Novocent Wins Three More Awards

Published by Al on Tagged News

trophies.jpgThe Communicator Awards honors creative excellence for communication professionals. Judged and overseen by the International Academy of the Visual Arts (IAVA), the Communicator Awards is an annual competition honoring the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations and identity work for print, video, interactive and audio. Their “Award of Distinction” is presented for projects that exceed industry standards in quality and achievement.

Entries are judged to evaluate distinction in creative work. In determining winners, entries are judged on their merits against a standard of excellence based on the 14-year history of The Communicator Awards, considering the category entered. IAVA members include executives from organizations such as Brandweek, Coach, Disney, Estee Lauder, HBO, MTV, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Wired, and Yahoo!. Winning entries are selected by the IAVA.

So anyway, we won three Awards of Distinction in the 2008 awards competition.

1) In the “Business/Trade Publication Ad” category we received an Award of Distinction for our “One Group, Many Solutions” ad for Degremont Technologies.

2) In the “Auction” category we received an Award of Distinction for our design of the Robert Edward Auctions website.

3) In the “Self-Promotion” category, we received an Award of Distinction for Novocent Partners website.

As a special reward for their outstanding work, we are going to unlock our designers’ cages for a whole hour today, so they can walk around outside (with supervision).

2 Comments » Read more May 29th, 2008



Comment spam is making my meatball.

Published by Al on Tagged General Yammering

That’s all.

2 Comments » Read more April 25th, 2008



Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Motorhead.

Published by Al on Tagged Events, General Yammering

I’m in Chicago this week for the first annual PCCE show, where I delivered a seminar on branding and marketing in the sports memorabilia business.

I spoke after noted sales trainer Jeffrey Gitomer. It was a pleasure to chat with Jeffrey; he’s a generous guy and a Jersey boy to boot. He’s got lots of great insight into the sales process and had a host of interesting and entertaining comments. In the rock and roll business, the headline act usually goes on last, but in this case The Beatles opened the show and the warmup act (me) went on last. He was a tough act to follow, to say the least.

As for the presentation itself, I focused mainly on the same concepts that we constantly preach at Novocent - that the brand consists of the entire customer experience, and that businesspeople need to do everything in their power to ensure that every single customer touch point is managed with customer loyalty and long-term profits in mind.

This is especially true with small business - a passion of mine and a good portion of the attendees today. In a small business environment, companies need to work extra hard to ensure that marketing remains a mission-critical business process, with adequate planning and intelligent spending constantly at the forefront. Small business owners are busy - it’s very easy to spend the entire workday focusing on the day-to-day, operational components of keeping the lights on and orders going out the door, and completely forget about marketing. The problem with this is that without processes designed to gain new customers and build relationships with existing ones, good customers go elsewhere.

In talking with some of the attendees afterward, the following seemed to be fairly universal:

1) Marketing is necessary
2) I never have enough time to do it

The problem with this is that, if business owners don’t make time, someone else will - and the risk is that business owners will lose the most valuable asset they have: their customers, and the relationships they could have with them.

The one point I felt was most important to make was this:

When a customer makes a purchase, the revenue pays the business owner’s rent. When customers make repeat purchases, the revenue pays the business owner’s retirement.

Comment now » Read more April 17th, 2008



Tastes Great, Less Filling - 1889 style

Published by Al on Tagged General Yammering, Novocent Projects

The Robert Edward Auctions sale has begun.

That’s the big catalog job that we finished up a couple of weeks ago. 724 pages of historically significant sports memorabilia, released to the printer with a day to spare. The auction opened yesterday.

And yes, we placed a bid on the T206 Honus Wagner card. Unfortunately, bidding on that particular item is already up to $140,000, so I’m thinking the final price will fall just outside our budget.

We did think the Cap Anson/Buck Ewing beer poster was pretty cool, however, and a relative bargain at its current $90,000 price. This is, of course, the country’s first example of the coupling of its two most important institutions - baseball and beer - and also the first example of a professional athlete being paid for making a commercial endorsement.

That’s right, it’s the first beer ad featuring pro athletes.

We’ve come so far in such a short time.

Comment now » Read more April 4th, 2008



Vocabulary Lesson #2

Published by Al on Tagged General Yammering

Making my meatball - mak-ing-my-meet-ball, slang, response from Jessica to the odd expression “eating my lunch.” As in “This project is really eating my lunch.”

Jessica’s feeling is that the expression “eating my lunch” is nonsensical, and that it would make just as much sense to say “This project is really making my meatball.”

So, from now on, let’s all say “making my meatball.”

1 Comment » Read more March 20th, 2008



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