This morning my co-workers and I attended Seattle Goodwill’s Appreciation Breakfast, which honors volunteers, sponsors, and scholarship recipients. As a proud sponsor of Goodwill we were humbled by the stories of individuals whose lives were changed by the job training and support that Goodwill offers. It truly brings into focus the reason behind everything we do in support of an outstanding organization that for over 80 years has been devoted to our community. To ensure that Goodwill continues to thrive, we throw our creative energy into developing thought-provoking campaigns and guerrilla marketing events on behalf of Goodwill, and this past Memorial Day weekend was no exception!
To bring awareness to the many reasons for shopping at Goodwill, we staged a mock protest at one of the largest events in Seattle – Northwest Folklife Festival! With over 250,000 attendees over four very spirited days, it’s the perfect opportunity to utilize guerrilla marketing at it’s finest… in other words, GoMobile = kid; Folklife = candy store.
We crashed Folklife Festival with protestors dressed entirely in outfits found at actual Seattle Goodwill stores carrying picket signs encouraging attendees to “Free Your Wardrobe!”, “Eliminate Waste, Save a Shirt!” and “Fight to Stop Outfit Dumping!”, etc. We also passed out 10,000 coupons for 30% any item at Goodwill, which alone is quite a feat!
Everyone at Folklife Festival was very receptive to our spirited protest and we were happy to have the opportunity to converse with hundreds of people about their history with Goodwill.
If the name doesn’t give it away enough, GoMobile Advertising is an extremely mobile company, both as a business model and as a team of individuals. Among our group there are avid bikers, boaters, skiers, snowboarders, climbers, rafters, travelers and explorers, and at any given point it seems at least one person is in Mexico. But staying mobile represents a bigger idea in the advertising world, and it’s critical to building a brand. Here’s how we do it:
1. Technology: Although we play hard as a staff, we always stay connected. Since ours is such a visual medium, keeping our department heads equipped with iPhones has been instrumental showing people the types of campaigns we’ve created. We regularly update our devices with our latest photos and videos to flip through with just about anyone we meet. If they didn’t know what experiential mobile marketing was or can’t believe we created a 25ft Chicken & Biscuit Bowl for KFC inside a mobile showcase, they can see for themselves!
2. GPS Tracking: Each of our multimedia advertising vehicles is fitted with a GPS tracking unit that allows our staff, and better yet, our clients to see exactly where their campaign is on the streets at any particular moment. Even better, we take our clients on “Ride-Alongs” where they get to experience first hand the amazing reactions of real people where they live, work and play.
3. Events: The cardinal rule of advertising: “You don’t schmooze, you lose”. We make sure to stay active in both the local advertising community, attending AdClub meetings and events and serving on numerous boards around the city. We also attend national advertising conventions and galas that honor the best in our industry each year. We’ve even been honored with a few national awards ourselves – check it out!
Take it from the experts in mobile: it pays to get up out of your desk and get out where the people are. It drives brand engagement, builds lasting connections, and best of all – works that kink out of your neck from staring at this blog.
Event Marketer magazine’s EX Awards were on Monday night, it’s now Wednesday afternoon and my body is just now returning to homeostasis (which tells you what a great event it was). It was an excellent experience for Chris (President of GoMobile) and I to be able to rub elbows with a lot of our fellow event & experiential marketing industry colleagues and be recognized for the efforts we’ve made in creating a niche in this industry. We were nominated for the Best Vehicle Design category for our mobile marketing campaign with Miller Chill last summer, and I would tell you what happened next, but I made a video blog during the event so you can see it all for yourself.
So yeah, we won the EX Award! We are thrilled, especially because the EX Award is judged completely by event marketing colleagues who know the industry. Special thanks to Chip Berry from Event Marketer magazine for encouraging us to attend, it was well worth our time!
As announced a couple blog posts down, as well as all over our website and the internet community as a whole (we hate secrets), we won a Silver ADDY Award for our Miller Chill campaign at last month’s local competition put on by the AAF. Well, we just got word a couple days ago that at the regional competition (competing against five states in the Pacific Northwest), we won another ADDY…
And this time it’s GOLD!
You should have seen us in the office when we heard. Ryan, our Marketing Director, literally jumped from his chair, arms flailing, and he and I ran into Chris’ office like a couple of 5-year olds (which actually isn’t uncharacteristic of us). In other words, we’re all really excited. From here, we’ll go on to the National competition held in the other Washington (DC) on May 8th and 9th.
The Miller Chill Cuban Lounge campaign was an outstanding display that the team worked painstakingly on, so we kinda feel like proud parents of an honor student right now (look out for our “Our beer campaign can beat up your beer campaign” bumper stickers soon). To check out a case study of the campaign, click here.
GoMobile Advertising was recently asked to answer a set of questions about our event marketing experiences in 2008 by Event Marketing Magazine’s EX Awards, for which we were recently announced as finalists. The EX Awards competition honors the best of the best in event marketing each year, and we were thrilled to be chosen for our Miller Chill campaign in 2008. We wanted to share our video responses with you as a sneak peek before they’re shown at the EX Award Ceremony on April 24th.
As you can see, we keep it pretty lighthearted in the office, but when it comes down to it, we’re obsessed with experiential and event marketing and we live for creating unforgettable brand experiences for consumers. Enjoy!
Question 1: What Inspires You?
Question 2: What Were Your Biggest Challenges in 2008?
As it turns out, all of the blood, sweat and tears (and late nights drinking Miller Chill) paid off! Nearly a year after putting together the multi-market campaign for Miller Chill, we have something to show for it, aside from the millions of impressions and interactive experiences garnered for Miller throughout last spring and summer.
Out of over 400 entries, we were chosen as the silver award winner in the Vehicle Design category for our local Seattle ADDY awards. So, our entries will head to Spokane next week to be judged for regionals.
The awards show was last Friday, and it was a blast. Seattle does some really creative work! We were honored to be there, humbled with our single award amidst some giant agencies taking home armfuls.
But we are also proud to say that we are the only media company (non-agency) with winning work. I guess there aren’t a lot of media companies doing creative work that could compete at an agency level.
Anyway, congrats to all of the agencies that took home awards! You guys do great work; keep making Seattle proud; let’s make it a city to be recognized amidst the international advertising community!
College sports fans across the country are sharpening their pencils in preparation for the always-competitive bracket competition that infiltrates offices and social circles nationwide. Of course, we’re no exception. But aside from the sneaky live game web streams that are sure to pop up around the office during business hours, we’re all addicted to another double ‘M’: Mobile Madness.
March brings a revitalized spirit to the outdoor advertising industry because it’s the first sign that the hibernation and frigidness of the past winter is on its way out. As people begin to emerge from their cozy winterized homes and out onto the streets, mobile advertising follows suit with fresh, innovative campaigns.
With stimulus and tax refund checks in-hand, the public is ready to buy. What they buy depends on what they see. Did we mention mobile billboards have a 97% recall rate? All we’re saying is it’s a good way to make sure they see you.
Give us a call, ask about how we can get you out dominating the streets, helping the economy help you.
Facebook. Flickr. StumbleUpon. Bebo. Tumblr. Digg. Twitter. If these words are foreign to you, beware: you’ve just aged yourself and your company 10 years. Before you throw your hands up in defeat, however, here’s the good news: even though it seems a new funny-sounding social networking site pops up every day, if you master just a few you’re already on-par with some of the most savvy web marketing companies out there.
I can hear you now – “why should I devote my precious time creating fluffy user profiles on Facebook when I could be out selling?” Believe me, no one understood that better than our own Chris Schuler… until recently.
Like most companies, we have Monday morning meetings where we discuss current projects, internal news, and the occasional “wait’ll you hear this!” weekend story. During our last meeting, Chris started off his story by saying, “Jamie, you’ll love who I met this weekend!” Turns out it was Jim Tobin, President of Ignite Social Media – a marketing company that focuses on social networking sites. I did love this, because since day one I’ve fought for using social media to our advantage to expand our reach. Chris has always gone along with it, but like most, never really “got it”. As he continues to tell me about his conversation with Jim and how important social media is, it was like the sky opened up and the sun shone right down on our conference table! Next thing I know he’s ordering Jim’s book (an Amazon best seller) “Social Media is a Cocktail Party” to learn more. Fantastic.
You see, social media, although difficult to grasp initially, can be an easy to use and extremely beneficial to a business. You don’t have to spend hours creating profiles at the hundreds of sites out there, and it probably wouldn’t benefit you anyway because they’d be too time-consuming to continuously update (which is so important). Some of the most successful that we’ve utilized are:
Twitter is my favorite social networking site because it’s absolutely the easiest and has been very successful in terms of creating relationships with other businesses. The concept is simple: you post, or “tweet” 140 character or less updates on what you’re working on, new projects, or anything interesting related to your company. This can include recent press you’ve received, new blog announcements, or just what’s going on in the office. Twitter gives your company personality and voice, and since followers (people or companies that ‘subscribe’ to your updates) know that your updates are guaranteed to be short, they’re more likely to pay attention to what you’ve got to say.
Facebook is the 5th most visited website on the internet (source) and second in social networking only to MySpace. We love Facebook because it has business page formats that stay consistent and clean looking, but are still customizable via applications. We add our YouTube videos, photos of our latest and greatest campaigns, and even have a wall where “fans” (Facebook users who are supporters of your company) can post their thoughts, ideas and comments. This is more time consuming to keep updated than Twitter, but also gives more freedom in providing information to the public.
The possibilities are endless with YouTube, a video sharing website. We use the site as a hub for our campaign recap and promotional videos, but it can be used for video blogging, informational tutorials, or to show off news coverage that your company has received. It’s the third most popular site on the web, so it’s a no-brainer that it can increase visibility.
Of course, there are many other social networking sites that can be beneficial, so explore and decide which fits your demographic best. For a list of the top 50 social networking sites recommended for businesses, click here.
Durability and dependability are terms that have become synonymous with the GoMobile name, but we think it’s about time another word is added to the mix: sustainability. Our green efforts are not something we parade around, but we like our affiliates, potential affiliates & clients to know what we’re up to on the green front.
Since day one, we’ve offered mobile advertising vehicles that run on BioDiesel fuel. If you’re unfamiliar with the difference between BioDiesel and regular gasoline, take a look at this:
A study done by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that BioDiesel reduced net CO2 emissions by 78%. This is in part due to the fact that the raw materials (plants) used to produce BioDiesel help to recycle the CO2 emissions from the finished product. In addition, the exhaust emissions of sulfur oxides and sulfates (major components of acid rain) from BioDiesel are essentially eliminated compared to traditional diesel. Source.
A staggering fact: Americans throw away over 195 million tons of trash per year. When a campaign is over, we store old billboards in our warehouse to recycle for future campaigns instead of tossing them. In addition, we work with the leader in billboard and banner production, BannerGalaxy and their PriorLife program, which recycles campaign billboards into custom tote bags, wallets and messenger bags. We’re always researching new and innovative ways to continue to operate using sustainable practices and encourage our affiliates to do the same. Stay tuned for more upcoming projects that do just that.
SEATTLE – When Goodwill Industries decided to launch a new store on the hippest street in Seattle’s University District, VP of Development and Communications Catherine McConnell knew they had to get the attention of the 18-22 year olds who frequent the street known as simply “The Ave”. That meant ditching the typical clean, white walls for burnt red and army green, and organizing the store to fit the choosy demographic. Dresses are sorted by decade rather than length/color to complement 1980’s dance parties and 1950’s cocktail hours, and an entire section is devoted to western-style shirts, boots and hats to make that Halloween costume even easier to assemble. Another difference is the bold statement above the cash registers reminding customers that they’re shopping for a good cause. In 2007, Goodwill Industries served over 1 million people through employment and training programs with the 1.9 billion dollars in funds from over 2,000 retail stores across the country.
To market the new location, Goodwill turned to GoMobile Advertising, an experiential marketing company specializing in outdoor and event marketing. Together they created a 3D mobile showroom that will travel around the University District announcing the store beginning January 13. The interior of the glass-walled truck features fashion-forward outfits with pieces from Burberry and United Colors of Benetton, all found at local Goodwill stores. The declaration “Not Your Mom’s Goodwill” is printed on each side of the display to differentiate Goodwill On The Ave from other locations. “This mobile showroom can be likened to owning a window display that spans The Ave in its entirely. That kind of exposure will help introduce this unique Goodwill to the public in a fun way”, said GoMobile President Chris Schuler.
The “Not Your Mom’s Goodwill” campaign will wrap up on January 28th.
This morning my co-workers and I attended Seattle Goodwill’s Appreciation Breakfast, which honors volunteers, sponsors, and scholarship recipients. As a proud sponsor of Goodwill we were humbled by the stories of individuals whose lives were changed by the job training and support that Goodwill offers. It truly brings into focus the reason behind everything we do in support of an outstanding organization that for over 80 years has been devoted to our community. To ensure that Goodwill continues to thrive, we throw our creative energy into developing thought-provoking campaigns and guerrilla marketing events on behalf of Goodwill, and this past Memorial Day weekend was no exception!
2. GPS Tracking: Each of our multimedia advertising vehicles is fitted with a GPS tracking unit that allows our staff, and better yet, our clients to see exactly where their campaign is on the streets at any particular moment. Even better, we take our clients on “Ride-Alongs” where they get to experience first hand the amazing reactions of real people where they live, work and play.
3. Events: The cardinal rule of advertising: “You don’t schmooze, you lose”. We make sure to stay active in both the local advertising community, attending AdClub meetings and events and serving on numerous boards around the city. We also attend national advertising conventions and galas that honor the best in our industry each year. We’ve even been honored with a few national awards ourselves – check it out!
Event Marketer magazine’s EX Awards were on Monday night, it’s now Wednesday afternoon and my body is just now returning to homeostasis (which tells you what a great event it was). It was an excellent experience for Chris (President of GoMobile) and I to be able to rub elbows with a lot of our fellow event & experiential marketing industry colleagues and be recognized for the efforts we’ve made in creating a niche in this industry. We were nominated for the Best Vehicle Design category for our mobile marketing campaign with Miller Chill last summer, and I would tell you what happened next, but I made a video blog during the event so you can see it all for yourself.
Social Media
Since day one, we’ve offered mobile advertising vehicles that run on 
The interior of the glass-walled truck features fashion-forward outfits with pieces from Burberry and United Colors of Benetton, all found at local Goodwill stores. The declaration “Not Your Mom’s Goodwill” is printed on each side of the display to differentiate Goodwill On The Ave from other locations. “This mobile showroom can be likened to owning a window display that spans The Ave in its entirely. That kind of exposure will help introduce this unique Goodwill to the public in a fun way”, said GoMobile President Chris Schuler.