Adfinity Marketing Blog

11.22
2011

By Felicia Wyrick

Adfinity Turns Ten

We recently celebrated our 10 year anniversary with a bash here at the shop. It was a special evening toasting with many family members, friends, colleagues and clients — past and present. During this Thanksgiving season, we’d like to acknowledge the people behind our success:

Thanks to our mentor who taught us to make hard decisions based on what’s best for the client.

Thanks to the fiscally conservative parents who always gave support even when they had their doubts.

Thanks to our spouses who let us vent, cry, laugh and pick their brains.

Thanks to our friends who encouraged and supported us as we ventured out on our own.

Thanks to our staff that stood by us through tough, uncertain times and trusted our leadership.

Thanks to our vendors who are our partners and gave their all to help make our projects successful.

Thanks to our clients for valuing our talents and trusting us to do our jobs on behalf of their companies.

Thanks for ten great years. We couldn’t have done it without you.

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09.19
2011

By Betsy Caszatt

Adfinity Advice

Where does the time go?

“Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.”
John Lithgow

We live by commercials … life moving in 30-second increments. Whole stories are laid at our feet in half the time it takes to fix a batch of Minute Rice.

Consider the harried Traveler’s Insurance pooch: wake up, find bone, bury bone, fret about it, take it to the bank, go home, worry, worry, worry, back to bank, get bone, scurry to the back yard, cue the insurance. There’s character, exposition, action, conflict, soul-searching, symbolism, metaphor and resolution. It’s a work of art and literature.

This is a problem for a writer.

Thirty seconds of wide-open time has a way of shrinking, shriveling and decomposing before all the must-have, salient points start piling into each other at about :23 (set-up…atmosphere…laugh line…vital info…more info…… disclaimerphoneaddresslogodone).

Even in business-to-business advertising, which is largely commercial-less, we have the task of fitting every last, flipping fact into digestible blocs of type, tweets and mobile alerts. I’m involved in a video project now calling for interviewees to make a spontaneous statement within 10-15 seconds. Most finish in the twenties. One arrived with a 12-line cheat sheet that would have timed out at a minute.

Our perception of time is up for grabs. So perhaps we all should take Thomas Jefferson’s idea as our mantra: “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” Now that I look at it, even he could have left out the words “that of” and cut a second.

Topics: business-to-business, Copywriting, print ad

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08.16
2011

By Felicia Wyrick

News

Adfinity Team Adds Aly

Say hello to Aly Kratovil, who has joined our team as a Graphic Designer. She comes to us from GoDaddy.com, one of the world’s largest website domain brokers and internet marketers, where she gained experience in e-mail marketing best practices.

She graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with a B.A. in Art, emphasis in Graphic Design. During her college career, she completed two hands-on internships with local agencies whose principals gave her rave reviews.

Her design philosophy? “Use no more than you need. Simplify. Draw the eye. I also like the quote: ‘Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.’”

Can’t wait for her to put that philosophy to work for our clients!

Topics: graphic design

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07.15
2011

By Betsy Caszatt

Adfinity Advice

Pass The Drano

Our very own Betsy Caszatt was the featured guest blogger on today’s brainzooming.com. Here’s the link and her entertaining musings for your enjoyment.

http://brainzooming.com/pass-the-drano-guest-post-on-creativity-by-betsy-caszatt/8563/

Operating on the premise that an alarming number of brains can be blocked at any given moment (why you’re perusing this blog post instead of designing the next killer campaign maybe?), let me put in a few words about the roto-rootering that Cedar Rapids’ ad community got a few months ago.

The scene: CreativeBloc11 … 8 AM, lots of coffee, 16 sessions and a couple-hundred of the Walking Clogged. As karma would have it, headlining the plumbers du jour was Mike Brown from Brainzooming – who later spent a week on this space answering residual creativity questions sparked by his two sessions. This begins to illustrate the beauty of a day-long immersion in ways to open the mind – it releases a flood. And, boy, do we know about floods in Cedar Rapids.

Given Small Shop Syndrome (whereby a large percentage actually has to be there working), I was the sole attendee from our agency. As it turned out, it was too good to bottle up in one person, so a week or two later we had a download session with our own gang of six. Over a Cinco de Mayo lunch, a quick PowerPoint of highlights, a smattering of handouts, and a YouTube clip of Bill Gates getting a pie in the face – Mike’s prescription for unblocking creativity with something that makes you laugh – everybody got the spirit of the six sessions I’d gone to. Talk around the table was spontaneous, engaged and specific to us.

With companies struggling to extend training time and dollars, having fun and building on ideas from a conference are great ways to spread the benefits. These kinds of insights into the wackified ways we creatives think and the walls we come up against are what any creative “training” should be. I got what resonated with me and was able to rain it down upon our internal team. Ideas bubbled to the top at lunch and we’ve kept ‘em coming.

So in the spirit of shared creativity, here’s something our art director saw and shared. Open it, marvel at it, pass it on, unleash your neurons. And have fun. – Betsy Caszatt.