By Ann Oliver, Account Director

Finding reasons to celebrate

We recently launched a new campaign for Balloon Time Helium Balloon Kits. We started the project by laying out our communication objectives, and then talked about strategies that will help us reach these goals. Sounds pretty traditional so far, right?  But connecting with moms and reaching moms during the party decoration purchasing cycle has led us to develop some very fun social media applications to integrate with our traditional programs.

Why this investment in social media now?

Is 2009 the year to risk our limited marketing funds and test the waters of social media? Our Balloon Time client has enjoyed tremendous success with their online marketing program since its inception just four short years ago. Of course over that time we’ve evolved the program and changed some of the media partners and tactics we started with. But our objective has remained consistent - connect with influencer moms. The research we’ve seen points to social media as a key connection point.

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By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

Hospitals often seem like commodities, don’t they? With the exception of a couple well-known names, they’re pretty similar - they do surgery, deliver babies, most have an emergency department. So how do you differentiate one from another? Especially when most people really don’t want to have a relationship with your brand?That’s where we come in. As a communications company, we love to identify what makes our clients’ brands unique. Then we start to tell that story and engage customers in a dialogue. In today’s Web 2.0 world, it takes a blend of traditional and non-traditional strategies to produce great results.

This was the case with Riverside Methodist Hospital and the Innovation Campaign. The campaign features three real-life people who’ve benefited from a relationship with the hospital and its physicians. From these stories, we were able to build an attention-getting campaign that not only increased brand awareness for our client, but allowed us to stretch our creative legs in this niche, highly competitive market space.

The results went well beyond a move of the brand-awareness needle and rewarded us with a few feathers in our healthcare marketing cap. From thousands of award entries from across the country, the Innovation Campaign was recognized as the cream of the crop from renowned publications such as Marketing Healthcare Today and Healthcare Marketing Report.

We’re proud of getting awards like these, but even more proud of the results we help get for our clients.

By Kathleen Ramirez, Fahlgren EVP and Corporate Media Director

This post is part two in a series written by Emilie DeLong, Chrystie Reep and Bobbie Termeer. If you missed part one, it makes sense to start there.

Now the big upfront question is not only how much, but when?

The start of the TV upfront market may be as soon as this week or as delayed as post-July 4 or longer.  What’s the hold up?  Well, both broadcast and cable networks are still in the midst of mapping out their pricing indices.  Network budgets are likely to see declines in spending anywhere from 5%-10%, if not more. Cable will most likely realize a slightly smaller adjustment.

As we mentioned in part one of this two part series, we spent three days in Detroit watching presentations and wondering what key points the TV networks were going to try and make advertisers and buyers “feel good” about spending money again.

What was consistent across all presentations was that the networks seem to recognize the challenges ahead of them.  What they still have to work on explaining is how they are going to continue to adjust their sales strategy and philosophy.  Three themes that seem to surface in all of the presentations are as follows:

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By Jenny Fuerst, Director, Corporate Communications

For those who like lists.

In case you missed it, you might want to check out the April 13 issue of ADWEEK and April 27 issue of PRWeek, both include their annual agency rankings. Fahlgren Advertising moved up the ranks from 99 to 91, while Fahlgren Mortine Public Relations jumped 10 spots from 80 to 70. Both lists are based on revenue.

By Kathleen Ramirez, Fahlgren EVP and Corporate Media Director

This post is part one in a two part series written by Emilie DeLong, Chrystie Reep and Bobbie Termeer

Programming with Promise

One of the many benefits of living in Columbus, Ohio and working with some of the leading brands in the Automotive Aftermarket is that we get to partner with the Detroit advertising community.  We attended the network TV upfront presentations to get a taste of what is coming in the world of primetime TV in the upcoming year.  Our goal was to not only to get a sneak peek of programming, but also to glean insights as to how the networks are adjusting to the changing economic environment, evolving use of technology and ultimately the consumer’s wants and needs.

During our three-day visit to Motor City, we attended the FOX, ABC, CBS and Turner presentations.   There were lots of things that we expected:

• Food, food and more food
• The words “in these tough times” mentioned often
• Trafffic and construction on 75
• Poorly delivered jokes
• Recognition that it is all about ROI

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