In 2009 (the middle of the Great Recession), 74 out of the top 100 spenders on advertising cut their budgets or held them static.  The remaining 26 “bucked the trend and increased their ad spends.”

I’ll let you read the full story to find out what happened next. But it’s something important to keep in mind for the future.

Click here to read it.

Design Day is a unique event, which allows college seniors to work on real engineering problems with real companies. It also allows pre-college students to interact with Spartan engineering students. This semester, it takes place today, April 27th, in the MSU Union.

So what's it about?

Student teams within the college get a chance to show off their real-world engineering projects, demonstrating theory and practices. Along with high school students in attendance, graduating seniors at MSU get to interact with and present to more than 35 industrial sponsors.

Here at BCP, we assist the college by designing their program for this special day. To be able to continue to play a part in such an important event for these young students is an amazing feeling. Check it out below!

Here at Blohm Creative, we pride ourselves on being lifelong learners.

For me, the latest bit of reading that has been occupying my free time is the book, Perspectives On Social Media Marketing. Written by Stephanie Agresta, Global Director of Digital Strategy and Social Media at global public relations firm Porter Novelli, and B. Bonin Bough, Global Director of Digital and Social Media at PepsiCo, the book brings together an agency perspective vs. a brand perspective when it comes to connecting with consumers on social media.

These two offer radically different views than what traditional marketers bring to the table. Simply put, I have found it to be extremely enjoyable and insightful.

Do you have any books or materials that you have found helpful in furthering your marketing IQ? Let us know!

Conversely, a sub-standard logo invariably makes a bad impression on prospects and can even confuse people about your brand and what it stands for.

The following are seven qualities of logo design which will help you to create a logo that's original, memorable and an authentic representation of your company. Enjoy!

A logo should:

1. Accurately reflect your personality of your business: Your logo has to feel authentic to your staff and current customers and honestly represent your organization to new people and prospects. It needs to look and feel appropriate to what you offer and deliver.

2. Differentiate your firm from your competitors: Simple, really. Your logo should be clearly different than any competitor’s logo or brand identity.

Avoid the "too similar style" complaint.

3. Be distinctive and memorable: You can achieve this by creatively combining fonts, colors and designs. The end result needs to be memorable and visually interesting—as well as practical and usable.

4. Work well wherever it is placed: A logo needs to be versatile enough to work well in all possible mediums—from packaging, signage and direct mail to the web, social media and mobile devices. If it looks great in print but lousy on a monitor there’s a problem.

5. Be used in any size—large or small: Your logo should look equally good painted on the side of a building or on the screen of a smart phone.

6. Have an icon/logomark (if you have one) which contributes to the design: If your logo has a graphic element in addition to the wordmark, the icon needs to serve a meaningful purpose and be unique and strong enough to eventually stand alone and not just be a piece of visual clutter. If it doesn’t add anything to the design, simply use the wordmark.

And drum roll please…

7. Be simple and not too “trendy”: A logo should be designed for the long haul. It should be contemporary enough to successfully represent your brand now, yet not so trendy that it will quickly seem dated when design styles change, as they do over time.

Thanks for reading! Let us know if you found this helpful!

If you haven’t already updated your profile, Timeline offers some intriguing features: namely, the ability to highlight moments in your brand's history, called Milestones.

Here is a short rundown of our personal experience so far using Timeline with clients.

Pros:
-Highlighting milestones in your brand’s history
-More opportunities to add visual elements
-Fan-messaging feature
-Mobile features
-Improved admin panel
 -Story-pinning

Milestones (known as Life Events on personal profiles) allow a brand to document their history in a unique fashion. Check out this article about the social media efforts of the United States' military.

Timeline’s wide design and cover photo option lend itself perfectly to using images in a more engaging manner, including the ability to highlight stories and have them stretch across the entire page.

A fan-messaging feature allows for more personal communication between a brand and its followers. Only fans can initiate conversation; brands can only respond.

Facebook now allows for tabs and apps to be viewed on a mobile device. A lot of tabs have been developed without mobile in mind, so this may mean you need to update their design.

An improved admin panel at the top of the page is the nerve center when it comes to management. New real-time insights allow a campaign to be analyzed within minutes.

Story-pinning allows a page manager to select a story that stays at the top of the Timeline for up to seven days. This is a good way to recognize an item which you want to stay above any clutter on the page.

Cons:
-The app layout
-Inability to select default landing page

With Timeline, the app navigation has moved from the left of the page to a layout just below the cover.

Here is where things get a little tricky.

Now, only four apps can be viewed when first landing on the page. The rest are hidden and require a user to open them in a drop down selector.

Up to 12 apps can be featured, but you will NOT be allowed to select a specific app as the default landing tab. Timeline is the default.

While this could be considered a positive, in my opinion, I believed the ability to select a custom tab as landing page was great opportunity for creative designs or promotions. Now, you will be handed everything at once from the Timeline. This is where the pinning feature comes in handy (to have a particular message stand out), yet it is limited to seven days.

Also, apps now will require a redesign, as the custom tab image does not fill the required space when making the transition from the older brand pages to Timeline.

Finally, the apps now open in a separate page away from Timeline. This might cause some noise among users.

This is just our early take on Timeline, and it will be interesting to see what else Facebook has up its sleeve in the near future. What are your thoughts on Timeline pages for brands? Let us know in the comments below!

I stumbled across the phrase on Twitter today, and what a great reminder it is when it comes to creating social strategies.

Content, after all, is king. It takes the right kind of creative direction to engage participants effectively on social networks without bombarding users with advertising or marketing blabber. People will see right through that. And they will no doubt be less interested in clicking on your page or profile ever again.

Ever been on a first date where the other person talked too much about themselves?

Look to add value for those who decide to follow or like your page, and to facilitate two-way conversations with users. Doing so will give them a reason to come back!

I love Shamrock Shakes. Since I’m a vegetarian, that’s one of a handful of things I can order off the menu. So of course I had to take part in this newest internet phenomenon.

Sure enough, after my lunch break I returned with one of the bright-green shakes. Iain, our creative director, snapped a photo of me (below), which I then uploaded to the BCP Twitter account.

A few hours after posting the photo, I logged back in to see if there was any feedback. It was then that I saw that the official McDonald’s Twitter had retweeted the photo!

It’s not every day that one of the world’s largest restaurant chains interacts with you on a social network. Impressed with their response, I thought nothing more of the matter.

Fast forward to today.

This morning, Patty, our operations director, told me that a package came in with my name on it.

“That’s funny,” I thought. “I didn’t order anything.”

Confused, I read the label. It said the package had been an overnight delivery from Chicago. Huh?

My curiosity now through the roof, I tore it open to see what was inside. To my surprise, the contents made sense! Staring at me was a treasure trove of shamrocking goodness!

All I can say is: what a unique way to thank loyal followers. I was immediately impressed by the contents of the gift (which included a t-shirt, personal note and multiple free shake coupons), then taken aback by their response time and how they actually found out the address of the BCP office!

This exemplifies the personal touch needed in a successful social media marketing strategy. Rewarding brand loyalty and assuring positive association with a brand through word-of-mouth marketing are cornerstones. Do you think I posted about the shamrocking gift on my personal Facebook? Heck yes. Twitter? Heck yes. I shouted the news from my social platforms to everyone. This was no doubt the goal of the McDonald’s strategists, and in my view, they hit a home run!

Have a happy St. Patrick’s Day!

In late February, the Michigan State University College of Arts and Letters won a Gold ADDY and the Best of Show – Interactive award at the 2012 ADDYs for their online edition of MUSES magazine. MUSES' print edition also captured a Silver ADDY. The mid-Michigan ADDY Awards, held this year at the MSU Union Building on the campus of Michigan State, are the advertising and marketing industry’s largest and most recognized competition.

Mike Jenkins, College of Arts and Letters Communications Director, explained the rationale behind taking the magazine online.

“We wanted to present our audiences with a higher-quality interactive experience with MUSES magazine,” said Jenkins. “To this point, all we had done online was post the PDF file. The online MUSES can include video, audio, online surveys and more. So, an enhanced user experience was important to us.”

Jenkins added that developing an online version fit better into their overall marketing objectives.

“Each issue of the MUSES print magazine is mailed to nearly 30,000 alumni of the MSU College of Arts and Letters,” he said. “Although the total cost per magazine is under three dollars, we still get feedback from some alums who say that an online magazine is preferred because of its easier access.

“Taking a look at the numbers, we realized that if 10 percent of our mailing list opted for just the online magazine over the hard copy, the cost of each online issue would be covered and create a break-even situation. Therefore, anything above a 10 percent conversion to online over hard copy would be savings.”

Jenkins concluded that the future preferred format of MUSES was still up in the air.

“I don’t know if we would ever totally eliminate MUSES print magazine should we face harsh economic or other constraints, but with the online magazine templates, we could do so, if necessary, without missing a beat,” he said.

Check out the latest issue of MUSES online here: http://muses.cal.msu.edu

Mike Jenkins poses with the awards.

I give you Michigan Apples. Apples are Michigan’s largest and most valuable fruit crop, with an estimated economic impact of $700 million annually. Along with a website overhaul, we developed a new logo for the Apples folks to use in their promotional materials.

Check out the photo below and view the results in a local Meijer supermarket. Seeing our designs come to life is something special that never gets old!

-provided more than three million meals this year, nearly half of which went to children?
-rescued more than 500 thousand pounds of food this year?
-maintained 90 community gardens featuring more than one million square feet of space?
-entered its 31st year of helping feed the hungry?
-can feed a family of four for six days with just a $60 donation?
-collected, purchased, and distributed food through 22 Ingham County pantries, as well as 36 human resource agencies, including community kitchens, shelters, and other food pantries?
 For some, daily life serves as a stark reminder of the challenges found in society; specifically, the threat of hunger. The right to food is a basic human need.  Fortunately, there are local organizations that are doing their best to wipe out hunger year-round, such as the Greater Lansing Food Bank.

The GLFB has been in existence since 1981. Originally known as the Greater Lansing Food Alliance, the organization has expanded to become not just a food pantry, but now includes services such as the Garden Project and Food Movers. The former began in 1983 and quickly established numerous community gardens and backyard gardens for low-income residents, while the latter specializes in rescuing perishable but wholesome food from restaurants, commercial kitchens, bakeries, grocery stores and delivers this food to pantries, agencies and subsidized housing complexes.

None of the GLFB’s efforts could be accomplished without the generous giving of local citizens, coming together to provide support by donating and volunteering to sustain this worthy cause.

Do your part this year and help eliminate hunger. Visit www.greaterlansingfoodbank.org for more information, or contact their offices directly at (517) 853-7800.

Listen to Joe Wald, interim executive director of the GLFB, explain just what the food bank means to the community at Spartan Podcast (www.spartanpodcast.com/russ/JoeWald.mp3).