Can You Own a Holiday?

Coca-Cola and Christmas. Hallmark and Valentine's Day. Cadbury and Easter. And now, Spaghetti Warehouse and National Lasagne Day.

Our innovative social media promotion for the Spaghetti Warehouse restaurant chain, effectively branded July 29 as National Lasagne Day.

Spaghetti Warehouse is a regional Italian-American casual dining chain with 20 locations in nine different states, headquartered in Irving, TX. They have been in business since 1972 and came to our agency this year looking for guidance on how to enter the social media realm and embrace new trends in the digital advertising age.

Our agency was able to establish the Spaghetti Warehouse brand on a variety of social media platforms and crafted a social media strategy to gain new consumer awareness and increase trial of their brand. Social media offered a cost-efficient way of conducting advertising campaigns while also exposing awareness of the Spaghetti Warehouse brand to a new consumer demographic.

Utilizing the offer of Free Lasagne for Spaghetti Warehouse Facebook Fans, we generated over 5,000 fans for the page within 48 hours. (Click to visit page)

The promotion was picked up by national trade publications, such as Chain Leader (Click to view article), regional news networks such as the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and a wide variety of popular blogs such as Gizmodo, one of the top 5 most-read blogs on the internet.

And it all began by building a brand presence of Facebook and Twitter. And by offering a lot of free pasta.

Find Your Purpose

By Jason Acquisto - Director MZD Interactive

“Are you drifting through life? What’s your purpose?”

The man in the video is not preaching at me. He’s just asking questions.

“Have you really asked yourself the question ‘why am I here?’?”

He’s passionate, articulate and compelling.

“I want you to know that you do have a purpose.”

The man is David Greene, Pastor of Purpose of Life Ministries in Indianapolis. The video is his personal greeting for those visiting their website www.PurposeofLifeMinistries.com

“In a day and age where the unemployment rates are excessive and crime is on the rise,” says Pastor Greene,

“Our ministry is driven to help individuals center their focus during difficult times.”

“We truly believe that when you walk in God’s purpose for your life, you are a happier person.”

In 2009, Pastor Greene approached MZD and shared his vision for the church. Recognized as the oldest Black Baptist Church in Indiana, the church – located at 3705 Kessler Blvd North Drive, had thrived under their previous name (Second Baptist). The dynamic new focus of the church is to assist individuals from all walks of life in finding their own life’s purpose.

The exciting new direction of the church called for a complete “re-branding” process.

This process is where MZD excelled, creating an identity system (logo, tagline, literature, signage, etc.), PR campaign, media program and an all new website. The new Purpose of Life Ministries brand was unveiled at their annual Watch Night service on New Year’s Eve.

How fitting … a new year. A new beginning. New goals.

Says Pastor Greene, “I believe that we can change the dynamics of our community.”

Is that some kind of New Year’s resolution?

No, it’s something far greater. It’s a whole new purpose.

What’s a Smart Phone and Why Should It Matter to Me?

By Rick Doyle, MZD Media Director

A smart phone has many names. A Droid. an iPhone. a Blackberry, a Palm. It’s the new generation of mobile phones, but it’s much more than that. The smart phone is the harbinger of a new medium. Smart phones make mobile advertising, interactive advertising and highly targeted customer focused communications possible.

What took cable television 20 years to accomplish and the internet 10 years to achieve, mobile media will achieve within the next two to three years. That is, a level of penetration in the market that makes the medium a viable platform for both national and local advertising.

Unlike cable, which took nearly 20 years to wire the majority of U.S. households or the internet, which took 10 years to grow high-speed broadband connections into the home, the mobile “3G” platform is already established. All that is required is the expansion of hardware, the actual phones themselves. Currently, one study indicates 29% of all U.S. adults own a smart phone. Nielsen projects that by mid 2011 that number will reach 50% or 150 million smart phone users.

What happens then? As people become more familiar with the features and capabilities of their mobile devices, they will become more comfortable accessing web content and using their mobile device much like there home computer. They will also become more comfortable with direct to customer communications from companies they do business with. That could be their local grocer, their favorite restaurant, the dealer who services their car. The possibilities are endless and we are only at the forefront of this new medium.

Happy Holidays

Enjoy our gift to you this Holiday Season ...

Holiday Game
click to play

E-mail Deliverability Suffered on Cyber Monday - ClickZ

E-mail Deliverability Suffered on Cyber Monday - ClickZ
By Christopher Heine, ClickZ, Dec 3, 2009

Almost one-quarter of e-mail messages sent on Cyber Monday didn't reach the inbox, according to new data from deliverability services firm Pivotal Veracity. The waves of messages being sent out on one of the busiest e-commerce days of the year resulted in only 76.2 percent of campaigns being successfully delivered. Depending on whose data one looks at, marketers these days generally report deliverability percentages in the 80s and sometimes as high as the mid-90s.

Len Shneyder, a director for Pivotal Veracity, placed blame on an unmanageable glut of messages going out almost simultaneously. He added that the most popular send time was between noon and 1 p.m. Central Daylight Time for Cyber Monday, as well as Thanksgiving weekend as a whole.

"It's not so much a matter of what marketers did wrong individually, but what they did wrong collectively," he explained. "They all sent at what appears to be the same exact time... When volumes go up, [Internet service providers] are forced to take more draconian actions to control the volume of e-mail they are trying to process."

When it came to the four major e-mail services -- AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail -- Schneyder said Hotmail was 7 percent worse than the others on Thanksgiving Day. The report, he said, was based on "thousands of campaigns sent to tens of millions of recipients" between Nov. 23 and Nov. 30. About one-third of the campaigns hailed from retailers, he explained, while the data overall reflects benchmark averages across all the Phoenix, Ariz.-based company's clients.

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