The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is reviving a campaign that first launched in 1954. They are using the same agency, the same basic layout, even the same photographer.

The original Ogilvy & Mather print ads caused a buzz because they featured a beautiful, artsy photo accompanies by copious amounts of text. (One of the original ads ran almost 1,000 words!)

But the new campaign is not intended to work on nostalgia. As it was 50 years ago, Puerto Rico is a diverse land with many attractions, and a verbose, visually rich campaign seemed to fit the bill. A new media-rich website mirrors the ads' appearance.

The campaign has just launched in New York. Not sure when it'll make its way to Milwaukee or Indianapolis.


Top: one of the original ads. Bottom: one of the new ones.

If this kind of thing is going to become a trend, boy, are we in luck. With over 40 years' experience, Meyer & Wallis literally has hundreds of great campaigns we could resurrect! Now we've just got to convince all our clients that that fits their retail marketing strategy.

Just kidding. The campaign for Puerto Rico looks pretty nice, though.

I like beer. In fact, Meyer & Wallis likes beer. While our intake falls far short of the kind you see on Mad Men, we've been known to wrap up a busy workweek with a round of ice cold "art supplies." Clever, we know.

And it makes sense, too. Meyer & Wallis started over 40 years ago here in Milwaukee — home to four nationally recognized breweries at the time: Schlitz, Pabst, Blatz and Miller.

But where are they now? Schlitz has just recently returned to brewing in Milwaukee, but is owned by Pabst, now headquartered in Illinois. Blatz is being brewed once again by Miller, but Miller has merged with Coors, and, you may remember if you follow marketing blogs like this one, has moved their marketing headquarters from Milwaukee to Chicago. Yup, of the original four independent, local breweries mentioned above, not one remains. The largest domestic brewery left in the US? Sam Adams.

Now I'm sure these breweries have good reasons for merging and moving as they have, and I'm also sure that product quality, not profit, remains at the top of their lists. (Wink.) But how have consumers responded to the mass production of beer that's happened over the last few years. Well, have you been in a Whole Foods lately?
 


Sure, there's a section for your Big Name Beers, but a gloriously massive amount of space is devoted to smaller, local, craft beers. Why? Because they taste better. Because they manage to get something right that the bigger breweries can't.

What does this have to do with Meyer & Wallis?

There's this assumption that bigger is better, even with Ad Agencies. Bigger means more resources, more talent, more sway. Or so it seems at first. But really, when it comes to Ad Agencies, bigger means that your account is only one of dozens. It means if your ad budget isn't in the tens of millions, your campaign gets crafted by inexperienced interns. It means you get to pay for all that a big agency says they have at their disposal, while getting none of the personal attention required to leverage those benefits for your brand. To revive the metaphor, it'd be like paying $5 to drink a bottle of Schlitz when you could have a bottle of Lakefront East Side Dark Lager for $3.50. You haven't heard of it? It's delicious.

Meyer & Wallis is a small, independent, local ad agency with offices in Milwaukee and Indianapolis. We aren't owned by another company. We have relationships with the media going back decades. Our experience in retail marketing management is second to none. Our UK style account planning approach means every campaign is carefully researched and and planned and executed by the same team of people, utilizing a proprietary planning process. We come to know the unique needs of each of our clients as only a small agency can.

So if you're sick of the watered-down taste of your current ad campaign, and yearn for the full-bodied, unique flavor that only comes from a local agency, give us a call. We're the ad agency that made Milwaukee famous.

Chicago, IL, October 15, 2008 - Meyer & Wallis won two awards — platinum and gold — at last year’s HealthLeaders Media Marketing Awards held at the Art Institute of Chicago. Each year, HealthLeaders Media honors the nation’s best healthcare marketing campaigns. This year, Meyer & Wallis took Platinum for “Best Branding Campaign” and Gold for “Best Integrated Marketing Campaign,” both for their “North Campus Grand Opening” campaign for Community Health Network based in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Judges for the 2008 Marketing Awards used a variety of criteria to make their selections, with an emphasis not only on the look and quality of the campaigns, but also on their effectiveness, including ROI.

Community Health Network is one of Indianapolis’ oldest and most established healthcare systems. Already boasting three of the area’s leading hospitals and dozens of primary care physician practices, CHN reopenned a $170 million renovation of their northeast campus earlier this past year. For the launch, which also served as the effective beginning of a massive rebranding effort, Meyer & Wallis created a comprehensive campaign that included Radio, TV, outdoor, print, direct mail, and a blog. As a result, on a sunny sunday afternoon in April, more than 7,000 members of the curious public showed up for free tours of the new facility during its open house. Since, the facility has been a huge success, as has Meyer & Wallis' rebranding effort on behalf of Community Health Network.

Congratulations to Community Health Network, and congratulations to all those at our Indianapolis office who worked hard to pull off this comprehensive campaign!

While we like to fancy ourselves jacks of all advertising trades, I'd be kidding you if I didn't tell you that healthcare marketing is one of the things we do best.
We know the world of healthcare better than most because we've been serving hospitals, clinics and blood centers longer than many agencies our size have been around. We'd love to talk with you more about the success of our campaign for Community Health Network and others. Contact us today!

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.

Meyer&Wallis is a Milwaukee ad agency. It's also an Indianapolis ad agency. Since 1990, we've operated two offices, allowing us to serve clients from a wider area.

But with one office in Milwaukee and another in Indianapolis, how do you suppose Meyer & Wallis continues to move forward as one company, sharing talents, ideas and responsibilities?

Technology, you might say. And it's true. I have a video conference at least once a week with one of my coworkers in Indianapolis. He and I can easily work on the same project because we have access to the same file servers in each office via a dedicated, high-speed connection. We also have an agency wide conference call every Monday morning to talk about open jobs, work coming down the pipeline, and the latest Colts-Packers match-up. Well, that was just this Monday. But did you see that game?!?

So while we're separated geographically by 275 miles of Midwest earth, we're able to work quite closely as one team dedicated to your brand.

But this doesn't set us apart from anyone. Any agency with multiple offices that can't videoconference and share files between them these days probably has bigger things to worry about (like whether there's a fresh ribbon in the secretary's typewriter or if the president's dictaphone has recently been oiled).

No, what I think sets Meyer & Wallis apart is that, even with all this technology at our disposal, there's usually at least one of us — if not three or four — driving between Milwaukee and Indianapolis each week. Why? To make a delivery? No. FedEx does that. Super-important meetings? Not really — we have important meetings all the time over the phone. I think we just really like connecting with each other. Advertising is about making connections: between your company's goals and your brand's development, between your brand and consumers, and, most recently, amongst consumers via interactive media, where many of them connect about your brand via social networking and blogging. Connecting is what makes an ad a compelling message, and our passion for helping you connect with your customers is matched only by our collaborative desire to connect with each other.

Know that with Meyer & Wallis as your advertising agency, you have at your disposal a group of people who love making connections. If we'll regularly drive 275 miles just to stay in sync with each other, imagine the lengths we'll go to for your brand. (Or call and ask. We'd gladly share some success stories.)

If I didn't see that coworker from Indy that I work closely with in person at least once every other week, it wouldn't be normal. And if I don't, I can only assume the perpetual construction in Chicago must be especially bad, or the Colts got spanked by the Packers again. Did you see that game?!?

This past Wednesday in Chicago, Meyer&Wallis' Indianapolis office received two awards for their work with Indianapolis' own Community Health Network.

For our "North Campus Grand Opening" campaign for CHN, HealthLeaders Media awarded Meyer & Wallis their Platinum Award for "BEST BRANDING CAMPAIGN" and their Gold Award for "BEST INTEGRATED MARKETING CAMPAIGN."

We're very grateful to HealthLeaders Media for this recognition, and will happily add these awards to our "wall of intimidation."

Incidentally, we've been working with hospitals, blood centers, and other healthcare industries for a long time. In fact, we like to think healthcare marketing is one of our specialties. It's nice to know someone else thinks so, too.