Category Archives: Mortar’s Work

Galaxy Wars

StarwarsApparently Mortar is in the throes of an internal battle for space.  To counter Account Services’ imperialistic cubicle-grab, the Creative Department has established a bulkhead by welcoming three new talents to the team.  Thank GOD one of them has considerable experience battling the Dark Side, or else the fight may have been lost.

Interactive associate creative director Chris Inclenrock hails from Lucasfilm, where he was responsible for the development and art direction of all websites including starwars.com.  Most recently, he was the Director of Interactivity at Francis Ford Coppola presents, where he was perhaps best known for discovering the secret key to the private wine cellar and drinking his way through much of the famous director’s old and rare vintages. 

David Myatt, associate creative director, brings more than 15 years of experience in the creation and design of advertising and branding to the job.  Rumor has it that he can’t spell, but no matter—he’s an art director, and a darn good one.  A fine artist cursed with the brain of a marketer, David has worked for RBG Marketing, TMP Worldwide, and Austin Knight, and has solved the toughest of creative marketing problems for industry leaders like Time Warner, Geico, Nike and AT&T Wireless.

As for designer Michelle Kim—not only has she traveled the globe and then some, but the girl has one unbelievable portfolio.  She’s studied at RISD, Corcoran College of Art and Kenyon College, and holds a second degree in Anthropology from UVa.  Before discovering her true calling, she lived in Paris, taught Kindergarten in Seattle, and flew fighter kites in Bombay.  Oh yeah, did we tell you that she also spent considerable time studying with the Jedi masters?

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Brand positioning

Brands looking for a new position should visit here: Mortar360.

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Top ad agencies

Top ad agency? Check out Mortar.

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PR works: survey of online shoppers provides measure of PR success.

Here’s an idea for those of you PR doubters. Why not ask site visitors how they came to hear of your site?

A recent survey of holiday buyers on a client’s ecommerce Website revealed that nearly one third of site visitors can be attributed to PR activity. Verbatim from the email:

"Just thought you’d like to see the responses to one of the questions I slipped in the survey we ran with 4th quarter buyers:

Question: How did you first hear about XYZ.com?

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And of those who answered other it was pretty much 1/3 article 1/3 website 1/3 crazy

This tells me close to 30%  (article + TV+ Other)  found us based on PR type activities.   At least that is my interpretation…"

Careful readers will note that the site attracted 3,800 buyers, too.  Want to know more, contact MortarPR here.

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Come get some. Our facelift is complete.

Comegetsome The wait is over dear readers. 2007 can officially begin now that we have completed our much anticipated online facelift. (Someone please explain to me why internal branding projects take four times a long as the work we do for clients. Sheesh). Still. Click through and marvel at the new Mortar agency site. The MortarPR site. And our own branded approach to, well, branding, Mortar 360.

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Let the breakthroughs begin: Isilon Systems IPO best since dot com crash.

John Cook at the Seattle Post Intelligencer reports that Isilon’s IPO is the "best performer in years". From his "Venture blog":

"Isilon Systems skyrocketed in its stock
market debut Friday, with shares rising 77 percent in the best opening
performance for a technology IPO in more than six years… Isilon, which raised $108 million in a public offering that industry
watchers described as one of the hottest of the year. The stock closed
at $23.10, giving the money-losing company a market value of $1.4
billion.

"This is the best technology first day pop since 2000 without
question," said Paul Bard, a vice president at Renaissance Capital’s
IPOHome. The previous title holder: Santa Clara, Calif.-based
Transmeta, which had a first day gain of 115 percent in Nov. 2000."
More here.

John’s article in the Post continued:

"The 246-person company, which helps customers such as Kodak, MySpace
and NBC manage their digital storage needs, raised $108 million through
the public sale of stock. It initially was looking to pull in about $80
million.

The sharp rise in the stock even surprised some Isilon executives
who had gathered on the New York trading floor of Morgan Stanley, the
company’s principal underwriter. As the "ISLN" ticker symbol flickered
across an electronic monitor, Isilon’s senior director of marketing,
Jay Wampold, said it "caused us to raise some eyebrows." Full article here.

Mortar watchers will note that Mortar launched the new brand for Isilon back in October.

You can see some of the work here (Website). And here (The Almost Awards). Isilon is our first debut on the public markets since we founded Mortar back in 2003.

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Mortar launches MortarPR.com

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Hot on the heels of last week’s launch of the Mortar 360 Brand-o-meter comes the new site for Mortar’s PR team.  Click through to learn about the offering that Hugh (our gracious writer) describes as "finding new ways to tell the most important love story of all. Yours." So sweet. And did we mention that PR is very reasonably priced? (Shut it-Ed)

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Brand Quiz: Is your brand a sucking, swirling eddy of despair?

Brand_o_meter We launched our much-anticipated Mortar 360 brand quiz today.

Click through to test your brand management prowess against the Web’s most advanced (and we might say pithy) brand analysis tool.

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New ER campaign earns honorable blogosphere mentions.

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Several blogs covered our new campaign for San Francisco’s St Mary’s Medical Center. Check them out:

St Mary’s Center Ad: A humorous approach to healthcare.
"…Of course, this ad campaign has humorously treated a very sensitive
aspect of human life and it could be dubbed as a path-breaking
advertisement in healthcare advertising.

MortarSF uses light hearted approach to healthcare advertising. Adland was the first to pick up the post. Their readers commented:

Come onnnnn. Not to be nasty, but the famous last words idea has been done a bazillion times. No, wait – quadrillion. – Plywood.

Well I like it. It feels fresh in this category and loads better than the last tagline I heard for an a & e clinic "Treat every illness like an emergency". I reckon consumers would appreciate this light-hearted approach. –  Genau

See also St. Mary’s Medical Center unveils "QuickCare ER",  Adhurl and MarketingBlurb picked up the release.

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Degrees for those who won’t be inheriting Daddy’s company.

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Audiences know San Franciso’s Golden Gate University (GGU) isn’t in the Ivy league.

But they know it certainly isn’t a diploma mill either (like some places we could mention).

In fact, ask their students and you’ll learn that the classroom experience at GGU is second to none.

So, you have a real school, with outstanding faculty and a long, long history, competing for attention with marketing organizations offering a degree-in-five-minutes.

How do you position a high quality organization like GGU for today’s undergraduate audience? By talking about a GGU education as something of lasting value – typically the kind of thing you’d have to be related to someone hoity-toity to have access to.

Gratuitous bashing of the hoity-toity follows. Click here to see more from the campaign. Click here to get your degree.

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