We’ve completed our branding assignment today and are pretty pleased with what we delivered. Although you’re going to have to wait until the August 2012 unveiling to see our new logo and brand i.d. suite- and more than another year after that to actually ride the train. Bigelow Advertising and partner Jones Worley also developed and created the wayfinding, signage, advertising and marketing strategy plus the exterior and interior design of the actual light rail car itself.

You already know that the Atlanta Streetcar will connect Centennial Olympic Park to the King Center, touching many intown neighborhoods in between. What you may not know is how high downtown Atlanta’s hopes are for this one way loop with stops at Sweet Auburn Curb Market, Hurt Park, Woodruff Park and 40 other points of interest along it’s 2.6 mile length.

And while advocates of mass transit applaud the route, there are others whose confidence in the project could described as lukewarm at best.

From what we’ve seen we’re positive that the new streetcar is going to be a real amenity for Georgia State University, Grady Memorial Hospital employees and visitors and a real boost for Atlanta tourism. What remains to be seen is how much of a catalyst the streetcar will be to revive the adjacent neighborhoods and small businesses along the route. If the recent nightlife activity on Edgewood and Auburn are any indication, downtown is going to be the next hot address in Atlanta.

Have you tried to create a new brand lately? Over the past year we’ve been involved in five very different branding/rebranding projects. Two in the wine and spirits category, one in hospitality, one in mass transit and the fifth in information and data management. Each has brought the challenges of creating a relevant, memorable brand name in this age of instant information raining down upon our collective head. And from that, we developed a new approach. A proprietary approach earned after spending literally hundreds of hours playing GoDaddy bingo and filling in TESS search fields. But be warned, you best be emotionally prepared for disappointment before embarking down this slippery slope. Tenacity and creativity must walk hand in hand in order to safely get to your objective.

In case you didn’t know, there’s an global business based on registering (poaching) URLs alone. 8 times out of ten the brilliant brand name you’ve dreamed up is already registered as a dot com. Joe in Singapore, Ralph in Cedar Rapids, and Henri in suburban Paris- these fellas literally choose a business category to mess with and then proceed to create every possible relevant URL/brand name that they (and their dictionary) can come up with. GoDaddy even offers a service to help you negotiate the sale of your sought after URL from these poachers who originally bought the URL for only $9.99. And now it could be yours, at a highly marked up rate.

So why aren’t they in our business if there so good at dreaming up cool brand names? Evidently their psychological profiles resemble Lisbeth Salander’s, i.e., it pays better to do what they do, and they don’t have to interface with other human beings.

And once you’re finished with the poachers, you’re not out of the woods yet. Next up is your trademark attorney. And they’re just waiting to heave another wet blanket over that smoldering hot brain baby of yours. (You’ve got to remember that they’re trained to auto-say no.)

Yes, it’s a real accomplishment to successfully name or rename a product or service today. But it comes at a price.

We’ve found many of our clients are baffled by the ever growing array of social media offerings and are not quite sure which ones they should be integrating into their marketing efforts – “Should we tweet?” “Facebook or LinkedIn, or both?” “What’s a Pinterest, and why do I care?”

In an effort to simplify and define what makes one different from another we offer the following:

Twitter – I’m eating #sushi.
Texting – I <3 sushi
Facebook – I Like sushi.
YouTube – Here I am eating sushi.
LinkedIn – My skills include sushi eating.
Spotify – Now listening to “Sushi & the Banshees”
Pinterest – Here’s a nice sushi recipe.
WordPress- I blog about sushi.
Tumblr – I’m a college student who likes sushi.
Flickr – Here’s some pix I shot of sushi.
Cloob – I’m an Iranian who likes sushi.
G+ – I’m a Google employee who eats sushi.

We hope this helps with your social media strategy in 2012!

I’ve always enjoyed the drive up through the North Georgia Mountains. So I welcomed the opportunity to present our capabilities to a prospective new client located in historic Habersham County. In fact, it was an historic mountain water springhouse that was the catalyst for my visit.

Built in the early 1800s by slaves, the springhouse most recently had served as the source of Blue Ridge Mountain Spring Water. A long time client of Bigelow Advertising. After 25 years of successful bottled water operations throughout metro Atlanta, Blue Ridge sold to competitor Crystal Springs, who promptly shut down the bottling operations.

The original owners of the property, the Lovell family, then reacquired the springhouse and decided to put it back to work. They had been using the cool, clear natural spring water in the family’s distillation business for nearly 150 years. In fact, when the Lovell boys ceased distilling operations in 1964 they were flat-bedding over a quarter million bottles of sour mash clear corn spirits throughout the South. These historic tidbits, and a whole lot more, were told during a classic Southern seven course lunch at the home of Carlos Lovell in Clarksville.

Now in his 80s, Carlos had spent the last 30 years developing property throughout Habersham County. Now that he had “been there and done that” he wanted to get back into the distilling business. Enlisting his daughter Carlene to handle the permits, licensing and myriad of details that come with such an endeavor, they set to work building Ivy Mountain Distillery in Mount Airy. By the time 800 new American oak barrels arrived at the distillery in August, operations had commenced. First up was Apple Brandy, followed by sour mash corn whiskey.

After dessert, we set aside our sweet tea to sample some of the famed last batch of 1964. I think I said something as profound as “Wow!” Carlos claims the secret is in the water. Personally, I think that 150 years of family heritage counts for something. The package design we created attempts to capture that sense of history, time and place.

We’re pretty excited that a new product Bigelow Advertising helped create has finally hit the shelves in Georgia. New Mini Wines are imported by client and partner Prism Wine from the South of France and come in three different varietals – a red, a white, and a rose’. The red is 100% Merlot while the white is comprised of 50% Sauvignon Blanc grapes and 50% Viognier grapes. The rose’ is a Cinsault based wine.

Targeting young women, Mini wines are light in alcohol and in calories, with each wine having a typical alcoholic volume around 11% and containing approximately 87 calories per glass (120 ml). This is approximately 25% fewer calories than found in a typical glass of wine. The lower alcohol and sugar levels are achieved naturally in the vineyards. We’re just getting started with the promotional activities so keep an eye out and a wine glass handy.

Wow. This kind of brand piracy wouldn’t last 15 minutes in the West. I just had to “re-blog” this from Ellen Shapiro’s blog at Imprint. Interesting article on counterfeit packaging. “Counterfeiters avail themselves of excellent scanning and printing technology; they put the care into it because for them it’s like printing money.”

Read more: The Ultimate Brand Extension? — Imprint-The Online Community for Graphic Designers

Courtney Alexis Stodden has nothing on us. And we certainly wouldn’t be the first 26 year old to go under the knife for a little cosmetic surgery. But just as the shoemaker’s children run around barefoot, we here at Bigelow have been talking about updating our web site for well over two years. And I guess that’s a good thing. Letting the “paying work” take the front burner is pretty typical in any business.

First of all, we wanted to perform a little nip and a tuck to our way too long URL address: bigelowadvertising.com. Now you can find us at the shorter and sleeker bigelow.co URL address. Those of you prone to habit need not worry. Typing in the longer bigelowadvertising.com will still get you where you want to be.

Other than that, our main objective was to create an online presence that genuinely reflects the personality of the company. Easier said than done.

“Just what does this company stand for?” We discovered that what’s so intuitive for us to do with your brand was a real challenge when it came to defining our own. It was apparent early on that the new web site wasn’t going to be a simple exercise of just freshening up the graphic design.

In the end we decided that we should let our work, our actual output, define us. After all, it’s what we do. And it shows how we think and hints at the process we take to get to a final advertising answer.

We also wanted a web site that was easy to update, navigate and keep fresh with the latest news and views of the ad industry.

Then, just like that 26 year old celebrity, we started looking over the rest of ourselves a little more critically. “Maybe a little brand augmentation in the trademark area?” suggested some staffers. After all the old logo had been around for over a decade. And the business has changed.

The new Bigelow Advertising logotype is meant to reflect that change. The recession literally knocked our serifs off, leaving a trimmer, “digital age” sans serif font. The tri-square, tri-color icon visualizes our strategic and integrated approach- whether that be through traditional advertising or guerilla tactics and social media- all applied with laser-like focus to the objective at hand. Growing your business.

So I guess we have a lot of new news.

New logo. New web address. New web site. And a new attitude. We hope you like our new look.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” seems to be Mark Zuckerberg’s latest working philosophy. And thank God. Many of us here in Agencyland have been wondering when they’d take up Google’s good example and actually start to work with us.

“When it comes to creativity and brands and the advertising world, there’s nobody better from a strategic perspective and creative perspective than the agency community,” says Blake Chandlee, VP Global Agency Relations at Facebook.

Thanks Blake! We’ve had to be creative in order to work with those postage-stamp sized ad units Facebook has been offering us over the last couple years. These mini-billboards, with their 7 – 11 word limit, are admittedly some of the most targetable ad units in the biz. And that alone almost makes up for their serious lack of real estate to communicate a message other than “click here.”

Facebook has become a behemoth with 500 million users. To put that into perspective, some of the largest TV networks reach only 98 million households. And the average Facebook user has 130 friends. That’s a lot of potential for word-of-mouth advertising. Undoubtedly the most effective form in our industry.

Facebook has hired Leo Burnett Chicago to create a new ad unit where advertisers will be able to ask users questions. The user response then will show up in the user’s news feed.

I guess the objective was to find a replacement for all those Farmville and Mafia Wars updates that we all came to love?

I ask who in their right mind would want their poll responses published on their Facebook homepage? Aren’t the current “like” postings embarassing enough?

Am I the only one who finds himself scrubbing his Facebook page clean of these weak moment clicks. “Tom likes so and so,” equals “Tom has too much time on his hands and spends way too much time on Facebook.”

The other big news in Saturday’s news release was that Facebook users will be able to click to “like” an ad, answer questions in a poll, respond to an event ad, accept free product samples and watch videos.

In other words, all the same stuff advertisers and users can do right now, given a little creativity and an understanding of the medium. So why wait the two months while the new ad units are being tested with big brands like Hallmark, Sealy, Walgreens and Ronald McDonald House Charities? We’d be happy to help you introduce your brand to those 500 million Facebook users today.

Bigelow Advertising turned 26 years old today. We’re now officially older than some of the employees. I never would have predicted that on that cool, damp morning at 1447 Peachtree Street on April 1st, 1985.

While a lot has changed, a lot has stayed the same. The biggest changes occurred in technology (and directly related to that, the media arena.) In the creation of print (as well as in other related traditional mediums) there’s simply fewer people between the idea and it’s final execution. And there’s fewer people looking at print.

And that’s because there’s far more interesting, immediate and interactive places to get information these days. From smart phone apps to mobile text sites, online video to the Internet in general, there’s simply more places than ever to run (and track) messages.

It’s not called the Information Age for nothing. Ads are now placed with pinpoint accuracy. Chances are that if your web surfing habits include visiting wind surfing and organic food-related web sites, you’re looking at wind surfing and organic food-related ads on the right side of your Facebook profile.

But ad placement is only part of a successful formula. The thing that hasn’t changed is that for an ad to be effective it still has to cut through the clutter and connect emotionally. Digital may have changed the way we physically create advertising, and even where we see advertising, but it hasn’t changed how we make advertising work.