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.

One of our clients recently unveiled a new campaign that we're really proud of, and I though I'd share a bit of it with you.

Carpet town is a local retailer that may have started as a carpet store years ago, but today, they have one of the best selections of carpet, wood and vinyl flooring, and window treatments in the area. And yet, their name — Carpet Town — is so well known, they're hesitant to change it. Understandable. So we wanted to communicate to consumers that their trusted source for Carpet is also a great place to buy other home decorating products at similarly great prices with similarly great service. How'd we do that? Here's a couple examples:


A mirror graphic in the bathroom


We decorated the exposed elevator shaft in the lobby of this mall with curtains and a "rug" floor graphic.

This has been a fun project for us. In store media is one thing... In MALL media is another. It's been fun to work with the unique opportunities Mayfair mall has given us. More on this campaign later this week.

If you're a parent, there's a good chance you've found yourself in this dilemma: Your little one is begging from the back seat for the latest Bratz doll, but you really need to pick up some penne pasta and marinara sauce for dinner. You only have time for one stop.

Oh, what is a parent to do?

Well, Toys "R" Us thinks they've got a solution for you.

In a move to make shopping more convenient, they are unveiling "R" Market in about half of their US retail locations. Within the "R" Market, you can find cereal, canned goods, beverages, paper towels — anything you might need to pick up in a pinch that could otherwise keep you from visiting Toys "R" Us.

Interesting, hmm? While Toys "R" Us isn't the first retail store to expand their selection past their core products (virtually all Target and Walmart stores now offer a vast selection of foods), it is perhaps one of the most... interesting pairings.

There's no clear segue here, so I'll just put it like this: If you own a regional chain of automotive tire and lube service locations, and you're thinking of adding some integrated bowling alleys and family dental practices, Meyer & Wallis would love to help. At least let us buy your media.

Oh, Convenience, you're an alluring muse. What will you make us think of next?

We're not the smartest bunch, you and I. As consumers, we tend to gravitate towards specific selling angles, even if we haven't completely thought them out.

For example, I've often been in Target and other "Big Box" stores and found some kind of item — let's say t-shirts — "bargain priced" at three for $20. If you look at the tag, however, you may find that each shirt is individually priced at $7.50. If you buy three, you're only saving $2.50. But it sounds good. "3 for $20" just sounds like the original price of the shirts has been drastically rounded down.

In the current economy, retailers are finding that consumers are reacting more to the percentage of the discount than the actual price. They want to know exactly what they are saving.

For example, you might be running a promotion right now, selling an item at $14.99 that regularly sells for $49.99. You might even have big signs proclaiming this deep discount to your customers. The funny thing is, it seems they'd be more likely to make a purchase if you simply told them the item was "70% OFF!!!"

Perhaps our collective math skills ain't so good, or maybe seeing the percent off better prepares us for the inevitable conversation with our better half. ("But honey, it was seventy percent off!") Either way, it's an interesting finding. Read more about it in the New York Times here.

Speaking of deep discounts, did you know Meyer & Wallis can save you money on advertising? Over 40 years, we've developed some special relationships with suppliers, producers, publishers, tv and radio stations. These allow us to keep our costs controlled in ways younger agencies just can't. When it comes to media buying and production costs, we can offer you world-class work at some seriously competitive prices. Get in touch with us to find out more.

Design by Committee:

Stories are flooding the internet of consumers who look right past this container in their search for their beloved Tropicana Orange Juice, consistently mistaking it for a generic store brand. Why? Because it looks like a generic store brand. I'm sure the Arnell Group (the group also responsible for Pepsi's new logo) has plenty of research to suggest that this packaging had broad appeal in focus groups. Vanilla has broad appeal, too. Because it's vanilla.

Whose idea was this? One guy? An entire design team? What do you think they had in mind — current Tropicana consumers and the product they'd come to know and love, or expressing their own ideas about branding via their clients? (Remember the new Pepsi logo?)















Design by Strategy:


This is one of several packaging designs we did for one of our clients, Palermo's pizza. They're a family owned business based right here in Milwaukee, and they make some of the finest frozen pizza money can buy. (And I'm not just saying that. It's good.)

Their pizza is good because it's based on generations-old family recipes from Italy.
What other regional frozen pizza company can make that claim? Probably not a one. So we wanted their packaging to reflect their unique offer — frozen pizza that tastes like authentic pizzeria pizza because it actually is. So the packaging is imbued with subtle, rustic Italian imagery. Nothing groundbreaking, really. Just stubbornly on target. We wanted the package to really suggest the taste of the product and the ethos of the company that makes it.

And what happened in both of these examples? Well, sales of Palermo's Frozen Pizza have pretty much been steadily up since. More than any other regional frozen pizza maker. They've launched in new markets and introduced new pizzas. (There's even reason to suspect other manufacturers have tried to copy their packaging layout and color scheme.) As for Tropicana, they've pulled the new packaging in favor of the old, familiar carton we'd all recognize. That was an expensive experiment!

Here at Meyer & Wallis, we don't just do retail advertising (although you should hear the radio spots we've done for Palermo's). We're also a graphic design company. We're media buyers. And we're good at all this stuff. We won't run an experiment on your brand. Instead, we'll leverage our 40+ years of experience to achieve exactly what you need us to. That's how we roll.

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.

There's one thing John McCain and Barack Obama agreed on during their presidential campaigns: Health Care Reform. Partisan politics aside, they both agreed that the US healthcare industry was losing money and losing ground by being slow to adopt digital technology.

Multiple companies, including Microsoft, have developed products intended to take medical files online so that they may be securely accessed from anywhere immediately. The benefits — and risks — of such technology are obvious.

But that's internal stuff. What about marketing? What about networking patients who have been served by your hospital?

James Heywood is the cofounder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe.com. Think of it as a Facebook for patients who form social networks around common diagnoses and illnesses instead of interests. Here, people share insights about medication side effects, new treatments, and, yes, the quality of the various treatment facilities they've been too. Heywood thinks, even with the tight security around healthcare and medical records in this country, people are nevertheless gravitating towards online communities where they can openly share with people with similar interests or experiences.

Another new product, called HealthVault, enables people to store their medical records online, where they can be securely accessed by doctors and hospitals, and even synched with meidcal devices like heart-rate monitors and weight scales. The movement to get our healthcare system into the digital age is clearly underway, and it's mostly coming from outside the healthcare world.

There's an enormous potential here for hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Most healthcare marketing tends to stick to mainstream media, but comsumers clearly want interactive options as well.

Imagine creating for your healthcare facility an intranet where inpatients can talk to each other about their doctors, nurses, experiences, even post status updates for loved ones to follow who are too far away to visit. Or imagine a place on your hospital's website where area residents can upload their medical information to your hospital's system in case they're ever rushed there in an emergency and want their medical history to go before them.

This is the kind of digital world we're entering. Consumers, clients, and now patients want communities that connect them with eachother and with information, and if hospitals, clinics and private practices don't work with their marketing teams to come up with these solutions on their own, someone else will do it for them.

Incidentally, Meyer&Wallis is chalk-full of progressive healthcare marketing ideas. Perhaps we should talk?

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.