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.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Ann Oliver, Account Director

What’s for dinner?

I’ve been asked this question nearly every day for the last ten years or so (prior to that, dinner was complimentery appetizers at happy hour). It’s a challenge to constantly come up with tasty, easy, and economical recipe ideas. Lucky for me I discovered AllRecipes.com about eight years ago and it’s been one of my favorite go-to sites ever since.

Before the buzz words User Generated Content, Multi-media and Online Community became ubiquitous, AllRecipes.com was organizing visitors’ favorite recipes and the community was rating and reviewing them.  Home cooks upload pictures of their delicious creations, users share ideas on how to make it better or offer compliments on the tasty results.

I was really impressed when a co-worker who knows that I am a fan of the site, mentioned a new iPhone app, Dinner Spinner, available free from the site. I do not have an iPhone or iTouch, I use the mobile version of AllRecipes when I’m remote.  But after checking out Dinner Spinner, I’m thinking I may need to make a smart-phone upgrade.  I won’t be the only one. eMarketer predicts 53% of the world’s population will have a mobile phone by 2014 - many of them will likely be smart phones capable of storing applications for everything you can imagine. Like recipes. 

Dinner Spinner, for the iPhone or iPod Touch, allows you to pick out what kind of dish you want, how much time you have and the main ingredient. What’s the “spinner” part of the Dinner Spinner app? You can randomize one of the search criteria or shake your iPhone to spin for ideas–how cool is that?

All Recipes 2008 Year End Report highlights the huge rise in home cooking. It makes sense that eating at home is a trend consistent with a down economy. Maybe a next gen feature of Dinner Spinner could be a search field for cost per serving?

Kudos to Allrecipes.com for providing on-the-go tools that help get dinner on the table and for giving me plenty of food for thought.