Taking on pro bono clients is our way of giving back to the community. We have the talent and ability readily at hand, so partnering with deserving organizations like MOFAS is a no brainer. Not to mention that this non-profit is an organization whose cause, mission and vision almost anyone can get behind.

The Minnesota Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (MOFAS) is the only statewide source for information, resources and support for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD). It is their mission to eliminate disability caused by alcohol consumption during pregnancy and it is their vision to create a world in which women drink zero alcohol for the nine months of pregnancy.

In early 2010, MOFAS tasked us with developing an impactful public awareness campaign that promoted the philosophy of their organization—no amount of alcohol is safe during pregnancy. Wanting to generate buzz and awareness, and more than willing to elicit strong reactions, we were thrilled to exercise our creative skill.

With such a strong, stable core truth, we developed a robust concept that brought the message to life. The “Kids with Alcohol” campaign used toddlers with alcoholic drinks to illustrate our point...as absurd and shocking as giving alcohol to a toddler looks, it’s even worse to think about giving it to an unborn child. 

(download)

Click here to download:

minnesota-organization-on-fetal-alcohol-syndrome-uwyrDdAoFwEvEBHEdkls.zip (9.98 MB)

The “Kids with Alcohol” campaign went live in December of 2010 and consisted of physician media, radio, Facebook advertising and outdoor. To date, MOFAS followers on Facebook have grown from under 200 to over 1600. And though negative reactions and responses were expected, MOFAS has received nothing but positive feedback.

We just completed a social media push during September, and looking forward we will be developing a new plan and campaign for 2012 that extends statewide.

To learn more about the Minnesota Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, visit http://www.mofas.org/

The loss of Steve Jobs hit hard around KC. At just about every keynote speech he gave over the past 10 years you could find us gathered around a computer following along. His impact was undeniable, and other companies knew it. It's amazing how Apple products have been copied by so many tech companies. From operating systems to digital music players to phones to tablet computers, just about every technology company has their own version of an Apple product.

But the one thing we wish these other companies would copy from Apple isn't their products, it's their CEO. Instead of modeling their next phone after the iPhone, more companies should model their next CEO after Steve Jobs. CEO's that have incredible passion for what they do, make things they truly love. Steve Jobs loved the things his company made and his passion showed in those keynote speeches.

People watched those speeches and saw an incredible salesman. We watched and saw an excited kid. He was so proud to show off Apple's latest creation. Like a kid with a new toy. It was real. It was passionate. It had nothing to do with quarterly returns or market share or pleasing investors. And consequently Apple's quarterly returns and market share destroyed projections year after year and shares went through the roof.

Imagine what a better world we'd be living in if more CEO's were like Steve Jobs

AMIN

Bill Coontz, KC’s very own, is Chairman of AMIN World Wide and former president of AMIN North America.

AMIN, the Advertising and Marketing International Network, is a global alliance of independently owned advertising agencies. This alliance spans the globe, with member networks in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Bill recently attended AMIN’s annual conference, held in Warsaw, Poland from October 6-9, 2011. Tailored for senior management and key disciplines, this conference helps member agencies adapt to the ever-changing landscape of the advertising industry by covering topics ranging from best practices to emerging technologies and developing trends.

We’re very glad to have Bill back home!

Completed Space!

If you’ve stopped by Kruskopf Coontz in the past few months, you may have noticed that we’ve grown! KC recently completed an expansion to our downtown location. We have more offices, another large conference room, a second kitchen, and more storage space.

If you haven’t stopped by lately, we hope you do soon!

Here are some photos of our beautiful new space.

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Click here to download:

agency-news-ujfHHktHpFCvlvicqlmh.zip (4.75 MB)

By Robb Burnham and Mike Cronin

Not to sound like recently thawed cavemen, but we really do live in amazing times. We’re typing this on our iPads while listening to music on Spotify, working at a coffee shop where we used a phone to pay for our drinks, inside an app that allows us to share a document so we can both see it and add our thoughts, all in real time. Amazing. 

There are amazing things happening in marketing, too. Brands have countless new ways to engage and interact with consumers: Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, email, text...and new tactics appear every day. Things are changing by the second. There...a new marketing technology was born. Did you see it? Seriously, amazing. 

It strikes us, though, that amongst all this change two things stay the same: clients want to be listened to and brands need a voice. These are the two things we spend our days focused on.

We’ve seen it happen time and again. An agency representative droning on about this new media or that new technology, proselytizing about how these will be the cure for all that ails your brand. But in our experience clients want more than a snake oil pitch. They want to be heard, not talked at. They want to know that an agency understands and can execute these tactics competently, sure. But more than that, they want to know an agency is listening to their needs. They want them to respond with the right strategies--not just the latest tactics--to solve their problems. Listen, solve. That's old-school client service. There's no app for that.

Of course, more ways to be heard mean more opportunity for a brand to get noticed or--more dangerously--go unnoticed. In this brave new world, what a brand says and how it says it plays as important a role as where the message lives. Brands need a strong voice. One born from the core truths of the brand. One that’s unique in the category. One that’s consistent. One that consumers can get behind, believe in, adopt, act on and amplify to their friends.

Change has a way of making people nervous, making them question what they’re doing, or making them focus on things they’re not necessarily good at. At KC, we embrace and thrive on change. We live with it and learn from it and take the good and leave the bad behind. But we will always, always listen to our clients. And we will always fight to give their brands a powerful voice. That never changes.

Mashable.com

NOTCOT inspires creativity via a studio bulletin board gone digital, with visual filtrations of ideas, aesthetics, and amusements.

TechCrunch.com

TechCrunch helps KC keep up on the newest capabilities for web and mobile, and should be a go-to website for any client looking for inspiration to improve their digital potential.

Pinterest.com

Pinterest has all of your favorite things, all in one place. They might put bookmarks out of business.

Foodgawker.com

Foodgawker not only helps you find good recipes, but pretty ones too. Warning: Don't browse before lunchtime. Your brown-bag lunch might get jealous.

NOTCOT.com

NOTCOT inspires creativity via a studio bulletin board gone digital, with visual filtrations of ideas, aesthetics, and amusements.

Thoughts on Email Marketing from Magnet 360 – Part 2 of 2
Evolving from CTAs and CTRs to Curation and Automation

Last month, we shared recommendations for building a solid foundation to support email marketing within your marketing organization. Beyond the basics, however, the question becomes this: How can email play a more sophisticated role within your marketing efforts? Here are some recommendations that we believe can help shape the right kind of plan:

Content Strategy - Simply stated, it starts by having a clear plan to define, create (or in some cases, curate), maintain, and consistently deliver the right kind of content to your customers.

Suppose your plan suggests that you update the home page every week, post to a blog once per month, and create a video tutorial every two months. Each of these items are perfect opportunities to share with your email subscribers. In addition to content you author, consider leveraging content created by your social sphere, by directly pulling in posts from Facebook or Twitter, or by curating the vast amounts of social content with tools such as Curation Station.

Another important factor of a solid content strategy is how content is aligned across multiple digital properties. It is fair, and expected, that the content that is created for one channel will be used in others. What's important, however, is that the content is not simply a "copy & paste"; rather, it is tuned to the channel and to the audience that uses that channel to interact with your brand.

And speaking of multiple digital properties, we also recommend that you use your email communications to promote your participation in other digital channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others. Given that these channels will be used for more frequent and timely updates, use this call-to-action as a way to engage with your customers on more of an ongoing basis.

Automation - What's better than email campaigns that just run themselves? Well, maybe it's not that simple, but event-based email can be highly effective at engaging your customers based on their actions.

For example, much like re-targeting, automated follow-up emails can be sent to subscribers who click-through to view products on your website, inviting them to check out that specific product again, creating another opportunity to convert. Taking this even further, automated email can be effectively used to reach out to customers who have abandoned their carts in an effort to convert one or many items into a sale. Other automation techniques include creating decision trees that automatically feed follow-up emails based on whether or not a subscriber responds to the initial campaign.

Re-Engagement - Do you have a high percentage of un-opens? Re-engagement campaigns are a great way to remind your customers of the promise you made when they opted in and can be an opportunity to re-engage them in future communications (or dropping them from your list and improving your open rates!) This type of campaign starts by segmenting the list based on a duration of inactivity (for example, subscribers that have not opened for the past 120 days), and sending an email to rekindle their interest. A click-through is the desired outcome, which keeps them on the list. But for those who don't respond to two or three cycles, they will be removed from your list.

We appreciate your reading our thoughts on email marketing, it is a marketing channel that we believe has great yields for modest expense. In your own efforts, whether you are just ramping up or looking for more advanced tactics, we'd appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and see if we can help you take your efforts to the next level.

http://magnet360.com/index.html

Posted 7/11/11, by Bill

We love to keep you current on what's happening at KC, and to that end, we want to share a piece from our partners at Magnet 360. Our affiliation with Magnet 360 gives us the best digital capabilities in the country, across a wide variety of channels. KC and Magnet 360 can provide you with the most-up-to-date strategies for your on-line and off-line messages. 

Bill Coontz

President, Kruskopf Coontz

Thoughts on Email Marketing – Part 1 of 2

For a marketing tactic that is almost as old as the commercial web, we still find many marketers that under-utilize this valuable form of media. Yet, for many, particularly on the B2B side, it is typical that email and search marketing battle for the #1 and #2 spot for which has the best ratio of cost per result. Here at Magnet 360, we assist many of our customers in establishing or enhancing their email marketing efforts. While these campaigns are fairly inexpensive to implement, they still require hard work, good content and a solid plan to be a success.

Through our experiences, we have put together a two-part series. The first article focuses on the fundamentals of email marketing. We will follow in May with a piece on emerging tools, trends and advanced tactics.

Back to the Basics: The Fundamentals of Email Marketing

#1 List Quality

Start by thinking of an email address as a valuable marketing asset of the business. Each valid opt-in email address that you have earned is important and keeping an up-to-date list of email addresses for prospects and customers is crucial in executing a successful email campaign. This requires continual work including validating the quality of email addresses in current systems, updating email list, capturing emails from reps on phone, capturing emails at trade shows, and using your website as a tool for new capture of opt-in emails.

#2 Frequency Counts; Develop a Campaign Calendar

In B2C marketing for mass retailers, there is a trend to heavily use and, some would argue, abuse their email list. If you have relevant sales and special offers that merit daily or weekly emails, there can be valid arguments for high frequency. But for most marketers, we need to be far more sensitive to the frequency of the emails we send. Managing frequencycorrectly can lead to greater trust & higher open rates while abuse can drive unsubscribes.

While there is no magic frequency, we have found that an email every 3 - 4 weeks is a good starting point. At this rate, it is frequent enough that a business can properly communicate its message to its target audience, but not too frequent where people feel they are being spammed.

With that said, we typically help our customers develop an email campaign calendar where we determine in advance the content and frequency of the email campaigns to be sent. And while we start with an assumption of about one email per month - we increase or decrease frequency based on the quality of content we feel we can deliver and the relationship between the business and its audience. Typical content includes product announcements, special deals, trends that your audience wants to know about, recaps of events of interest to the audience, publishing of research studies or white papers etc. Ideally, email content strikes a balance between messages that deliver value to your audience as well as special offers and promotions intended to drive a business result.

#3 Work to improve open rates

We all know that if a tree falls in the forest, it fails to make a sound if nobody is there to hear it. Well the same can be said of emails that go directly to the trash bin. A critical variable to focus on is the open rate of the emails that we send.

• The most important variable that impacts open rates is the relationship between the sender and receiver. For example, we all open an email from a best friend and instantly delete what we recognize as spam. So where do our emails fall that we send as marketers? Are we trusted by our audience? Two of the key areas we focus on to build trust are, #1 (quality email addresses) and #2 (quality content).
• The next most important variable is the content on the subject line of an email. Writing compelling subject lines can be challenging and we have found that aggressive testing leads to the best results.

#4 Establish and track benchmarks

Key benchmarks include Open Rates, Deliverability, Click Through Rate, Unsubscribes and Conversion. For each of these variables, there are easily found industry benchmarks that we can use as a starting point in establishing campaign targets (for example, open rates typically start around 25 - 30%).

Establishing these benchmarks and utilizing the reporting tools common to most email platforms is critical in determining the effectiveness of your campaigns and driving future optimization.

#5 Content and Design Matter

With email boxes overflowing with personal email, business emails and ads, we are better off delivering short, easy to read messages. In email campaigns, we advise our customers to:

• Limit the depth of content to something that is easy to read and quickly delivers the core messages.

• Pick a primary theme with a few supporting messages.

• Create a more accessible email by embedding links with each message.

• Be cognizant of your audience (i.e., For older audiences think about the font size of the copy)

• Utilize your resources to develop compelling email templates and produce quality content.

#6 Segmenting and targeting

When it comes to communication, relevancy counts. While many of us don't like to be marketed to - we enjoy receiving messages about products or services that are of interest to us. The better job we can do as marketers of segmenting our audience, the better job we can do of providing relevant and targeted messages of interest to our audience; thus, increasing those key metrics we are tracking in #4 above.

This requires up front effort to develop segmentation, ongoing effort to maintain and, most importantly, ongoing effort to create more content.

#7 Landing Pages

The landing page needs to be considered part of the campaign. When a user clicks on a link in an email, are we taking them to the right place? Once they are there, is the info they need waiting for them? Is there an action we want them to take and is it clear?

#8 Unsubscribes

While we don't want unsubscribes, it is a measure of respect for our audience and it is a requirement under US law to provide the option for any email subscriber to opt-out of your future email campaigns.

We suggest that along with an unsubscribe, in many cases it’s a good idea to allow for a "manage subscriptions" option. Given the opportunity, many audiences will opt for a decreased frequency vs. complete opt-out if they like & trust the sender.

#9 Make sure your email platform is a trusted sender to the major ISP's

We typically use market leading email platforms like Eloqua & ExactTarget which have invested over the years in fostering close relationships with the major ISPs to avoid spam filters and black-list which increases email deliverability.

We have seen many businesses that utilize the email service that is bundled in with pre-existing systems. While these tools might be bundled, inexpensive and even reasonably full featured – it will not benefit you if a large portion of emails sent never makes it to the destination due to spam filters and firewalls setup to block spam.

#10 Integration

The best email platforms can easily be integrated in with your CRM, whether you are on SF.com, Microsoft CRM or others. There should be one system of customer truth and one repository with all of the customer email addresses, data, etc. Packages like ExactTarget, Eloqua, and others are very good at supporting this integration and there can be great future cost and inefficiencies if this data is split up between the EMS (Email Marketing System) and your CRM.

http://magnet360.com/index.html

Posted 4/19/11, by Scott

Funny Is Good Business. Seriously.

By Robb Burnham & Mike Cronin

You may have noticed, at KC, we like funny. It's in our genes. We're not sure why. 

We hesitate saying it's because we're all so darn "creative". That always sounds like some hack sitcom writer's version of agency culture. No. Creativity is hard work. It's not all indoor badminton and loud music. It’s more about getting into the right frame of mind, buckling down and wringing your brain until the right answer trickles out in it’s purest simplest form. Creativity is actually tedious, boring stuff.

So why do you so often hear the sound of giggling, cackling, and in some cases snorting, ringing through the halls of KC? Why is the front page of our website usually something that evokes a smile (or attempts to, anyway). Why the funny?

Well, we've never analyzed why. Until now. Not until running across this old article written by John Cleese. It's a great read for anyone in business. Enlightening, affirming, and in many ways, freeing.

As the silly Monty Python member and writer of the hysterical A Fish Called Wanda points out, humor is serious business. Turns out humor is what helps us get into a more open frame of mind--the first part of creative problem solving. In other words, humor just may be the answer to all your problems.

We’ve always said people in business shouldn't be afraid to let their hair down a little. Now there’s scientific proof as to why. Just don’t tell your boss you showed up to work wearing a clown nose because we told you to.

Thank you, Mr. Cleese.

Kruskopf Coontz welcomes the addition of Karl Sherry to the agency’s business strategy team. Sherry, a seasoned consumer products specialist, spent 12 years at brand design firm, Baker, and has worked for many of the Twin Cities region’s biggest consumer brands.

“Karl’s a terrific addition to our busy team,” says Bill Coontz, president, Kruskopf Coontz. “He thinks like a creative and has the management skills of a senior account person. So he’s a perfect fit for KC where we’re hands-on and work across many disciplines. Karl is going to be a key part of helping us shape our agency growth going forward.”

Sherry joins KC as the firm sees growth in the consumer, B2B and healthcare categories. His portfolio of consumer brand experience includes major industry leaders such as Trix, Lucky Charms, Gogurt, Coca-Cola, Oreo, Ritz and Hormel.

“I love KC’s whole truth platform,” says Sherry. “It’s a refreshing breath of fresh air in the ad agency business.”

Sherry previously worked at Baker, Campbell Mithun and BBDO.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that an advertising agency focused on finding the truth is breaking down walls. But this week, Kruskopf Coontz takes the hammer to the firm’s conference room wall in an expansion that has been in development for months.

“Quite simply, we’re growing fast,” says Sue Kruskopf, CEO. “It’s been a tough couple of years for the advertising industry during the recession, but we’ve stayed true to what we do and our business kept growing throughout.”

The expansion will increase the Minneapolis firm’s footprint by close to 30 percent, increasing space for meetings with clients in the consumer brand, healthcare and B2B categories as well as an expected increase in staffing in the coming months.

“We’re all about finding irrefutable truths for our clients and their brands,” adds Kruskopf. “This one was pretty easy. We’re growing way too fast to stay put.”