With more than 60,000 entries annually, the national ADDY® Awards are the world’s largest and arguably toughest advertising competition. The ADDY® Awards represent the true spirit of creative excellence by recognizing all forms of advertising from media of all types, creative by all sizes and entrants of all levels from around the world. The American Advertising Federation conducts the ADDY® Awards through its 200 member advertising clubs and 15 districts. It is the only creative awards program administered by the advertising industry, for the industry.

This year’s local competition produced 446 entries from Baton Rouge professionals and LSU students. Judging was held January 16, 2010 at Lamar Advertising. Renee Miller, President/Creative Director of The Miller Group in Los Angles, Ca.; Jim Dudley, Broadcast, Copywriter, Creative Director of Dudley Creative in Roanoke, Va.; and Jimmy Ball, Art Director/Designer, Photographer, Interactive of Jimmy Ball Design in Dallas, Texas, served as judges for the competition.

Gatorworks brought home a Silver ADDY award for their client project, Santa’s Online Wishlist. Santa’s Online Wishlist is an interactive website where children can dress a snowman, have fun in Santa’s Toy Factory, view Santa’s Mailroom, and best of all send emails to Santa Claus. The website took approximately 6 months to hand-draw, custom illustrate, and then custom animate using Adobe Flash software. David Link, Creative Director and lead designer/developer on the project, said, “It’s really nice to be recognized for our hard work, especially in a community as talented as AAF.”

At the red carpet ceremony, 41 gold ADDY®s, 50 silver ADDY®s, three Special Judge’s Awards, a Mosaic Award, Best of Show and Best of Category awards were presented. Advertising students were also recognized with 17 gold ADDY®s, 19 silver ADDY®s, a Best of Show and Special Judges’ Awards. ADDY® 2010* also recognized professional excellence on the business side of the advertising industry with its Pinnacle Awards.

Mallery Mele leads the king cake cooking class

After the shop tour it was time to make our homemade king cakes. Now, for those of you who don’t know, Mele Printing bakes thousands of cookies each month for their clients. Many of their clients plan to receive their printing order on a Monday or a Wednesday so they’ll be sure to also receive a nice batch of fresh cookies. Anyway, each of us was given a log of dough with cinnamon rolled in the middle. We worked our dough in the form of a circle and threw it in the oven.

Once we took the cakes out of the oven, we dug out a few holes with our fingers on the bottom of the cakes to create a canal to insert fillings. I put strawberry and cream cheese in mine. Then, we flipped the cakes over and drenched them in hot icing and topped them with sugar. It was a masterpiece!

The event was an innovative way for Mele’s clients to learn more about their company all the while celebrating the rich history and culture of Southern Louisiana. We’re proud that Mele Printing is one of our vendors, and we look forward to fostering a long-term relationship with them!

Brian Rodriguez bakes his first Mardi Gras King Cake

Check out a small sampling of some of the websites we’ve designed, developed, and maintained throughout the last year.

Giraphic Apparel: http://www.giraphicapparel.com

Giraphic Prints: http://giraphicprints.com/

Giraphic Blog: http://thinkgiraphic.com/

Hoist & Crane Service Group: http://www.hoistcrane.com/

LA Office of Juvenile Justice:  http://www.ojj.la.gov

LA Dept. of Veterans Affairs: http://www.vetaffairs.la.gov/

Louisiana Finance Assoc: http://www.louisianafinanceassociation.com/

Metropolitan Gastroenterology Assoc: http://www.metrogi.com/

Republican Party of LA: www.lagop.com

Rotolo’s Restaurant: http://www.rotolos.com/

Santa’s Online Wishlist: http://www.santasonlinewishlist.net

Southern Republican Leadership Conference: http://www.srlc2010.com

Stein Engineers: http://www.steinengineers.com

Surgir Real Estate Development: http://www.surgirllc.com/

The Tradewind Report: http://www.tradewindreporting.com

Tiger Bookmarket: http://www.tigerbookmarket.com/

VasoCare Healthcare: http://www.calmrestlesslegs.net/

VoxBox: http://www.yourvoxbox.com

Zymeaux Mobile Marketing: http://www.zymeaux.com

Tickets: 225.216.0660, theparktheatre.com
$10 – AAF-BR and SME-GBR members
$25 – General Public

The social media revolution has changed the way we live our lives and conduct our business. Learn social media techniques that will improve your sales from a master marketer.

Gary Vaynerchuk has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local retail wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. In so doing, he learned that the Internet offers up potential via these free tools for businesses and individuals alike to develop their own brand. Gary will touch on his core themes for best utilizing these tools, including why listening is more important than speaking, the importance of authenticity in business, and what it means to “scale your caring.” Learn more about Gary at garyvaynerchuk.com, or catch him on Twitter where he has over 840,000 followers!

Join Gary at a Wine and Cheese Reception before the event from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Cost to attend the reception is $250.
Information courtesy of AAFBR.

At the end of my talk, the students played a multimedia presentation that they had put together as a going away gift for Ms. Trammie. The presentation was put together very very well, and I think I was in the presence of some future business owners in the room.

Congratulations, students, on all your hard work. I wish you all the best!

11:30AM
The techies are in the LaunchPad conference room planning out the technical aspect of the project. Matt Tritico is jumping from the concept meetings to the technical meetings to try to keep an open dialogue between both groups. Our goal is to have a system by 4PM today. We’re thinking WordPress might be the technology to use.

11:40AM
Tritico just ordered pizza- will be here in an hour! Gatorworks will host the system.

11:55AM
Chris Schultz is heading up the concept meeting, and we’re going through our site architecture. Chris’ wife just walked in to join us! Here’s the temporary link for testing our system: http://www.gatortesting.net/schooldistrict/

12:10PM
The proposed domain name is nolaschoolvolunteers.org

12:25PM
The email address info@nolaschoolvolunteers.org has been set up. Our concept meeting will be meeting with the technical guys after lunch. Lunch should be here within the next 15-20 minutes I think. We’re going to purchase a WordPress theme to use.

12:40PM
We’re breaking for lunch right now. We’ll be back online in a bit!

1:00PM
We’re back at it- both the concept group and technical group is now coming together to discuss our ideas. We have 3 hours to code the system!

1:20PM
Chris Schultz just finished briefing the room on what our concept meeting discussed. Now Stanford Rosenthal is briefing the room on what the techies discussed in their meeting. I think the site architecture is pretty much finalized. We’re discussing specific WordPress plugins to use, etc.

Our goal is to thank the past and current volunteers of the NOLA public schools, report the latest happenings of volunteer projects in the schools, and help mobilize new volunteers for the NOLA public school system.

1:30PM
We’re getting ready to break out into teams again. We’re going to have different teams assigned to developing the various WP plugins we’ll need to achieve our goals. We’ll have copy writers working on gathering content. The energy is great in the room…people are stepping up and taking ownership of various pieces of the project.

2:10PM
The theme has been selected, and we’re getting ready to install on the server now. Thanks to Marc Juneau and Chris Schultz with the help on selecting the theme. We have several dev groups working on the WP plugins, and Andrew Larimer is going to work on modifying the design.

2:20PM
The theme is now installed and activated at http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org. We’re working on customizing the site according to the site map and architecture we’ve put together.

2:55PM
Things are coming together. We’re going to re-group in about 5 minutes to see what needs to happen during our final hour of development. I’m working on a press release that will communicate what we’ve done for our local community and help encourage technology professionals to join us for our next BarCamp. We are talking about planning a BarCamp in Baton Rouge in the Spring of 2010!

3:40PM
I just finished draft 1 of the press release, and I’m feeling pretty good about what was accomplished today. We have about 20 minutes or so left, and I think we’ll be in pretty good shape. Tung Ly has been documenting everything we’re doing so Troy Peloquin of the Recovery School District will be able to take this system moving forward and be able to update the content on a regular basis.

4:15PM
We have some guys working overtime over here at BarCampNOLA. However, the project is just about finished, and we just need to populate with content now. Check out http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org.

4:30PM
Ok, I’m going to go ahead and call it a day. We did it… we developed a website in ONE day in support of the New Orleans public school system. BarCampNOLA would not have been possible without our sponsors: Voodoo Ventures, LaunchPad, Humid Beings, Gatorworks, and Newstwit.com.

Today was truly inspiring.

Our goal is to raise $4,000 to help drill a well in an Ethiopian village. In an area where people make less than $1 a day, these expensive improvements are hard to come by without our help.

If you have suggestions for venue, entertainment, or any thing else, PLEASE leave a comment or contact myself or David Link. I will update this blog with more information as it comes along. If you are interested in attending/helping out … please let me know. We can’t do this without you.

Stay Tuned!

If you build it, they will come…or so you thought. So you have a new website, but no visitors? What do you do?

Useless.

A friend of mine, Jorge over at Reach Local, likes to use this analogy: “It’s like a gas station in a desert. You can build the best website ever, but if there are no people coming to it, it’s useless.”

Well, here are three tools you can use to increase your web traffic.

1. Offline The first place you want to start marketing your new website is offline. Yes this may seem backwards, but most of your customers are not going to know (or know that they should know) that you have a new website. Shout it from the rooftops. Put your new website address on all of your business cards, letterhead, signs, advertisements, emails, etc. Tell it to everyone you speak to. Send an email to all of you contacts letting them know of your hot new site. Notify all of the organizations you are a member of and try to get them to pass word to all the members.
2. Search Engines Almost 80% of your traffic will probably come from a search engine. There are ways to optimize your traffic. SEO (organic search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) are two of the main ways to go about this. I won’t go into much detail here (for PPC that’s another post and we’ll have more information about organic search engine optimization coming soon as well).
3. Your website! Yes, your very own website can be a huge tool in promoting itself. Make sure you target your site to its audience. If people don’t like the site, then no matter what you do, they won’t go. Put up a blog and post about what people care about. (this also helps search engine traffic) Make sure you make it easy to use and look good.

Gatorworks President Brian Rodriguez and I (both chamber members) attended the function held at Perkins Rowe in Baton Rouge.  It was amazing (albeit, a bit cold).  The After 8 band played while all the restaurants in Perkins Rowe set up booths serving out free food.

Bryan Castillo, Mayor Kip Holden, and Brian Rodriguez

But the real treat was getting to see so many business friends, all in one place.  The opportunity to rub elbows with Baton Rouge’s best businesspeople is always too much to pass up.  A lot of laughing and cheer (and even some business) can be found at the annual event.  If you have never been or are new to the area, I highly recommend joining the Baton Rouge Area Chamber of Commerce.

That being said when I went to this collaboration of designers and artists I was somewhat blown away. They spoke about their processes they went through in order to win the Addy Awards (awards given by the federation for excellence in creative design, marketing and advertising) and it made an impact as to how I view what I do.

One of the speakers (whose name is Greg Milneck) was the winner of an Addy for his work on some local commercials. Now when he spoke about his process it seemed at first that “Oh he’s talking about filmmaking, so this doesn’t really apply to me.” Yet, when I took time to listen and examine what he was saying it all made sense and really fit well into the process of my job.

Pre-production, pre-production, pre-production. Those were the three most important steps in his process. And if you think about it, those should be the 3 most important steps in pretty much any design process. Regardless of whether it’s print design, commercials, or web design, having pre-production as the primary priority in your process is pretty logical. He went on to say that regardless of budget “more time spent on pre-production will allow you to spend less time on the actual production and post-production saving you money in the long run.” That’s why it’s so important. For him, it was to avoid going to a set and having 30 cast and crew not knowing exactly what to do. But for people like me and my coworkers, it’s more about having the site functionality and content laid out in front of you like a blue-print. If it isn’t, the client will make mid-design changes, or even post-approval design changes which cause more time to be spent going back and repeating work.

He had others that he put less emphasis on, but the one that stood out to me as a web designer was “Cooperation between pre- and post-production crew.” Now in terms of web design, this struck a very resonant chord with me. More often than not, I’ve run into an issue in the closing processes of deploying a site because I didn’t inform the designer of the limitations of HTML/CSS. With an increase in collaboration between developer and designer, these hiccups and tiny setbacks that frustrate us all and run minutes/hours off the clock could easily be avoided.

This is why i think even though the speaker was talking about commercial making, the logic and process applies to all walks of life.

My purpose with this post is really just to share with you my experience at the luncheon and how it affected me. If you have any other steps in your design process or workflow that you find is imperative I would love to hear about it. Leave a comment or email me directly.