It does now, thanks to the new Moss Wellness Spa. Moss is a unique spa in Arizona as they’re the first “eco-luxury” spa to make their home here. Moss occupies a LEED-certified building (that’s fancy for environmentally friendly) and they employ the use of products that are free of preservatives and harmful chemicals in their treatments. In fitting fashion, our new campaign promoting the opening of Moss stresses the environmental elements that make Moss unique. With the help of Park&Co, and Olson Communications Moss was recently able to open the spa doors to the local community. Look for the latest ads in current and future editions of Arizona Republic’s YES magazine, Scottsdale Magazine, Phoenix Home and Garden, and other notable publications. Visit the website for Moss, and learn more about what a greener shade of serenity can do for you.

In the world of “Web 2.0” the blogger is king. To those of you who might not be sure what a blog is, exactly, let’s have a brief tutorial. Blog is short for web log. In its infancy, blogging was merely a way for people to track their daily activities and for their friends and others in the wilds of the internet to follow them through their stories of everyday activities. Now, blogging is more than just daily minutiae.

Today blogging is a diverse action that can be anything from hardcore news reporting to columns and commentary to a public diary, with content ranging from simple text to rich media. In today’s world of skepticism about almost everything commercial or institutional, blogging offers the people at companies and organizations a voice that cuts through the corporate veil. Lower level employees and C Suite suits alike have a new voice, and are giving brands personalities they never could’ve had otherwise. Blogs are also a valuable resource for providing valuable, relevant content that attracts traffic to sites.

Throughout media and communication, there is nary a place where ads haven’t made a home. Those who work in advertising and marketing are constantly looking for an edge by exploring a medium that the competition hasn’t. From product placement to naming rights, advertisements appear in places many never thought they would. So where’s the next step? It’s probably in your pocket or purse. Your cell phone may be the next revolution in advertising. Right now, a very small portion of advertising budgets are used on what’s called “mobile marketing,” but that’s changing rapidly. According to eMarketer, ad spending on mobile is projected to rise from $4.6 billion this year to $19.1 billion by 2012. Most people will immediately think about this as an invasion of privacy. But is it?

Mobile ads are optional by their nature. You have to personally submit your number in order to receive any messages from the advertiser, creating an opt-in relationship between the sender and receiver of the message. There are other advantages to mobile marketing as well. Mobile allows the message sender to reach the customer on a personal level, often within just a few hundred feet of the store. Posters ask the user to text message a number for a promotion, and the business next door to that bus stop or down the street from that billboard can give you incentive to stop by at just the right moment. In the end, the consumer will determine whether or not this medium can survive. For now, many advertisers believe mobile marketing is the next step in reaching their customers.

DriveTime has just launched its new 30-minute New Hire Orientation video with the help of Park&Co. As the nation’s largest car dealer, DriveTime wanted a fun piece to set them apart from their competition in the eyes of new employees. Our creative team asked Hollywood pro Larry Hartstein to join the party, and together we cooked up three terrific concepts for the agency to show off. Now DriveTime has a fast-paced, high-energy video in the form of an “Entertainment Tonight”-style TV show. The show incorporates smart facts about the company woven into the clever dialogue of the two glamorous hosts, a fun play-by-play broadcast of a typical day on a DriveTime car lot, and a National Geographic style mockumentary using nature speak to describe the way the team works together at the Phoenix home office. Have a look at some highlights from the finished product.

With the recent completion of expansion and remodeling, the Park&Co team was itching to introduce its new Combustible Café to the world. In flammable fashion, Park&Co welcomed our friends from Flypaper.net over for some fresh-brewed coffee, fruit, warm cinnamon buns, and pastries. After introducing the new digs to our guests, they were nice enough to give us a quick tour of their uniquely sticky product. Visit their site, and take a look at what Flypaper.net has to offer. We’re making secret plans for our next shindig, but no worries. We’ll keep you posted.

We’ve turned up the heat around Park&Co lately, with our campus getting a healthy facelift. The second phase of our recent remodel has been completed with the addition of the Fish Bowl Conference room (complete with repurposed lighting from the old James Hotel), the Combustible Café (don’t forget the extinguisher) and Creative Garage (if this place is rockin’, come right on in) as well as sparkling new offices for happy creatives. The Café and Garage are already hot attractions, and have been christened with the first Coffee Klatch and official jam session. Eager to fire up their brains, everyone has moved in to their new permanent homes and are making themselves quite comfy (especially Jon Hrach, who’s the envy of the office with his cool green retro desk). Phase 3 of the hot new look is on the way to the North side of our offices, and will open soon, complete with a new home for our old friend the pool table. Stay tuned for more updates and events as we finish our incendiary upgrades. Check out our Flickr page and take a tour of the new office.

Don’t know about you, but it feels like I’ve been "self-helped" to death. Then I tripped across How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas at SeaTac Airport last week on my way back to Phoenix from Mother’s Day with Mom. Like a sockeye salmon lured by a Flash Rattle, the caution orange/F-16 silver-colored cover caught my eye. I thought, "Here we go, another wonk ready to get my life in order for only $12.95." But remember, I’m a mindless salmon at this point so I keep moving toward the lure, even against my best instincts. Then I spot the naked fat dude jumping for joy beneath the title. Can’t help myself: This is definitely a different book. Curious, I flip through the 254 pages and begin to laugh out loud at the pros. Thankfully, they are short and to the point, embellished by a wonderful assortment of illustrations, photos, graphs and exercises. I’m hooked.

So, now let me dispense with the tired salmon analogy and just talk as the often exhausted, multi-tasking creative ad guy I am. In this unbelievably fast-paced, way-too-much-info-to-comprehend world we swim in (couldn’t help myself), Chris Baréz-Brown shows us how to slow down, chill out, and produce the best Kick-Ass Ideas of our lives. This is a fun and engaging read with loads of exercises that you can do with yourself, company, clients, family, friends etc. It’s the Adderall of self-help books, because he designed it for the attention-deficit creative person in all of us (and yes, that includes you CPAs and engineers out there, too). This book is for everyone that wants to design a career and a life that aren’t mutually exclusive. So slow down, take four hours and ponder the book , and learn how to be creative with what’s around you today instead of what’s alluring tomorrow…that’s about as Zen as I get.

Park&Co entered three projects for Global Water’s “Reality” print campaign and “Water Crisis” video in the 2008 Utility Communicators International Better Communications Competition. Global Water and Park&Co went 3-for-3, winning an award in each category:

• Single Newspaper Ad - Image or Public Relations - “The Writing’s on the Wall”
• Series of Newspaper Ads - Image or Public Relations - The “Reality” Campaign: “The Writing’s on the Wall”, “160,000 People Moved Here Last Year and Not One Brought Water Along” and “Water Recycling Can Seem Expensive, Until You Run Out.”
• Advertising Potpourri - “Water Crisis” Video

The UCI BCC is an annual competition, recognizing and rewarding creative excellence in the art of advertising for the gas, electric, cable, water, and telephone utilities sectors. Judged by peers, the BCC is a prestigious competition which draws entries from utilities of all sizes. The BCC is the oldest awards program for utility communicators.

To view the winning entires, visit the Print Portfolio and the Video Portfolio pages on our website. To learn more about Global Water, visit their website.

A refreshing new trend online is the advent of the micro app: a smaller, simpler version of a web application that takes little time to learn and is usually designed to do only one thing, but do it well. This is benefical to users, who don’t need to invest time into something that may not end up being useful or relevant, and to developers, who don’t have to spend months developing and planning a product that may not be successful. Starting small and building constantly is the smart way to expand on the web.

Here are two examples of micro apps that I use:

Instapaper

Instapaper is a non-social bookmarking site where you can easily save web pages that you want to read later. When first logging into Instapaper, you can choose to define a password or not; your choice determines whether your bookmarked sites will be private.

Your bookmarked sites are comfortably divided into two categories: not read and read. The interface is clean and optimized for Mobile Safari, which makes it pleasant to access your bookmarked sites on the go. Instapaper’s strength is in its simplicity, unlike del.icio.us, whose url I have to Google every time to remember how to spell it.

Foamee

Foamee works in conjunction with Twitter to keep track of who you owe a beer and who owes you a beer. (if you don’t use Twitter yet, refer to Ed’s post, which I think includes one of the best explanations of how Twitter works).

Here’s how Foamee works: First follow @ioubeer on Twitter. Then, in Twitter, type @ioubeer followed by the name of the recipient, followed by your tweet explaining why you own the that person a beer. This will go out as a tweet and will be tracked on your personal page on Foamee.

Here is my Foamee page (As you can see, I owe a few).

You can use Twitter’s text function to send I-owe-yous to Foamee, which works well when you are out at the pub (and broke).

My only complaint with Foamee is there is no way to search for user names, so you are forced to browse through an alphabetical listing or find a person by typing their name in the url (example: http://foamee.com/people/yourtwittername).

This works for coffee also, by using @ioucoffee instead of @ioubeer.

The idea here is that web applications don’t have to be huge, all encompassing products. A good idea, simply and efficiently executed, can be more rewarding to the developer and user.

20 Ads That Shook the World
by James B. Twitchell

Josh Feig rates it 5 out of 5

Advertising in the twentieth century became, over time, an art form not unlike the many others that people enjoy in their everyday lives. In 20 Ads That Shook the World, James B. Twitchell, an author and professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida, examines the growth of advertising through the last one hundred years not just as a vehicle for commercialism, but as a developing art form. Although the beginnings of advertising reach much further back than the twentieth century, it was during these years that it attained its cultural status.

Twitchell begins his examination on the early part of the century with the genius that was P.T. Barnum. Pointing not to a specific ad, but more the man himself and his techniques, Twitchell suggests that Barnum was a natural marketer before they ever existed: the original “carnival barker extraordinaire.” Later, he discusses the artistic merits of early ads for Pear’s soap, and how the ads were the initial cross between popular art and commercialism. Andy Warhol is quoted as saying “To me, business is the highest form of art.” Warhol’s art was often the definition of commercial and is perhaps a descendant of this first crossing of the two paths.

Advertising is discussed as a method for the creation of nonexistent conditions, or situations, simply for the benefit of the producer. Listerine gave us the myth of halitosis, for example, and is the reason why people believe they should even have fresh breath in the first place. The arguments are sound, and make you think hard about the claims that advertising makes about any product, or what type of situation that product helps alleviate.

Some of the ads that Twitchell points to are even more intriguing by virtue of his analysis. Did you know that Coca-Cola created the jolly, red Santa Claus? How about the masculinity of the Marlboro Man or the feminism of the Charlie girl? All of these lasting images are set before us by Twitchell and examined for their merits. He compares them with great works of art as though they belong in such company.

My favorite chapter is about the little Volkswagen Beetle that truly altered the way people look at advertising. Bill Bernbach changed the way people thought about advertising forever through the use of clever tactics that allow the consumer to do the thinking, instead of cramming the idea down their throat.

Overall, this book was an excellent read and definitely draws out some considerable thought on the subject of advertising, where it’s been, where it is, and where it may be going. I recommend this book to anyone who loves or hates advertising, and I think that might cover just about everybody.

“Overwhelming logic by fervent belief is the secret to the power of endorsement.”
James B. Twitchell