HELSINQI CREATIVE

More cracks in the monolith: Ads down; PR up

Thursday, 25 February 2010

Everywhere we look, the status of marketing is changing radically. Whether you see it as a catastrophic sinkhole opening up below, or a powerful groundswell buoying you up depends — as revolutions always do — on how vested your interests are in the entrenched (erstwhile) status quo versus your readiness to embrace dramatic change as an opportunity.

It may come down to where you stand on the advertising-to-PR spectrum, or, to put a finer point on it, the spectrum between old-school, monolithic, unilateral push-messaging and a participatory communications model which, in terms of antecedents, is closer to the PR model.

The Economist writes on the sanguineness of public relations in the recession:

According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year. PR’s position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage, such as outreach to bloggers, is included. Spending on such things increased by more than 10% in 2009.

— ”Good News“, 14 Jan 2010.

Interesting times. Of course, whenever things look like this, there are two ways to respond. Most will take (what appears to be) the swift and easy road, devising ever cleverer ways to game the new situation. (The Economist refers to “blow-dried blogs.”) Pity, that. But I can’t complain: it leaves swathes of market hungry for a fundamental change — and visionary enough to see the writing on the wall — wide open to those of us solidly committed to the integrity way.

Zoomtopia Grand Opening

Thursday, 28 January 2010

Carole Zoom and Mayor Sam Adams celebrate the grand opening of Zoomtopia

Client: Zoomtopia
Project: PR
Team:

• Anna Daedalus: director, writer
• Heather Stanley: copywriter, PR disseminator
• Leo Daedalus: art director
• Michael Welch: graphic designer

Special Thanks to Brandon Sprague for his advance writing.

Our dear friend Carole Zoom has done it again! She has built a new home for artists & nonprofits, this time in Portland (the last was in Eugene). At Zoomtopia, “affordable pricing and lease-to-own terms enable artists and nonprofits to find a stable home while building social and financial equity.”

Carole asked Helsinqi for help with a big, last-minute PR blast (press release here). We obliged, and we’d like to think we had something to do with the teeming masses who crammed into the building on January 28th for the dedication by Sam Adams and all the other good stuff that went down.

Check out the postcard and poster designs:

Thanks to Gabe for incorporating Michael Welch’s graphic on the Zoomtopia website masthead.