Please welcome our new Associate Creative Director, Scot Przybylski. Scot will be writing about his thoughts and learnings on design and sharing inspirations on all things digital.

Late last month, Meyer & Wallis unveiled a highly visible and creative campaign for our client Carpet Town. With just about anything for the walls, windows and floors in your home, we really wanted to sell the point that Carpet Town is more than just carpeting.

So we took our message to where the shoppers are, and especially where the keepers of the home are — the Mayfair shopping center.

"It's unlike an medium we've ever used," says Carpet Town owner Wendy Werner. "In fact, it's unlike anything I've seen in a shopping center. It's going to be very dramatic."

Complete with floor graphics, window clings at entrances and exits, washroom signage, food court table tents and 5' x 8' hanging banners in the north atrium, this comprehensive campaign is designed to capture attention and challenge the assumption that Carpet Town is just carpet.

"To our knowledge, no one has ever taken over a mall to this degree," said Werner. We hope it helps Carpet Town get their message across and increase traffic to their stores!

Window cling on your way into the mall


Window cling on your way out


Floor graphic


The elegant elevator shaft








Food court table tents, in three flooring flavors












Mirror clings in the restrooms




And, finally, big banners in the atrium declare our message plain and simple




Our thanks to Wendy Werner, owner of Carpet Town, and to Dianne Adam, Carpet Town's head designer. And, of course, to Mayfair shopping center, for letting us take it over for this campaign.

Do you have a message you need to get across to potential customers in a memorable way? Why not talk to Meyer & Wallis? Our strategy-driven solutions are always designed with your success in mind, whether that means traditional media, interactive marketing, in store media, in mall media... whatever. 

For more information on this campaign and others, contact Laurie Kanekoa at lkanekoa@meyerwallis.com.

The creative execution of this ad sucks you in, especially when it really counts. An ad you'll watch all the way through. Nice work!

 

Just caught this tv spot for Barclays. I haven't seen an ad speak this frankly and creatively about the economic troubles we've been having. I don't know too much about Barclays, but they play up the stability and safety of their company like they've been saying it for 100 years. Not sure if that's a new brand strategy for them, but they do it very well.

Sometimes being an internet ad agency isn't about flashy animated websites. Sometimes the most effective interactive media is the easiest to find, and that has more to do with playing by Google's rules than outside-the-box creative. Yes, sometimes the most important tweaks to your website can seem downright ho-hum. But they make a world of difference. There's a nice summary of the kind of things you need to think about in order to make your website "more than just a website," as we like to say. Check it out here.

It doesn't take a complete redesign to make your website work harder for you. Talk to Meyer & Wallis about ways we can help you improve your existing site today.

Meyer & Wallis has set up shop in some pretty cool spaces over the years. Our first office was in the oldest building on Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Milwaukee. Twenty years and three offices later, we find ourselves on the corner of Jackson and Mason.

This is the first space we've had that we've been able to build to suit. It's pretty cool. With in-house facilities for everything from media buying to broadcast production, we really are a full service advertising agency.

The first space you enter off the elevators is our reception area.



Behind the hiding receptionist, and below our target logo, you can see a few of the awards we've won over the years.

There are more of these. In fact, we have a couple "walls of intimidation" throughout the place.



And another:



In fact, we've won so many awards, they can be found throughout the agency, anywhere there's shelf space. Like here, with our software manuals:



I'm not trying to brag. It's just that, well, we've won a lot of awards for our work. Anyway...

Our walls are covered in galvanized steel on which we can display our work however we wish.



We've also been known to display some personal "Flair" outside our offices, as well.



The floor really feels like a creative space. Even our common area feels fun and inviting. On the back wall: the famous Meyer & Wallis Christmas Card Retrospective.



And, finally, throughout the agency you'll find these unique displays representing beliefs that our company has been built on:



They remind us why we do what we do, and why we do it better than most.

If you'd ever like to get a closer look at the place, Bob Meyer loves giving tours. Just a warning: he'll probably want to talk about your advertising, too.

Several years ago, there was a supermarket chain here in Milwaukee called Kohl's. It was a higher end food store, and dominated the local market with about 45% market share. That's far more than any one of its competitors. 

The company that ran Kohl's food stores had also recently opened some department stores, also under the name Kohl's. Long story short, ownership of all the Kohl's brands changed hands, and the new management was much more interested in the department stores they had acquired than the food stores. So they started running the food stores almost as an afterthought, devoting no resources or attention to them at all. Within months, market share had plummeted from 45% to about 12%, and public opinion of Kolh's food stores was downright abysmal. People were actually angry over what had happened to the chain.

About this time, Meyer & Wallis (R.L. Meyer Advertising at that time) was asked to help. Bob Meyer's pitch was pretty simple: "You've lost the trust of consumers because you've mislead them. You've changed a store they've come to know and love without any forewarning, and you will continue to hemorrhage customers until you start telling them the truth. I've got a plan that will save this company, but for it to work you have to tell your customers the absolute truth from now on." They agreed.

The first TV spot that aired was much like GM's. It was an apology; an acknowledgement of the trust lost and the expectations unfulfilled. "But give us a couple weeks," the ad asked, "and we'll show you a whole new kind of super market."

Over the next couple weeks, and with our help, Kohl's reevaluated their practices and prices. They got back in touch with what had once made them so popular, and redesigned their stores around these strengths.

The stores reopened as a new TV ad began to air. It rebranded the stores "Kohl's II," and promised a new shopping experience to consumers, combining the high quality they remembered with low prices that might surprise them. Within weeks, Kohl's food store's market share climbed back up to about 21% — nowhere near the 45% they once enjoyed, but almost double where they had been. (As I talked this over with Bob Meyer, he was quick to make an important point here: it's much easier to hang onto market share than to regain it. Getting Kohl's back to 45% market share could have easily taken years, because repairing a brand is a slow process.) After losing money for 10 straight months (sometimes millions per month), Kohl's food stores were able to buy a nearby grocery chain with the sudden and unexpected revenue the campaign helped generate.

Alas, this story does not end well. As happens all too often, management at Kohl's was quicker to credit themselves for the stores' turnaround than our marketing campaign, and cut ties with our agency in favor of a marketing direction they could feel more in charge of.

After losing money year after year, all Kohl's food stores were finally closed in 2003. Nowhere near 12% of the market missed them.

Anyway, there are two morals here: (1) Meyer & Wallis are turnaround specialists. We excel at identifying the unique claims a struggling business can make within their industry and helping them make them in a cost effective yet highly creative way, with the ultimate goal of getting results. Time after time since the Kohl's campaign, we have proven our ability to do this. We'd love to talk with you about it. And yet, (2) No campaign, no matter how effective, can save a brand that isn't willing to match the claims it is making. If a company makes its own advertising claims out to be lies, it has no one to blame but itself if the public picks up on the inconsistencies.

We'll all find out soon enough if GM can match its marketing claims.

When it comes time for us to dream up a retail marketing strategy for your brand, our precise and painstaking brainstorming techniques have not been made well-known. And that's intentional. Sure, everyone knows we like to "think inside the circle." But what does that mean???

Well, the secret's out.

I just read a long blog post about the origins of April Fools Day, and it didn't say a thing about the explanation for the day that I had heard and liked best. So here it is. I'm not sure it's true, but it's the one I like the best.

In the middle ages, much like today, everyone was real concerned with what people thought of them. So in every little town throughout Europe, the baker did his best to just act like a normal baker, the blacksmith acted like a respectable blacksmith, etc. No questioning the status quo. No funny stuff.

But just about every town also had at least one "village idiot." Idiot or not, their job seemed to be to do whatever the hell they wanted — sing in the streets, cause a scene for no reason, whatever. These citizens were treated like outsiders.

For 364 days a year, anyway.

At some point, people started to realize that, crazy or not, these "idiots" seemed to be happier, freer, more expressive and more creative than they allowed themselves to be.

So on April 1st, everyone gave themselves permission to act like the village idiot, doing whatever they felt like without worrying about what people would think. It was a powerful break from the rules and expectations the villagers lived under every day, and you can still find remote town squares filled with people on April 1st, screaming, juggling chickens, talking to themselves... playing the part of the village idiot for a day for the betterment of their souls.

True or not, I think this explanation for April Fools Day is great. At Meyer & Wallis, we're all about creativity. You can tell the second you step off the elevator that we exist to feel free to be as creative as we can be. But while our ability to think beyond traditional models and approaches has made us one of the top advertising agencies around, it's our ability to execute to a well-defined brand strategy that truly sets us apart from the rest. Hence, our motto: Think inside the circle.

So even though we can act like a bunch of village idiots at times, there's a method to our madness that consistently pays off for our clients. And we like it that way.

So take some time today to act like a fool today. You just might enjoy it. Happy late April Fool's Day, from Meyer & Wallis!

I just happened upon an article that is not only written by a company whose logo bears a striking resemblance to a slice of our own, but contains some well articulated truths about one of the ways marketing is being affected by the digital cultural shift we find ourselves in.

In the recent past, as the article suggests, it was the norm for marketers to tell consumers stories about themselves. When life was about keeping up with the Jones's, telling us that the Jones's want what they sold and we should, too, was basically enough. But, as the article asserts, we are increasingly less concerned with what the masses have and more concerned with niche products and services that fit our unique wants. This shift is powerfully supported by our present ability to get information about niche interests and needs like never before, via the Internet. Within the vast community of the World Wide Web, we find others using the same products or services we're interested in, so we can find out about them and research them in unprecedented ways. But as we've turned to virtual communities for information about these niche interests, we've come to trust them immensely, often more than the marketers themselves. I'm pretty sure I've blogged here before about the rising percentage of consumers who consistently research significant purchases online instead of in person — like reading several user reviews of a Toyota Camry before ever considering an actual test drive. Thus, when we hear advertising messages from marketers, our instinct is increasingly to go corroborate what we've heard with stories from consumers like us. The article puts it pretty well:

As more brands (have to) go niche and therefore tell stories that aren't known to the masses, and as experiences and non-consumption-related expenditures take over from physical (and more visible) status symbols, consumers will increasingly have to tell each other stories to achieve a status dividend from their purchases. Expect a shift from brands telling a story, to brands helping consumers tell status-yielding stories to other consumers.

What a fascinating thing to say: "Expect a shift... to brands helping consumers tell status-yielding stories to other consumers." But I'd argue the shift isn't just in who's delivering the message, but it's also in the content of the message itself. As consumers, we're moving from a sales-pitch mentality to a narrative mentality. So if you're an awesome Milwaukee ad agency like Meyer & Wallis, you see double opportunity here. I'll explain.

First, we excel at telling stories. That's what much of the best advertising has always done — given the consumer a narrative picture of what their world would be like with you in it. I'd argue that, given our vast experience and exemplary creative department, we get this better than virtually any full service advertising agency our size.

But second, our understanding of interactive media and online advertising strategies are second to none. Our VP of Interactive is one of the most forward thinkers when it comes to utilizing digital media, and I'm not just talking about websites. Several of our recent campaigns demonstrate there are plenty of ways to use digital media to get your message out, including, in more than one instance, giving consumers a chance to tell their stories on behalf of clients.

And when these two competencies are married into one integrated campaign, our results are consistently remarkable and measurable.

So check out the article linked above. The trend they're talking about is very real. If you have the slightest suspicion that your ad agency doesn't get how to use digital media for all it's worth, maybe you should give us a call.

Meyer&Wallis has been named the agency of record by Carpet Town, one of the leading purveyors of flooring and interior design in the Milwaukee area for more than 35 years. Meyer & Wallis will provide Carpet Town with marketing and advertising services.

Founded in 1971, Carpet Town quickly grew from a “cash-and-carry” carpeting warehouse to one of the largest retail flooring stores in the greater Milwaukee area. It has repeatedly earned The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Consumer Analysis Award as the number one choice for flooring. It has also won multiple awards from the Metropolitan Builders Association, and is proud to be one of 200 retail stores nationwide chosen as a Stainmaster Flooring Center.

Throughout our 40-year history, Meyer & Wallis has built up a rich foundation of experience working with a wide variety of retailers. And, despite our being a midwestern ad agency, many of them have been from all over the country, including supermarkets, realtors, manufacturers, and several specialty retailers. Through our prorietary planning methodologies, award-winning creative abilities, and innovative media buying strategies, Meyer & Wallis intends to help keep Carpet Town on a trajectory of success and growth!

Visit Carpet Town by clicking their logo above, and visit our main site to see what else we've been up to.

This probably goes without saying, but a lot has changed in the advertising world in the last decade or so, and most of these changes have been brought about by technology.

When I was a kid, I used to come into this office (my dad has worked here for a while) to play with the art markers. At that young age, seeing a sea of dozens of different, vibrant colors in each of the art director's offices was almost mind numbing. I'd find a free desk and challenge myself to use as many colors as I could in one drawing.

I can also remember hearing the gentle whir and not-so-gentle clackity-clack of IBM Selectric typewriters. But they were mostly for the accountants and secretaries; the writers scribbled out their ideas longhand.

Today at Meyer&Wallis, we still have a set of art markers. I've seen them used twice in my tenure here. And our last Selectric died about two years ago. It sits in the copy room with a note taped to it that half-seriously suggests we should have it gilded or stuffed, lest we forget where we've come from.

Like virtually every other industry, advertising has been transformed by technology. Tasks formerly done by hand are now more quickly and elegantly tackled with a computer. Where we used to send out a physical monthly newsletter, we now have our website, and this blog. And some assignments — like banner ads or web pages — can only be done with the aid of a computer.

But there's something about Meyer & Wallis' long history that sets us apart from newer shops. Read any book on advertising (such as Luke Sullivan's excellent Hey Whipple, Squeeze This), and you'll see that while there's an art to writing creative ads that can be learned at school (or in a book), there's a science to writing creative ads that work that only comes with experience. And when it comes to experience, Meyer & Wallis has more than we know what to do with. Literally. Every time we've moved offices, we've had to throw out part of our archive of past work. Because after more than 40 years of doing this, we just don't have room to keep copies of all the great work we've done. Having been around for more than 40 years (and having several current employees who've been with us for decades — a couple at least 35 years) gives us a foundation of experience no digital startup can touch.

And while so much has changed, a lot has stayed the same. Namely, people are still people, and the things that grab our attention, make us think and challenge us to try something different are all the same. This is where Meyer & Wallis shines. Now only have we developed proprietary research methods for pinpointing what consumers currently think/need to think about your brand, but even our "gut instincts" have gotten uncannily accurate after a few decades.

So it's been a long time since we've used those art markers for any production work. It's also been a long time since we've engineered a campaign for a client that wasn't a complete success. That's what experience can do for an agency that even the freshest, fanciest digital technology can't. That's not to say we don't do digital. Our recent interactive campaign for a display of Roman art from the Lourve at the Indianapolis Museum of Art helped draw the largest crowds in their 125-year history.

That's the standard of excellence we set for ourselves, no matter the media, no matter the client.

Incedentally, Meyer & Wallis is now kind of a best-of-both-worlds kind of place. With our vast experience with traditional media, even our media buying strategy is light years ahead of anyone else (probably because we have relationships with all the local television and radio stations that date back to, well, when they became stations). We can get more bang for your media buck than anyone else. Period. And our UK style account planning puts proprietary market research and insight behind your brand strategy in a way your current Account Executive might not even understand. But we also happen to have one of the most progressive, strategically grounded interactive departments around. There are things we're implementing digitally in the coming months that we think we might be the first to do, so I can't even tell you about them. Yet.

It's not a perfect marriage of old and new here, though. Creative Director Tom Dixon still prefers to scribble his ideas on a pad of paper. And his iMac? Usually playing a steady stream of Johnny Cash in the background.

It may not be a perfect marriage, but at least it's a civil union.

Here's an example of what I was talking about in my previous post. We did this spot for Shorewest Realty — formerly Wauwatosa Realty, right after they changed their name. They needed to communicate to home sellers and buyers that, even with a new name, there was no one better equipped to help them buy or sell a home. We wanted to drive this message home in a humorous yet memorable way. Thus:




Now, this spot was funny. In fact, it caused a bit of a sensation. It made it onto one of those "World's Funniest Commercials" shows. Local record stores began selling the song from the ad, and many stores sold out. But what really matters is: how did it affect Shorewest?

Within 10 months of the launch of this campaign, Shorewest saw a 54% increase in business, and a 600% over the next 5 years. To this day, they are untouchably the largest homeseller in Southeast Wisconsin.

Incredibly creative, undeniably effective. What could M&W do for you?

That's our slogan.

Think inside the circle.

And our logo is a target:


It's like there's a theme going, here.

Take some time to look around the web at some other ad agency websites. (Go ahead, it's okay.) There are a lot of (younger) agencies out there that pride themselves on being able to think up the most outrageous, off-the-wall, outside-the-box ideas. And they'll prove it to you. Check out their sample work: lots of ads with images and headlines that are often more memorable than the message given about the brand being advertised.

See, "creative types" are born creative. It doesn't really take a whole lot of experience to think up an ad people will notice. What comes with experience is having seen hundreds of successful and unsuccessful ad campaigns and figuring out what makes them different. What comes with time is the discipline to think up outrageously creative marketing that ALSO adheres to a specific brand strategy.  Did you know Meyer&Wallis uses proprietary research techniques that we've perfected over the past 30 years? Only after we feel we've nailed the ideal marketing strategy do we start working on the ads. And if there's one thing we feel sets us apart from other ad shops, it's that our campaigns are consistently successful. They may not all be funny or famous, but they work. And what's more important to an advertiser than that?

So we think the essence of great advertising is execution to a precise strategy. Go check out our sample work if you haven't already. Some of it might make you smile, some of it might make you think, but all of it should tell you something about the brand being advertised.

Thinking outside the box may get people's attention, but often misses the mark when it comes to achieving a marketing goal. We'll let the kids do that stuff. After more than 40 years, we prefer to think inside the circle.

Do you choose your career or does your career choose you? In his youth, Creative Director Tom Dixon played on his local Little League team. The name of the team?

The Advertisers.

No joke.

Meyer&Wallis: Destined to be the best advertising agency ever.

Today, thousands of bloggers across the web are making it a point to talk about poverty. I think this is a great idea, because precious few of those participating have the luxury of actually writing day-to-day for a cause/company/purpose that directly relates to the topic at hand. The rest of us - the majority - are challenged to think ourside the box (or inside the circle?) about how what we do affects poverty.

What is advertising? Simplistically, it's the artful suggestion that you should buy product A instead of product B. We may convince you with words, a compelling visual, humor, logic, or an appeal to your emotions. What does this have to do with poverty?

Almost nothing.

But advertising is what we're good at. It's what we know best. And, at its heart, it's about ideas and persuasion.

These have plenty to do with poverty.

For over 40 years, Meyer & Wallis has committed to spending a percent of its time on pro bono work for clients who improve the condition of society, especially here in Milwaukee. We've done work for America's Black Holocaust Museum, rasing awareness about the racism against African Americans that has persisted in our country long after the end of the civil war and the civil rights movement. We've worked on PSAs relating to drug abuse and cigarette smoking. We've also done campaigns for the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, a public music school that has shown an amazing committment to providing even the underserved populations of Milwaukee with access to quality music lessons. Interestingly, some of our pro bono work has garnered us international attention, leading to several new paying clients. We've even been known to donate to a worthy cause or two that relate to poverty in our city.

Meyer & Wallis thinks part of what it means to run a good business is to be a good citizen of the community we live in. We can't all work directly with the poor. But we can get clever about ways to use what we already do to make a difference. Whether it's donating our time or our money, Meyer & Wallis remains committed to finding creative ways to use our gifts and talens to combat not just the symptoms, but the precursors of poverty. And in this age of technology and globalization, who knows what we'll be able to "do" about poverty in the coming years that we haven't been able to before?

Starting next month, Samsung is going to begin shipping its mobile phones with an application called ScanLife preinstalled. This is a product made by a company called Scanbuy, and allows a user with a simple digital camera — like those in mobile phones — to read a special barcode. Similar technologies have been explored in Japan and other parts of Asia for about a year. I think even Google has been trying to push its own version of something like this. Now, it looks like the tech is finally getting large-scale support stateside.

There was a curious article in the New York Times this week. The journalist was writing out of honest confusion. He had heard that AOL was adding some new features to its home page, and wanted to ask his readers if any of them cared. Even a little bit.

See, this world we call “interactive media” is a funny place where empires rise and fall with the predictability of the seasons. There was a time when America Online was called the “goliath among Internet service providers.” Admitting you weren’t on AOL was like admitting you didn’t have indoor plumbing. AOL’s base of almost 30 million dial-up users made their service synonymous with “the Internet” for the better part of the 1990s.

But even though AOL was a kind of perfect solution to the WEB 1.0 world, it fell flat on its face as newer alternatives were brought to market. All of a sudden, internet users didn’t want online hand holding. They wanted freedom, options, media, and speed. Oh, how they wanted speed. Now, in this world of broadband access and wireless hotspots, the AOL many of us depended on for internet access is basically obsolete. Obsolete?!? How did this happen?

What AOL was among the last to appreciate is that, unlike print or broadcast, interactive media has yet to develop any sense of heritage. Small innovations aside, a book is still a book and a 30-minute sitcom is still a 30-minute sitcom. But we love interactive media for what it can do today that it couldn’t do yesterday, and we have little patience for it when it doesn’t evolve fast enough.

Anyway, the author of the article in question did get a handful of replies from people who still use AOL. Predictably, they were mostly baby boomers who only use the internet to check their email and use their cell phones “for phone calls and nothing more.” Like AOL, this kind of internet user probably won’t exist in a generation. And, for that matter, neither will the internet as we know and love it today.

With all that said, I should probably mention that Meyer & Wallis’ interactive team spends a lot of time each day playing with and discussing the emerging interactive technologies you won’t even know about until next year. Our commitment to our clients is to understand this stuff better than anyone, and to understand it in the greater context of a comprehensive creative marketing strategy across all possible media. You owe it to your customers to stay current on the means available to you to interact with consumers. Like never before, they expect this of you, and see it as a measure of your company’s relevance to them. If you last looked at your company's website before FaceBook and YouTube existed (only a couple years ago), chances are it's collecting some virtual dust. Don’t believe me? Don't know what FaceBook is? Hey – you aren’t reading this on AOL, are you?

Read the NY Times article here.

    The podcast turns 4 this month, and over the last few years, we’ve seen a sharp increase in the number of people who download Podcasts. Podcasting is a relatively new technology in the world of digital media, allowing anyone from individuals in their mother’s basement to big movie studios to post an audio or video file to the internet in such a way that it is automatically downloaded by those who “subscribe” to that podcast. Now perhaps that lengthly explanation wasn't necessary, but, like I said, this is relatively new technology. Only four years ago this month, the word “podcast” had yet to be uttered. Today, about 19% of internet users have downloaded a podcast to enjoy it later, and they have literally thousands to choose from. While 19% may not seem very impressive, it's likely to keep going up and up as the medium gains momentum. What does this mean for your business?

    Whether you're a hospital looking to rise above the sea of healthcare marketing going on around you, or a retailer wondering how to make use of interactive media in your retail marketing, or the guardian of an aging brand wondering how to reach out to a younger generation with your brand strategy, podcasting might be for you.

    It just so happens I'm listening to a podcast right now. There's a show on NPR I'm never around a radio to hear live, but that I can download as a podcast. Not only has this allowed me to enjoy this programming I'd otherwise miss, but it has led me to audition some other NPR programming as well, exposing me to their sponsoring companies, even to consider making a donation!

    Think of the other great ways to engage potential customers with this medium. You could feature company news or new products in a weekly or monthly podcast. Talk about exciting new hires or technologies at your hospital. Does your product really shine when it's in use? Produce a video podcast showing your ingredient being cooked with, your product being tested for durability, your product being used in innovative ways, or how it compares to the competition. A podcast is also a great way to create a "culture" around your brand. For example, you might be a beverage manufacturer, which has nothing to do with music, but you know your customer base tends to like a certain kind of music. Produce a weekly podcast featuring up-and-coming artists you think your customers should know about. They'd soon come to see your brand as "in touch" with who they are, helping you stay top-of-mind for sure.

    These are just a few ideas off the top of my head. But at Meyer & Wallis, that's NEVER how we actually do advertising. Our creative marketing strategies are grounded in what we believe to be the best research and planning in the industry. And with new media like podcasting, it's still possible to do something no marketer has done before. Imagine what a "first" like that could do for a brand. We do. All the time.