With millions of videos being uploaded to YouTube every week, it’s ever important to get your brand to stand out from the clutter. Just showing up isn’t enough anymore, you need to excite your visitors and engage their minds. Video marketing can be a powerful tool in your belt if you know how to use it.

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During this call, you’ll have the chance to discover how the pros put together videos that compel people to action. You’ll also get an opportunity to ask your burning questions and discuss your challenges with our guest expert Adam Caplan.

This exclusive webinar will teach you the know-hows of expert marketers Jordan Stevens and Adam Caplan. On the call you’ll learn about:

• What makes an engaging video
• Best practices for usability
• How to extend video’s life
• Converting viewers into sales

And more!

This webinar will be recorded for future viewing.

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About the Speakers

Adam Caplan, eCommerce + Transactional Media Entrepreneur
After graduating from the California Institute of The Arts in 1995, Adam Caplan worked in the entertainment & advertising industry in Los Angeles for companies such as Universal, Paramount, Columbia/Tri-Star, Disney, Apple, Launch (Yahoo!), and many others, leading to a role as Executive Site Producer for the Home Shopping Network in 2000.

Returning to his hometown of London, Canada in 2003, Adam began lecturing on e-Commerce Strategy at Western University, and in 2005 joined digital signage pioneer EK3 as its Creative Director, working with clients such as Tim Hortons, The Home Depot, RBC, and TELUS, among many others. Adam left EK3 in 2008 and the following year started web.isod.es with a mission to use Web video to tell the amazing stories of our community in unique and dynamic ways.

Supporting a core value of community engagement, Adam sits on the Board of Directors for Museum London, where he also served as Chair of the Marketing and Development Committee; served as a Strategic Advisor on the Emerging Leaders Steering Committee; was a Producer-At-Large for the London Ontario Live Arts (LOLA) festival from 2008 to 2010; and is a founding Director and Past President of the UnLondon Digital Media Association.

Jordan Stevens, Chief Noisemaker and Audio Brand Consultant
Almost born with a guitar in his hands, Jordan Stevens is instrumental in inspiring business leaders to listen to the world around them. As the owner and chief noisemaker of TreBrand he plays a pivotal role in helping brands achieve peak performance. Jordan continues to set the standard by working expressively with all of his clients. His work has been heard at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at The Pillar Nonprofit Commnity Innovation Awards and The Toronto International Film Festival. He corporate clients include McFarlan Rowlands Insurance Brokers, North Star Windows and Doors and digital agency tbk Creative.

Seating is limited to this special event. Join us on July 30th for this exclusive webinar by clicking here.

You might remember the days spent at summer camp as being some of the most fun you’ve ever had. You developed skills you didn’t think you had and met some pretty cool people. However, some of these memories fade during the year when you’re not at camp.

Companies that have an extremly seasonal sales cycle, like football teams, golf stores, and mountain biking suppliers, all have the same challenge of keeping customers engaged during the off season. There are a few ways to do this, but we’ve found one camp in Connecticut is using audio branding to keep the memories alive.

Buck’s Rock Gong

Buck’s Rock Creative and Performing Arts Camp is a unique place where campers get a chance to learn all sorts of creative skills, like acting, graphic design, and glass blowing. The camp has many rituals including putting on two fully produced musicals and trips off campus to see the Boston Pops.

As a former music counsellor at the camp, one of the memories I have is the hearing the sound of the camp gong. The camp gong isn’t an ordanary gong as it’s shaped like a giant cooper ring (see picture).

The gong itself is used to signal the time for certain events, like meals and put-to-bed time. On a typical day, you would hear the gong five or six times. As you can imagine, it gets burned into your mind as a camper or staff member.

The leaders at Buck’s Rock decided to take the sound of the gong and create a ringtone for anyone to download. Once you download the sound to your phone, everytime you get a call you will be reminded of camp.

Because of its functionaliy, developing a ringtone creates a way for memories to extend into the rest of the year. As long as you have good memories of the place associated with the sound, this will cause you to want to go again or share your experience. What more in case, the sound of the gong is so unique that I wouldn’t be surprised if people started asking you what that sound was, further extending the marketing reach of this audio brand asset to new people.

Overall, this approach fits our criteria for a great audio brand. So, good on you Buck’s Rock for taking the audio branding route!

Over the years, Canada has produced some pretty good beer. Many of these breweries have built an impressive brand. Some have gone international and others have stayed local.

In recent days, London welcomed a new player to the game – Forked River Brewing. Their design agency Honey Design has done a wonderful job on their visual identity and we expect great things from them in the future.

Looking at another local brewery, Steam Whistle Brewing (Toronto), we see another great brand who’s really found a place in the market. I wanted to feature them here as they’ve also done a great job in creating an audio brand.

First, they’ve captured the origins of the company’s headquarters, which was originally a roundhouse for trains to switch directions, in it’s audio logo of a train steam whistle. This creates a natural congruency to their brand. As we’ve talked about in the past, this is vital to building a strong audio identity.

The next thing that Steam Whistle did was leverage this sound in other areas of their business. For example, when you call up the company to book a tour you’ll be greeted with the Steam Whistle audio logo. As well, at the end of the tour you’ll have a change to turn on a real steam whistle in the brewery – neat!

Steam Whistle has also developed their sound even further as you’ll hear in the commercial below.

Again, this commercial shows the commitment that they have to consistency and building trust through congruent sounds. This has helped Steam Whistle expand outside of Ontario and to the West coast of Canada. I suspect with their approach to marketing we’ll see them grow futher and show the world what good beer and brands are all about.

For many cities design can plan a role in helping to grow a metropolitan area by making things simpler and helping people live better lives. And as your city grows it becomes important to do two things:

1. Create an image or brand for your city
2. Move people to where they need to go as quickly as possible

For a large city like New York or Toronto this can present some challenges. If you thought it was hard to build a brand for a company of a thousand people try to build one for millions. This is because a significant part of how people perceive your brand is how people represent the brand itself. Good design goes a long way in helping both tourists and locals communicate in a consistent way.

Recently New York City redesigned their parking signs to make them easier to read and follow. This helps the locals, but also for visitors it makes the city more friendly and helpful.

The Art of Moving People

When you first visit a large city one of the first experiences you will have is on the rapid transit system so it seems important to make it easy to navigate. Cities that use smart design use a combination of visual and audio cues to help people move to where they need to go. In many cases this has created an image for the city such as the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) three note ding, New York’s “Stand clear of the closing doors” and London’s Underground “Mind the gap”. Check out the videos below to see and hear what I mean.

TTC Three Note Ding (start of video)

New York MTA

London Underground

A World Outside

Now, looking outside the city’s limits, some do a significant amount of advertising to get people to visit. This makes perfect sense because the more money that goes into a city the more taxes get paid and then more services can be created. But advertising alone won’t get people to visit your city – you need to give people a reason to visit. Showing off the culture and community is a good start.

If you’ve ever been attracted to a foreign accent you’ll know that music and sound are powerful tools for communicating emotion and displaying culture. The City of Vienna and its tourism board a few years back decided to create their very own audio brand. The audio brand for Vienna is used across many of its marketing channels including, on-hold, in videos and on the radio. This helped Vienna tap into their history of being a great music centre but also helped to show off their culture as well.

Smart cities of the future will continue to help those whole live in the city lead better lives but also help newcomers feel right at home. Providing great design will help get you there.

I wish I had one of these bears to scare away the monsters in my closet.

Last December we had the opportunity to work with filmmaker Phillip Barker on short film called Malody. The work is one of Baker’s finest and was an official selection to the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.

Set inside a roadside diner, a sick woman meets herself as a little girl in the reflection of a mirror. The diner is built within a large wooden wheel and is literally rolled through a studio. As the world turns upside down, the changing gravitational pull creates chaos and sets off a fateful chain of events.

TreBrand provided sound design services for this film. Creating the sound FXs was challenging in that there were a lot of organic sound but also many sounds that needed a bit of a combined texture to get the right sound. Below is the trailer for the film.

If you are like most people over the weekend you spent a fair bit of time watching the Olympics. Of course with most big events comes big advertising. The frustrating thing because this event takes place over two weeks is that you’ll be seeing the same ad many times.

So, my question to marketers is why aren’t we doing more sequential advertising? Just so we are using the same definition, sequential advertising is a multi-stage TV or radio spot (I guess other mediums can be involved too). Think of it like an episodic commercial. I think particularly for an event like the Olympics this could work really well to increase engagement over the entire event.

As advertisers we need to think more like a hit TV series producer. How can we keep people excited to watch the next episode? Maybe you could show the evolution of a brand building up to its greatness like an Olympian.

Anyways, the point is that we should be able to make commercials that are exciting to watch over the life of the campaign instead of just the first appearance of the spot.

This weekend we had the chance to visit our friends from Ryerson University who have developed the Emoti-Chair.

What is the Emoti-Chair?

Well, it’s part back massager and part communication tool. It was originally designed to help deaf and hard of hearing persons to feel and thus hear films. You can find out more about the Emoti-Chair by visiting the Center for Learning Technologies site.

I encourage you to get involved in any type of research that matters to you. Get out there folks and do something awesome.

Over the years there have been many advertising campaigns that have come and gone. We thought it would be fun this week to look at some of the campaigns that have stood the test of time. Below are our favourite marketing campaigns that have been around for at least two years.

What have been some of your favourite long lasting commercials?

MasterCard “Priceless”

Budweiser “This Bud’s For You”

Progressive Insurance “Flo”

Capital One “What’s In Your Wallet”

Wiser’s Canadian Whiskey “The Wiserhood”

Energizer “They Keep Going”

When is the last time you tried something new? I mean really new?

Trying new is tough. You don’t know what to expect or how to react. There are no models to follow or conventions to help you out. That’s what comes with trying the new.

Commonplace is boing and the factories are closing both literally and fugitively. You want job security? Lead the way. That’s your reward for conquering the new.