A New Face for Fayetteville

The Fayetteville A&P Commission has decided to re-brand its logo along with a new tagline with the goal of attracting more visitors to the travel destination in Northwest Arkansas.

Fayetteville is a great place to visit and we want everyone to know what the city has to offer. Because the Razorback brand dominates recognition throughout the area, we determined during the GOST planning process that there was no better way to attract tourism to Fayetteville than by leveraging Razorback red.



The new logo features “Fayetteville,” the most important aspect, in a red collegiate font and the tagline “Are You Feeling Fayetteville.” The Fayetteville A&P hopes that this logo redesign will help highlight what gives the city its unique feeling:
• Fayetteville is a stand-alone getaway experience
• There is a loyal following of the Razorback brand
• Fayetteville is a destination beyond sporting events

This classic logo design combined with the new ad campaign captures the essence of Fayetteville that includes art admirers and football fanatics. See the logo for yourself here, and check out the campaign on our home page under “Recent Work.”

If a Tweet falls in the forest

To marketers, the appeal of social networking isn’t hard to recognize. A quick and usually free opportunity to promote your product may sound like a great idea, but too often, marketers get what they pay for. The effectiveness of these efforts still falls short when compared to that of well-executed creative and well-timed media.

We’re not saying there’s no value to social network marketing. It can be a powerful tool when used to reinforce existing impressions and brand loyalty. Users may want to follow upcoming Riverfest events on Twitter, or Facebook fans might look forward to news about the Race for the Cure in their area. Established brands like these can easily keep devotees up-to-date through social networks.

But capturing the attention of new followers still presents the biggest challenge. Even the most intricate fan page can’t replace the original impression that only a campaign makes. If you’re looking to make such an impression, let us know. We’ll have a solution that’s not limited to 140 characters.

Beautiful car. Shame it won’t go.

Auto shows are places where manufacturers show off their latest ideas with what they call ‘concept cars.’ They’re sleek, pretty and most always completely impractical. Because these vehicles are never meant to be driven, they often don’t start or even offer the potential to propel themselves in any kind of forward motion.

Unfortunately, many advertising campaigns work the same way. They are great ‘concepts,’ but they’re never meant to actually do any of the work that’s required of a campaign.

We’ve all seen an ad that fits this description – it’s clever, it’s entertaining, you even tell your friends later. But when someone asks you whom the ad was for, you have no idea. At best, you may know what category, but you aren’t sure which company or product specifically.

Think about ads you’ve seen and liked. It’s easy to remember that the ad during the Super Bowl was for an employment site, but was it CareerBuilder, Monster or HotJobs? Was the energy drink on the outdoor board Red Bull or Rockstar? Was the ad in the fashion magazine for Diesel, Lucky or Gap?

As we’ve said before, clarity of message is important if you want to build a brand. You need to visually separate yourself from the competition and then reinforce that with a unique message. Advertising must do all of these things, not simply entertain people. Look at your current campaign. Is it readily identifiable as your brand? If not, then you may have a problem. Could its message apply to any of your competitors? If so, then you definitely have a problem.

It doesn’t matter how entertaining of an ad you have. Just as concept cars are interesting, so are the concepts behind these types of ads. But until they’re fleshed out with a driving message that propels people to take action for your specific product, then they’re nothing more than flashy smoke and mirrors that will never be seen outside of the auto show. And, these days, is the auto industry really worth emulating?

We’re not in it for the awards, but if you’re handing them out anyway…

This past weekend, an industry came together for a night of glamour, awards and somewhat formal festivities. No, we’re not talking about the Oscars – although rumor has it those happened this weekend, too. We’re talking about the Addy Awards.

Sponsored by the American Advertising Federation, local Addys are sponsored by ad clubs all across the country. Ceremonies were held this past weekend in both Little Rock and Northwest Arkansas, and the Sells Agency came away winners in both competitions.

Now, we always say that we don’t create ads for the sake of winning awards. And that’s true. But we still enjoy seeing how our creative stacks up against the competition.

This year, it stacked up pretty well. In the Little Rock competition, we won eight awards – more than any other agency – including four gold, two silver and two bronze. Add in our silver from NWA, and that’s a total of nine awards for five different clients. Here are the details:

Gold – Arvest "Changing World" for National TV Campaign
Gold – Arvest "Changing World" for Special Effects
Gold – Acxiom "Jump drive Mailer" for B2B DM, Flat
Gold – Acxiom "Media Kit Mailer" for B2B DM, Dimensional
Silver – Change for the Better "Poster" for Public Service Poster
Silver – Acxiom "InfoBase-X" for Photography, Color
Silver – HealthSouth "Print Campaign" for Photography, Color
Bronze – Acxiom Corporation "Acxiomimage.com" for Micro or Mini Sites
Bronze – Centennial Bank "$100 Hot Dog Ad" for Newspaper, Fractional Page, Color

Congrats to all those who were honored. The gold winners will move on to the district competition in April. Of course, we’ll keep you posted on those results. Now, back to work creating next year’s winners.

The Evolution of an Agency

We just received a phone call from a vendor that went something like this:

Vendor: “Is Sue there?”
Me: “This is she.”
Vendor: “I tried to send you an email regarding last year’s so-and-so project, and it bounced back.”
Me: “Oh, are you calling for Sue Smith or Sue Watson?”
Vendor: “I’m looking for Sue Jones.”
Me: “You’ve found her. Jones is my maiden name.”
Vendor: “May I have your new email address?”
Me: “Yes, it’s still my first name and ends in @sellsagency.com, but I work in a different department now, so you’ll want to speak with Dan about that project.“

The point is that there has been a lot of change at 513 Center Street in the past several months. Some of us have switched departments, as well as last names, some of us have received well-deserved promotions, some of us are brand-spankin’ new and settling in nicely, and one of us just moved to Denver (the rest of us could’ve done without the latter)!

Heck, even the agency has a new name. Luckily for us, the changes have been good! Even in this tough economy, we’ve had the need to add additional staff members, managed to reach the $11 million mark in capitalized billings for the first time, and business continues to move at a comfortable, break-neck speed. That’s our favorite speed, by the way.

What we’re trying to say is, we’re evolving. And we bet your company is, too. If you’d like to evolve and grow together, give us a call. We promise to make that call as unconfusing as possible.

Summing-Up the Super Bowl

Advertising’s biggest day has come and gone. The general consensus around the Sells Agency is that the Super Bowl ads may not have met the public’s (possibly) unreasonably high expectations, but they still made the most of the only time of the year where people don’t even think of fast-forwarding through the commercials.

At $3 million for one :30 spot, this is not the time to blow it with mediocre creative. And, while a few did, others managed to stand out. If you need to refresh your memory, visit www.superbowl-ads.com. Otherwise, our insightful observations may be lost on you.

Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head made comic headway, so to speak, in delivering Bridgestone’s message, while the E*TRADE baby brought a friend. Hilarity ensued. Alec Baldwin was perfect as Hulu.com’s spokesperson, and was probably seen by a larger audience than every episode of 30 Rock combined. Coke Zero continued its fake battle with Coca-Cola by parodying Coke’s Mean Joe Green Super Bowl commercial from 1980. We laughed and were nostalgic at the same time.

We were mildly amused by Teleflora’s talking roses and found no creativity whatsoever in Go Daddy’s annual bad-acting extravaganza (but we did go to their website to view the “uncensored” spot, and they are now #1 in their industry – hey, we didn’t say it wasn’t effective).

While the spot itself was pretty funny, the best delivery of message may have been from Denny’s. The Sells Agency staff came close to taking the chain up on their “Free Grand Slam” breakfast offer, but thought better of the idea when we imagined how many people with time on their hands would spend the morning in search of a free meal. And they did – lines were reportedly out the door all over the country. And news coverage was priceless.

Proving that good things come in small packages – Miller High Life’s one-second gimmick worked like a charm. We were watching to see if and when it would really appear and buzz was growing before the spot ever aired. For delivering value, Miller was clearly the winner. See the ad – and some that didn’t air – at www.1secondad.com.

Overall, the result was good buzz, some funny jokes and a great addition to an already exciting game. And, of course, free breakfast.

A million dollar logo?

Let’s first agree that art is subjective. Your Jackson Pollock is another person’s 1st grade art project… And, so the camps are divided on whether or not Pepsi’s new logo, which is said to have taken five months and upwards of a million dollars to produce, is creative genius or just a big waste of money. It’s only their eleventh logo in 110 years of doing business and most likely their most expensive rebranding effort to-date. This led us to muse on what the client estimate for this logo must’ve looked like!

Here are, what we consider to be, the most clever and the most offensive aspects of the new logo and the pseudo charges associated with each idea:

Type Setting, $250k – the typeface has gone from its long-standing, all caps version to a more modern, all lowercase font. We like the change. In addition, the “wave” from the previous logo’s white interior band is mimicked in the “e” of the new typeface. Good attention to detail.

Pepsi Icon, $500k – According to Advertising Age, the new icons (yes, there are three of them) represent varying degrees of a smile. Notice on the bottles below how the white “wave” changes size. Diet Pepsi gets a “grin,” Pepsi gets a “smile” and Pepsi Max gets a full-blown “laugh.” So, what does that say about the drink itself? Diet Pepsi will make the consumer slightly happy, while Pepsi Max makes them laugh uncontrollably? It’s also important to note that Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max both have “0” calories and Diet Pepsi and Pepsi have the same caffeine content – so why the different degrees of happiness?

Bottle Design, $250k – In both the current bottle design and the previous bottle design, the dominant feature of each icon, the “wave,” is replicated on the plastic container. Alas, the execution of the most recognizable element of one of the world’s most recognizable brands went too far. In our humble opinion, the bottle design would’ve related better to the new logo had it stayed the same.

Take a look at the images below and decide for yourself. We think we could’ve done just as well with a much more down-to-earth budget. Oh, wait – we already do!