Fourth Element

08/11/2012

Spent the day at the Inbound Marketing UK conference in London. Here's my brief overview of the day. http://bit.ly/QpySsG

17/08/2012

4th elementccc

Revised and updated, check out our Creating Communities Through Content ebook.

Creating Communities Through Content – How

15/08/2012

http://bit.ly/MyLs5L

Looking to get started in branded content or content marketing? Here are eight simple thought starters to get the creative juices flowing! http://bit.ly/MyLs5L

09/08/2012

Hot off the press (or slightly warm, depending on where you live and when you read this!) the latest issue of Trust The Leaders for our client Smith, Gambrell & Russell, LLP.

11/03/2011

The Process (a.k.a. Designing The Stop Sign Video) - ORIGINAL

Love this video highlighting what happens when corporate America is given the task of designing the STOP sign. I'm sure all our agency and client friends can relate!

What if there were no stop signs, and a major corporation was charged with inventing one? They'd brief their agency and let them do it. Sorta. Welcome to corporate creativity, where groupthink and endless revisions help good ideas get executed.

20/01/2011

Rethinking Brand Positioning in a Nation of Narcissists - Advertising Age - DigitalNext

An interesting perspective here on how – in the new world of social media – brands need to start behaving like people in order to be noticed and welcomed into a consumer's world. Content, conversations and community are again at the core of any relationship.

If every person wants to be a brand and every brand wants to be a person, where does that leave marketing?

21/12/2010

Great catchphrase or motto all creative teams should remember. Yes, you can have it great. Yes, you can have it cheap. And yes, you can have it fast. But you can't have all three! That came courtesy of one of our fave photographers, Chris Stanford.

21/12/2010

Hot off the press and still warm (well, almost!) the new issue of Smith, Gambrell & Russell law firm's Trust The Leaders magazine

17/11/2010

Photographing lawyer Ernest Greer for the Georgia Chamber of Commerce in Buckhead on Monday.

13/10/2010

Great visit to the Georgia Chamber of Commerce today to discuss exciting new communications piece for end of year.

06/10/2010

Walton Press: Welcome To Walton Press

The new revamped Walton Press website went live late last week. Some cool new features, a little video here and there and Alan's stylish design combined to make a nice little upgrade!

Established in 1995, The Cherokee Ledger-News has been Cherokee County’s most trusted local community news source for more than 15 years.

01/10/2010

Big thanks to everybody who attended and helped out at our Shooting For Success in Social Media event at the very swish Mansion Hotel in Buckhead yesterday. We were thrilled with that 92 people braved the rain and notorious Atlanta traffic to make our 8am start. Looking forward to doing it again soon!

23/09/2010

Titus Sports Academy News

The September edition of the Titus Sports Newsletter went out today. It features some inspirational success stories and a host of fitness and nutritional tips to help you live a stronger, healthier life. There's also a rather interesting new blog. Please feel free to check it out. Comments are welcome but please keep them clean since my wife and kids read it!

Stories and articles surrounding athlete development and living healthier lives.

17/09/2010

We played the inaugural "three-putt" classic - hosted by Fourth Element and our ad agency partner here in Atlanta, three. The nine-hole mini-course meandered its way through the creative and account management areas, past the men's restroom, through the lemon lounge and into the foyer. Michael won in a sudden-death play-off, although the victory was tainted by controversy when he introduced the outdated "stymie" rule in the middle of the extra hole! That's what happens when you let the organizer and the course designer play in the event!

31/08/2010

Starting work on the new Play Better Golf iPad app - watch this space. Good to get back to creating good quality golf content.

28/08/2010

Top 42 Blogs | Top 42 Content Marketing Bloggers | Junta42

It's against our principles to toot our own horn too much on this page, but our Fourth Element marketing blog recently was ranked 106th in Junta42's list of top marketing blogs. Not a big deal? Well, we only started the blog a couple of months ago, only the top 400 or so were listed and we finished within striking distance of mega marketing guru Seth Godin, who ranked 96th!

The Junta Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs list highlights the best bloggers on the web discussing content marketing.

21/08/2010

"How to Werk. Tips from Collaboration Experts." Great result of a great collaboration. A great read!

one of our trusted advisers, Scott Lukas from Dosage Consulting, recently launched an ebook on how agencies can strategically collaborate with each other to create great client work. Essential reading in an age when multi-agency projects are becoming increasingly prevalent.

20/08/2010

Chris Stanford

One of our fave photographers, Chris Stanford, launched his new website today and it's great! If you're looking for a stellar portrait photographer or video director with zero attitude and who is super easy to work with, Chris is The Man!

17/08/2010

When we arrived at Tommy Hilfiger's sprawling Connecticut mansion for a magazine photoshoot, we were greeted by Jimi Hendrix and Dylan, the fashion designer's French bulldogs! Turns out Hilfiger is a big 70s rock aficionado and pop art from such luminaries as James Gill and Andy Warhol adorned his sumptuous home.

16/08/2010

home - JWT.com

Given that online "search" seems to have become embedded in our culture, expect to see many companies adopting Google-style search engine or filter-based capabilities on their website home pages to give consumers the choice of how how they interact with a brand. Check out the J Walter Thompson site for a glimpse of where the online world could be moving to next.

Congratulations to JWT New York, JWT London, SCPF Barcelona & JWT Bangkok for the 3 Silver & 4 Bronze Lions in Film, Filmcraft & Titanium

16/08/2010

Ernie Els Callaway FT-iQ Driver TV Commercial

Evidence that great corporate content doesn't have to have five-star production values to hit our captivation checklist of being: 1. entertaining; 2. educational; 3. exclusive; 4. providing value to a customer beyond the use of the product is the behind-the-scenes video we shot for Callaway during the filming of a series of TV commercials with Ernie Els. No need to ask what got more hits on YouTube - the real FT-iQ Driver ad or our fly-on-the-wall video footage!

Behind the scenes at a Callaway FT-iQ Driver shoot with Ernie Els at The Bear's Club, Jupiter Island, Florida.

14/08/2010

Junta42 Content Marketing blog: 7 Reasons Print Will Make a Comeback in 2011

Very interesting post here about how print is making a marketing comeback (did it ever really go away?) Anyhow, the gem of a line from this link is how one company wanted to leverage print as something new in their marketing – priceless!

Okay...there, I said it. You'll find no greater supporter of online content marketing than me, but marketers and agencies are talking up print for 2011. Yes, in the era or iPads and Apps, there is still a role for print....

29/07/2010

Creatives at a Crossroads

Interesting point of view here on how the proliferation of free content on the web is forcing writers and editors out of the industry. Perhaps if companies like Yahoo and AOL led with good quality features and investigative stories instead of dumbed-down drivel like "Top-10 ways to tell if your man is cheating", people would start to value the content creation process again.

If the only real option left is to work in advertising, shilling Shrek 11, why would anyone bother? Certainly, people don't fantasize about moving to LA to make viral Pampers commercials.

21/07/2010

EverBank: Daily Pfennig

Proof that you don't need a huge marketing budget to create a compelling content experience comes in the form of The Daily Pfennig - the blog of currency exchange expert Chuck Butler. Even if dollar spots and cable trades are gobbledygook to you, Chuck's daily appraisal of the currency market is a compelling read. Great insight, authority, humor and some nice personal touches make this a blog model worth copying.
http://www.dailypfennig.com/

21/07/2010

Interesting chat in the office today with interactive producer and digital strategist Mac Randall about whether social media has gone too far. Have we reached a point where it is easier to blast a company on Facebook or Youtube about poor service or a poor customer experience than to simply pick up the phone and call customer service and deal with it privately?

21/07/2010

Adobe to add iPad app-creation tools to InDesign | Publishing | Creative Notes | Macworld

The launch of the iPad must have had thousands of coders, developers, interactive designers and digital content strategists wringing their hands at the prospect of all those app fees that would shortly be making their way to them. Unfortunately, Adobe has taken the wind out of their sails - and their sales - with the addition of an iPad creation app to its Indesign software.

http://www.macworld.com/article/152812/2010/07/indesign_ipad.html

Adobe's new tools allows designers to create interactive magazines in InDesign that can be output as apps for mobile devices.

20/07/2010

I Write Like

OK, so just for kicks, I decided to type in several paragraphs of Alexandre Dumas' famous novel The Count of Monte Cristo into the writing analysis window at www.iwl.me to see what would happen. Apparently, Dumas writes like James Joyce. Not sure which of the two epic writers would be more disconcerted by that!

Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.

17/07/2010

Old Spice, Isaiah Mustafa Storm Viral Chart - Advertising Age - Digital: Viral Video Charts

Love the idea of Old Spice reinventing itself on the web and, more specifically, through social media. "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" featuring former NFL wide recever Isaiha Mustafa is currently top of Ad Age's Viral Video Chart. Kudos to Proctor and Gamble for occupying four of the top-10 spots in the chart last week. See the top-10 videos here:

Old Spice dominates the Viral Chart this week with, driven by video responses recorded by Isaiah Mustafa.

17/07/2010

IPad's Early Adopters Are Gazing at the Ads -- for Now - Advertising Age - Digital

Digital advertising on the iPad platform seems to be producing deep levels of engagement with viewers/readers. This is not so much an endorsement of the power of online versus print, but proof that advertising, when presented as an entertainment experience instead of a sales message, still works!

The first advertisers on Apple's iPad are enjoying enormous engagement rates with their ads. Can it last?

17/07/2010

Attention all budding writers. Go to: www.iwl.me and paste an example of your writing into the window. The site analyzes your copy and instantly tells you which famous author's writing style your copy most closely resembles. The worrying thing for us was that it told us that our art editor Alan wrote like Hemingway, but when our writer/editor Nick pasted in his latest blog, he was told he would need to add pictures!

17/07/2010

Printing's Alive

If you thought that creating enagaging and entertaining marketing videos was only for corporate giants like Nike, you have to check out Pazazz Printing's promotional video. Whoever wrote the script is a genius. Best of all, it's the CEO playing the starring role. I was hooked from the first line..."People think it's magic you know. They think the stuff just appears by waving a f***ing wand!"

Pazazz presents one Print Fanatic and his team who love printing! This film was based on Steve Delahoyde's film "Regrets: Boxes" which can be seen here coudal.com/boxes.php Steve is a filmmaker with Coudal Partners in Chicago (coudal.com)

17/07/2010

Tim Tadder: Advertising Photographer

Tim Tadder is one of the best advertising photographers in the business. He's too expensive now for some of our editorial shoots, but a few years ago when he was still building his reputation and we could talk him into flying coach halfway across the country with the lure of a willing portraitee and a free dinner, he produced some stellar images for our publications. Check him out here.

Tim Tadder is an advertising photographer in southern California, specializing in creating dramatic photographs of people, sports, action and concepts. Tadder uses location photography combined with lighting effects to create truely unique images.