Adams & Knight, Inc. was honored with ten Mercury Awards at the Southern Connecticut Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America’s (PRSA) 2011 Mercury Award Ceremony, which was held June 23 in North Haven, Conn.

“We’re thrilled to be recognized in so many different categories — everything from interactive and social media to media relations and crisis communications,” said Gary Griffin, director of public relations for Adams & Knight. “More and more clients truly understand the value of an integrated communications program.”

Adams & Knight received Gold Mercury Awards for its integrated campaign for CHET (Connecticut’s 529 program), its special events management for the CHET Dream Big! Award Ceremony and its marketing campaign for Hartford Stage’s Antony & Cleopatra.

The agency was presented with another seven Silver Mercury Awards for a wide array of programs and clients, including media relations for the Sun & Ski Sports’ Bike Samaritan Program, a customizable brochure for Symmetry Partners, a webinar for the Council for Disability Awareness (CDA), a by-lined article for Sun Life Financial’s Employee Benefits division, research/promotion of the CDA’s consumer attitudes survey, crisis communications for Shiloh Church and a social media campaign for Hartford Stage’s Antony & Cleopatra.

About the Southern Connecticut Chapter of the PRSA

The Southern Connecticut Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America was formed to advance the public relations profession and the PR professional. The chapter represents a diverse group of mid- to senior-level professionals who are committed to enhancing the practice of public relations in Southern Connecticut. Professionals in the chapter represent advertising agencies, independent consultants, business and industry, government, hospitals and healthcare organizations, professional associations, and education and nonprofit organizations. http://www.prsact.org

Adams & Knight, Inc. was honored with two Gold Bell Awards during the 42nd Annual Publicity Club of New England Ceremony. The 2011 Bell Ringer Awards Ceremony, which recognizes and honors excellence and achievement in the communications and public relations profession, was held at The Westin Waltham Boston on June 7.

“We strive to deliver effective, results-focused public relation strategies for all of our clients,” said Gary Griffin, director of public relations for Adams & Knight. “It’s an honor to have our efforts recognized by such an established organization.”

The two Gold Bell awards were presented for the agency’s crisis communications campaign for  Shiloh Christian Church and for its local television news placement for Sun & Ski Sports. The agency also received a Merit award for its response to breaking news for KBE Building Corporation.

About the Publicity Club of New England

Founded in 1949, The Publicity Club of New England is the region’s oldest not-for-profit public relations trade organization. The Publicity Club strives to promote and encourage involvement in the communications industry and specifically the professions of public relations, promotions and marketing. Additional information can be found on the Club’s website at www.pubclub.org.

Adams & Knight, Inc. was honored with three Best of Industry Awards at the 57th Annual Advertising Club of Connecticut Awards Show, held May 10 at the Crowne Plaza in Cromwell, Connecticut. The prestigious awards were presented to the agency for its work with Hartford Hospital, NewAlliance Bank and Mystic Seaport in the categories of healthcare, financial and retail marketing. The agency was honored with a total of 24 awards.

“It’s an honor to be acknowledged by the Advertising Club of Connecticut,” said Jill Adams, principal of Adams & Knight. “We’re proud of the results that we generate for our clients and to be recognized for our creative work in the agency’s specialty areas of healthcare, financial and non-profit services.”

More than 70 awards were given out over 47 categories. Adams & Knight’s award-winning work spanned a wide range of advertising categories, including consumer outdoor signage and transit, consumer posters, consumer interactive, B2B magazine, radio, public service, television, and public service posters and logo design.

Adams & Knight was also recognized for its work for Seven J’s Farm, Diversified, Masonicare, Bike Walk CT and Canton Raptor Care.

About the Advertising Club of Connecticut
The Advertising Club of Connecticut, founded in 1913, is the largest professional association in the state, serving advertising and marketing professionals. More than 500 members belong to the Advertising Club of Connecticut. For more information, visit www.adclubct.org.

BancorpSouth is in the midst of a small-business blitz: It is training hundreds of employees—from branch managers to commercial loan officers—on how to make sales calls and running a commercial on television and online to let business owners know what it has to offer.

One way the commercial tries to grab attention is by showing the action from an unusual perspective: It’s as if the viewer is looking over the shoulder of someone using an iPad.

In the 30-second spot, the screen starts out completely black. Then, a couple of hands appear and begin clicking and tapping to create images, expand windows and move icons around, much like one does on an iPad.

“All of this ties into touchscreen technology, obviously with the tablets that are out there these days. We thought that was kind of a cool approach,” says Randy Burchfield, director of corporate marketing for the $13.5 billion-asset bank in Tupelo, Miss.

The commercial is one of four in BancorpSouth’s advertising campaign. Each one focuses on a different topic, such as personal banking or wealth management. But they all use the same approach, focusing on a pair of busy hands.

“What if you could create a bank that’s just right for your business?” a voiceover asks in the small-business spot, as a woman’s hand does a quick tap to make a check appear.

A scanner pops up, and she drags the check to it. Accompanying the action, the voiceover plugs “easy-to-use business tools to manage your cash flow, like Express Deposit.”

Then she moves an image of a banker to the center of the screen and clicks a phone icon as if she’s going to call him via Skype. Here the voiceover talks about “a special relationship with a banker, who can make decisions locally, quick and customized for you.”

Stone Ward, an ad agency in Little Rock, Ark., created the campaign. The creative concept, with the hands moving as if operating a tablet computer, arose from the idea of customizing the banking experience, says Lindsey Ingram, an account manager for the agency. “It was like you were playing with a touchscreen tablet. You kind of just pick and choose your photos and you build it the way that you want it, and everything’s simple.”

The high-tech theme has the added benefit of helping the bank appear progressive, Ingram says.

The bulk of exposure for the small-business spot is actually not on television, but online. It appears on sites frequented by business owners, including Bloomberg.com and CNN.com.

The campaign also includes banner ads that link to a special landing page with short videos about the bank’s small-business products.

Mandy Mitchell, retail banking sales manager for BancorpSouth, says the effort includes specialized training for about 400 employees. In a two-day workshop, they ran simulated small businesses to gain a better understanding of the challenges that owners face. A new phase of the training will focus on figuring out which businesses to pursue and how to get time with the owners.

Patrick Dugan, associate creative director at Adams & Knight in Avon, Conn., says he likes the imagery in the BancorpSouth commercials. “It’s refreshing from the standpoint of you’re not just seeing the typical inside of a bank.”

He also likes that each one uses a different person’s hands and voice to represent various lifestyles. For example, the wealth management spot features a male who is of retirement age.

“I think it is a smart move, because they all kind of look the same,” Dugan says. “The different voices and the different hands sort of help avoid the pitfall of someone thinking they’ve seen that ad already.”

The current buzz around touchscreen tablets works to BancorpSouth’s advantage too, he says.

Of course, there is a risk that such imagery could start to feel “gimmicky” fast, Dugan says.

“But it doesn’t feel like that now, because I don’t feel like I’ve seen a lot of it.”

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Adams & Knight, Inc. was recognized by the Connecticut Chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA) with top accolades for nine of the eleven 2011 Mark of Excellence Awards. The Mark of Excellence Awards are judged by a panel of AMA marketing professionals from across the country and are evaluated based on overall campaign strategy, creative and results.

The Avon-based integrated marketing communications agency was awarded top honors in six categories: Business to Business Campaign, Consumer Marketing Campaign, Event Marketing Campaign, Marketing Research Project, Not for Profit Marketing Campaign and Public Relations Campaign.

“We’re proud of the number of awards that we received on behalf of so many clients and across so many disciplines,” said Jill Adams, president of Adams & Knight. “Most importantly, we’re honored that the American Marketing Association recognized our continued focus on delivering measurable results.”

The AMA panel presented awards for NewAlliance Bank, Sun Life Employee Benefits Group, SPARTA Insurance, Mystic Seaport, the Connecticut Higher Education Trust (CHET) Dream Big! Competition Awards Ceremony, the Council for Disability Awareness (CDA), Hartford Stage’s “Anthony & Cleopatra” Campaign and Shiloh Church.

“The campaigns submitted this year returned impressive results, making the judges’ job harder,” said Aimee Furness, AMA-CT President. “The final scores were very high, setting new benchmarks and, we believe, representative of the great marketing produced by our local marketers.”

So much of the talk these days is about how marketers must adapt to survive in our new digitally driven world. And CMOs are certainly listening. In fact, a recent IBM study of global CMOs found that over 60% expect to continue increasing their interactive/online spending and decrease their allocation to traditional advertising.

No doubt, it’s a brave new world. But the brands that will truly rule in this new world order won’t be led by digital gurus. They’ll be championed by marketing visionaries who advance “interactive” marketing to a new level — where a fusion of tactics powers a new era in brand building.

That advancement to “fusion marketing” will require marketers to stop trailing after digital crazes as well as to move beyond the stereotypes of integrated marketing communications. Here’s what it will take for you to lead your organization in this new cosmos.

1. Beyond “multiple touchpoints” to seamless connections. Too many marketers still plan and measure singular “transactions.” For example: How many people watch the program? Read the magazine? Click the banner? Follow you on Twitter? But today, emails drive people to websites where they watch “TV spots” that drive them to Facebook pages that link to feature articles published in magazines whose ads feature QR codes that take you to YouTube videos.

That requires a new type of marketing planning, one that doesn’t list each tactic on a separate line in the campaign spreadsheet.  Today we need organic strategists — those who can analyze each medium’s specific strengths and synthesize how they can best work together to turn emotion into motion. So stop viewing social media or any media as a “tactic” and recognize it as just another channel in the surround-sound that’s essential to reaching today’s B2B as well as B2C audiences.

2. Beyond Web analytics to integrated analytics. So much of the shift to digital marketing has been driven by the panic to prove ROI. But just because digital marketing is more measurable doesn’t mean it’s more effective on its own. With all the noise in the Websphere, one timeless marketing principle is more timely than ever: People won’t want to talk to you unless they know of you. So if you’re serious about pursuing the new holy grail of “brand engagement,” you’ll also need to be smart about deploying public relations and “traditional” advertising in a fresh way to build brand awareness. And together, we all need to demand—and to develop—better ways of measuring those integrated marketing results than just clicks, likes, fans or followers.

3. Beyond standing out to standing for something. Of course, getting people to know your brand is only the first step. Getting them to care about it takes building trust — something in very short supply these days.  So brands need to be more than memorable. They need to be admirable. That means organizations need to stand for something. And marketers need to reach across the organization to work with those involved in community relations, customer relations, human relations, and every other kind of relations to collaborate on building—and living—the brand.

These are just a few examples of the new levels of fusion thinking that will characterize the next generation of marketing leaders.

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Jill Adams has built her business by helping others build theirs. So ask this CEO of her own integrated marketing communications firm what she’s most proud of, and she rattles off the results Adams & Knight has helped others generate. Like a 31 percent increase in checking accounts. Or a rise in patient volumes seven times the national average. Or a 340 percent boost in Web traffic.

Making things work has always been Adams’s passion…even back when she and her partner Bill Knight were running Adams & Knight out of a cramped attic studio. Both were industry veterans, with experience in successful ad agencies and corporate marketing departments. That was after Adams’s initial stint in one of the most high-stress, high-stakes environments, a congressman’s office on Capitol Hill.

When the team went out on their own in 1988, their dream was to create a silo-free culture where savvy strategies inspired creative solutions. In 2007, they even built their own “hothouse” for these ideas — an environment that’s been featured in CNN.com, the Saturday Evening Post and Fast Company.

Adams & Knight now attracts talented staffers as well as national clients, many of whom are leaders in financial services and health care. Adams & Knight has also gained the attention of numerous industry associations, including the American Marketing Association, whose Connecticut chapter has named the agency Marketer of the Year for five of the last six years.

Key Principles Drive Marketing Success

At Adams & Knight, the strategies are as creative as the work. “Creativity is so much more than clever slogans, eye-popping graphics or cool technology,” says Adams, whose “no fluff” philosophy sets her apart in an industry that often sacrifices results for style.

“We believe there are key principles that are absolutely essential to marketing success,” she says. The firm runs SparkStorm workshops to help C-suite execs agree on a shared vision of success and how it will be measured. That leads to a clear prioritization of audiences and strategic insights into how to turn their emotion into motion. From there, the firm develops a 360-degree engagement plan, which can encompass everything from advertising and public relations to all kinds of Internet and social media connections. Then it produces relevant yet unexpected creative that stands out by standing for something that truly matters to the target audiences.

“What we really specialize in are big ideas that are reinforced at every touchpoint,” explains Adams. “Our specialists get together as a team to develop and implement a cohesive plan for our clients. As a result, their audiences get a consistent message — and they get measurable results.”

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Adams & Knight, Inc., an integrated marketing communications agency, announces the addition of Chief Business Development Officer Felicia Lindau. Lindau will focus on continuing the agency’s rapid growth, particularly in the financial services, healthcare and consumer services sectors.

Lindau’s appointment to the executive team comes at a time of increasing demand for the agency’s strengths in driving measurable results through a strategic blend of advertising, public relations, and digital and social marketing initiatives. Over the past five years, the East Coast-based marketing agency has increased its staff by 50 percent and recently expanded its creative offices, which have been featured in the Saturday Evening Post and Fast Company and on CNN.com (http://www.adamsknight.com/tour.html).

“Felicia knows how to help emerging leaders grow their business. That experience will be extremely valuable not only to our agency, but to our clients,” said Jill Adams, CEO of Adams & Knight. At Adams & Knight, Lindau is charged with bringing on mid-market clients who are looking for a strategic marketing partner to help them take their organizations to the next level.

Prior to joining Adams & Knight, Lindau held leadership roles on the agency teams that helped launch Amazon.com, Excite.com and MSN and that fueled momentum for MasterCard and Compaq. Her career has taken her from Dallas to San Francisco and New York City, where she worked with such leading agencies as FCB, Ammirati & Puris, Inc., Anderson & Lembke, Inc. and TracyLocke. She also founded and eventually sold Sparks.com, a highly successful e-commerce company.

Throughout her career, Lindau has been quoted in Forbes, Entrepreneur, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal on brand-building and e-commerce. She has also appeared on The Today Show, CNN and NPR, and has been a guest lecturer at Stanford Business School.

Adams & Knight, Inc., an integrated marketing communications agency, announces the addition of Chris Spada to its interactive team. Spada, a skilled interactive designer with extensive experience in social media, will help address clients’ increasing demand for cohesive strategies that extend across all communication platforms.

“Chris’ expertise in both application development and in high-level user interface design further expands our team’s capabilities,” states Jim Kieffer, VP of Interactive Strategy. “He has a keen ability to make sophisticated functionality easy to use.”

The Avon-based marketing agency has quickly taken advantage of Spada’s skills, applying his talent to the recently launched Cookies for Heroes website for the Girl Scouts of Connecticut. The user-friendly website promotes the donation of Girl Scout cookies to our troops and invites visitors to nominate military or civilian heroes to a virtual Wall of Heroes. Visitors can also post links to their heroes on Twitter and Facebook and send CookiEmail messages to troops at www.cookiesforheroes.com.

“The Cookies for Heroes campaign is a great example of the power of integrating public relations, social media and digital marketing to connect with your target audiences in a more meaningful way,” states Kieffer.

Spada recently completed his first marathon in October and plans to compete in a triathlon in the future. He studied at Pratt Institute in New York and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communications Design at the Hartford Art School.

The research NewAlliance Bank did for its new branding effort showed that people are far more engaged in banking than they ever have been before.

“They’re paying more attention,” both to their personal spending and to the financial industry itself, says Nancy Benben, director of marketing communications for the $8.4 billion-asset bank in New Haven, Conn. “They’re looking more closely at their statements. They’re reading up on how their bank is doing. They’re listening to the media about what’s happening in the industry.”

This all bodes well for NewAlliance, which is highly capitalized and eager to make loans. And with people being so attuned, its advertising campaign, which had a splashy Super Bowl debut in the bank’s home state, is even more likely to get noticed.

Called “Do Your Thing,” the campaign depicts stories from the perspective of people who could be typical customers, all making big changes in their lives. “They are the heroes of the campaign,” Benben says. “Our goal, our promise to ourselves and our customers, is about how we enable them to thrive. These ads are an expression of that.”

The upbeat song that plays throughout its four television spots is an anthem to personal empowerment. Each opens with the lyrics, “Be yourself. No one else. Do your thing. Do your own thing,” as a montage of scenes rolls by.

One spot shows a woman at home, day and night, focused on her computer screen or huddled over a book. In the background, her husband vacuums, folds laundry and brings her coffee.

“Do something you’ve always dreamed of doing,” a male voice-over says. “While you may have to work at it, you don’t have to do it alone. NewAlliance will be right there by your side,” with people ready to help and money to lend, no matter the goal.

Even “important redecorating,” he says, as the woman hangs her diploma on a wall, smiling husband next to her.

Adams & Knight in Avon, Conn., created the campaign, which also includes a Web site redesign, along with print, radio, outdoor and online components. In choosing stories to present, Jill Adams, the agency’s president, says she wanted partly to highlight situations where people need help, but might not think of going to a bank. The intent is to convey that banks are not just for savings accounts, but also advice.

Mike Moyers, creative director at BLF Marketing in Nashville, Tenn., gives the campaign high marks. Though “very polished,” the ads feel fun and down-to-earth, he says. “I think it does a good job of being folksy yet sophisticated.”

The jingle in the television spots is particularly good, and cleverly underscores the ‘do’ theme, Moyers says. “They do a lot of ‘do-do, do-do, do-do.’ I thought that was a really nice touch.”

The print ads also have some distinctive elements. Instead of tucking the disclosures at the bottom, they are at the top. And in an ad for mortgages, the headline-”Doable”-is vertical.

David Hoke, a partner at BLF, says the “Do Your Thing” theme-which is also NewAlliance’s new tag line-is appealing. He likes that NewAlliance even incorporated the concept into its Web site. Visitors to the site get asked “Ready to do your thing?” They can choose from a menu of personal or business goals.

Hoke says the ads also do a good job of engaging people emotionally.

That is exactly what Adams and Benben wanted. “Banks have not been as effective as they need to be in really connecting to the emotional drivers for customers. It isn’t all about this rational analysis of fees,” Adams says. “Ultimately, you really gain customer loyalty when you can connect to the things that matter most to them. I think that’s what this campaign-and this bank-really do well.”

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