Tag Archives: Fallon

A brief history of marketing in Minnesota

Over at MinnPost John Renian has a post in tribute to Pat Fallon (who is about to be inducted in the Advertising Hall of Fame) and other Minnesota marketing greats. If you click over to the story you can read about Fallon, Carmichael Lynch, Campbell-Mithun, and a 1914 booklet printed by the UofM on how to plan an advertising campaign.

(and because it’s International Women’s Day, I have to tell you to make sure to read the comments)

FanChatter and True (B)romance

For the love of the game, there’s an up-and-coming social media/mobile tool for sports fans called FanChatter. If you want to send your picture to the stadium’s Jumbotron or keep up with fans of your favorite team, FanChatter is your ticket.

The founders of FanChatter were recently invited to spend some quality time at Silicon Valley’s YCombinator, a twice-a-year brain camp for startups who get some seed money and, more importantly, access to priceless free advice from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

I recommend two recent stories about FanChatter – a story by Graeme Thickins in Minnov8 and one from Finance & Commerce by Arundhati Parmar. Coupled together, these articles free The Nerdery to tell an entirely different side of the FanChatter story – and one told to me by Tom O’Neill, our VP of software development. Tom’s story has something for everyone, whether you’re into stories with true romance, sports, technology, brotherly love, suspense, the thrill of victory, and the agony of … whatever.

Ever go to a ballgame at which some hopeful romantic type gets the nerve to go on the Jumbotron on bended knee to propose to his surprised sweetheart? It’s among the most anxious moments in all of sports (sometimes I can’t watch). Did you know that Major League Baseball has a rule that only one such public proposal can be aired per game on the Jumbotron? Ed O’Neill didn’t. When his brother Tom learned this, he had to make a series of life-changing game-time decisions.

Ed had the ring and everything when he showed up at the Twins game with his girlfriend Holly, brother Tom, and Tom’s wife Anni. Here’s the play-by-play:

Top of the 1^st inning: Tom sneaks off  to Metrodome Fan Services to plunk down $100 for his brother’s Jumbotron appearance. Returning to the seats, Tom tells Ed, “Done deal.”

Bottom 1^st inning: Dude from Fan Services frantically waves Tom down, tells him somebody else had dibs on the one-a-day Jumbotron proposal. Tom curses rules as made to be broken, but no dice.

Top of the 2^nd: Tom tells brother about FanChatter as possible Plan B for his proposal. Select fan photos submitted to FanChatter are shown on the Jumbotron in the 5^th inning. Anyone who’s been to a ballgame with Tom knows he’s a fan and early adopter of FanChatter. If Tom were Minneapolis Star Tribune sports columnist Sid Hartman, he’d name-drop FanChatter creator Marty Wetherall as a “close personal friend.” When he’s not at YCombinator, Marty works for Fallon, a frequent agency partner of The Nerdery. Meanwhile, Tom takes a picture of brother Ed with his iPhone …

Bottom of the 2^nd: … and emails Ed’s photo to his Nerdery colleague Mike Johnson, who steps away from normal Friday night activities long enough to Photoshop this short and sweet caption: “Marry me, Holly?” Matt Tolbert tags up and scores on Joe Mauer’s sacrifice fly and it’s 4-zip. Just as Tom gets the doctored photo back from Mike, Tom’s iPhone battery goes dead.

Top of the third: Tom pleads with lady at gate nearest his car to let him out, and more importantly, re-enter after he charges his phone and completes his sacred bro-deal – he tells the gatekeeper what he’s up to, deftly playing the brotherly love card and probably pitching a romance novel fit for nerds – and she buys it, even signing his ticket to green-light his re-entry.

Bottom of the third: Tom plugs his phone in at his car and reaches FanChatter’s Marty and asks that Ed’s picture please, please, pretty please be chosen for the 5^th inning montage. Marty, who’s out to dinner with his wife, says we must reach FanChatter co-founder Luke Francl who’s better positioned as game-time go-to-guy to try to make it happen. A flurry of phone tag follows as Tom’s iPhone recharges and Brendan Harris puts the Twins up 5-0 on a single to center, scoring Cuddyer.

Bottom of the fourth: More runs driven in by Mauer, Morneau and Cuddyer. Tom reaches Luke, who says he’ll do his best to get Ed’s FanChatter photo on the big screen. Having done all he can, Tom heads back to the Dome. The score is Twins 9, Brewers 0. Upon his return, Tom gives Ed an unknowing but hopeful shrug.

Top of the Fifth: Holly, a Brewers fan, cheers as her team finally scores, and it’s the first run Tom has actually seen cross the plate.

Middle of the fifth: The FanChatter photo montage begins on the Jumbotron. Tom inexplicably isn’t paying attention. Anni, not in on the plan but well aware of Tom’s high regard for FanChatter, points and asks, “Tom, did you submit a photo as usual?” Tom’s watching Holly, who follows Anni’s pointing finger to the Jumbotron, watching just in time to see Ed’s pretty decent proposal. People start cheering. Ed is beaming. Holly says, “Yes.”

The rest of the game is really just icing on the cake. Cuddyer hit for the cycle and the Twins won 11-3.

All that was back in May, and we’ve sat on this story during FanChatter’s quietly productive exile in Silicon Valley. Today is Demo Day for FanChatter – a public unveiling of sorts after which the fledgling company looks to attract additional contracts with sports franchises, and perhaps, additional VC funding. The Nerdery wishes them well, and the growing O’Neill family thanks FanChatter for being there for them during the 5^th inning stretch.

Skimmer wins gold at Cannes

Skimmer, the Fallon created and Nerd built social-media aggregator, won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions international advertising festival, according to AdAge.

Woohoo! Congratulations to everyone involved. Nice work, people.

On the design of Skimmer & what agency clients are clamoring for

When Chris Wiggins, Creative Director at Fallon, set out to create Skimmer he put a lot of thought into the design of the application. Working with freelance designer Andy Gugel, Wiggins said they were specifically going for something that sort of flew in the face of the Web 2.0 “not designed design.”

“We intentionally didn’t approach the design of Skimmer the way typical software developers do,” Wiggins said. “For this we put experience over data, experience over functions.”

There’s be a long-standing precedent of user-experience testing that results in design by committee, he said. “In my opinion, that’s not the best way to go anymore.”

Wiggins pointed to Apple’s steady decline of usability tests and how their products continually win acclaim for their usability and design.

“You just need to take products to a certain point before you even consider getting feedback,” he said. “You can’t always trust people to know what they want until they’ve seen something. Users would never had asked for the iPod, because it would have never crossed their minds to ask for something like that. At some point you have to have a vision and make something that you are confident about.”

Often times, Wiggins said, “design is considered superfluous eye candy that you don’t need for these kind of service.”

So part of their goal with the design of Skimmer was to see what people would think if this kind of application was presented in a beautiful and elegant way. The response to Skimmer as a whole (not just the design but the way it consolidates all social media networks) has been what Brenda Fogg, Interactive Producer, called “almost effervescent.”

“We were warned by our PR person not to get too excited,” Wiggins said. “The app was much more quickly well received than we anticipated. It blew away all our expectations.”

A few of the sites that picked up the Skimmer story right away include: Cool Hunting, AdWeek, TechCrunch, AdFreak, and Mashable.

Wiggins said it was a little hard not to get drunk on the positive buzz.

“Our clients are calling it a spectacular move, a bold move,” he said. “It’s exactly the kind of buzz an ad agency can use right now. One of the biggest fears of most traditional agencies is having the competence in the social web sphere because so many clients are clamoring for it.

“It shows that we’re about finding ways to get your brands out there and to make people do things they already want to do, better,” he said. “We’re a place where you can reliably turn to for this kind of thing.”

Skimmer on WCCO

WCCO ran a story about Skimmer on the news last night. Sadly, I can’t embed it here. But you can go watch the video on their site.

A calm before the next storm, a few Skimmer fun facts

Picture by @shreshta

It’s been an entire day since Fallon unleashed Skimmer on the world, and some of the nerds are still recovering. As you can see it was a long, long process. I asked Mike Woods, who led our team of nerds on this project for a few numbers regarding Skimmer.

While I’m not sure if I’m at liberty to release official download numbers, I will tell you that there were thousands and thousands of people who registered yesterday and that on average each Skimmer user registered more than two service accounts (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.), and every user avergaed at least one friend using Skimmer (cute!).

What I can tell you is this:
Beers had in celebration of launch = 24 + two bottles of champagne
Hours spent in meetings = ~400
Number of curse words uttered during testing = Woods stopped counting at 1,000
Hours of sleep lost to project = 800

Woods also said Brenda Fogg had the honor of submitting Trac bug ticket #500 the night of launch.

As you can see by the picture above The Nerdery never sleeps. Tomorrow we’ll tell you all about an another amazing project we completed with one of our agency partners. Trust me on this one, it’s pretty cool.

Look what we helped Fallon build

Today, Fallon launched Skimmer, a life streaming thing that lets the social-networking butterfly in you keep track of all your friends.

Skimmer collates updates from your connections on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, and YouTube. While that’s pretty cool and all, the best part of it is it opens things like TwitPics right in the app, you can also watch your pals’ YouTube videos, and see their Flickr photos right in the desktop client.

This is a project the nerds have been working on for months and months. Mashing up all those technologies in an Adobe AIR app is not an easy task. Of course, they made it work. In the coming days we’ll be taking a peek into the Skimmer project and you’ll learn all about how this awesome new tool came into existence. Right now, you can visit Chris Black’s blog to see some of the challenges the team faced working on Skimmer.

In the meantime, you should give it a try, it’s free and you can download it on Fallon’s site.

Twitter: How do you choose who gets to market to you?

Earlier this week Julio Ojeda-Zapata had an article on using Twitter for business in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In the article Ojeda-Zapata asks if Twitter is a channel that businesses should explore. In the article Ojeda-Zapata also presents three Minnesota businesses using Twitter, including Fallon’s @_S_A_R_A_H_ campaign for the Sci-Fi Network (check out that slide show presentation by Aki Spicer, Fallon’s Strategic Planner, it’s some good stuff).

It seems pretty obvious why a business would want to use Twitter. It’s direct, immediate contact with customers or potential customers. Even more than that, it’s a contact that the customer chooses, giving the business a chance to stay top of mind for as long as a person follows them, depending on how frequently they Twitter.

Anyway, the more interesting question here is why would people want to follow a business on Twitter?

For some reason being marketed to by tweet seems more invasive than e-mail, and yet when I looked through the list of twitterers I follow, I found a few businesses. However, I never feel as though I am being marketed to. In fact, a lot of the time these businesses (I like to follow publishers) are providing links to content I find interesting.

For me, I think (I just started thinking about this right now), I choose to follow businesses in industries I am passionate about (book publishing). Or I follow them for purely selfish reasons (see Amazon MP3, because I do need to know when Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water” is on sale for $3.99).

So here’s my questions to you, oh faithful readers:
Do you follow any businesses on Twitter? How do you choose which businesses to follow and which ones not to follow? What are you looking from a businnes’ Twitter feed?