant of the font family. Thus we only ever see individual fixed points in what is actually an infinitely wide space of possibilities. With digitalisation, however, typeface has left its manifest image – cast in lead – behind, and with it all the associated limitations. Computer-based applications, the Internet and new, fluid advertising media allow us to go beyond the existing, static view of typography.” – from LAIKA website
Check out the technology that Topps is using to have baseball cards come alive with the use of your computer’s webcam. Topps 3D Live cards are included in packs of Topps Series 1 baseball cards released last month. You hold them in front of your webcam and special software on topps.com makes the card come alive, creating a Star Wars-like 3-D image appear on screen that you can interact with.
